The impact that director Emerald Fennell’s dark comedy-slash-thriller Saltburn has had on pop culture and the collective mind of the Internet just cannot be overstated.
Months after the film’s release, jokes about bathtubs are everywhere, from tweets to sketches in between awards at the BAFTAs; “Murder on the Dancefloor” is in the background of one out of every five Tiktoks; and Barry Keoghan, Saltburn’s lead actor, had lodged himself more and more into the “incredibly charming and weird guy who’s both very attractive and very disturbing” niche in Hollywood.
Now, clearly, I’m not the only one who’s still hung up on Keoghan’s performance as Oliver Quick in Saltburn—Emerald Fennell is also very much still thinking about her own characters in the scenes she herself created. The photo shoot she directed for the latest The Directors Issue of W Magazine, titled “Lucky for You, I’m a Vampire,” is undeniable proof of that.
The pictures have already burned through the Internet, as pictures like these are bound to do. In the six shots W has shared on its social media, Keoghan takes up the role of a modern-day vampire torn between 21st-century life and his old soul—one that wears a suit of armor to shield himself from the sun when going out for a little shop at Tesco.
Surrounded by bloody waters and red lights, Keoghan wears latex gloves, eats hearts, reads Twilight—the fact that the more obvious choice here could have been Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the original vampire story, but no, it’s Twilight because Fennell knows her audience very well is something that has me screaming, actually—and drinks his tea out of a Buffy-themed mug. It’s all anyone who has watched Saltburn and loved it after a lifetime spent in fandom spaces could ever want and the reactions are, predictably, hilarious.
The title of the shoot, “Lucky for You, I’m a Vampire,” comes from one of Saltburn’s most infamous scenes where Keoghan delivers this very line to Alison Oliver’s character, Venetia—the youngest of the Catton family and the little sister of Jacob Elordi’s Felix.
In what has become known on the Internet as “the vampire scene,” Oliver performs oral sex on Venetia while she is on her period. It’s not an act of romantic or sexual interest, though—it’s just one of the many steps in what is revealed to be Oliver’s master plan to seep into the crevices of this family and gain the upper hand on them.
(featured image: MGM)
