This is a testimonial for a technically defunct medium, an endorsement for a product you can't buy, and incidental proof that sometimes you can only be taken seriously when you choose to act like a child.

So wrote Michael Almereyda for film annual Projections 3 in 1994 in praise of the Fisher-Price PXL 2000, a cheap plastic video camera marketed for children in 1987. Never a success, and discontinued three years later, the camera provided the kind of low-resolution black and white images unlikely to seduce MTV-kids. But, with a perversity we've come to expect of modern technology, the few still kicking about have found a new lease of life in the hands of filmmakers dedicated to the shadowy, other-worldly ghosts it produces. Almereyda is the prince of anti-IMAX Pixelvision (most notable for the feature Another Girl Another Planet), and although his new film, a meditative and blackly funny vampire picture, is shot largely in conventional 35mm black and white, long pass-ages are devoted to the mysterious images only this shifting, shimmering light can provide.

Nadja (Elina Lowensohn at her most icy) is the ethereally beautiful vampiress come to New York to look for sick brother Edgar (Jared Harris). Quickly she senses their father, Dracula, has been freshly killed by Van Helsing (Peter Fonda), vampire hunter and uncle to the long-suffering Jim (Martin Donovan doing his usual startled rabbit). Soon Nadja is seducing Jim's wife Lucy (Galaxy Craze) and the stage is set for long stretches of blood-guzzling and existential emptiness as these characters move toward their inevitable fate.

Nadja lifts almost wholesale the plot of Lambert Hillyer's Dracula's Daughter, 1936 sequel to Todd Browning's Lugosi classic, pausing only to exchange heterosexual complications for the lesbian ones evident here. It could also do with lifting that film's concise 72 minute running time. While this new picture is hardly excessive, it out-stays its welcome by a good quarter-hour, seeming to end in conflagration, then going on to Romania for a hackneyed coda. It's a shame, because up to then, and especially in the moments immediately before the fire, Almereyda has fostered some most remarkable, lingering images.

Fisher-Price provide the film's vampiric POVs. Blocky and dislocated, they are grainy and voyeuristic in close-up (at their most conventional), and extraordinarily distressing (like half-glimpsed views of dead ships on the seabed) in long-shot. As madness takes over, the film becomes a whirl of singular images that recall nothing so much as Almereyda's hero, Derek Jarman. Elsewhere the director succeeds in exciting memories of German Expressionism - in particular Murnau's marvellous silent Nosferatu and, more than once, Eraserhead. (Inevitable, perhaps: the executive producer is David Lynch, who makes a fleeting cameo as a dazed morgue receptionist.)

If Nadja holds the visual attention, it's general tone is less certain. Although deeply sombre to look at, Almereyda's script has all the appearance of being conceived largely as black comedy. Not only are Lowensohn and Donovan veterans of the films of Hal Hartley, but the American maverick seems to be all over the dialogue. The splendid Fonda - who gets to play not only the long-haired cycling hippy Van Helsing, but also, in flashback, the staked Dracula himself - describes the Count at his end as "like Elvis... drugs, confused, surrounded by zombies." Although there is much to be admired in both schizophrenic personalities, the film's balance is often uneven and distracting.

The music is important and defiantly British, boasting Simon Fisher Turner's glutinous, atmospheric rumbles, amply enhanced by a string of suitably severe indie luminaries from The Verve through splendidly used Portishead trip-hop.

Nadja is difficult. Its plot is pure exploitation and yet it flaunts neither the sex nor violence it needs to be successful on a mass scale; it's gorgeous muddy visuals will frighten many off. Like Almerayda's far more conventional debut Twister, it smacks of a cult in the making. We still have to see what Abel Ferrara can do with similar material in his own forthcoming black and white vampire flick The Addiction, but for now this quaint, messy, but often startling little film offers the 90s bloodsuckers of choice, especially compared to the hollow-headed gloss of Interview With The Vampire and Bram Stoker's Dracula.