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As horror becomes more and more popular, venturing well into mainstream spaces, it’s easy to forget the genre’s underground network of films. They are far less polished, they feature no household name actors and, for the most part, they are deemed too unsavory for the general public. If that description hasn’t scared you off yet, then behold Bloody Bridget, Richard Elfman’s newest film.

Bloody Bridget concerns an ambitious but down-on-her-luck performance artist (Anastasia Elfman) who gets back at her abusers and then some. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity entails Bridget becoming a heart-eating and mythologically-brewed vampire after she meets Baron Samedi (Jean Charles), an lwa of Haitian Vodou from another realm. It’s not long before Bridget gets to take her new powers out for a test drive.

Along with the audience, Bridget finds immediate pleasure in hurting the usual suspects in her life. The chronically unfaithful boyfriend...

Richard Elfman redefined underground cinema with his barely-categorizable 1980 film Forbidden Zone, a vehicle for his musical unit The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. He re-energized absurdist cinema with the musically-propelled sci-fi comedy Aliens, Clowns &- Geeks (2021). Directed and written by Elfman, the upcoming Bloody Bridget is another music-driven piece with a score by Ego Plum and Richard’s brother Danny Elfman.

For Bloody Bridget, Elfman is infusing new blood, and plenty of heart, into the vampire genre he thought he’d staked with the 1998 cult horror movie Revenant (aka Modern Vampires). Richard’s wife Anastasia Elfman plays Bridget, a dance horror choreographer who is sexually harassed and tossed into a legal wringer. Voodoo father Baron Samedi (Jean Charles) mistakes her for his wife, the Irish saint Maman Brigitte, and turns her into a “Valentine vampire.” Blood is just an appetizer for the main course. She “must feast on the hearts of evil-doers,...