Slayer
2018 · 9m
Directed by Dimitri Kanjuka
Genres: action, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic
Slayers are people who hunt vampires and other monsters in a steampunk world — for them it is like every other job. But not everything goes according to plan.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Steampunk vampire hunters as blue-collar workers is solid subversion, but the execution feels like it's treading water in genre pastiche rather than actually breaking the premise open—where's the real bite?
The tonal balance between action spectacle and deadpan workplace mundanity shows formal control, though it sits comfortably within a well-established lineage of genre deconstruction that Taika Waititi and others have already explored.
That transition from routine-job indifference to chaos works because Kanjuka commits hard to the performances staying flat even as everything collapses around them—a single tonal choice that makes the whole darkly comic premise land.