Honourable mention: Dracbeth

The merging of vampires and Shakespeare is not an unknown concept though the results vary, ranging from the entertaining, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, to the not so entertaining, Hamlet the Vampire Slayer.

Tobias Beer as Macbeth

This short film, release date unknown, was directed by Kevin Jackson and reworked Macbeth into twenty minutes with Macbeth (Tobias Beer) and Lady Macbeth (Pamela Banks) both vampires. The dialogue is purely from the play, selected to work in to the scenes, and the costuming/props modern. If I mention first the positives and that is the use of soundtrack, which was inspired in places (especially Venus in Furs) and the photography is marvellous.

Pamela Banks as Lady Macbeth

The negatives are simply that the short nature of the film deters exposition and relies on knowledge of the play and, ultimately, the vampirism is unnecessary to the story (though the addition of fangs in anything could always said to be a bonus). I liked the way the witches became voodoo in nature, that worked nicely. As an experimental piece it works, as a story not so much in this form. At the time of writing this article there was no IMDb page.

Vamp or Not? Freak Encounters – Vampire Virus

I have to admit that I have never been one for hidden camera shows. Freak Encounters purports to be one that takes the concept of a creature from cryptozoology and recreates it on an unsuspecting butt of the joke who has just started working for a group or company.

Camille

In this case the episode (which likely aired late 2010 or early 2011) sets to recreate the unleashing of a “Vampire Virus”. Of course I do wonder if the stooge (in this case Camille) is not actually also an actor (and the joke is actually on the audience) as one wonders how someone with no apparent background in geology could think that getting a job with a geological expedition team and doing said expedition at night makes any kind of sense?

drilling

So they are out in a quarry and they have Camille describing rock samples and then (in a portacabin) running a UV light over them when, outside, a woman taking core samples causes an explosion (causing the portacabin to apparently shake) as a vent of steam escapes the area she was drilling. The sfx of the steam is not seen by the stooge (it is by us) and one wonders again at why an effect would have been set up that the stooge wouldn’t see.

hazmat suit

The drill operator has “contracted a virus” and this involves 1) foaming at the mouth and 2) biting a colleague's arm whilst outside (again out of the stooge’s vision, though the bitten person shows her the bite marks later). Before the reveal there is the appearance of “emergency services”, all wearing hazmat suits as this has happened before, and her three companions all succumb to… well foaming at the mouth, basically. There is nothing to justify calling it a “vampire virus”. Perhaps if one of them had apparently been killed and had their blood sucked? Though that might have been a little extreme (on the other hand they dropped a "severed foot" onto a windscreen, to freak out the stooge, in the Ahool episode, which I also watched as it concerned a giant bat).

vampire graphic

Really it was a contagion with no real vampire element, rather it had a similarity to rabies (in the foaming and the bite response), and indeed rabies is mentioned during the show. There was an attempt to tie a “vampire virus” to Genghis Khan, which was a push as it was, but mention of him being light sensitive was a joke – I don’t know whether Genghis was reputed to have such a sensitivity or not but the vampiric sensitivity to light was an invention of the media vampire. Poor TV and Not Vamp.

The imdb page is here.

Empire of the Dead – Act 2 – review

Author: George A Romero

Illustrator: Dalibor Talajić

First published: 2015 (trade paperback)

Contains spoilers

The blurb: Zombies vs. Humans vs. Vampires

Welcome back to a very different New York City, still standing – barely – years after a world-changing undead plague. Zombies are used for sport in the arena, and vampires secretly rule the city! But now outside forces are knocking on Manhattan’s walls, and death rains down from above!

As Mayor Chandrake makes deadly power plays, can Dixie Peach control the rogue militia that’s rolling in from the South? What are Paul Barnum and Penny Jones secrets? What is the fate of street urchin Jo and undead cop Zavier? And what’s worse for the city’s remaining normal residents: the roaming flesh-eaters who seem to grow smarter every day, the ruling blood-suckers struggling to stay in power, or the militia bent on pillaging the city? It’s zombies vs. vampires vs. an invading army as the undead saga continues!

The review: Having enjoyed Act 1 of this marvel series, written by zombie-master George A Romero, I really anticipated reading book 2. All in all it was still brilliant but the pace, perhaps, slowed a tad as the various strands of machinations was explored.

Vampire Mayor Chandrake finds his position being assailed but is as intent on dominating Penny Jones as he is to holding on to his position. Barnum is concerned about their relationship – given his feelings for Jones – but to complicate matters we discover that Chandrake’s wife, Lilith, left Barnum for Chandrake.

The blurb tells us about the militia rolling in on New York but we also discover that, within the “safe” walls someone has been kidnapping and harvesting children. Jo is one of the orphan children but she has a protector in the form of the former cop and now zombie Zavier. Zavier is one of the zombies showing intelligence and this is the brilliance of the series. Romero has always had a hankering towards showing the dead evolving but in this he, through Zavier, does it in a way that we genuinely start to root for and care about the character.

The slower pace probably detracts a little but overall this is still a brilliant graphic novel. 7.5 out of 10.

Jonathan – revisited

Director: Hans W. Geissendörfer

Release date: 1970

Contains spoilers

When I first looked at this film I gave it an “honourable mention” due to the fact that the print I looked at was so horrendous. Having now watched the film from a much better source I have decided to revisit the film and review it.

The film is, as I mentioned first time round, a political allegory as much as anything and, whilst the cinematography is lovely, I unfortunately found it as plot confused and plodding as I did the first time around. The film is based on Dracula with the conceit that vampires rule the area, controlling a totalitarian regime. This means we get some familiar scenes, from Stoker’s novel, but they are often out of novel order – Jonathan (Jürgen Jung) reaching the Castle of the Count (Paul Albert Crumm) is the start of the film’s climax rather than the introduction, for instance.

aftermath of the dog attack

Following an opening containing a suicide, Vichy type collaboration, a girl ripped apart by dogs (with the actual act occuring off screen) and a fleeing man shot in the back – all of which builds a sense of the dystopian world we have entered – we meet Jonathan who is part of a resistance organisation. The time has come to fight back and the resistance plan to chase the vampires, as they gather at the Castle, into the sea – water being deadly to the vampires. Jonathan is sent ahead, told to infiltrate the Castle and prepare the prisoners to join in the revolt.

Jürgen Jung as Jonathan

He is given a bag full of vampire killing paraphernalia and a map, which it is vitally important he doesn’t lose. Within a few scenes he loses his coach driver and horses and the bag but its loss does not seem to slow anything down and this was the shame of the movie. That it pulled together a variety of scenes that needed more narrative coherence. The best of these were when the film mirrored the novel.

drink of me

As Jonathan leaves on his quest the Count pays Jonathan’s fiancée Lena (Eleonore Schminke) a visit and, having fed upon her opens his shirt and offers her opportunity to drink at a bloody weal on his chest – taking the scene from Stoker and placing it near the head of the film. This taking of Jonathan’s love has little on running story impact other than the fact that she is amongst the brides later in the film. As I mentioned previously there are a large number of brides, dancing through scenes like refugees from the Bolshoi. This offers a dreamlike quality to the cinematography.

kisses for us all

We do get the scene of the three brides from the book, coming to Jonathan when in the castle (I am still as befuddled now, as when I last looked at the film, as to why someone deemed as dangerous to the vampires was allowed free reign of the castle by the Count). This includes them being given a baby to eat, instead of the hero, and the mother running up to the castle (though the wolves that kill the mother are human collaborators). I have read that the “twist” of allowing the vampires to walk in the daylight was the root cause of their dominant position in the world created for us – though we should remember that Dracula could walk in sunlight in the novel. Rather, to me, it was the collaboration of ordinary humans with the monsters that gave said monsters their power.

feeding

As interesting a concept as the film may have, and as beautifully designed and shot as the film is, it is a bit of a chore to watch – though I found the direct novel parts alleviated the chore to a degree. It isn’t a bad film, at all, but it isn’t great fun either. I’m going to give it a 5 out of 10, overall, and suggest it is a must see for completists but casual viewers really may want to give it a bit of a wide berth.

The imdb page is here.

Dracula’s Guest: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories – review

Editor: Michael Sims

First published: 2010

Contains spoilers

The blurb: Before Twilight and True Blood, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula.

Acclaimed author and anthologist Michael Sims brings together the finest vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Byron and Shelley, the stories range from Aleksei Tolstoy's tale of a vampire family to Fitz James O'Brien's invisible monster to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's rich and sinister widow, Good Lady Ducayne. Sims also includes a nineteenth-century travel tour of Transylvanian superstitions, and finishes the collection with Stoker's own Dracula's Guest - a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.

Vampires captivated Victorian society, and these wonderful stories demonstrate how Romantic and Victorian writers refined the raw ore of peasant superstition into a whole vampire mythology of aristocratic decadence and innocence betrayed.

The review: I am always looking for interesting vampire stories from the 19th Century though, I must confess, that had I not found this volume for a penny on Amazon I probably wouldn’t have bothered. That’s not to say that it is poor – far from it – just that I have so many different anthologies and most of the stories within it. But a penny it was and so I ordered it.

Many of the usual suspects are within this book that isn’t quite what it says on the tin. In a section called Roots, it interestingly carries an extract from Calmet and obvious stories from the Georgian period. The final section, Fruit, is in the Edwardian period. However there are a good number of stories from the Victorian era. Not all are what I would call vampiric. Sim’s may be correct in his thought that Fitz-James O’Brien’s story What Was It? foreshadowed and maybe inspired the Horla but (unlike the latter story) it had no hallmarks of vampirism (bar strangulation – but that isn’t a common hallmark of the literary vampire).

Probably the most interesting couple of stories, for me, came out of the Fruit section as they were new ones on me. Luella Miller by Mary E Wilkins-Freeman is a fantastic energy vampire story that comes out of Massachusetts during the period when exhumations of corpses, as vampires, was still practiced. However Alice and Claude Askew's Aylmer Vance and the Vampire seemed hurried – a whole novel could have been built from the story – but was an interesting tale of vampiric spirit possession.

If you see this cheap or don’t have the stories inside then this is a fine collection. 7.5 out of 10.

Return of the Demon – review

Director: Ying Wong

Release date: 1987

Contains spoilers

Mo gao yi zhang, in Cantonese, the name Return of the Demon is possibly a misnomer (or at least not literally a demon) despite the bad guy in this being referred to as Monster (Dick Wei, the Seventh Curse) through the film and in the credits.

The film was written by Gwing-Gai Lee and Ying Wong, the latter being the writer who developed the story of that great piece of Hong Kong cinema Mr Vampire. This film does not have kyonsi in it – though it has ghosts and what we might see as variants of the werewolf and zombie. However the Monster is an energy vampire of the soul eating variety.

pouring ink

It begins with us being told of a treasure being held in the hands of a Buddha that could only be released by someone born in the year of Hoi (what that means I actually do not know). We see a group of four treasure hunters approach what is visible of a giant Buddha statue (only the hands and head are above the ground). The leader, Fierce (Fui-On Shing, Blue Jean Monster) , spots a rival treasure hunter on a cliff and takes him down with a hatchet, two more are then despatched. The group’s Lockmaster (Siu-Ming To) pours ink on a sword in the Buddha’s hands to try and retrieve the treasure.

freeing the monster

This causes steam to escape the hands and an eclipse of the sun. Celestial electricity strikes the hands, opening them and revealing what looks like a corpse – it’s actually the Monster – holding a treasure box. As they investigate the box – and discover it contains bizarre spiked steel devices – the Monster awakens. He grabs one of the devices and closes it around the head of the treasure hunter Kwai killing him. (To note the last treasure hunter is Fierce’s sister Panther (Sau-Lai Tsui, also the Seventh Curse)). They start fighting for their lives.

Te-Lo Mai as Mak

Intervening in the fight is Kin (Charlie Cho, the First Vampire in China & Here Comes a Vampire) and his student Mak (Te-Lo Mai). They use the sword to fight him off. Later they explain to the treasure hunters that they had come to stop them awakening the Monster. Kin and the Monster were brothers who studied longevity (Kin is 280 years old) but the Monster went astray and started stealing the souls of Hoi men so as to gain immortality (49 souls are needed). Kin subdued him and locked him in rock.

stealing a soul

As the story progresses we discover that Kwai is soul 47 and that Monster needs just two more. Each soul gives him additional powers. By the time the heroes actually confront him for the final battle he needs just one more soul and can only be killed by pushing the sword into his “pulse” – given that we see a red pool pulsing with maggots crawling in it I took pulse to be a mistranslation of heart and that his heart had been removed (by himself) and placed in a rock for safety – it is revealed by happenstance. There is a mechanism for fully extracting the soul, which then passes through a stone bas-relief and into him. However Kin confirms that Monster has to digest the soul (and so is eating them).

Emily Chu as Tayona

I mentioned other supernatural types. Kin trades senses with a dog through magical means but is caught out by the full moon, which causes him to transform into a dog-man who is crazed and homicidal (and leads to a prolonged fight/physical comedy routine with several characters)… so kind of a werewolf but he is cured when the fur of the dog is removed from his forehead. There is a haunted house scene with ghosts, including one powerful ghost called Tayona (Emily Chu, Vampire’s Breakfast) who is seeking a virgin to give up their life so she can reincarnate. Finally the soul extraction mechanism is powered by the dead pushing it – they are all victims of the Monster and have the steel devices on their heads. These are zombie like and can be killed (or deactivated) by removing the pin in their head. The Monster also kills a man by scooping out eating his brain, this enables him to control the corpse.

a were-dog

The film isn’t bad but I wasn’t overly struck by the comedy. The scene where they are arrested by sadistic cop Wei (Pak-Cheung Chan), and which culminated in the were-dog scene, went on a bit too long for my taste. There was a very Hong Kong cinema urine joke that was triggered by a visit to vet Kao (Ma Wu, Exorcist Master, Mr Vampire 5, a Chinese Ghost Story (1987), Mr Vampire 4 & also Vampire’s Breakfast) that didn’t necessarily tickle and a joke around Kin, Tayona and eggs that was brilliant in conception but flat in delivery. This is a shame as the film was fairly solid otherwise. Not brilliant but entertaining. 4.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mentions: the Master and Margarita

This novel by Mikhail Bulgakov was written between 1928 and 1940 but remained unpublished until released as a serial in 1966-67. It was released as a volume in 1967 and as an uncensored book in 1973. The novel itself is a satire on Stalinist Russia and uses the Faust legend (amongst other things) as a background.

It begins with Satan, in the guise of Professor Woland a foreign magician, visiting the Patriarach Ponds and his impact thereafter on the artists of Moscow. The novel also contains scenes from the last days of Christ told both by Woland (who was at the meeting with Pontius Pilate and tells a story not entirely consistent with the Christian gospels) and also from a manuscript written by the Master, an otherwise unnamed author who was ruined by the literary bureaucracy and whose love is Margarita.

For the sake of TMtV our focus is on the character Hella – one of Woland’s retinue. She is not named until quite late into part one of the book and is described as a very pretty red-headed girl. I've noticed that, on the internet, she is often described as a succubus – though, other than the fact that she spends an awfully large amount of time naked, there is little evidence to support that. Indeed every indication is that she is a vampire.

We see her, naked, approach the house-manager of the Variety Theatre, Varenukha, and she is described as “red-haired, her eyes burning with a phosphorescent gleam.” Despite him being drenched in cold water her hands are colder still – like ice. She offers him a kiss and he passes out before feeling it.

Hella is also portrayed as having a purple scar on her neck, presumably where she was fatally bitten in her turn, though that is supposition. She is described as perfect, though when she attacks Rimsky, the Treasurer of the Variety Theatre, we see her arm elongate and become putrid green as spots of decay appear on her chest; she is depicted as dead. The attack is interrupted by a cock crow, which causes her, and her accomplice, to escape the theatre by flight (implied as being an escape from sunrise). In another scene we see her helping Margarita (who is temporarily a witch and serving as hostess for a Walpurgis Night ball) shower in reviving blood.

Although Hella is never actually directly named as a vampire herself, Varenukha is and he begs Woland to allow him to not be a vampire – it is clear therefore that Hella turned him. I also discovered, through a website dedicated to the book and subsequent adaptations that Bulgakov found Hella’s name in the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary where it says “that Hella was the name given to girls who died too early, and became vampires after.”

Technically a fleeting visitation (or series thereof) in the book, the book itself cannot be recommended highly enough – a must have for collections.

Vampire Evolution: From Myth to Modern Day – review

Authors: E R “Corvis Nocturnum” Vernor and L E Carruba

First Published: 2015

Contains spoilers

The blurb: Vampires are beings of myth: folkloric creatures who live off the blood of the living and have been recorded in nearly every culture around the world since the beginning of man. This work traces the evolution of the vampire, from its roots in ancient mythology to obscure folk tales and legends, leading up to when these foul beings transformed into the suave Byronic heroes that continue to influence the world’s view of the vampire today. It also examines key individuals in history involved in reshaping our concept of the creature. Popular culture is explored, along with the development of the vampire into the protagonist in plays and poems and novels. Sixty-one frightening images bring the topic right to your front door. Will you invite the visitor in?

The review: Save me from ill-researched reference books.

When this arrived (and it was sent as a review copy) I was taken by the embossed hardback cover with the red bat but as I opened it I inwardly groaned. The fancy font suggested it may be content light and the book was packed with pretty pictures (which, in fairness, are very pretty).

However I noticed a bibliography, though no index, and a reference to Anthony Hogg, which perked me up as it boded well for good research. Sadly the referencing left much to be desired (there are at least three improperly referenced bits from Anthony but only one bibliography entry) and the content proved to be one which had me shouting at the book. This took three forms – bad research/supposition, bad writing and errors. I will cover some of my (least) favourites.

Discussing Thomas Aquinas and his belief that the Devil could cause metamorphosis of men to animal the authors suggest “This might be the origin of Bram Stoker’s Dracula becoming a wolfish creature and mention in future stories of vampires shifting into bats and mist.” Now re-read the sentence, this suggests that Dracula (in Stoker’s original) didn’t turn into a bat or mist, and that lore came in later stories, but it was part of Stoker’s lore. On the next page there is a supposition that nightmares symptomatic of the Black Death inspired Dracula communicating to Renfield telepathically – which is really plucking connections out of thin air.

Mention is made of Ludovico Fatinelli – of his “Treatise on Vampires” and suggesting the gentleman was burned at the stake… Except the gentleman did not exist and the treatise is a hoax volume.

Vampire poems are mentioned such as Christabel by Coleridge, and Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci and Lamia. True, later authors have tied Lamia and vampires together, and many claim that Christabel was an influence on Le Fanu’s Carmilla, however none of the three poems are vampire poems (and Lamia is not a poem about Lilith either, as the authors further suggest).

One of the authors (I assume Vernor) tells us the Michelle Belanger told him a lot about Byron but the quote (I assume of her) was a mismatch of half-truths, bad research and myth and stated, “he identified as a vampire”. Not one single scholarly tome I have read on Byron suggests this; indeed Byron stated, whilst repudiating authorship of Polidori’s story, “I have, besides, a personal dislike to ‘Vampires’ and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets” (The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol 125 1819 p633). The authors suggest Byron’s fragment (which we know Polidori expanded upon) was published before Polidori’s story – it was published after to prove Byron wasn’t the author of Polidori’s work and contains no vampire aspect. Its only real impact on the genre was the fact that Polidori used it as a base for his work.

Whilst talking of Planche’s The Vampire, or Bride of the Isles (1820), the author says that “Not since Varney did a vampire so clearly introduce the dualism of intellectual man and mindless, killing predator…” except of course that it predated Varney by twenty five years!

On Dracula it is suggested that the “phantom-like ship, Demeter was based off a real story of a boat by the same name” – except that the real shipwrecked vessel was called the Dmitry and the crew landed safely. The authors revive the suggestion that Van Helsing was based on Robert Roosevelt (except the author states Theodore Roosevelt) and Dracula was based on Walt Whitman (taking on “his attributes” even though we know the character’s appearance came from the Baring-Gould description of a werewolf) and the book was some sort of psychodrama of homophobia due to Stoker’s syphilis – despite the fact that the belief he had died of this comes from as late as 1975 and Daniel Farson (his grand-nephew) and has no corroborating evidence. In other words there is little evidence to support the suppositions. Vernor quotes himself as saying “Washington Irving—the very same man Stoker had in mind to play the character Dracula on stage”, err that would be Sir Henry Irving. The normal inflated conflation with Vlad Tepes occurs and later, discussing other books, the authors suggest that Dracula needs his “native earth” though this is from the movies and the book had different lore, being “in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest”.

Whilst talking about books, the authors cover Anne Rice and quote Louis’ opening narrative… except (as well as not being referenced) it isn’t from the book but from the film – which itself is covered in the next chapter – hence why it talks of the death of his wife, which as an event replaced the death of his brother from the book.

When it comes to films apparently Lugosi “starred in Dracula sequels” – actually he only played Dracula one other time. In the Munsters Marilyn is called a “fairly normal teenage daughter” – she was the niece. Apparently in Black Sunday Asa uses “the Elizabeth Bathory method of attaining youth and beauty through virgin blood.” Well there isn’t a bath of blood in sight and she is revived by the blood of an older (and presumably non-virginal) male doctor and actually acts as an energy vampire when attacking her doppleganger.

Calling Dracula (1992) “the first faithful cinematic retelling of the source material” is a push, to say the least, and suggesting it introduced “other elements hinted at, but not fully explained in the novel, like the growing relationship between Count Dracula and Mina Harker” is nigh on fraudulent as that relationship was not hinted at! Blade (as in the Marvel character) is described as African-American, in the original comics he is British. Also, it might have just been really badly written but “trying to find the next True Blood, television networks adapted other vampire book series to television, like author Tanya Huff’s Blood series became the show Blood Ties (2007)”. Now, given the authors correctly date True Blood to 2008 earlier in the paragraph one has to either worry at the clunky writing or the time machine involved.

Adding in a section about Self-Identified Vampires I suppose was inevitable, though it is so thin as to not over-egg the pudding, but not necessarily welcome in a reference work on vampires in folklore and media.

So, there we have it. I have barely touched on the issues I had with it. The volume does look very pretty though. 2.5 out of 10 for the pretty pictures.

Honourable Mention: First Bite

Films using the vampire panics are depressingly few and far between, which is why this short animation by Drew Christie and narrated by Timo Sämann was most welcome. It was created for the New York Times Op-Ed series and takes its source from the case of Petar Blagojevjić (also spelt Peter Plogojowitz).

This was one of the earliest cases from the vampire panics, Petar died in 1725 and the film uses the detail presented by Paul Barber in his excellent book Vampires, Burial, and Death where he outlines the report filed on the incident by Kameralprovisor Frombald, who was pressed by the locals to be present when they unearthed Petar’s body after nine people died within a week of him – some of them claiming that Petar had visited and attacked them.

This is a short animation but well worth your time watching:

Mercy: the Last New England Vampire – review

Author: Sarah L. Thomson

First published: 2011

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD HALEY BROWN is struggling to cope. She’s got a new stepmom, her cousin is dying from a terminal illness, and the boy she likes is dating her best friend.

But that’s nothing compared to what she uncovers when she digs deep into her family history for a school project. Now she’s got a blood-stained glove, eerie messages on the TV screen, and ghostly images on her camera. Just what—or who—has Haley unearthed?

Inspired by a true story, Mercy explores a disturbing New England tradition that will make you think twice about what lies beyond the grave.

The review: Though the blurb sounds rather mysterious, the core story that has inspired this book (probably best described as young adult in tone) is one that readers of TMtV will know. The story of Mercy Brown – or more specifically the events post her death from tuberculosis – have been catalogued in the reference works Food for the Dead and Vampires of New England (both of which are recommended in an afterword to this book). A contemporary news-clipping that mentions the incident was kept by Bram Stoker in his notes for Dracula. Thomson plays around with the number of siblings and the relative ages but, otherwise, tries to keep her backstory in line with the known facts.

Her central tale is about Hayley – distantly related to Mercy – who discovers a little more than she bargained for when she researches her ancestor for a school history project. If I am honest, whilst the character certainly had a lot in her life (mentioned in the blurb) I found her somewhat whingey and thus my sympathy was perhaps a little on hold. Her cousin is terminally ill from an un-diagnosable blood disease (and I think we can all guess what the cause of that will turn out to be)…

That said I don’t want to spoil too much, I liked some plot twisting Thomson played with and don’t want to undermine it. I do need to mention a few of pieces of lore, however, one concerns vampires feeding on their own family rather than strangers, another being that turning is a matter of wanting to be a vampire, so long as the person has a strong enough will, and the last being that vampires do not like to step on graves for fear that they will be reclaimed.

The book is a swift read, but then it isn’t too big a novel and the prose is designed to be a little unsophisticated due to the target audience. Not that the prose is bad in any way.

Most of all I liked the fact that this used the legend/tale of Mercy and was respectful to the past whilst building a story that will serve to introduce kids to that American variety of vampire folklore. 6.5 out of 10.

Poltergeist the Legacy – the Crystal Scarab – review

Director: Brad Turner

First aired: 1996

Contains spoilers

I really enjoyed Poltergeist the Legacy when it first aired and recently picked up (cheap) the first season DVD set. Unfortunately the further seasons (in which there is a traditional vampire story, as well as a succubus) are rather pricey.

The technical downside to the DVD set is that it seems to be an analogue print that has been lifted and dropped, giving the entire thing a “fuzzy” ambience. I had also forgotten just how angst-ridden and whingey the primary characters could be. Be that as it may, I’m still having fun with the season and this episode had an unusual form of vampirism.

Helen Shaver as Rachel

The overarching story had little to nothing to do with the Poltergeist films and follows the adventures of a secret society – the Legacy – as it protected mankind from the things that lurked in the shadows. The Legacy was split into Houses and we follow the San Francisco House run by Derek Rayne (Derek de Lint) and assisted by Alexandra Moreau (Robbi Chong), priest Father Philip Callaghan (Patrick Fitzgerald), psychiatrist Rachel Corrigan (Helen Shaver) and ex-Navy Seal Nick Boyle (Martin Cummins).

the ring on a corpse

This episode begins with Clayton Wallace (Roy Thinnes, Dark Shadows: the revival & the Norliss Tapes) visiting a shop run by a Turkish shopkeeper (Brian George, Hotel Transylvania). The shop has smuggled in artefacts for him – one is a scarab pendant worn by Ali (Sasha Popovic), Wallace has to remove it as the one who put it on the wearer must take it off. The other part is a scarab ring that is on the hand of a desiccated corpse, the finger must be chopped away.

wearing the pendant

We do note that they say the ring wearer is the spring and the pendant wearer drinks from the spring – and this is clearly a form of energy vampirism. Clayton’s daughter Samantha (Nicole de Boer, Forever Knight & suck) is dying. He puts the pendant on her just before Derek – an old friend of the family – arrives. Later he puts the ring on himself, giving his life to her. It doesn’t kill him but does revive her and makes him hideously scarred.

mugger drained

She becomes ill again and he is told that he is not dead because the ring wants to be passed on, and that his life is not enough to return hers fully. He has to cut his finger off to retrieve the ring and, once off, his other scarring vanishes. He starts having others put the ring on – the first wearer being a mugger who steals the ring – and they are drained to husks. This gives Samantha a short respite but the effects are never permanent. She is fully aware (through the pendant?) of what is happening and starts demanding victims. At one point Derek suggests to Clayton that she isn’t his daughter, his daughter is dead.

the ring bites

An insect at the heart of machinery that causes vampirism had been done before in Cronos, however this is slightly different (not having a mechanism as such), but the scarabs do seem to be alive. The ring bites into the wearer’s finger and also seems able to scuttle off of its own accord. The pendent buries itself into the wearer’s chest.

This was unusual, which was good, but not the strongest Legacy episode. That said it was worth watching and deserves 6 out of 10 as a standalone episode.

The imdb page is here.

A Short Break

Sorry to regular readers but I have been sidetracked by Rebellion 2015, which is right at its midpoint. Normal service should resume on Monday 10th August but, in the meantime, enjoy this track by the Gaslight Troubadours. Not a Rebellion band but great fun down at the vampire disco.

Interesting Shorts: Graour the Monster

Graour the Monster was a short story from 1903 by Camille Debans and can be found reproduced in English in the volume the Misfortunes of John Bull, translated by the inimitable Brian Stableford.

It starts with an introduction that discusses the brucolaca, the Greek revenants known in Western Europe as vampires and tells us “a man—or a woman—has just died, and is buried. Soon, the rumor spreads that he emerges nocturnally from his tomb and goes to isolated houses to suck the blood of the living, especially that of young women and young men. In reality, he is not entirely dead. His heart, it is said, is still palpitating and he strives to renew life by gorging on that blood, which causes his arteries to pulse.” He even ties in Charles Nodier and some of his material and mentions the idea that in the Carpathians a lunar eclipse is caused by a vampire eating the moon.

Our story is set in Vidra, Romania, and starts proper with mountain men running through the countryside shouting “Brucolaca! Brucolaca!” as they chase an Englishman. They are led by a muscular dwarf, as wide as he is high, called Graour.

The Englishman is Doctor Mathews and he makes monsters. Indeed Graour was one of his creations (essentially by placing a growing boy in a “mould” to retard upward growth, a little like a bonsai I guess). Graour is seeking revenge and looking to free any of the Doctor’s experiments he can find and has tricked the mountain men into joining him by suggesting a vampire when there isn’t one. So what we have is essentially belief in vampires. However we do get professed lore.

Whilst it is suggested that they are nocturnal, the Mountain Men are not 100% sure that this is accurate and we also hear that they feed through the victim’s chest and “that brucolacas suck the blood of their victims with such fury and in such great quantity that it emerges thereafter from all their pores.” To destroy one, “two or three infallible means existed of rendering a vampire impotent. One was to pierce the heart of the dead man with a sharpened stake; the second was to plunge the cadaver into quicklime; the third was to crush it beneath an enormous cube of granite so that it could no longer budge—but the last procedure was not very certain.”

It is interesting to note that the story mentions a castle razed in the reign of Vlad… IV.

This was an interesting misadventure, which hinged on the belief in vampires even if the monsters were man made. The page for the Blackcoat Press volume is here.

Honourable Mention: White is for Witching

The Blurb: In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, Luc, mourn her absence with an unspoken intensity. All is not well within the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls and Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them slowly-

Slipping away from them-

And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story.

Miri I conjure you

This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.

The Mention: I came across this 2009 novel by Helen Oyeyemi as it is one of the novels discussed in Gizelle Liza Anatol’s the Things that Fly in the Night and it proved itself to be an erudite and atmospheric piece of modern literature. The atmosphere draws on the Gothic and seems more important than the plot (not that there isn’t a plot, there most certainly is, but it is the atmosphere that to me feels key here).

Main character Miri has pica – a psychological condition where the person has a craving to eat non-food substances – but one of the characters, Ore, is knowledgeable about the soucayant myths. Of Nigerian origin, her foster mother has struggled to find books exploring the culture and myths of her home land and gives her a book on Caribbean myth – though she already owns it – and her favourite section is about the soucayant.

Ore is actually the first voice we hear in the novel – speaking of Miranda going missing and suggesting that it is the only way that Miranda could fight the soucayant. However, her belief in the myth is just that. Whilst the book has a supernatural element, almost Poe-like (ironically as Poe is one author Miri dislikes) as the house has a voice that reminds one of Usher, the soucayant is not involved but is the filter through which Ore understands the events. Ore herself is silent after the novel’s opening until the second part of the book (met by Miri, in the first part, her voiced contributions to the tale do not begin when they first meet). Arguably Miri herself might be the soucayant – certainly Ore is physically affected by their association, dramatically losing weight – but this isn’t explicit.

An interesting inclusion in a very interesting book.

Justice League: Gods and Monsters

Directed by: Sam Liu

Release date: 2015

Contains spoilers

The first thing I saw, with regards this straight to DVD release, was a webisode where Batman (Michael C. Hall) was tracking down Harlequin (Tara Strong). It made me immediately excited about the feature that was due. Harley was truly psychotic and dangerous, with severed heads in a fridge and mannequins made out of victims. Then there was the reveal… Batman was a vampire and not exactly morally squeaky clean.

the League

He was also not Bruce Wayne. This is essentially an Elseworlds story and set in an alternate dimension. The league consists of Batman, Wonder Woman (Tamara Taylor) and Superman (Benjamin Bratt) but not as we know them. This league will kill, we see them in a raid at the head of the film and they do not hold back from killing (Batman even feeds during the fight) and they are not the same identities as the normal DC Universe.

general Zod

Superman’s alternate identity is Hernan Guerra and he is the son of General Zod. When he reached Earth he was found and raised by Mexican migrant farmers. Wonder Woman is Bekka, a New God who is an escapee from her own dimension following the betrayal and murder of Darkseid. Finally Batman is Dr. Kirk Langstrom, who in the normal DC Universe is Manbat. One of the issues I had with the film was the fact that I felt their backgrounds were patchy at best.

bite

As Luther (Jason Isaacs), who is a good guy in this, has doubts about Superman due to absolute power corrupting and a nature vs nurture argument we needed to see and hear more about his background. Wonder Woman’s background was shown, as in the Darkseid incident, but the subsequent flight to Earth and how she ended up in the League isn't really touched on. We did actually get more about Batman’s origin than any other character. We hear in passing how he and Superman met but more importantly we discover how he was transformed.

fangs

Langstrom was a brilliant scientist who was at University and was also searching for a cancer cure using bats as a source for his serum. The serum wasn’t stable but he used the research into nanite technology by his friend Magnus (C. Thomas Howell, Kindred the Embraced, Blood Wars & Mutant Vampire Zombies from the ‘Hood!) to stabilise the serum and then he took it himself – as he was dying of cancer. The serum, of course, turned him into a vampire. This was a nice background (similar to Manbat’s standard background) and yet one couldn’t help but also think of Marvel and their Morbius character.

protests

The story centres around a plot to frame the Justice League (by using robots, which could leave evidence at murder scenes that seemed to come from them) in order to execute a more dastardly plan, and the general action and story was engaging. What I didn’t like – and this is a spoiler heavy observation – was the idea that it all built towards their redemption and morphing them into heroes rather than dangerous vigilantes in an uneasy alliance with the US Government. I really liked the greyness of the morality and thus it felt like a bit of a story wimp out. I do recognise, however, that the direction was pretty much the point.

I think this deserves 6.5 out of 10 but I would have liked to have seen a more expanded background especially around Superman and a darker ending.

The imdb page is here.