PARK CITY, UT - At the Sundance Film Festival last weekend, Academy Award winner Alex Gibney debuted his latest collaboration with the HBO network, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, that recounts the rise and fall Theranos, former start-up unicorn that shuttered last year after a massive fraud investigation, and Elizabeth Holmes, its wunderkind Chief Executive. Much of the film was was well-received for the raw exposure of Ms. Holmes, who is revealed to be a centuries-old vampire whose bloodlust is said to be the impetus for Theranos itself.
The revelation is shocking to some, but to many it aligns with many twists and turns of the medical testing company whose $9 billion valuation was build on a house of cards. “When we started this project, I knew there had to be something more,” explains Mr. Gibney, “and as it turns out, that missing piece was the unslakable thirst for human blood. [Holmes] engineered this entire venture for the singular purpose of collecting and consuming as much blood as possible; she had no need of earthly trappings or money.” As the director dug deeper through the layers of secrecy that fueled Theranos’ growth, he uncovered that Ms. Holmes was not the young, Stanford-dropout that she portrayed in the media, but rather an immortal being of the undead, who had studied arcane rites of Satan deep in the pits of Hell.
The Inventor draws heavily on interviews with Tyler Shultz, a former employee and whistleblower who had altered authorities to Theranos’ wrongdoings. Mr. Shultz says that he first became wary of Ms. Holmes when she invited him to her family’s ancestral castle in Romania. His suspicions were horrifyingly confirmed a few weeks later when Ms. Holmes attempted to drain the blood from his neck and recruit him into her harem of the damned.
Gibney frames her lies masterfully: “I have no secrets” Ms. Holmes tells the camera at the start, her cold eyes concealing fiendish urge to subjugate humanity as bloated chattel. The documentary, which will be available on the network later this month.