Boys From County Hell is a vampire horror comedy from 2020 that was filmed and set in Northern Ireland. It’s about a group of working-class people in a small town who like to scare tourists with stories of a cairn in a remote field that marks the grave of an ancient, undead, blood-sucking creature, a legend that Bram Stoker appropriated for Dracula. When the cairn gets overturned during a construction project, they discover that the legends were true.
Fans of the Pogues, as any right-thinking people should be, will recognize the title of the movie as a song from their first album, Red Roses For Me. Like me, they’ll be disappointed that the song isn’t used anywhere in the movie. Instead, there’s a lot of fairly generic rock music of the type that’s made by bands where everyone has a day job they hate, and there are one or two friends of the band who love it.
At first, I assumed that they couldn’t get licensing rights because the song would be too expensive. The movie’s a little too polished, and the vampire and blood effects are a little too good, for it to feel like a bunch of friends getting together to make their first horror movie on a shoestring budget. But it does still feel like a scrappy independent movie that has to be mindful of where every penny of the money’s going.
After seeing it, I’m wondering if they ever even considered using the song, or if they felt it would’ve been too traditional and old-fashioned. There’s a defiant attitude to the movie that refuses to romanticize Ireland, not overly strident or explicit, but a strong undercurrent of “we’re stuck here, this place kind of sucks, but it’s ours, so f off.”1I’ll remind new readers that I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word in public and I’m doing my best. The movie doesn’t refrain from using it at all.
The movie takes inspiration from other horror comedies, and it doesn’t try to hide it — a sequence early on is reminiscent of An American Werewolf in London, and there is a stretch that seems to be trying to capture the vibe of Shaun of the Dead. But it’s not as dark as the former, nor as referential as the latter. And there’s a character that seems to be trying a bit too hard to be Nick Frost, but he doesn’t keep the focus for too long, and this isn’t a buddy comedy. It concentrates more on Eugene, who’s a directionless screw-up who can’t keep a job, and his father Francie, who’s an asshole.
There’s a lot in the movie that just doesn’t work very well. The first vampire attack that our characters witness has a tone that’s all over the place; it starts out pretty strong, but then it devolves into some violent slapstick set to awful music, and dialogue that doesn’t work. The lurches in tone keep on coming, as we get a sequence of exposition and its aftermath that tries hard, but just can’t get the horror/comedy/drama balance quite right.
But there’s a lot that’s fun and works well, too. It’s not new at all to have characters familiar with vampire fiction suddenly finding themselves in a piece of vampire fiction, but it was nice to see characters so quickly going from “this can’t be happening” to matter-of-factly figuring out what to do about it. And the highlight is the lore of the ancient vampire himself, who drains blood from his victims in a novel and horrifying way, and who doesn’t seem to have the same weaknesses as the fictional variety.
Plus, I was surprised by how much I appreciated seeing a character who is just kind of an asshole, instead of an asshole covering up a heart of gold.2So I guess you could say he’s a miserable bollocks and a bitch’s bastard’s whore?
Watching the Irish vampires in Sinners made me a bit defensive, both in the “wait, are we the baddies?” sense and because the traditional Irish music in that movie was the music I connected the most strongly with. So watching Boys From County Hell gave my green-wearing, corned-beef-and-cabbage-eating ass a much-needed reality check by basing its story on Irish folklore but refusing to romanticize any of it, neither the history nor the present day. Anyone coming to this movie hoping for tin whistles and bodhráns will be disappointed.
Unfortunately, so will anyone expecting an atmospheric vampire story, or a tight dark comedy with impeccable comedic timing, since it’s kind of all over the place in tone and execution. Ultimately, I think it works more often than it doesn’t, the cast is more endearing than not, and there are a few excellent scenes of Abhartach feeding off of his victims. It’s a pretty fun and scary vampire movie with enough of a story about a father/son relationship at its core to keep it from feeling shallow.
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