Honourable Mention: The Mysteries of Myra

This literary restoration of the 1916 serial The Mysteries of Myra is based on the novelisation by Eustace Hale Ball, based itself on the Charles Goddard script. Regular readers might recall that I looked at the tropes employed in the Algernon Blackwood story Nemesis of Fire and Blackwood’s story inspired one of the episodes within the serial – those connections, spotted by David Annwn Jones, are unsurprising given parapsychologist Hereward Carrington was associated with Blackwood and was a story consultant on the serial.

The series sees Myra (Jean Sothern) hounded and hunted by the Black Order, who want to steal her inheritance and also, it turns out, fear her developing psychic prowess. She is aided in her exploits by Dr. Payson Alden (Howard Estabrook), rapidly becoming her suitor. Her other suitor Arthur Varney (Allan Murnane) is secretly a member of the Black Order. The episode we are interested in is called the Fire-Elemental, in which the Master of the Black Order (Mike Rale) summons a fire elemental and causes it to possess the spirit of Alden’s deceased compatriot Haji (Shino Mori). The idea that a vampire might be the possessed body of a corpse is common in some folklore but to have the spirit possessed is more interesting. To summon the elemental there has to be a blood sacrifice and herein lies the vampirism.

This is no simple spilling of blood. The Master offers it Myra’s blood (providing itself the sacrifice when it kills her), but when Alden uses a(n animal) blood sacrifice to lure and trap the elemental we see that it seems to consume the blood: “the blood began to disappear, as though sucked up by an unseen sponge” (267). If this isn’t explicit enough Alden states “elementals are vampires and blood hungry” (267). The elemental is trapped by UV rays and the reasoning was given in an earlier episode, “these are ultra-violet rays and they will destroy all occult force”.

However, the appearance of the fire elemental is just a small part of the whole story and is thus just a fleeting visitation.

In Hardback @ Amazon UK