The perception that human beings are not what they think they are, that the self is no more than an illusion, is at the core of Thomas Ligotti's fiction and serves as the pedal tone of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It is perhaps for this reason that Ligotti's works are not, and may never be, translatable as cinema. Moviegoers do not want to see a film that portrays human beings as nothings and nobodies; like most people, they would rather be entertained by tales of transcendent selves -- action heroes, star-crossed lovers, villains, etc. Of the films I've seen, only one seems to approach the Ligottian view of existence, however obliquely: George Romero's Martin (1977). The title character, still in his teens, believes himself to be something that he is not: an eighty-four-year-old vampire. While Martin's sense of self is more radically construed than that of an average person, his relationship to the world around him is not much different from anyone else's. Working a thankless job and living with his overbearingly religious, superstitious cousin, Martin is haunted by an agglomeration of vampiric images generated by Hollywood as much as by his family's traditional lore. Acting according to what he believes to be his nature, he kills, and attempts to kill, others along the way. Though he is mostly timid and apathetic at home, Martin in the end is persuasive enough as a vampire to turn his zealot of a cousin fatally against him.
Martin's conviction that he is someone or something is just another illustration, though a striking and memorable one, of what TL defines in the poem "Insanity and Nothingness" as the "bottom line": "No one is in the market / for nothingness, / while insanity, / since time began, / has always been / flying off the shelves." In addition to being a fascinating meditation on insanity and nothingness, Martin is a great, jolting horror movie. Unlike other screenwriters and directors, who take care to preserve the lives of their main characters, Romero more often than not precipitately and violently dispatches them, right at the moment when viewers care about them the most. He does this -- legendarily, of course -- in Night of the Living Dead, as well as in Martin.
I'll make one final comment about Martin. The film was shot in an old industrial town, a place as grotty and run-down as many of the settings of TL's short stories. And, like TL, Romero uncovers real beauty behind, and within, dilapidation and decay.
