General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Martin (1977 film)

Martin is a 1977 American horror film written and directed by George A. Romero, in which a troubled young man who believes himself to be a vampire moves to a small Pennsylvania town and begins attacking residents, while an elderly relative who shares the belief treats him as a genuine creature of the night¹^•². The film strips vampirism of its supernatural apparatus: Martin has no fangs, cannot hypnotize anyone, and must drug his victims with sedatives before cutting their wrists with a razor to drink their blood³. It was made between Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), and introduced the actor John Amplas¹^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	George A. Romero; produced by Richard Rubinstein for Laurel Tape and Film with Braddock Associates¹
Lead cast	John Amplas (Martin, "and introducing"), Lincoln Maazel (Cuda), Christine Forrest (Christina), Elayne Nadeau (Mrs. Santini), Tom Savini (Arthur)¹
Running time and rating	95 minutes; MPAA rating R¹
Budget	Budgeted at less than $1 million per a 25 May 1977 Variety article; a note accompanying the 2023 restoration gives $100,000¹^•³
Festival and release	Premiered out of competition at the 30th Cannes Film Festival in May 1977; United States opening 10 May 1978 in Washington, D.C.⁵^•¹
Visual approach	Shot on color stock but released in color with black-and-white sequences for Martin's flashbacks and dreams¹
Later restoration	4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray release by Second Sight Films on 27 March 2023, from a restoration supervised by cinematographer Michael Gornick⁴

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens on a train to Braddock, Pennsylvania, where Martin attacks a woman in her sleeping compartment: he injects her with sedatives, rapes and murders her, cuts her wrist with a straight razor, and drinks her blood, then arranges the scene to look like a suicide¹^•⁶. In Braddock he is taken in by an elderly relative, "Tateh" Cuda, who believes Martin is an eighty-four-year-old vampire and hangs garlic on his door as a precaution. Martin insists there is no magic and presses Cuda's crucifix against his own face to prove the point¹. As the character puts it, "none of the magic is real, it's only a sickness"³.

Martin takes a job at Cuda's butcher shop and meets Mrs. Santini, an unhappy housewife who offers him odd jobs around her house. Cuda's granddaughter Christina defends Martin, insisting his supposed vampirism is superstition and that he is simply a troubled young man¹. Black-and-white sequences show Martin's visions of himself as a classic cinematic vampire, with women offering themselves under his thrall, in contrast to the drab, methodical reality of his attacks¹^•⁷.

Production

The project began as a different film. In 1975 the trades announced a vampire movie called Blood, to be written and directed by Romero and produced by Joseph Brenner Associates; when that version fell through, Romero filmed it in 1976 without Brenner's funding on a very small budget⁸. The early Blood material concerned a middle-aged Pittsburgh businessman, Martin Matthias, whose blood-drinking compulsion resembled a drug addiction; Romero reconceived the story from the ground up as a vehicle for John Amplas, a young actor he had seen in a local production of Philemon⁸. An Oxford Academic chapter on Romero's work describes the same development path: an abandoned early-1970s novel about Martin Matthias, a film treatment called Blood, and finally the script for Martin, about a painfully shy vampire who appears to be a teenager but claims to be much older⁹.

According to notes accompanying the 2023 restoration, the film was shot on 16 mm reversal stock in Braddock, Pennsylvania, for a reported $100,000; cinematographer Michael Gornick attributed the low cost partly to shooting in crew members' family homes and free locations in Braddock, and partly to film stock taken from the television documentaries Romero was making at the time³^•⁸. The AFI Catalog, citing a 25 May 1977 Variety article, gives the budget as less than $1 million, with private funding from Pittsburgh investors¹.

Romero shot on color stock but wanted to release the film in black and white, believing the material suited it better, as with Night of the Living Dead; he fought with producer Richard Rubinstein over the question. The compromise released the film in color with black-and-white sequences for Martin's flashbacks and dreams¹. Tom Savini, who plays Arthur, also handled makeup, special effects, and stunts, and Donald Rubinstein composed the score¹^•¹⁰.

Release and reception

The film was completed about two years before its release and sat "on the shelf" in the interim, according to a 14 August 1978 Village Voice review¹. It premiered out of competition at the 30th Cannes Film Festival in May 1977, where it quickly attracted distribution in France, Spain, and Australia; Romero said the foreign sales put the film "in the black," the first time since Night of the Living Dead that one of his films had returned money to its investors⁵. A paperback novelization from Stein & Day was planned to appear alongside the film¹¹.

In the United States the film opened 10 May 1978 in thirteen theaters in and around Washington, D.C.¹. It then became a midnight screening success at New York's Waverly Theatre, playing 43 consecutive weekend nights from August 1978 to May 1979; Boxoffice had predicted it might become a cult success like Night of the Living Dead, which was still drawing midnight crowds at the time⁵^•¹¹.

Contemporary reviews were mixed, but the film's standing grew over time. Reviewing a Romero retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image in January 2003, Elliott Stein described Martin in the Village Voice as "arguably the director's masterpiece" and "clearly his most deeply felt work"¹¹. A University of Wisconsin cinematheque note observed that the film long stood out as one of Romero's most underseen works despite a growing status among cinephiles and horror audiences³.

Home video

Second Sight Films announced a 4K Ultra HD restoration in 2019; after repeated delays, including an unsuccessful attempt to license the longer cut, the release arrived on 27 March 2023 in Blu-ray, standard 4K, and limited edition 4K editions, all from a 4K scan and restoration of a 35mm dupe negative supervised and approved by Michael Gornick⁴^•¹². The limited edition includes a feature-length documentary, multiple commentaries with Romero, Amplas, Savini, Rubinstein, and Gornick, a 108-page book of essays, and the original soundtrack CD by Donald Rubinstein⁴. The British Board of Film Classification passed the restored version for physical media and streaming on 13 September 2022⁶.

Dating

Sources differ on the film's year. The AFI Catalog and most reviews date it 1977, the year of its Cannes premiere, while the British Film Institute lists it as a 1976 film and the BBFC describes the UK release as a 1978 horror drama¹^•¹³^•⁶. The 1976 date reflects the year of principal photography, which the Horror Studies archive at the University of Pittsburgh also gives⁸.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026