Vampires appear to be making a comeback, aren’t they? Between the surprise revelation of Father Paul and the Angel in Midnight Mass, the selling point of a little girl ballerina vampire in Abigail, which should have been a surprise reveal, but we’ll move past that, we don’t have time; the upcoming Robert Eggers Nosferatu adaptation, and probably a fourth example of recent vampire media if you take the time to Google it, vampires are having a serious resurgence. Whether it’s done as a counterbalance to make The Twilight Saga as small in the rearview window as possible—also known as ‘The Robert Pattinson Method’—or because people are reminded of how fun vampires can be, vampire media has made a sharp return to grotesque violence and the old school rules of vampire lore. While we seem to be in a vampire renaissance—Renfield! Number four, we got there—there was a smaller film that snuck through the cracks in the Tenties that made vampires violent and bloodthirsty again: He Never Died.
Released on Netflix in 2015, the film stars Henry Rollins as the titular ‘he’ who never died. While released to consistently positive reviews, the film often goes overlooked by genre fanatics. Whether it’s due to its small release or because there’s a silent majority of people who can’t forgive Henry Rollins for Steve-O’s ‘Off Road Tattoo’ in Jackass: The Movie is anyone’s guess. Though, if it’s the latter, that’s a very niche and narrow hill to die on, and it’s a shame if that prevented you from watching Heat. Yeah. He’s in that too. Anyway, regardless of why the film has gone underseen, with the Halloween season in full force and people always looking for new and fun horror-ish movies to watch in October, He Never Died is a fun and gory outing that twists the vampire lore in a nihilistic, but still funny way, and plants the seeds for what other vampire stories would later flesh out as well as do its own take on themes that were established in films that came before it. The movie does all of this while also being elevated by Rollins’ perfectly (and hilariously) executed lead performance.
Rollins plays Jack, a guy who keeps mostly to himself and whose time is divided between sleeping, going to the local diner and seeing his usual waitress, Cara (Kate Greenhouse), and playing bingo. He also buys blood from a hospital intern named Jeremy (Booboo Stewart) since he’s secretly an immortal being who needs to drink blood and eat flesh, but he’s trying to maintain his sobriety and not hurt anybody. However, once his previously unknown adult daughter Andrea (Jordan Todosey) enters the picture, so does a group of mysterious mobsters who keep intruding on his life and trying to maim or kill him. What they don’t know is that that’s more of an annoyance for Jack rather than a threat.
What makes vampires a fun movie monster is that with the rules that pop culture has set in place, the stories and characters can range widely from funny and self-referential, like What We Do In The Shadows, to straight-ahead monsters like in From Dusk Till Dawn, to complex and tragic like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He Never Died plays it with a more grounded and realistic approach, more in line with Near Dark or Martin. The film doesn’t keep to the vampire mythos too closely—Jack can go out in the sunlight, he can’t transform into anything, and he can also enter churches. The only vampire-related traits he has is a desire to drink blood and eat people—which is treated more like an addiction rather than a necessity for survival, but more on that later—and he can’t die. No matter the injury, Jack heals from everything.
Where the film has the most fun with its premise is that because Jack can’t die and he’s lived thousands of years—one of the best exchanges in the film is when he reveals what his real name is—the character has zero social grace and doesn’t care about anything because nothing matters. There’s something oddly satisfying with how quickly he streamlines conversations to make them end as soon as possible. Near Dark is probably the closest comparison to this since Jack walks around with the attitude that he’s bored and done with being alive since he has nothing to live for and nothing to do. One scene has him list off every job he’s ever had, and the list is so long that you believe he’s done everything someone like him can do while also going unnoticed. He’s done so much in his life, yet he still has nothing to show for it since everything is treated more like a distraction to keep him busy.
While this sounds like it would make the movie a bummer to watch, it actually makes it funnier. Jack’s complete indifference to the well-being of everyone and everything around him gives the film a deadpan sense of humor, and a lot of that is owed to Rollins’ performance. Every word out of his mouth has the energy of someone who hates his job but can’t seem to get fired no matter how hard he tries—the job in this metaphor is living, if that wasn’t clear, and there’s a moment where he might have inadvertently gotten someone he knows killed, and he just shrugs it off, and you buy the fact that he’s not going to lose sleep over it.
The film is like a window into his life in that you get the feeling that the events that take place are only slightly out of the ordinary, and by the end, Jack doesn’t grow or learn anything. There isn’t even a moment where he thinks he’s finally about to die but cathartically realizes he finally has something to live for. None of that. He resolves the final hurdle in the story, and then the movie doesn’t end, so much as it stops. In another film, that would feel like sloppy writing, but Jack is built up as so cold and distant that if he did have some form of redemption or learned to care by the end, it would feel disingenuous.
This is a vampire film, so yeah, people die gruesomely, and Jack is entirely responsible for all of it that happens. It never goes into full-on Eli Roth-level torture porn or unpleasant macabre visuals; it’s always played as fun or darkly comedic. There’s never a moment where Jack attacks an innocent person; if anything, it’s always someone who’s trying to kill him first, or it’s a Falling Down situation where it’s someone that we, as the audience, are already preordained not to like and root for him to take out. One of the funniest moments in the movie is when he relapses, and he tries to start instigating people just as an excuse to go after strangers, like purposefully dropping money on the ground or bumping into people, but everyone is always super friendly and polite, so he can’t bring himself to do it, which just irritates him more.
It was mentioned earlier that Jack’s vampiric desire to eat people is treated more like an addiction rather than as a means to stay alive. If you’re a fan of Henry Rollins, you know full well that him playing an addict is about as ironic as CM Punk playing a hard partier in Girl on the Third Floor. If a word for reverse-typecasting can be found in the dictionary, him being cast in this role would be one of the examples. While the sobriety angle is there—it’s not even subtext, that’s what Jack calls it—the film never gets weighed down by heavy drama. This is a monster movie, not Requiem For a Dream, and the movie knows that. It just adds an extra layer to the burden of living that Jack has to deal with.
In a lot of ways, this feels almost like a precursor to what Mike Flanagan did with the vampires in Midnight Mass, showing the power of addiction and how a vampire’s feeding for blood could be comparable to drugs or alcohol, albeit in a heightened, fantastical way. While that undercurrent feeds into the many themes in Midnight Mass, when it comes to He Never Died, it’s more of an added layer to Jack’s personality. The film doesn’t judge him for relapsing and killing people. It knows that’s what you want to see when you go into one of these kinds of movies. When he does get around to eating body parts, it’s played so casually that it borders on comedy. At one point, he rips a dead guy’s throat out, Road House style, and then he just eats it because…well, let’s be real here, that other guy has no use for it anymore, and throwing it away would just add to the landfill.
While vampire films are a subgenre of horror that’s already filled to the brim with a lot of really entertaining entries that vary in tone—The Lost Boys has gone unmentioned here, but that’s one of the most infectiously entertaining movies ever made—He Never Died is another solid inclusion that makes for a fun Halloween viewing. It’s gory without being gratuitous, funny without being silly, and has just enough of a dark edge to be fitting for the season while not being a flat-out horror film. It takes the themes from other vampire movies that show what a burden being able to live forever would be like, but it has the self-awareness not to get bogged down by the drama and simply shows the humor in the dullness of what the day-to-day would be like. Most of this has been singing the praises of Henry Rollins’ performance, but it’s what makes the movie. He makes what could’ve been an underwritten character and breathes extra life into Jack… which is ironic considering all he wants to do is die.
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