Dueling Vampires Stake Out Territory

Both are vampire movies. Both are set in contemporary Manhattan. Both involve central female protagonists turned into bloodsuckers by stalking female vampires. Both are low-budget indie productions filmed in black and white.

And both Michael Almereyda’s “Nadja” and Abel Ferrara’s “The Addiction” are being released in big-city markets like Los Angeles and New York by October Films--within weeks of each other. “Nadja” opened locally Sept. 1 and “The Addiction” will be unleashed Oct. 6.

October Films would appear to have a marketing challenge on its hands, given the remarkable similarities the films share, along with the intensely crowded fall marketplace for upscale studio releases and art-oriented movies.

“It is a pretty large coincidence--black and white, female leads, all that,” director Ferrara says from New York, where he is readying his next film, “The Funeral,” which October is also producing. “But I’m not really worried about it. Once I’ve done my thing, what can I do?”

“It is unusual for a distributor to release two such similar films at the same time,” says David Davis, an analyst for the investment firm Houlihan, Lokey, Howard and Zukin . “[October] must have a belief that each film will diversify the company’s risk.”

As if to crowd the bloodsucking field more, Paramount’s Eddie Murphy vehicle “Vampire in Brooklyn” arrives Oct. 27, in time for Halloween, and the sixth edition in the “Halloween” franchise, care of Miramax, opens two weeks earlier.

Bingham Ray, October’s co-managing executive, plays down what he says are only surface similarities between his company’s two movies.

“I happen to think that there are vast differences between both films,” he says, speaking by phone from Edinburgh, Scotland.

“Michael’s movie pays homage to past masters, it explicitly plays with the classic ‘Dracula’ tale, and it has a trippy quality that goes back to ‘Liquid Sky’ and ‘Eraserhead,’ ” Ray says, referring to the 1978 underground classic by David Lynch, who served as “Nadja’s” executive producer and key source of funding.

“In Abel’s case, it’s about a New York University grad student who picks up the vampire ‘disease’ as if it were AIDS. It goes beyond being a vampire movie.”

As Almereyda views it: “I take romance in my film very seriously, and Abel takes the damnation theme very seriously. Mine has a fairy-tale quality, while Abel’s is grittier, more obsessive.”

The target crowd--what Ray describes as “urban, sophisticated, hip”--is another thing both films have in common, but it’s one October believes won’t overlap with the hard-core “Halloween” cult and Eddie Murphy fans.

Unlike studio product aimed to take in huge box-office sums in the first weekend, indie films like “Nadja” and “The Addiction” will trickle out to the market in platformed release patterns, with reviews and word of mouth as key support.

But Ray acknowledges that both titles will have to be handled intelligently: “For people who aren’t fans of the genre, we don’t want to fang ‘em to death in the trailers and ads, but we’re also not hiding the fact that both films have vampire elements.”