A few weeks ago, my niece and her partner were watching some movie on Shudder about middle-schoolers with a sword. I cannot fairly judge it since I only saw [most of] the last third, but I was not especially impressed with what I did see.

The relevance of this is as follows: I just saw The Shed, a movie which is nearly identical to the sword movie, but improved in every way that mattered to me. There’s this guy, see, and he’s attacked by a vampire, just enough to both turn into a vampire himself and to learn by example about things like staying out of the sun, with the result that he hides from his first dawn in (you’ll never believe this) a shed.

Then the relevant part of the movie kicks in, insofar as the shed is owned by a juvenile delinquent orphan and his authoritarian asshole grandfather. What follows is a slow burn story about the intersection of bullies and small town hopelessness that spirals entirely out of control in the third act, in the very best kind of way.

It doesn’t quite stick the landing. If anything, once the metaphor had been followed to its logical conclusion, it’s like the writer didn’t really know what to do about cleaning up the mess left behind by that metaphor. But it worked well enough for me up to that point that I don’t begrudge him being less good at writing monster movies.

Would recommend, for people who aren’t allergic to high school darkness.