While evil hide among us, a fierce weretiger fighting the cities vampires is shunned by her elders as she argues for her beliefs to be accepted, while an ancient evil threatens to return and destroy the Earth.  

SYNOPSIS:

Shot on location, City of Caves is the fire and fury of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meeting the compassion and need for acceptance of Being Human.

Billi and Sally seek out and destroy vampires and other forces of darkness, as they gradually come to terms with their feelings for one-another. Their battles with evil are frequent, since Nottingham, where they live, harbors a secret gateway to an alternate universe. As they deal with the challenges of being supernatural creatures, their desire to live with the freedom of humans bonds them.

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Endorsement from Oaxaca FilmFest 2017.

Billi is minding her own business, having her morning swim when she’s attacked by a stranger. However, this is no ordinary stranger, he’s a vampire looking for an easy meal, but things don’t go as planned as the vampire attacker soon discovers Billi has a secret of her own.

Billi is not a damsel in distress, she’s a surprise, bait, the embodiment of a twist, giving the vampire the surprise of his un-dead life.

The vampire is overconfident, he has done this time and time again and relishes his power and the security it brings him, knowing he can’t be matched in strength especially by a woman, he is not some dark and terrifying creature of the night but rather a coward with too much power.

Once it becomes evident that Billi is not your average girl, the vampire loses his power, not his supernatural strength, but rather his power as a victimiser, his confidence and his poise. Billi turns into something truly terrifying and suddenly the creature of the night becomes the opening sacrifice of the show before the credits roll.

The events play out as a reversal of roles and tropes of the genre, the hunter becomes the prey and the prey becomes the hunter. The other trope being subverted is that of the last-minute hero, where the vampire wouldn’t have killed Billi, rather, she would have been rescued at the last second by some dashing male hero, some vampire hunter of sorts or perhaps even another vampire, although one with heroic inclinations, dispatching the villainous fiend and being rewarded with Billi’s affections.

But, this is not that story, Billi is the hero of her own story, she rescues herself and does so in a way that makes her even more formidable than any vampire, she’s something new, something dangerous.

Billi is a beautiful young woman, with a clever sense of humour and wit. She’s a heroine out of the mould of Buffy Summers, if Buffy was a shapeshifter.

The vampire she confronts is not the main antagonist, but rather one more of a legion of the undead who play by the same book, they are overconfident and predatorial the way real-life douchebags are. With all his power, he still picks on girls at their most vulnerable moments, his comeuppance is made even more cathartic given recent accusations of sexual predators in the industry. In a way, City of Caves taps into these same themes, of predators underestimating the strength of their victims and not expecting the retaliation that is coming in the form of a public mauling, overconfident in their power to silence and overpower women, but no longer.

Set in modern day Nottingham, in the small but vibrant city, and below in the myriad of sandstone caves. City of Caves follows two intrepid werecats, Billi (a weretiger) and her oldest, and only friend, Sally (a werecat) as they try to uncover the truth about their heritage, and what really happened when Yfel was destroyed, while someone is endeavouring to have one of them killed.

With the aid of a werewolf, George, they discover they are being hunted by an enemy thought dead for almost a thousand years, Eldred, as he attempts to hide and understand an evil even more dangerous than himself.

While Billi and Sally are fighting these battles, they begin to realise that they are in love. Can two women from two different species ever truly have a relationship, not if the Clowder Council, makers of werecat laws have anything to do with it.

Using George to facilitate her release, the evil escapes in the form of a Panther queen, Giovanna. And Billi must act fast to destroy her before she brings about the end of the world as they know it.

CITY OF CAVES - THE WHITE TIGER