It is ironic, but at the same time perhaps typical of great independent cinema, that one of the most intelligent and revisionist of modern vampire movies may not be a vampire movie at all. It's a question that has hovered over the film ever since its release and is central to its narrative – is Martin Madahas an 84-year-old vampire or a mixed-up kid with psychotic tendencies? Either way, Martin is a genuinely great vampire movie, one that recognises and fully understands generic conventions and yet turns most of them completely on their head.

If you like to call yourself a horror fan then you'll already know Martin well. Even if you only have a part-time relationship with the genre then you'll be aware of the work of its director, George Romero (whose middle initial, 'A' is as come-and-go as Francis Coppola's 'Ford'). Made shortly before the director had what may be his most influential success of all with Dawn of the Dead, Martin was for some time his most talked about but least seen film, the perfect conditions for the birth of a cult, and one whose steady growth has been matched by an increased critical appreciation of the horror film as a vehicle for social commentary.

Very much a film of its changing times, Martin was the first vampire movie to completely shake off the genre's folklore origins and the shadow of novel that effectively shaped the first 50 years of vampire cinema. It recognised the shifting nature of both the horror audience and the fears of the society in which they live, a post-Charles Mason, post-Ed Gein era in which you could be killed for no even remotely logical reason by the guy who lives just down the road. This is recognised even in the film's title. Like Dracula, the most famous vampire tale of them all, the name of the vampire is the name of the film, but whereas 'Dracula' invokes a sense of the exotic, the mysterious, the foreign (appropriate for a time in which international travel was the province of the upper classes, and when everything foreign was regarded either with wonder or deep suspicion), Martin is deliberately ordinary, an everyday name that has no specific connotations other than its day-to-day familiarity.

The development of the vampire genre has seen the figure of the vampire shift steadily in locale and class, moving closer to home and descending in rank as the years have passed. In Universal's Dracula the vampire was, as in Bram Stoker's novel, a nobleman from lands afar, a nobleman of wealth and supernatural power with three wives at his disposal. By the time Hammer took up the reigns with their spirited 1958 adaptation, the vampire was a Count in name only, living more as a country lord in a monogamous (if abusive) relationship and only a long horse ride from the town he eventually lays siege to. But Martin brought the vampire onto our doorstep and stripped him of nobility – he is an ordinary kid and he lives in a spare room in his cousin's house. He has no bride, no girlfriend, and unlike the sexually potent vampire of lore and films past, is actually afraid of women and sex. Martin is the boy next door, the reclusive, uncommunicative kid, the loner that the CIA would peg as having terrorist potential. He's the shy boy who, if stories are to be believed, one day shocks the neighbourhood by doing something horrible and out of character that, just for a few moments, makes him special. Most of all, he is the product of his family and environment – all his life he has been told he is bad, and now he believes it and acts accordingly, a self-fulfilling prophecy if you will. Well that's one reading...

In the film's notorious opening sequence, Romero confronts us head on with the unpleasant reality of what a non-supernatural vampire killing actually entails, and in the process sets Martin up as the film's bad guy, its monster. Not that you'd realise it to look at him – gawky, shy and seemingly intimidated by everything around him, he is as far from the traditional figure of the all-powerful vampire of movies and literature as you can imagine. But even as he boards the train on which the film's first murder will take place, he is selecting his victim. He may lack the supernatural power of Bela Lugosi's Dracula or the animal strength of Christopher Lee's Count, but he makes up for it in knowledge and experience – he knows what drugs to use to incapacitate his victim, how to pick the lock of her sleeping compartment, and how to cover his tracks when the deed is done. And it's a nasty and bloody deed. His target is no willing victim seduced by his hypnotic power and good looks, she fights him all the way, physically and verbally until dragged into drug-induced unconsciousness. Even as she fades, Martin assures her that she'll be alright. She won't. Once she is out cold, Martin strips her and himself bare, pulls her on top of him, slashes her wrist with a razor and hungrily drinks her blood, then cleans himself up and coldly arranges the room to suggest that her death was suicide. This is the vampire brought down to earth, stripped of all of the trappings that distance most movie vampires from real life, until all that is left is a calculating serial killer.

In perhaps the most iconic image in modern vampire cinema, Martin is briefly framed at his victim's door with a syringe held ready in his mouth (the image will recur later). Here the needle replaces the fang – both are used to sedate and ultimately destroy the vampire's prey, but while the traditional elongated canine teeth link the vampire to the wolf into which he is fabled to transform, the syringe has, for most, very unpleasant real world associations. It's clinical, surgical nature directly reflects Martin's approach to his assaults, which are executed like military stealth operations. Brilliantly constructed and edited (the use of rapidly cut huge close-ups is particularly impressive), this is a nonetheless deliberately confrontational and uncomfortable opening. How could any audience sympathise with such a central character?

Enter Tada Cuda. Immaculately dressed in white from head to toe like a stern faced Colonel Sanders, he is Martin's cousin, a member of the boy's extended family and the latest one to be charged with the task of watching over him. He meets Martin at the station and strides ahead of him to catch the next train while the boy shuffles behind. When Cuda looks at Martin he crosses himself. He's never met him before, but has already made up his mind about him.

Once they reach Cuda's house it is astonishing how quickly our allegiance shifts, as Martin the monster becomes Martin the put-upon, misunderstood, verbally bullied teenager and Cuda assumes the role of overbearing and unloving parent. He clings to the old beliefs, to the concept of the folklore vampire, decorating his the house with Christian artifacts and his own room with garlic and crosses as protection against 'Nosferatu', generic iconography that Martin instantly debunks by kissing the cross and taking a bite from the garlic. "It's not magic," he tells Cuda, but the old man is not so easily convinced. But then, religiously obsessed parental figures never are.

From here on in Martin becomes the subject of increasing audience sympathy, a representation of lost youth in a decaying town populated by the intolerant old and couples whose relationships have fallen into stagnation, a town devoid of life. Even the church is in disrepair after a fire, with canteen chairs for pews and an altar cobbled together from a broken TV set. The priest, on the other hand (amusingly played by Romero himself), is new to the parish, is fond of his wine and cigars and has trouble taken Cuda's old-style notions of evil seriously.

Martin's one ally is Cuda's twenty-something granddaughter Christina,* a fellow resident of the house whom Cuda has forbidden Martin to talk to. She is an opposing force to Cuda in every respect – young, defiant, progressive and convinced that Martin is the victim not of a vampire curse but harmful family superstition and prejudice. It is she who opens up the lines of communication to Martin, offering to share a phone line with him in spite of Cuda's protestations over this devil's device, an offer Martin eventually accepts and uses to call a local talk show to put its host right on vampire mythology, in the process becoming the show's most popular phone-in guest. That Martin is able to communicate more lucidly through an electronic device rather than face to face is not only representative of the disconnected youth of the mid to late 70s (whose collective rejection of social values of the time gave birth to the Punk movement), but anticipates today's mobile phone generation, for whom texting sometimes seems preferable to direct conversation.

Our engagement with Martin meets its greatest moral challenge in the film's centrepiece, a night-time break-in that goes wrong when the woman he has targeted is not alone as expected, but caught in flagrente delicto with her lover. In the brilliantly staged sequence that follows, Martin's level-headed experience keeps him consistently one step ahead of the couple's attempts to both track him down and call for help, the house a dizzying maze of corridors, stairs and doorways that Martin is able to use against people who should know them better than him. Where we were shocked by the opening sequence, we actually find ourselves rooting for Martin here, even though the purpose and potential outcome are the similar.

Perhaps the most telling relationship is the one Martin develops with Mrs. Santini, one of the customers to whom he makes grocery deliveries for Cuda. A depressed housewife whose relationship with her husband is no longer based on love or desire (he is only seen once, and gruffly pulls his wife away while she is talking to Martin at the church), her gentle come-ons to Martin are at one are both a cry for affection and a lament for her own lost youth and wasted life.** In a complete reversal of the genre norm, here the potential victim attempts to seduce the vampire, and he reacts initially by running away. When he does return his approach is both direct and awkward. "You want me here for sex, don't you," he asks her. This the only time he refers to sex that way, on the radio phone-in alluding to it more self-consciously as "the sexy stuff." But as their irregular liaisons continue, Martin's craving for blood abates, which subtextually casts his attacks in a masturbatory rather than forcefully sexual light, the secret nocturnal activities of a young boy that diminish once he gets his first taste of real sex. What this inexperienced adolescent fails to realise is the nature and cause of Mrs. Santini's emotional pain, something that will later have dramatic and unexpected consequences.

The uncertainty over whether Martin really is an 84-year-old vampire or a screwed-up kid with homicidal tendencies remains tantalisingly unclear, the intermittent black-and-white inserts set in some undefined turn-of-the-century township functioning either as memories or fantasies, depending on your take on the story.*** Martin himself believes he is 84 years old, but also rejects Cuda's supernatural explanations, mocking his beliefs with a pantomime vampire costume and using a simple off-the-shelf magic trick to point out that, "there is no real magic." This rejection of the supernatural includes Cuda's strongly held religious faith and by association its standing the genre, ineffectual against Martin's condition and irrelevant to a generation who have turned against the values of their elders and are looking for answers of their own, ones not steeped in dogma and superstition.

Martin takes the codes and conventions of the vampire genre and reworks them to remarkable ends, with one eye on the past but the other fixed firmly on the society in which the film was made. In that respect it has to be seen as the first truly modern vampire film, a strikingly intelligent, inventive and socially relevant take on a genre that even in the 70s was still hanging onto the coat-tails of the Transylvanian Count whose story gave it birth. Martin contemporised the vampire tale, not by transporting Dracula to swinging London in 1972, but by exploring modern fears through modern eyes and confronting the audience, perhaps for the first time, with what it really means to be a vampire. That it remains so fresh a work today is, ironically, in part due to its lack of mainstream success. When commercial cinema eventually re-embraced the vampire film in the 1980s, it had learned little from Romero's extraordinary work, the younger protagonists of The Lost Boys – dressed to look cool and pining for MTV – having more to do with audience demographic than a desire to explore the genuine fears of society or the traumas of youth. In this respect Martin is even today a unique work, a low budget gem of extraordinary depth and complexity that showcases Romero on phenomenal form both as storyteller and filmmaker (the editing alone is a wonder to behold), and built around an utterly convincing central performance by the young John Amplas and a support cast of largely natural nonprofessionals. There is simply no contest here – Martin is THE modern vampire film. End of story.

OK, let's get the aspect ratio issue out of the way first. Framed 16:9 and anamorphically enhanced, this is actually cropped down from a 4:3 16mm original. Romero fans will know that the director has expressed his firm preference for that original framing, and if you look at both versions side-by-side it's easy to see why, with close-ups made claustrophobically uncomfortable, characters cut in half in a couple of wider shots and in the case of one of Savini's make-up shots, the effect itself is pushed off screen. Have a look at the comparisons below with Anchor Bay's now sadly discontinued region 1 disc.

Arrow Films UK disc (left) and Anchor Bay US disc (right)

But even allowing for that (and I don't see why I should), the picture quality here still comes in a weak second best to both the Anchor Bay disc and the New Line re-issue from which this disc is sourced (which was also the wrong aspect ratio, of course), suggesting NTSC to PAL transfer issues, although there are is no motion blurring to back that up. Sharpness is less impressive than on the Anchor Bay disc, with grain far more visible (the picture has been enlarged to fill the widescreen frame, of course) and colours less true-looking. The picture is also somewhat darker, or perhaps I should say muddier – detail in shadow areas is particularly lacking. On the whole, a major disappointment.

There are two soundtracks available, Dolby stereo 2.0 and 5.1 surround. Music aside, both largely mono, with the sound spread across the front speakers on the 2.0 track and confined largely to the centre on the 5.1. The sound quality is pretty much identical on both, clear with no noticeable problems.

This new release from Arrow films is marketed as a 2-Disc Special Edition and even comes in a cardboard sleeve to prove it. However...well, more on that when we get to disc 2.

The Anchor Bay disc only had one extra, but it was a damned good one, a commentary George Romero, Tom Savini and Martin himself, actor John Amplas. It was an insightful, enjoyable look back at the making of the film and became famous for the discussion of a three-hour cut that was stolen and never recovered, and even included a plea for its return, despite the intervening years. For this edition a new commentary was recorded, minus John Amplas but with Romero and Savini, plus producer Richard Rubenstein, composer (and Richard's brother) Donald Rubenstein, and cinematographer Michael Gornick. Curiously, Savini's name is not listed with the others on the extras menu. Fortunately this proves as engaging and informative as the commentary on the Anchor Bay disc, and with new participants is different enough in content to be of real value even to those who have that DVD. The five are clearly old friends and there is a fair amount of joking with each other that is pretty funny at times, plus a nice selection of anecdotes amongst the technical details (the technician left outside swinging a light when everyone took a break, how much Stephen King hated the film of The Shining, etc.). Romero also believes that the house chase sequence I admire so much is just about the best scene he's ever done, and in the joshing says "Forget about it!" almost as much as Donnie Brasco. There's also a brief but interesting reflection on post-9/11 hysteria in America on which they all appear to be impressively united.

As for disc 2, well... OK, this has been one of my pet peeves for some time now, spreading a single DVD's worth of film and extras over 2 discs to better justify the Special Edition label, but this has to be a new record. If you were to lay all of the extras here end to end you'd have precisely 12 minutes 3 seconds of video material, 1 minute 2 seconds of audio and 17 small stills. Which is, frankly, taking the piss.

Making Martin: A Recounting (9:30) is an insubstantial featurette in which a very few of those involved in the making of the film look back at at a work Romero himself regards as his finest. Of interest is a brief trip back to some of the locations used, although we could have had a lot more on this, and just about everything else as it happens. Adding to the piss-take factor, this is in widescreen but not anamorphically enhanced – it's not as if space here was at a premium. Admittedly Arrow have licensed this from the Lion's Gate disc, where it was all on one DVD, but still...

There are 2 Radio Ads (0:26 and 0:56), which are of interest, but more so when linked to the Theatrical Trailer (2:33) which includes an address to camera from Martin that is not in film and possibly shot specifically as promotional material – it is his voice from this shot that is used in the radio ads.

The Stills and Poster Gallery consists of 17 promotional stills and posters, three of which are virtually identical. There is a lot more promotional artwork out there that should have been included. They are also way too small.

I love the movie, I'm a lot less enthralled with the DVD. I can't hold Arrow responsible for the aspect ratio issue, as they appear to have licensed the whole product from Lion's Gate, who must thus take the blame for the cropping. But the picture quality is still shabby in comparison to the Anchor Bay disc, and aside from the commentary the extras here are paltry for a Special Edition. But the commentary IS good, and that may prove enough for hardened Romero fans (it was for me), though if you have the Anchor Bay disc then I'd suggest hanging on until the price drops a bit before shelling out for this one, perhaps in the summer sales. If you haven't, then I'd get searching, or hassle Anchor Bay for a re-issue. Frankly, I'm going to put my copy somewhere very safe.

* Played by Christine Forrest, whom Romero married four years later.

** In an almost throwaway moment, Mrs. Santini first tries to arouse Martin's interest (no pun intended) by asking him to pass her a book from her car's glove compartment, which when opened contains a Tampax box and a dildo (although you'll have to look fast to spot both), a suggestion completely lost on someone of Martin's inexperience in such matters.

*** Romero states on both the commentary and the accompanying featurette that he firmly believed that Martin was a psychotic kid rather than an 84-year-old vampire.