Will Jones
The charcoal artist has created the official poster for Andrew Sullivan’s I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore, an anti-horror vampire drama premiering at the 35th Philadelphia Film Festival.
A Vampire Who Wants Out
Eiko has stopped aging. Nearly five decades have passed outside the walls of her family home, and she is still, physically, a teenager. She is safe, sheltered and slowly suffocating.
That is the premise of I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore, the independent vampire drama from writer-director Andrew Sullivan that premieres at the 35th Philadelphia Film Festival this October. Now the film has a face to match: an original charcoal portrait for its official poster by Mad Charcoal, the pseudonym of self-taught fine artist Josh Hernandez.
The pairing makes a certain kind of sense. Sullivan’s film has little interest in fangs or the horror of the turn. It cares about what comes after, when immortality stops looking like a gift and starts to feel like what the film calls a “comfortable prison.” Hernandez has built a career drawing exactly that kind of pressure: the turmoil sitting just beneath a subject’s skin.
Sullivan conceived the film during the Covid-19 pandemic, and lockdown’s fingerprints are all over it. Eiko, a young Japanese-American woman, grapples with grief, identity and whether she can ever reconnect with the world beyond her door. The isolation she once found comforting has become a cell of her own making. Drawing on ancestry, survival and intergenerational isolation, the film asks a question many audiences now know too well: what is the difference between living forever and actually living?
Miki Ishikawa, Sierra McCormick and Nick Sagar star. Geoffrey Orthwein produces, and the film was shot primarily in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Chaos and Control
Born in Los Angeles and now based in Phoenix, Hernandez is an artist of Hispanic heritage who never went to art school. His charcoal portraits are known for their raw physicality: faces and bodies rendered with visceral intensity, held together by a deliberate command of composition. His recurring subjects are the tensions between chaos and control, abstraction and realism, faith and raw emotion.
Those tensions turned out to be Eiko’s, too.
“After learning Eiko’s story and understanding how she exists between two realities, I was excited to begin working on the poster,” Hernandez says. “My artistic style often explores the balance between opposing forces, particularly order and disorder.”
He tried a few directions before landing on the obvious one. “I realized that my portrait style was a natural fit for Eiko’s character,” he says. “It allowed me to capture the duality of her life and the fine line she walks as she tries to find control amid the chaos.”
The result is a first look that sells the film’s mood rather than its monster: vulnerability, darkness and humanity in the same smudged frame. It is a fitting introduction to a vampire story whose real horror is not immortality itself, but the isolation that comes with it.
“I loved collaborating with Zealous Pictures on this project and am thrilled to have played a small part in bringing their film to life,” Hernandez adds.
As I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore heads towards its Philadelphia world premiere, the collaboration offers a compelling proposition for Hollywood: a film’s visual identity can be as distinctive as the story it tells. Hernandez’s portrait gives Sullivan’s intimate vampire drama an arresting first impression, inviting audiences to look closer before the opening frame. For a story about the longing to reconnect with the world, there is something fitting about that connection beginning with a work of art.