‘Morbius’ might have worked better as a horror movie

Richard Schertzer
2 min readJan 8, 2023

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By this time, we all know about the critically despised Morbius movie that Sony released. To its credit, it has some thrilling sequences of action and vampire violence but this film may have been the perfect case of style over substance. However, that may not mean that this action flick should be totally forsaken.

The film takes place around a crippled doctor named Michael Morbius who is trying to develop a cure for his ailment. He attempts to use bats as his basis for a cure and when the results become stable for mice, the typical animal that scientists in movies always test, he injects himself with the chemical, but that’s when things go sideways.

The film was hated for its bizarre story, janky visual effects and strange mid-credits scene with Michael Keaton’s Vulture, somehow getting in the mix of things in a post-No Way Home addition.

The film, itself, is not great but it doesn’t really deserve all of the hate that it gets. With that being said, it could have worked a lot better as a straight-up horror movie rather than a superhero flick. I could see the film paying proper homage to Bram Stoker’s source material, while using its horror thrills to manifest some scares from the audience.

The visuals do look overly stylized to a degree. It almost seems like they had a budget excess and needed to add visual effects to make it look “cooler” maybe. To me, it seemed pretty unnecessary.

However, its thrills are something to be praised and working in the realm of vampires gives it some wiggle room to have it be more of a period piece with more elements of a Bram Stoker novel.

Perhaps, if Michael Morbius was a visitor at Count Dracula’s house and fell victim to him, only to be gifted with the abilities of his assailant, it would be more palatable and if it focused on scares instead of Marvel fan-service, it might have received better reviews.

Those are only my thoughts. Anyway, last time I saw it was on Netflix and, if the big tech companies haven’t yanked it off by now, you could probably catch it.

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Richard Schertzer

Richard is a Howard University grad student and is working as a content writer and filmmaker with the dream to make films in Hollywood.