The background to this – as I can piece it together – is that there is a French TV series entitled Dark Stories. Episode 7 of Season 1 is entitled Long Night, comes in at just over 100 minutes, and it is that episode, which has been packaged as a feature film. The film/episode is a portmanteau style story.
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| Kristanna Loken as Christine |
To make things more convoluted I purchased the German Blu-Ray from Amazon UK. The page says that the languages are German, English and French… this is sort of true but not the whole story. In fact, there is a German dub and the film/episode’s original language is both English and French. However, the Blu-Ray does not have English subs for the French parts (nor French subs for the English parts). I then found the film (with closed captions) on Tubi under the title Dark Stories.
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| the jinn |
The vampire aspect is in the wraparound (and I will have to spoil it to explain it). However the shorts within the portmanteau cover various entities including (but not limited to) a really well put together ghost story, ghouls that exist within paintings and which can both enter our world and pull their victims into the paintings, a zombie (though probably better termed revenant) and a jinn that causes sleep paralysis. Each segment had something to offer.
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| mechanically draining |
In the wraparound we see a lab, where a man (who has been drugged) is strapped to a chair. He realises they are going to drain his blood and we see tubes going to a doll… In a house we see Christine (Kristanna Loken,
Bloodrayne) fussing around the house as she gets her son ready for bed. There is someone knocking at the door and a package is delivered – she complains it is late. She takes the package down to the basement, opens it and gets out a creepy looking doll.
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| with the doll |
The doll falls from the chair that she places it on when her back is turned, it starts to move slowly, to laugh and eventually is moving fast, gets a knife and cuts her. When it does it says, “
I’ve gotten all your blood inside of me. I’m happy…” It wallops her one and she awakens tied to a chair. The doll realises that her child must be in the house and so, to prevent it leaving the room, she starts to tell it stories – the segments. Now this is pretty much a vampiric doll (or so it would seem) but towards the end of the film, when she seems glad to see the sun come through the window, it mocks her for thinking it a vampire. She then tells another story.
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| face splits |
It is the story of a baby at an orphanage who refused milk and wouldn’t feed. After a while a nun cut her finger and discovered that the baby craved blood. Eventually she was caught feeding it and banished, which of course led the boy to go hungry because whilst she returned nightly she was never let in… until one day she found he had attacked and killed the occupants of the orphanage. She escaped with the boy and turned to her father, a scientist (and presumably the person from the lab we saw)… of course, she was the nun, her child the boy and (when we see him behind the blood filled doll) he has a face that splits open to allow feeding…
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| painting ghoul |
And that is our vampire aspect – though the jinn is of genre interest given the sleep paralysis aspect. The inclusion in the wraparound would make me look at this as a fleeting visitation deserving of an Honourable Mention normally (and certainly I normally only score the vampire part). However, this was a really good anthology, which I thoroughly enjoyed and so I’m giving the whole thing a score.
8 out of 10 and remarkable as this is actually just one episode. The episode's imdb page is
here.
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