- Patrick WaiMay 31, 2026Beautifully shot and full of grit, this feels like a mash-up of every post-apocalyptic survival movie you’ve ever seen, except instead of zombies you get feral vampires, and instead of just human scavengers you also get a crazy cult making the whole world even worse. The basic setup really is a coming-of-age story about a boy trying to survive under the mentorship of an older warrior, and that part works better than the vampire gimmick itself. What I liked most is that the movie is really more of a drama than an action film. It takes its time showing you a bleak, convincingly broken version of the end of the world, and that atmosphere is probably its strongest asset. Critics said similar things at the time, praising its characterization and eerie mood more than the monster action, which feels exactly right. It is not some masterpiece, and it definitely sits somewhere in the middle of the pack when compared with other survival movies in this lane. The story is familiar, the structure borrows from better apocalypse films, and the vampires sometimes feel like zombies wearing different makeup. Even so, it is engaging, well made, and has enough heart and grime to make it worth revisiting. That is probably why even people who were less enthusiastic still tended to admit it was at least watchable, while stronger reviews saw it as a solid, atmospheric genre hybrid rather than something revolutionary. So in the end, I liked it. It is bleak, well shot, reasonably smart, and easy to rewatch if you are in the mood for a dusty end-of-the-world movie with vampires instead of zombies. Not top tier, but definitely worthwhile.
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Stake Land was released on September 30, 2010.
Stake Land was directed by Jim Mickle.
Stake Land has a runtime of 1h 38m.
Stake Land was produced by Larry Fessenden, Adam Folk, Brent Kunkle, Peter Phok, Derek Curl.
Martin was a normal teenage boy before the country collapsed in an empty pit of economic and political disaster. A vampire epidemic has swept across what is left of the nation's abandoned towns and cities, and it's up to Mister, a death dealing, rogue vampire hunter, to get Martin safely north to Canada, the continent's New Eden.
The key characters in Stake Land are Martin (Connor Paolo), Mister (Nick Damici), Belle (Danielle Harris).
Stake Land is rated R.
Stake Land is a Horror, Drama, Science Fiction film.
Stake Land has an audience rating of 6.2 out of 10.
Stake Land had a budget of $650K.
Stake Land has made $33,245 at the box office.