It’s an ambitious hybrid, grafting the ethereal, landscape-driven, light-infused beauty and naïf narration associated with Terrence Malick onto a tale in which struggle against supernatural forces is just one challenge of coming of age—a trope that has become inescapably trendy of late, but hasn’t had such a sense of balance between the fantastic and the organic since the heyday of Joss Whedon…he narration is sometimes cloying, the Mother Mary metaphors are pumped hard, and the aesthetics can verge on self-parody (Martin’s vamp-dusting training reliably takes place at magic hour). But it’s thick with a distinct mood—the sadness and exhilaration of having nothing left to lose—and the characters, in their desperation and drive, feel real. Fessenden may be producing the best brains-before-blood horror in North America today.[Village Voice]