Haley Kenyon

How To Hunt Vampires

Set in the 1800s wild west, this queer-lens film with a gothic twist is about finding love in unexpected places and finding acceptance for who you are.

“My name is Haley Kenyon; I am an unapologetically alternative interdisciplinary artist. I like to tell personal stories veiled in fiction by using lived experiences as a jumping off point to write stories that create metaphorical connections to feelings and experiences that I struggle to put into words. I often use the lenses of dark fantasy and occultism as vehicles to present my ideas.How To Hunt Vampires, my newest and most ambitious project to date, is a 2 and a half minute animated short film that tells a story inspired by the time I unexpectedly fell head over heels in less than a week. The story follows Joanna, a dispassionate bounty hunter, and Morgana, a highly emotional vampire, that fall for each other unbeknownst of the other’s identity. Although misunderstandings ensue, the pair will eventually come to accept each other after experiencing some mixed-feelings and heartache. This film is at its core a dramatic romance about finding love and acceptance in unexpected places; a rather timeless tale so to speak, yet I have decided to turn the convention on its head. Not only am I showcasing a genre-bending western, but injecting my own personal philosophy on love and coexistence, as well as aspects of queer history I find quite fascinating and wish to share with the world. My choice of setting a queer film in the western 1800s serves not only as a reflection of my personal aesthetic tastes, but as a commentary on the erasure of queer individuals in history, and that even though there is little evidence of our existence in the history books due to deliberate exclusions, it is undeniable that we did exist back then as much as we do now, and the “wild west” provided many queer individuals the opportunity to fly under the radar due to lack of law enforcement and others who would persecute us simply for being alive. In addition to being a lesbian in the 1800’s, Morgana is a vampire; an undead being forced to live in the shadows and conceal her identity around others to survive, an unfortunate way of life not completely foreign to living queer individuals even to this day. The goal of this work is to showcase an unconventional romance as ordinary, thus subverting the expectations that the characters are supposed to be enemies, not lovers, and to celebrate otherness, as the aspects that make us weird are the very same aspects that make us wonderful. I felt it important to tell this story because as a queer person with many other quirks that pertain to my “otherness”, I cannot express how much happier in all aspects of life I have become since meeting someone who has accepted me and all of the things that make me “weird” down to my core, and I no longer have to feel like I am broken, left behind, and unloveable. The film was completely animated using hand drawn 2D animation in Clip Studio EX, including backgrounds also illustrated in Clip Studio, and light post-production as well as compiling done in Adobe Premiere Pro. This project is a solo endeavour with an audio track provided by sound engineer and musician Sepehr Rezaei. Feedback and morale support needed to see this work through has been provided graciously by many advisors, friends, and my dear love.”