A darker road: "Stake Land"

The distinctively bleak indie horror Stake Land is aiming high. As well as seeking to transfer the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of 28 Days Later... and its sequel to an American landscape, Jim Mickle's film tries to assuage that audience of Goths who thought that Zombieland made the end of civilisation as we know it seem too much like fun, but that The Road lacked for action. There's something of the Monsters-like voyage of discovery in it; even a little of Malick's Badlands in its use of voiceover, music-box score, and eye for the desolate beauty of the American hinterland.

Since the Twilight movies began trending in production meetings, its undead of choice are not zombies, but vamp-like predators, yet - as in The Road - the action turns on a father-son relationship. A grizzled vampire hunter (co-writer Nick Damici) drives around the South, taking care of business, and notionally working his way north to the fabled New Eden. His companion is a teenage boy (Connor Paolo) he's been schooling in his trade ever since he was obliged to stake the boy's parents after their homestead was attacked by creatures. (Look fast for a moment of throwaway nastiness involving the boy's infant brother.) With most towns closed to outsiders, mistrust hangs heavy in the air, yet the film finds consolation, if not hope, in the relationships this pair forge on their travels: with the nun they rescue from rapists (Top Gun's Kelly McGillis), a pregnant young woman they find singing in a bar, an African-American marine (Sean Nelson, the kid in Fresh) being employed as bait to catch the vamps.

As in TV's True Blood, it's clear this extreme co-habitation scenario is intended as an extrapolation of the direction in which America is currently heading: we learn how war in the Middle East reduced the country's defences to virtually nothing - allowing the vamps to assume control of the populace - and religiose, right-wing rhetoric pours out of every car radio, foreshadowing a final-reel crucifixion. Its sturm-und-drang is considerable, and results in something akin to last year's The Book of Eli without the laughs; not even Danny Boyle's (largely depoliticised) undead diptych seemed this tormented by the state of its particular nation.

Still, it's very decently played by its mostly unknown cast, and Mickle stages credibly chilling tableaux of carnage, chaos and confusion on a slender budget: billboards scrawled with cryptic cries for help, bodies hanging from lampposts and telegraph poles, the aftermath of a Jonestown-like mass suicide that provides the backdrop for a clever reverse. It isn't averse to the odd vampire helicopter raid, but shows where it's really coming from in the way it makes the embracing of old friends count for as much as the visceral staking scenes, carefully sound-designed to go right through you.

Stake Land is on selected release.