Habit (1997) is a vampire movie that casts some doubt onto who, exactly, is responsible for draining the life out of its lead. Written, directed, and edited by its star, Larry Fessenden, the film follows Sam, a perpetually disheveled young New Yorker going through what it would be an underestimation to call tough times. Near-simultaneously, his live-in girlfriend (Heather Woodbury) dumps him and moves out, and his father, whom he had a complicated relationship with, dies. It’s implied that Sam had already been struggling with alcoholism — someone expresses surprise when he dips, mostly sober, prematurely from a Halloween party not long into the movie — and so the twin blows unsurprisingly take his addiction to a new echelon. There’s rarely a moment in Habit where he isn’t in a haze — where we can be sure we’re seeing things as they really are. 

Much of Habit takes place at night; it’s inkily photographed by cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco in a way that feels both seductive and menacing. Much of the film is also spent inside a new romance Sam will start. He meets the woman, the androgynously presenting Anna (Meredith Snaider), at a gathering she’s crashed, and he’s quickly taken with her. That she’s mysterious — Anna is prone to disappearing if Sam turns his back for too long, and she refuses to tell him what she does for a living because it supposedly “has nothing to do with who I am” — only adds to her allure.

Habit’s many sexy scenes are increasingly punctuated with Anna biting her new beau and drawing blood; the morning after their first encounter, Sam’s lower lip is riddled with bloody bite marks. The more time he spends with Anna, the weaker and more withdrawn from his growingly concerned loved ones he’ll get. Sam becomes convinced that his new flame is maybe a vampire — and some fang reveals and moments where it seems like Anna is casting a spell of some sort feel close enough to corroborations — but Fessenden’s screenplay never quite persuades you of that. 

That isn’t to say that Habit is ineffective, but that it’s smartly coy around the truth. Is Sam’s life really being ruined by an otherworldly being, or is he destroying his own life and, in his chronic drunken stupor, pinning the blame on a woman whose enigmas make her easy to project on to? (Anna is, regardless of her intentions, an effective metaphor for the pull of addiction.) I like the film’s reticence even if as I wished it were slightly scarier as a horror movie — even as I rolled my eyes when, toward its end, a friend of Sam’s (Aaron Beall) didactically monologues about the various vampiric forces one has to existentially deal with daily, whether it’s capitalism or addiction. It’s elsewhere interesting enough to overcome its defects.