‘On Gallows Hill’ Review – Indie Horror Film Tweaks The Vampire Rules [TADFF]

It’s hard to come up with a new take on the vampire film. So much of the lore has been established, it’s easy to fall back on the common conventions of the subgenre.

Writer/director Edward Shimborske doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but he does have enough tweaks to make On Gallows Hill (2025) feel fresh. The film opens with a scroll about a particularly dangerous part of NY with a high body count before focusing on Matthew Bishop (Rohan Maletira), a College student with an active social life and a love of baseball.

One night at the bar, Matthew has an unusual encounter with the bouncer, Stuart (Tim Pollack). After getting kicked out of the bar for instigating a drunken fight, Matthew is attacked on his way home. By morning, he’s a full-blown vampire, complete with light sensitivity and an inability to eat human foods.

Cue the credits.

One of Shimborske’s twists is that vampires can’t simply consume human blood: they have to drink the blood type from when they were human. For Matthew, this proves to be a big challenge because he’s O-, but also…how the hell is he meant to find this information out? (An amusing montage shows him asking girls their blood type at a bar, and it goes about exactly as well as you’d expect.)

Enter Aussie vamp Joseph Singer (Sam Smiley), who mocks Matt but also shows him the ropes. Turns out there’s a club called The Inner Circle that caters to vamps. It’s lorded over by The Prince/Ben (Noah Jacobs) and offers clients both ambiance as well as blood on tap. 

Ben takes pity on Matthew for uncertain reasons (thanks in part to his Victorian styling). Jacobs plays the head vampire as something of a dandy (unsurprisingly for a vampire film, it’s not hard to get a queer read from both Ben and Joseph).

The Prince offers Matthew a deal: regular access to blood in exchange for work. Matthew is put to work overnight, bleeding bodies alongside Mikhaila (Isabella Vasari), a disaffected-verging-on-cruel vampire with no sympathy for the humans who are imprisoned solely to be drained and dumped.

Naturally, Matt doesn’t exactly gel with this philosophy, but Shimborske IV also ups the ante beyond the usual reticence to drink blood. In a novel twist, vampires must consume blood every ten days or they start to become desiccated husks who sink into living comas. The film helpfully reminds us of this fact with on-screen titles in bloody red, though the ticking clock is narratively less important than one would expect when all is said and done.

The tortured vampire is one of the most common tropes in vampire media (think Louis in Interview with the Vampire), and Matthew is – sadly – no different. Despite Maletira’s solid lead performance, Matthew’s struggle to accept his new vampire status, as well as his romantic longing for nursing assistant Annie Apples (Jill Pierangeli), proves to be extremely conventional. Even the revelation that Annie has the same blood type as Matthew (which, hmmm) doesn’t dial up the tension or intrigue, despite the two actors’ chemistry and their characters’ penchant for late-night wordplay.

Adding to the film’s unevenness is the presence of Western-coded vampire hunter Mr James Skinner (Billy Whitehorse), a character who spends the film tracking Matthew’s whereabouts. There’s more to the character than initially meets the eye (he shares a secret connection to other characters that comes out in the last act), but the reveal is executed in a muddled and abrupt fashion that lessens its impact. Skinner, in particular, feels like one element too many, and the film grinds to a halt whenever he appears. 

The result is a climax that feels both overstuffed and overcomplicated; these scenes feel less like an ending than a set-up for a sequel or spin-off.

Despite the fumbles, there are several fun quirks, including the film’s memorable black, white, and red animated opening credit sequence (made by Jasper Morris, Anna Anderson, Jake Johr, and Shimborske himself) depicting Matthew’s nightmarish turn to vampire. There are also several stop-motion bat scenes, such as Matthew-as-bat stealing an IV bag of blood and bats duking it out for the betting pleasure of club patrons. This memorable addition is extremely amusing and charmingly executed courtesy of stop motion animator Richard Svensson.

Ultimately, On Gallows Hill has enough unique tweaks on the familiar vampire formula to merit checking out. While the sad vampire and doomed love affair tropes feel played out and the climax doesn’t stick the landing, Maletira is solid, Smiley and Jacobs sink their teeth into their supporting roles, and the animated & stop-motion elements are unique and extremely welcome.

On Gallows Hill had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. Release info TBD.