Martin

Romero's own favourite of his films, made between The Crazies and Dawn of the Dead for almost nothing in Pittsburgh.

Martin is a teenager who believes he is eighty-four years old and a vampire. He has no fangs, so he uses razor blades and syringes. He is sent to live with an elderly cousin who greets him with the word nosferatu and hangs garlic in the doorway, and the film never once resolves which of them is right.

The flashbacks to gothic castles and torch-bearing mobs are shot in black and white and may be memory or may be a disturbed boy's fantasy.

It is really about a lonely, awkward young man in a dying steel town who phones a radio talk show, and Romero is far more interested in the economics of that town than in the blood.

The opening sequence on the train is thirteen minutes long and is the most uncomfortable thing he ever directed.