Blood for the Muse: The Omega Edition

• Directed By: Terry West
• Written By: Terry West, Stew Noack and Josh Robinson
• Country: USA
• Released: 2009
• Running Time: 80 minutes
• Links: Pleasant Storm Entertainment
• Horror, Reviews

Meet Josh (Josh Robinson), a cynical video-store employee who hates his job yet lacks the motivation to look elsewhere. Although he’s an aspiring musician, he lacks the both the drive to seek out his peers and the focus to build any sort of career for himself. Josh, in short, is a an unfocussed twenty-something watching his life drift past, and a bit of a loser. But Josh isn’t like every other slacker just out of his teens, Josh is different. Josh is a serial killer.

Convinced that he has seen the Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, Josh believes that if he offers her enough blood sacrifices she will finally grant him the dark oblivion he seeks. As a result, he spends much of his free time finding and murdering lone escorts.

Josh continues to inch ever closer to hearing the song of his muse until Sara (Tina Krause) walks into the video-store. She is a college student, new to the area and she quickly strikes up a friendship with Josh based on a mutual love of old films. As the friendship develops into a romance, Josh starts to turn his back on the dark muse until he finds himself tormented by nightmares demanding that he make the ultimate sacrifice Melpomene is calling for…

Shot entirely in black and white, Blood for the Muse is a film dripping with atmosphere. The set design, the cinematography and the soundtrack all come together beautifully to generate an ambience that manages to be both grungily real and disturbingly surreal in a manner that very effectively draws you in to Josh’s world.

Josh Robinson’s performance deserves a mention here as well. The film is told entirely from Josh’s perspective and Robinson does an excellent job of carrying the film, putting in a performance that is not only solidly understated but also manages to keep you interested in his far from likeable character.

Tina Krause also puts in a very sympathetic and believable performance as someone new in town and looking for a friend. In fact my only significant criticism of the film is that I would have liked to have seen more of Josh’s and Sara’s developing relationship. It doesn’t feel forced or unrealistic but the time line did feel a little compressed.

At the end of the day, though, Blood for the Muse is a film that is rich in atmosphere and one that harks back to the Gothic dramas of the 1930s and 40s. It’s also a film that is deliberately vague about the accuracy of Josh’s beliefs, how much of what he sees and hears is fantasy and how much is real.

Taking this approach makes for a remarkably unnerving and consistently gripping exploration of obsession and insanity and one that is well worth the time of any horror fan.