HOW FAR DOES THE DARK GO?: Queer Vampire Drama Sucks In All The Wrong Ways

The most interesting and important movies in the world today are being made by trans horror filmmakers. I firmly, passionately believe this is true. So it broke my heart a little when I saw How Far Does the Dark Go?, a new supernatural horror-romance film from a trans filmmaker that just falls flat on its face.

Now, it would be silly to suggest that merely because How Far Does the Dark Go? is written, directed, and edited by trans filmmaker Bears Rebecca Fonté, I am expecting a masterpiece. Much like Billy Eichner’s Bros, a landmark gay romcom that, by all reports, proves that gay people have just as much right to make terrible art as anyone else, How Far Does the Dark Go? shows that trans artists are equally capable of making a bad film as cis people. This is what equality looks like in 2025!

The Vampire and the Nurse

How Far Does the Dark Go? has a badass title and an intriguing premise: An opioid-addicted nurse (Anna Hindman) is kidnapped by a sultry seductress vampire (Chloe Carroll, whose British accent clashes with the Philadelphia setting). The nurse is forced to care for the vampire’s dying human son, and inevitably, the vampire and her victim fall in love. It’s a cool idea, but Fonté’s script rushes through the plot in its first 10 minutes, and the film has nowhere to go for the remaining hour and a half. There’s nothing gradual about the love story here — the nurse and vampire are hot for each other almost immediately, and the characters have nothing to do for the rest of the picture besides have sex in increasingly more novel ways.

Maybe it’s the mildly titillating lesbian sex scenes, or maybe it’s the terrible screenplay, dank basement location, or unimaginative costumes, but How Far Does the Dark Go? feels very soft-core porn-coded. (“Have you ever heard of Stockholm syndrome?” one person literally asks the main character.) However, having seen some of the pornographic art films produced from the 1950s through the 1970s by the likes of Stephen C. Apostolof, Kenneth Anger, and Jean Genet, I have to report that if it is meant to be a pornographic art film, How Far Does the Dark Go? lacks the sort of visual inventiveness, avant-garde editing, and bold imagery that characterize the best of the genre.

A Never-Ending Music Video

Maybe it’s better to call How Far Does the Dark Go? a feature-length music video, thanks to the incessant music playing on the soundtrack — it’s like an Enya music video made with $300 and a bucket or two of fake blood. The director says they intentionally edited the film like one long music video — with a staggering 35 songs on the soundtrack, from little-known but dark and intriguing artists like Kaila Hoy, Virgin Miri, and Linda Roan — but I shouldn’t have to explain the ways in which the never-ending music video style dramatically hinders crucial stuff like plot and character development. The director clearly wants to evoke a dreamlike haze, like Mulholland Dr. or Suspiria, but they seem to have forgotten that age-old maxim that one has to first master the rules before they can break them. How Far Does the Dark Go? contains a panoply of errors, the severity of which would make a college film professor keep you after class. The sound is abhorrently mixed, and the dialogue for several scenes seems to have accidentally been echoed four or five times on top of itself. (I’ve consulted other critics as well — this is not a technical glitch on my end.) There doesn’t seem to be any thematic purpose for such a decision, so we must assume it’s an error. How such a mistake wound up in the finished version of the film is anyone’s guess.

And the editing — oh, God, the editing. Fonté fails to grasp even basic editorial tenets like space and rhythm. Cuts arrive as though accidentally, like a cat walked across Fonté’s keyboard as she spliced scenes together. A scene late in the film where a man is cornered and bitten by a vampire — on paper, a suspenseful and darkly comic scene — should build up some sort of tension and let the dialogue breathe. Instead, the lines all step on one another’s toes, and we get 20 cuts in the span of 17 seconds. The entire film is like this. Several shots even have a “No frame available for MediaOut1” message in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, which is a rendering error for the DaVinci Resolve editing program that I have never ever seen in a finished film before, further evidencing that this project needed a more careful editor and a little more time in the oven.

The cinematography isn’t much better — the coverage is basic but never impressive. One of the consequences of shooting in real locations is that the camera will always be cramped — if you can’t work adeptly around an environment, you’ll become beholden to it, and that’s what happens here. Scenes inside the nurse’s home feel like the cameraperson is standing with their back to the wall, and in the scant scenes where the film enters a more open, spacious setting, the director and cinematographer feel completely lost, stymied by fundamental problems like where to put the camera and how to properly light their subject.

With some fair cinematography and a different editor, this might’ve been close to passable, but in its current sorry state, it’s a mess. I don’t want to wholly condemn Fonté — making bad art and learning from it, after all, is the only way one can make good art — so although the final result is abysmal, I can tell that Fonté and her game cast were genuinely making an admirable effort. The director just needs to surround themselves with more skilled craftspeople who can take their vision and elevate it into a watchable film.

One curious ingredient in this vampire porno soup is Robert Picardo — yes, that Robert Picardo, who played the Doctor for seven seasons on Star Trek: Voyager. How he found himself in such a low-budget disaster is quite the mystery, one which it’s at least fun to mull over while you watch the film. He either has the worst agent in the world, or he genuinely wanted to be here — and the performance suggests the latter. (Trans ally Robert Picardo!!) He plays the dying human son of the vampire vixen, and despite being bedridden for most of the film, he brings some real darkness and thespian sinew to the role. With the grunge punk music soundtrack, some of Picardo’s most cliché lines — “I was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage. I wish she just left me there.” — take on profound weight and thematic portent. Had all the actors had the clarity and emotional intelligence of Picardo’s performance, maybe this could have been a worthwhile film.

Conclusion

Exactly two kinds of people will seek out How Far Does the Dark Go?: people who like low-budget horror, and people who want to support trans filmmakers. Fans of low-budget horror will have little to chew on here, since the effects shots aren’t terribly original and are cut together quickly and haphazardly. Fans of trans horror might have more mileage with this, however. Trans horror films — whether by or about trans people — have a history of rougher production quality, lower-budget aesthetics, and the sort of run-and-shoot production techniques that make microbudget cinema so enticing to movie lovers. Trans horror filmmakers have not traditionally been given access to the resources of enormous Hollywood studios, so their films tend to feel like underground cult projects, and they’re all the more exciting for it.

Jane Schoenbrun’s duology of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, Alice Maio Mackay’s T Blockers, and Brad Michael Elmore’s Bit each use trans or nonbinary characters and stories within the horror genre to communicate complicated truths about the trans experience, and horror feels like the perfect avenue to explore a group that’s been stripped of their rights and unfairly demonized by lawmakers and bigots around the world. Their filmmaking isn’t always revolutionary, but it feels alive and intentional in a way that great punk art should. There are trans filmmakers out there producing great work, and I earnestly wish Bears Rebecca Fonté can one day be counted among their numbers.

How Far Does the Dark Go? premiered at Queer Screams Film Festival on August 2nd.