Shadows of the Past – review

Director: Luz Cabrales

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

A portmanteau film, where the anthology is made up of films that seem to have been created for the film, rather than just tying unrelated shorts together, should be welcome. However this one struggles due to its poor framing of the narrative and, frankly, lack of chills.

There is no traditional vampire in this, rather there is a banshee that is part of the wraparound. Banshees do actually appear in Bane’s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology but generally are not thought about as vampiric beings. In this I would argue she is.

the youths

So, before I get to the banshee, let me talk about the framing. It starts with a group of teens running. One asks why Mario (Jamie Dougherty), leader of the gang and only guy, made her do it. *It* is shoot a woman – a senseless slaying, as another gang member says that she was going to give them all the expensive items in the museum. It just feels hokey, like a story sketched but not thought through. They head for a mansion and duck in the unlocked door.

Dan Frederick as the Caretaker

Inside they meet the caretaker (Dan Frederick) and the gun is aimed at him. However, he talks them down by saying if they leave they’ll get caught but if they stay and keep him company then he’ll give them all the valuables. Again, hokey and not great storytelling or realistic sounding dialogue. Nevertheless, they stay and each story the caretaker tells is a segment of the portmanteau. When Mario demands the treasures, we get the wraparound’s backstory.

the Langstones

It centres on a ring, that the caretaker puts on, and the owner Collin Brooks Langstone (Karl Barbee), a 19th century gang leader and businessman who was given the ring by a banshee (played by several actresses). The ring would grant his desire so long as he kept on luring souls to feed to the banshee – the souls/life (both are mentioned interchangeably) kept her young. However, he met and married Rose (Tara E. Kojsza), the banshee grew jealous and killed her, cursing him. The dialogue says he was “condemned by the banshee’s dark mind” and then “the mind turned mansion” – indicating that the mansion is a manifestation of her mind and, as she is an energy vampire, the mansion is a vampiric building.

supping a cup of blood

Now, where this goes further awry is that it is indicated that the caretaker is Langstone in another form, and the curse can be lifted if he passes the ring (and thus the curse) to someone as evil and greedy as he… the inference being Mario. However, then the kids are hunted through the mansion by the banshee and the ring is not passed on. A cop, going door to door, shows up in the morning and Langstone answers. He is asked about what he is drinking (we only see the teacup) and he says tomato juice, it keeps him “young, rich and vibrant” and “he just made a fresh batch”. This implies it is blood that he drinks but, as a concept, comes from nowhere.

vampiric building

It is very crude storytelling, certainly for the wraparound, and whilst the segments feel a tad stronger it isn’t by much and they fail to chill. It is a shame as dedicated anthology/portmanteau films are very welcome in general and this might have been a welcome entry in that genre. Rather it is a damp squib. The use of a banshee as an energy vampire is unusual. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vampire in the Garden – review

Directed by: Ryōtarō Makihara

First aired: 2022

Contains spoilers

There is so much vampire genre material out there that it is impossible to keep up, hence this blog has been running so long and why I have a watch pile like Mount Everest (and that pairs with an equally high read pile). There seems to be little excuse for me to have not watched this anime series, however. Only 5-episodes long and released to Netflix it is a short, satisfying little animation.

soldiers

It starts with a group of soldiers including the young woman Momo (Megumi Han). They are human troops and they are in conflict with vampires. This is a world which has virtually fallen to vampires, with cities in ruins. These humans live in a conurbation that they protect with a wall of light and they scavenge from the dead lands to survive. Momo, we will later discover, is the daughter of General Nobara (Rika Fukami), and on these duties to stave off suggestions of favouritism.

musical box

In a building they discover vampires and Momo faces a child who holds up a musical box that has a painting in the lid of vampires and humans living in harmony. The music startles Momo – music has been banned in human society and is deemed part of vampire culture – as does her apparent youth. As more troops arrive, the child injects a vampire drug that morphs her body into a monstrous form. It is defeated and once back at the city Momo is reprimanded for not firing.

vampire decadence 

Elsewhere the vampire queen Fine (Yū Kobayashi) tries to avoid her duties by attending lavish parties and hides the fact that she is ill as she refuses to drink blood. It is notable that at this point you could read the vampires as a millionaire class, decadent and dancing, with the humans as a worker class who are violently estranged from the vampire class. However, later we see poor and destitute vampires and thus there can be a further reading of the false promise of trickle down economics and the impact on those workers who buy into the system (are turned).

Fine and Momo

There is a raid on the city by the vampires (human traitors have been promised turning to take down the generators for the lights) and Fine is, reluctantly, amongst the vampires. Momo has been caught with the musical box and has run from the city in upset. Fate brings the two together and, coincidentally, Momo is the image of Fine’s human lover, a relationship that ended disastrously. Finding each other they run away – but the humans want Momo back and the vampires want their queen.

Megumi Han voices Momo

What was nice about this, beyond some lovely animation, was the fact that the story concentrated on a friendship and invested itself entirely in that. Of course the relationship could be read as deeper than friendship and queer but that is a subtext and the writing felt like it wanted to genuinely portray a growing friendship without needing to rely on sexual attraction (and fan service) and felt all the more authentic for it.

monstrous vampire

However, beyond this, the story did feel a tad curtailed, as short as it was. There was a whole fascinating world that was barely built due to time. They just put the essentials in place to carry the story forward and thus develop the friendship aspect. Don’t let that put you off, there is a neat little anime here that looks lovely, has some fighting and vampire action and is worth your time. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mention: The Invocation of Enver Simaku

Released in 2018 and directed by Marco Lledó Escartín, this is a very slow burn horror, done in a documentary style, which interests us due to the central entity they call a kukuth. This would seem to be a derivative of the Albanian kukuthi/kukudhi, which is a vampire type listed in Bane’s Encylclopedia of Vampire Mythology. However, the entry in Bane bears no resemblance to the creature here, Bane’s description of the kukudhi is a vampire that “seldom needs to feed, and when it does, it takes a very small amount of blood from its victim.” In the film the kukuth is described as a soul eater.

monks' fresco

The primary character is Julien (Julien Blaschke) a documentary maker. He had been in Albania some 18 years before the primary timeline of the film, creating a documentary about monks within a particular order who seemed to have a spiritualist/pagan overtone to their beliefs. He was there with his wife and a crew and they were in a bar, having finished filming, when they heard gunfire and screaming. They rushed out with camera.

Julien Blaschke as Julien

In context it was the day before the so-called lottery insurgence of Vlora, a real-world event of civil unrest following the collapse of a Ponzi scheme. However they were too far away, in Mesopotam, for it to be connected. The night became known as the Mesopotam pogrom and it started with a man, Enver Simaku (Ferran Gadea), dying. Enver had been in a coma for years (actually, probably not a coma and more a vegetative state) and with his death his brothers went mad and tortured and killed at least 50 people – Julien’s wife amongst them.

the spirit of Enver

So, Julien has returned to Albania to understand what happened and unearths a story of supernatural events, discovering that an undercover agent from the Government’s anti-paranormal brigade had been investigating the Simakus due to a belief that they were involved in the supernatural. The villagers believed a kukuth was in the village – and as things develop it seems that it could possess people, had possessed Enver and the man had kept it trapped within him – his death allowing its escape. Julien starts seeing things, including the creature…

the Kukuth

The film, as mentioned, is a slow burn and the documentary style adds a real world feel but also stifles the scares. This isn’t helped by the absolutely stoic portrayal of Julien. Nevertheless, I found the idea fascinating and loved the idea of using some pretty obscure (to me) Albanian folklore; even if the nature of the kukuth seems changed to fit the film, with possession and inciting violence being the order of the day and even the accusation of being a soul eater seems to be hyperbolic. It is primarily shot in English but there are moments of Spanish, Italian and Albanian.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vesper Glen – review

Author: Coryn Noble

First Published: 2025

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Charlie Pike, a detective with the Boston Police Department, gets a call from his hometown in Vermont, asking if he wants to be their new police chief. It’s an appealing offer, but it would mean telling his wife Abbie, and eventually their kids Natalie and Marcus, about the “V’s” – the hundred or so residents of Vesper Glen with symbionts that make them live for centuries, heal rapidly from wounds, avoid sunlight and garlic, and regularly need to consume blood.

Even after Abbie overcomes her initial skepticism, and Charlie takes the job, she’s still apprehensive about her new neighbors, including leading citizen John Saxon, town doctor Meara Desmond, and night-shift Sergeant Ray Dante. Still, the family settles into small town life, sharing the ancestral Pike house with Charlie’s elderly dad.

Then a run-in with a biker gang gets the attention of an FBI agent, a hostile Army officer, a marauding band of V’s whose leader holds a grudge against John, and a secret society of fanatical vampire hunters. All of this will test the ingenuity and determination of the entire community…

The review: I think the first thing to note about Vesper Glen is the source of the vampirism. As the blurb mentions, the vampires are in a symbiotic relationship with a lifeform that has taken residence within their veins, living off the iron in blood and forcing the need to drink blood to feed the symbiote. In return it heals them and slows aging. A subterranean lifeform, it is highly sensitive to UV light. As such, these are living vampires and, as the novel progresses, they are split into factions – those in Vesper Glen believe in living side by side with humans, the most extreme believe that humans are foodstuff only and they are superior.

The book sees cop Charlie Pike take on role of police chief, already knowing about the Vs as he grew up in Vesper Glen (and kids are told the truth of some of the townsfolk at 15). Charlie’s wife and kids, however, are in the dark and he has to convince Abbie that living next door to vampires is not a dangerous thing. The reader soon discovers it is dangerous, however, not due to their vampires but down to general bad guys (in the form of a biker gang), a band of vampires from the extreme faction and the Hawthorn Cross – a shadowy secret vampire killing society.

The writing in this was crisp and perhaps veered over towards the utilitarian in places, but as this is told from Charlie’s point of view that felt right, given his cop pedigree. The book lies more towards police procedural than urban fantasy – though that element still sits there. We do get to hear quite a lot about the vampires’ society, including their own language, but there is much more than could and should be explored in future volumes. A neat little read, with some interesting takes on the genre. 7 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Carmilla – review

Director: Jay Lind

Release date: 1998

Contains spoilers

After watching Jay Lind’s Valerie I was much more upbeat about watching this low-to-no budget adaptation of Carmilla. Unfortunately this just didn’t capture me in the same way – though I will say that the selected soundtrack for this worked a lot better than the Valerie soundtrack did. There is a nasty crackle over the sound but I think that is going to be the best version that a distributor will find.

crucifix

It starts in the second half of the 19th Century and Carmilla (Maria Pechukas, Spookies) is being forced to marry and so she killed her husband and then slit her wrists with a crucifix. She returned as a vampire, of course, and the women of the family started to die due to a strange anaemia. Maddie (also Maria Pechukas) had a dream of a strange woman in her room as a child – it started when her mother (Heather War) died.

Maria Pechukas as Carmilla

The film has quite a disjointed narrative, with an attempt to draw a psychosexual drama in much the way Valerie did, but this isn’t as well put together. Angela (Colleen Van Ryn) is being called by a voice (haunted as she is by Carmilla) and Maddie’s dad goes to stay with her uncle as Angela is her aunt and is ill. Maddie is beginning to experience phenomena too and later we hear that her dad had an affair with Carmilla whilst her mom died.

vampiric imagery

The film does create a dreamlike aspect to the narrative. I was more taken with the performance of Carmilla than that of Maddie and there is, of course, much in the way of vampiric imagery. If you like your movies to be a fever dream (with low-to-no budget) then you’ll get something out of this but I’d direct you to the much stronger Valerie. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Queen Dracula Sucks Again

Directed by Curtis Everitt, released in 2024, and coming in at just over 46 minutes, this is ostensibly a sequel to Everitt’s Queen Dracula although, as Queen Dracula (Mel Heflin, Katherine) makes clear at the head it is for those in to “cheesy B horror sequels, where none of the original people come back and the continuity from the original does not matter.”

Now, this looks a lot nicer, in a photography sort of way, to the previous film and Queen Dracula is right in her description. However, it is also interminably long for a short, in a world where pacing is something that happens to other people’s films.

feeding

It follows Claude (Curtis Everitt), a recently divorced man with joint custody of his son – though because he lives out of the way he rarely sees him. It starts with him relaying how down he is and that seeing home videos of his son helps – which is then followed by said video of son on play equipment that just goes on. We then watch him at a (deliberately) excruciating speed dating.

QD and Claude

He gets a house flyer through the post and goes to see it. This has the film then follow him around the house, unaware of Queen Dracula who appears in the background watching. Eventually she makes herself known and shows him round the same rooms we just watched him go through until revealing her true nature and attacking him. Fin. The whole thing could have been cut down to a 5-minute sequence and lost nothing but gained pace.

The imdb page is here.

Valerie – review

Director: Jay Lind

Release date: 2002

Contains spoilers

Not to be confused with the director’s 1992 film of the same name, this was a straight to video, zero budget flick that has received Blu-ray treatment in a collection of five of his films, released by SRS video.

When I got the set, I was conflicted, after all I didn’t particularly think the films would be masterpieces but there were at least two vampire features (this and Carmilla). I watched this first and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it is low budget and has plenty wrong with it, but it was also a very watchable psychosexual drama.

bite

It starts with Nosferatu on TV and then cuts to a graveyard and, in a crypt, led on top of the tomb is Valerie (Maggi Horseman). She rises and does a slow amble through the graveyard – a note that the night lighting is well done but the shots seem out of focus, probably deliberately so to give a dreamlike feel. A couple are in the car and the lady (I think Crissy Madarang) hears something, she sends the guy out. He is killed by Valerie, who gets in the car with the, now topless, girl and feeds from her.

Maggi Horseman as Valerie

Valerie’s mom (Kelley Rouse) wakes her, with Valerie complaining that she is an adult (she’s 18). Her mom notices that she has had a nosebleed in her sleep and her face is smeared with blood. She goes to her therapist and talks about her dream and how excited it has left her. She works at a boutique, then takes lunch on a boardwalk and finally goes to dance class. She disassociates whilst in class, reliving memories of a violent sexual assault that leaves her screaming and comforted by her friend Lori (Mellani Love).

pick up

So, we discover that she was assaulted, immediately after believing she had been followed home. She cannot remember the assailant and refers to him as a vampire. Her step-father doesn’t believe it was an assault, rather she invited it and essentially victim blames. She is also self-harming. She regularly dreams of being a vampire, with Lori and the girl from the first dream (who is a person she has seen in real life) taking victim and vampire roles in the dreams. There is some evidence that she has killed someone she picked up, but that could be a dream also (and a serial killer called the moonlight maniac is mentioned occasionally to obfuscate the truth further).

Lori with fangs

As the film progresses, she meets an older artist, Jack (Jay Lind), who she falls for and who falls for her. Lori is less than pleased but it seems that she has sapphic feelings for her friend (these are unreciprocated in real life, but the fact that she and the other woman feature in her vampire dreams suggests that subconsciously Valerie entertains the notion). The whole film moves towards the realisation of who the attacker was.

projecting the vampire

The dialogue is sometimes off – I couldn’t believe that two 18-year-olds would be that coy around sexual language. However, aspects like Valerie’s ofttimes bluntness, worked well with the character and the performance suited that. There was no shying from nudity and some of the themes were very dark (rape, self-harm and attempted suicide). One poor aspect was the chosen soundtrack, which I felt was too bombastic. The film is more belief in vampires and acting like a vampire, though the projection of a vampire persona (the only male vampire) on her attacker kind of makes for a vampire and Valerie is an untrustworthy witness to her own narrative. However, surprisingly entertaining and worth watching 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.