Honourable Mention: Van Von Hunter

Van Von Hunter is a parody manga that was released in three volumes by Tokyo Pop. The series concentrated on Van, a vanquisher of evil and there is a vampire element in the series with one of Van’s nemesis being the Count Disdain.

So why is this film an honourable mention?

Well it starts with a trailer, one could call it (though later we discover that it is meant to represent a full film). In the green screen produced film we see Van (Yuri Lowenthal, Dear Dracula) fighting evil in his native land of Dickay and that evil is a vampire menace – thus we get plenty of fangs flashing. When the film comes to an end we see a riot in an anime convention and the cast and crew that have created the film leg it.

a vampire

The idea is that Van von Hunter vanquished all evil in Dickay and, looking for a new challenge, travelled through a portal to Earth (and ended up in Hollywood). In a bar he gets drunk and regales two guys with his stories – they happen to be the creators of the manga Mike Schwark and Ron Kaulfersch. Later he is found by a film student Patrick (Travis Stevens), who makes the strangely dressed and sword carrying Van the subject of a documentary (which is what we watch).

Yuri Lowenthal as Van

He discovers that Tokyo Pop are casting for a Van Von Hunter film and persuades Van to go for it… something that he would have failed to be cast for but Tokyo Pop realise that the writers have plagiarised his life. What we get then is the filming of Van Von Hunter, the failure of the film, Van’s quest to go to Japan and subsequent enlightenment.

So vampires only at the head and it is a spoof film within a spoof documentary. The actual film is definitely too long but was an interesting idea. The imdb page is here.

Merlin – Lamia – review

Director: Justin Molotnikov

First aired: 2011

Contains spoilers

It is a bad sign when I record an episode for review and it takes me over two years to get around to that review. You see I never watched the series Merlin – Merlin (Colin Morgan) as a young man seemed a strange concept to me, having grown with a more classical view of how Merlin should look and I always thought it to be more a “bright and shiny” BBC production than the gritty realism I would have liked to have seen.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked such sword and sorcery extravaganzas as Xena but this one never attracted me. Having watched the episode, I was right… It just isn’t my cup of tea. When they take the character Percival (Tom Hopper) and put him in sleeveless chainmail I inwardly groan at the all too modern nod at “yoof” which would have left the knight as armless as a character in a Monty Python film.

the village

My reasoning for watching this one episode for review was down to the fact that it was called lamia and the folklore of the lamia and vampires do cross and, indeed, the lamia is (at the very least) often portrayed as vampiric. So, best foot forward. I will try and review this for its vampiric content, and we begin in a village. Head man John (Wayne Foskett) and his wife Mary (Melanie Hill) share banter until a male scream is heard. John investigates and finds a man looking as though he is insensible.

drain with a kiss

Mary goes to Camelot to see old friend, ex-servant (apparently) and apparently not quite the girlfriend of the regent/King, Gwen (Angel Coulby), who in turn petitions Arthur (Bradley James). Four men have fallen to this strange malady but court physician Gaius (Richard Wilson, Demons) is busy dealing with an outbreak and so Merlin is sent (with knights and Gwen) in his stead. One night, no cure, and they are off back to get advice from Gaius. However on the way back they come across bandits harassing a woman and save her. She is called Lamia (Charlene McKenna, Being Human – season 2) and soon the knights are acting odd around her, though Gwen and Merlin seem immune and she won’t allow Merlin to touch her. Gwen’s brother Sir Elyan (Adetomiwa Edun) is the first to succumb to her life draining kiss (yes she’s an energy vampire) and soon they are in a castle of death being hunted by her – though the knights don’t know it.

monster form

Meanwhile Arthur, Gaius and entourage have gone to the village and Gaius recognises the effects of a lamia (for they are a magically created species, though why she has the same name as her species is beyond me) He says they were created (as a biological weapon) by mixing the blood of a human girl and a snake and can drain life with an embrace. Their eyes can turn yellow with elliptical pupil and they have a monstrous form as Merlin is about to discover…

eyes a-glowing

And, you know what, it really wasn’t for me. I couldn’t see me sitting down and watching the other episodes – though I know it was popular enough to get five seasons (this was in the fourth). There were some bits and bobs going on that needed a regular watch to explain but generally this was a standalone episode and it was okay. Lamia’s are a lesser used monster type and it was nice to have a full monster form. 5 out of 10.

The episode's imdb page is here.

Crowd sourcing: Varney the Vampire

This is a crowd-sourcing project that I am rather excited about – indeed I have pledged to the project myself.

The idea of taking Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, making him real, making him pigged-off that Stoker stole his thunder and thus he should be the famous one (not Dracula) is great fun. The kickstarter page has a video that will introduce the concept, and as I hope you will watch the video, I will say that Scott Massino, the author, isn’t quite accurate when he says Varney (in Rymer's work) can shapeshift. In the book his running gait is described as almost wolf-like at one point, but he hasn’t actually changed shape, and one victim dreams that she is attacked by a wolf and wakes up to see the human Varney. There is no actual shapeshifting.

That said, the original book is so full of inconsistencies that it almost seems appropriate that new abilities are added – the Varney purist in me does hope that the regenerative powers of the moon are maintained. The art looks fabulous, the story wickedly fun and I urge you to take a look at the project. The kickstarter page is here.

EDIT: Having just posted the above, Scott Massino has let me know that there is a referral system and so if you pledge then make the comment "Andy Boylan sent me" in the pledge's comments section. I am also adding the kickstarter video below and would ask you to note that the book is a Rated M Horror-Comedy for Thrillbent for print, drawn by DC artist Scott Kolins..

Honourable Mention: The Count of Monte Cristo

Published in 1844 and written by Alexandre Dumas, père, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of Dumas’ most famous works (probably only topped by The Three Musketeers). It may seem strange, therefore, that it is getting an Honourable Mention on Taliesin Meets the Vampires – but vampires are indeed mentioned in its pages.

Dumas was a prolific author and dramatist and he did contribute to the genre both with the story The Pale Lady and with the play Le Vampire based upon Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale - the play has been translated into English and released by Blackcoat Press as The Return of Lord Ruthven. Indeed Dumas was a protégé of Charles Nodier who had also adapted The Vampyre for the stage in 1820 (the script of which can be found in Lord Ruthven the Vampire.

As you can see, Dumas has a vampire genre pedigree. In Count of Monte Cristo, which preceded the Pale Lady by a few years, he invokes the shadow of Lord Ruthven in a scene between the Countess G— and Baron Franz d'Épinay where they look over at a mysterious stranger in the theatre. The Countess suggests that he “seems to me as though he had just been dug up; he looks more like a corpse permitted by some friendly grave-digger to quit his tomb for a while, and revisit this earth of ours, than anything human. How ghastly pale he is!” Of course, the pallor would be a trait he carried forward to the Pale Lady, a mark not only of the vampire (other than the rosiness after feeding) but any surviving victim. When Franz suggests the stranger is always that complexion the Countess wonders whether he is a vampire and then suggests, “Why, that he is no other than Lord Ruthven himself in a living form.”

Franz does not believe in vampires – though the stranger, he admits, could change that opinion. The Countess then namedrops Byron when she says, “Byron had the most perfect belief in the existence of vampires, and even assured me that he had seen them. The description he gave me perfectly corresponds with the features and character of the man before us. Oh, he is the exact personification of what I have been led to expect! The coal-black hair, large bright, glittering eyes, in which a wild, unearthly fire seems burning,— the same ghastly paleness.” She accuses his female companion of also being of that “same horrible race”.

It transpires, of course, that the stranger is the Count of Monte Cristo.

And there you have it; vampires, by passing mention, get into one of the most famous novels in French literature and not just any vampire but Lord Ruthven himself.

Vampire Lore – review

Author: Jan Louis Perkowski

First Published: 2006

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: This omnibus volume collects under a single cover the entire oeuvre of writings by Jan Louis Perkowski on the vampire theme in mythology and folklore, including his three previously monographs (Vampires, Dwarves and Witches Amongst the Ontario Kashubs, 1972; Vampires of the Slavs, 1976; and The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism, 1989), in addition to 18 previously uncollected articles on the subject, one newly written for this volume.

As Bruce McClelland notes in his Preface to the volume, in the folklore of the Slavs, the vampire plays a specific role in a broader system of folk belief. Where in the West, the vampire is utterly monstrous, the symbol of pure evil and darkness that is nevertheless romanticized and eroticized, its moral status is more nuanced and ambiguous in the Slavic conception. Yet the ancient Slavic folklore vampire represents the historical basis of the pop and cultural vampire about which movies, television shows, and video games are still being profitably made.

Some of the materials here are enormously useful because they reveal historical stages in the conception of the vampire that are quite different from what most would know about the vampire who are familiar only with the Western literary tradition. This corrective aspect of Perkowski’s vampires, which exposes a tradition directly linked to the Balkan or at any rate Slavic folklore that follows a path that is quite independent of the 19th-century literary/metaphorical notions of the vampire, has had a difficult time getting traction in popular consciousness in the West, which suggests an entrenchment of Romantic and Gothic traditions, and a concomitant resistance to correction by legitimate ethnographic research.

The review: What can I say about this volume? In a single word – essential.

I already had Perkowski’s volume the Darkling, which is contained in this volume, but this pulled together all three core volumes by Perkowski and 18 further papers. For those that do not know Perkowski, he is probably the foremost expert, in English, regarding Slavic folklore – and for our purposes the vampire. I have seen articles that disagree with some of his conclusions – I’m not sure that I agree with all – but all his writing makes the reader think and introduces concepts not covered in other sources. Painstakingly researched I don’t think you can get a better primer into Slavic vampirism. However it is a scholarly book, do not expect anything less and sometimes the language can be from the stuffy depths of academia.

Further criticisms I could level at the volume are that it is that it is sorely lacking an index and that certain bits of the volume are contained twice within the volume – but that is because Vampire of the Slavs pulled together various writings and thus reproduced part of Vampires, Dwarves and Witches Amongst the Ontario Kashubs and a paper that is placed within the collected papers, thus to make the volume absolutely complete they were included twice. Other than this, any student of the folklore vampire needs this book on their shelves. 9 out of 10.