Congratulations to Los Vampires ! The film saw a sold out premiere on Tuesday July 21, 2026 at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. A second showing was then added on Saturday July 25.
Everyone involved with the film were thrilled with early reviews.
Find below the review by Clint Worthington on RogerEbert.com
Fantasia 2026: You Are the Film, Someone’s Daughter, Los Vampires
The battle of wills between two people more alike than they’d like to believe continues in Craig Mitchell’s beguiling “Los Vampires,” which thinly restages the presumed behind-the-scenes production of George Melford’s 1931 Spanish-language adaptation of “Dracula,”—shot at the same time as Tod Browning’s classic, on the same sets, at night when the English-language film would stop production. Here, we follow Luis de Ossorio (“Lost”‘s Henry Ian Cusick), the Spanish actor cast to play “Count Vlad”; he’s been tasked to watch the day’s dailies of his English-language counterpart, Hans Orlov (Thomas Krestchmann), as Orlov (and the producers) insist he emulate each mannerism to a tee. Luis, however, bristles; he is an ack-tor, after all, and wants to make the role his own. (He’s even brought some custom-made fangs for the trouble.)
But Luis’ growing rivalry with Orlov, and their growing mutual fascination with the Spanish-speaking ingenue, Vianca (newcomer Daniela Couso), who’s been cast alongside him, begin to turn the production into a psychological nightmare for the struggling actor. And that’s before a series of mysterious murders around the soundstages begin to threaten the production itself.
It’s hard not to think of E. Elias Merhige’s haunting “Shadow of the Vampire” when watching this, finding similar supernatural sins in Spanish “Dracula” as that film did with “Nosferatu.” And granted, Mitchell makes the most of what was an exceedingly modest budget (the film was self-funded); the sets feel sparse in ways that match the charms of Old Hollywood, with graveyards backed by ominous backdrops featuring gigantic moons. The famous Dracula steps are emulated too (though not too much, to avoid litigation), and Simon Coull’s cinematography coats the whole thing in a soft-focus dream haze.
The central performances are uniformly excellent, too; Cusick’s antic disposition as Luis bounces wonderfully off Krestchmann’s Romanian diva. The real standout, surprisingly, is Couso, who finds a delicate balance between slinky ingenue and more complex aims as the film progresses. Mitchell’s script juggles a murderer’s row of thematic aims: acting as vampirism, the immortality of cinema, Old Hollywood’s fear of the immigrant, the impending censorship of the Hays Code, the predation of older men upon younger women. Some get plenty of room to shine; others get lost in a few moments of miscalibrated comedy and a wonky sound design (the English-language dialogue suffers most for this; the Spanish, helpfully, is subtitled).
But there’s a hallucinatory mist that surrounds “Los Vampires” that still intrigues among all its formlessness, especially as it stalks its way toward a surprising, somber grace note that evokes everything from “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” to “Boogie Nights.” Some actors lose themselves in the part; others succumb to it.
