The Familiar
2009 · 22m
Directed by Kody Zimmermann
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A vampire-obsessed young man jumps at the chance to become the human assistant, or familiar, to a real vampire. The glamorous afterlife he imagined turns out to be menial drudgery in service to his demanding master.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The vampire-familiar premise could've been pure wish-fulfillment fantasy, but Zimmermann flips it into a brutally funny inversion—the dream is just exploitation in nicer clothes. It's subversive without screaming about it, which is exactly why it works.
A sharp riff on the master-servant dynamic that echoes everything from *The Servant* to gothic literature's familiar trope, executed with the kind of tonal control that separates clever genre-play from actual craft.
The film's whole architecture hangs on the single choice to play the vampire as boringly tyrannical rather than seductive—that one tonal decision transforms what could be whimsy into something genuinely corrosive about desire and labor.