The Field Guide to Evil – review

Directors: Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz (segment)

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

The Field Guide to Evil is an anthology film that was produced by Tim League & Ant Timpson who also produced the ABCs of Death. This, however, is a very different beast – it concentrates on folklore from various countries. I found this film uploaded to YouTube.

There is one segment I am going to concentrate on but there are three segments that have a link into vampire folklore through the creature used (and the fact that they are included in Theresa Bane’s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, which I will quote when looking at each segment). The primary segment is The Sinful Women of Höllfall (also listed as Die Trude on IMDb and directed by Fiala & Franz, as mentioned above) and this does have a folkloric vampire feel/aspect. The other two segments I’ll touch on actually feel a lot less vampiric (if at all) and the use of the folklore is different to that described by Bane. Those segments are What Ever Happened to Panagas the Pagan? directed by Yannis Veslemes and A Nocturnal Breath directed by Katrin Gebbe.

being crushed

The Sinful Women of Höllfall is Austrian and begins with an intertitle that says, “Once upon a time in Austria, when life and love were still a sin, myths tell about monsters brought to human bedsides at nighttime. Monsters born from guilt and fear, sent to deprive us of our life’s breath.” It is in film that we discover that the monster is identified as a trude and Bane lists this as a variant of both the alp and the drude (both of which have their own entries in the encyclopedia, whilst the trude does not). One of the things I did like about this was the concept in the segment that the vampire was a manifestation of guilt.

bashing herself with a rock

It begins with a young woman, Kathi (Marlene Hauser), undertaking chores – beginning with milking the goat and then taking clothes to the river to wash them. On the way to the river she sees Valerie (Luzia Oppermann) and watches from a distance as the other woman bashes herself in the face with a rock, causing her nose to bleed, which she then cleans with her linens. At the river, with her mother (Birgit Minichmayr), Kathi sees Valerie approach and start to wash her clothes. As there is blood in her undergarments Kathi’s mother declares that Valerie isn’t with child.

a kiss

Valerie and Kathi meet and start to gingerly kiss each other but are caught by Kathi’s mother, who drags her to a woodland shrine to pray her sins away, having told her that if she sins the trude will be summoned. Something wakes her in the night but she cannot tell what it is and in the morning she has started her period. However, she does meet Valerie again and we discover that Valerie is pregnant, presumably out of wedlock hence hiding the fact, and the two girls take their relationship further. But when Kathi returns to her home the goat has died and she tries to clean her sin away and pray for forgiveness. However that night there is an invisible presence in her room, crushing the breath from her, which eventually reveals itself as a monstrous creature (Karin Pauer).

the trude

Bane says about the alp, “it sits upon the victim’s chest and compresses the air out of their lungs so that they cannot scream. Then the alp will drink blood…” In this we get no blood drinking but the Trude is shown as a female figure, her face ripped into a huge maw. Bane also suggests that a woman can call an alp to her (and it will be a gentle lover) in this case Kathi does summon it, whilst holding a knife, by masturbating. There is a slight aspect of the Electra complex to this also – though there is no male figure seen within the film.

pray the sin away

The segment is particularly dreamlike in construction, with little dialogue, perhaps apropos as the alp is said to bring vivid dreams and nightmares. Indeed, it had a feel of the VVitch, in atmosphere at least. Whilst it did not contain blood drinking there was a (menstrual) blood motif and the actions of the trude (crushing the breath out) was consistent with the myth as relayed by Bane. It also used the vampire as an analogy – manifesting Kathi’s guilt for what she had been told was a sin. The other two segments I want to mention were not as obviously vampiric.

mingling amongst humans

The intertitle at the start of What Ever Happened to Panagas the Pagan? states, “Kallikantzaros are the lowliest of devil’s children. They brood underground all year until Christmas day when they visit empty houses and play tricks on people. In parts of Greece where pagan customs are still alive the kallikantzaros dare to mingle among the drunk, beast-like humans.” Bane has it listed as a vampire type who is created by being conceived on the Day of the Annunciation and born on Christmas Day (or during the Feast of Saturnalia) and describes it has having “black skin, fangs, horns, hooves, a tail, talons, or any combination of animal parts.”

goblin blood

In this the creature is a goblin (Vasilis Kamitsis) who tries to join the pagan revelry by wearing a sack over its head but is discovered by the drunken men who take it off (and call a priest) in order to pierce its wrists and drink its blood – for the narcotic effect. So blood drinking is involved but reversed almost and the creature is neither human nor displays any vampiric tendencies itself.

lying lifeless

The final segment returns to Germanic folklore and uses the drude (which I mentioned earlier as an entry in Bane that lists the trude as a variant). The segment is entitled A Nocturnal Breath and the intertitle tells us “A drude is a Bavarian malevolent spirit that leaves the body of the possessed to haunt and spread disease. The person lies there lifeless until the spirit returns. If the drude is killed, the person remains dead.” Conversely Bane suggests it is “A vampiric witch well versed in the black arts… Almost always a woman…” Her modus operandi is to find a victim and “inflict horrible nightmares and terrible visions upon” them.

drude goes back into her body

What we actually get is a brother (Thomas Schubert) and sister (Lili Epply) on a farm and she is possessed by a drude. She collapses at night and the creature emerges from her mouth in the form of a mouse that then spreads disease to their livestock, which develop buboes and die. The brother is at a loss of what to do as he cannot kill the drude as it will kill the catatonic sister. There is an indication that damage done to the drude will appear on her body (we see a welt on her neck after it is briefly caught by a dog). However, whilst some vampires are associated with spreading disease, the creature does little in the way of the vampiric in this segment.

Kathi prays for forgiveness

I mentioned the further two segments as they used folklore that some associate with vampires, even if they are not vampiric films, but the film as a whole is worthwhile. That said its long (two hour running time) and the dreamlike quality of some of the segments (as well as their languid pacing leading to a slow burn) might put some off. When I score anthologies I am scoring for the vampire section alone and I am balancing that I liked its more languid pace and minimalist approach to narrative, against the fact that many will find it a tad too slow. I think it deserves 6 out of 10 and could make an interesting feature, if handled correctly, that oscillates between the folk horror of the VVitch and the psycho-sexual fairy-tale that is Valerie and her Week of Wonders.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Vamp or Not? Alp

This 2016 film by Juan Salas came to my attention because of the title. The Alp is often quoted as a Germanic variety of vampire, in fact Theresa Bane (in Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology) states it to be a “vampiric demon” – to confuse things, however, it is said to not have am infernal source but is created “when a newborn male child dies, when a child whose mother went through a particularly long and painful childbirth dies, or when a family member dies and his spirit simply just returns”. This illustrates the confusion and overlap that can exist in the wider view of vampirism.

The film starts by showing a version of Fuseli’s Nightmare and an intertitle that concerns itself with sleep paralysis. We then follow Chris (Yussef Abdur Razzaaq) who, as the film begins, starts (as though awakening from a micro sleep) at the wheel of a car. He asks his passenger, his therapist Dr Jim Atterson (W.M. Bacon, Blood Reunion 3: Hunters), if he saw *that* but Atterson suggests that Chris was hallucinating. They go to the door of a house, Chris holding a gun, and with some effort he opens the door… the film jumps back to a few days before.

Chris sleeping

Chris is in therapy and telling Atterson about his dreams. These include showing Trisha (Vanessa Anders), his fiancée, a tree in the backyard of his childhood home and being in a convenience store where he sees a hooded figure. He suggests he often sees the figure in his dreams and also when he is awake. He then describes sleep paralysis including the feeling that someone is on his chest. Bane tells us that the alp “sits upon the victim’s chest and compresses the air out of their lungs so that they cannot scream”. Finally they discuss him returning to the old house, something the doctor believes will be cathartic.

Dave & Chris

Trisha is going to the house with him and they plan to stay for three days. Chris’ estranged brother Dave (Adrian Lockett) is at the house and is going to sell it. At first everything seems ok – there is a party in the backyard, at which one of the partygoers mentions suffering an episode of sleep paralysis and Trisha mentions that Chris has that all the time. Then Chris and Tricia go to bed but he suffers another set of vivid nightmares. This includes a fire at the house, a baseball and a bloody woman.

bloodied woman

The dialogue isn’t explicit as to what happened in the siblings’ past – apparently it involved a babysitter, murder by meat hook, a fire, and Dave and Chris being the only survivors. Their mother (presumably out during the incident, hence the babysitter) soon after committed suicide. What the film does well is keep us off kilter, just as Chris is off kilter. We are not always sure if a sequence is dream or otherwise – though there are obvious dream parts also. Perhaps it is in his dreams that Chris researches sleep paralysis and the alp – for one would have thought he’d have done so earlier, given the history. Moments where the hooded figure moves into Trisha or Dave’s awareness may just be dreams that Chris is having.

the hooded figure

Going back to the quote from Bane, what an alp does after sitting on a chest is “drink blood (and milk if the victim is a woman who is lactating), which will cause her to have both horrible nightmares and erotic dreams. The next day the victim will have vivid memories of the attack and be left feeling drained of energy and miserable.” Chris is certainly miserable (and paranoid) but the film does not give us any blood drinking. The alp is associated with myth figures such as the mare and the old hag and so it may be that there is energy vampirism going on. The film also lingers, during a google, on the word succubus – but there seems nothing in the way of erotic activity (bar one interrupted shower moment).

Vanessa Anders as trisha

The fact that the film uses the alp is great and the entire sleep paralysis aspect is covered off. What we don’t see, per se, is anything vaguely resembling vampirism (or even energy vampirism). Rather we have a decent into delusion and madness. As such this is of genre interest but ultimately it is Not Vamp.

The imdb page is here.

V-Wars: Shockwaves

Edited by: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers

The blurb: The Vampire Wars are raging. We're all infected. Anyone can turn at any time. Your ally one minute could be at your throat the next. Or you go suddenly crave their blood. V-WARS: SHOCKWAVES chronicles the spread of bloodlust, bloodshed, and violence between the living and the undead.

The review: I am a fan of the V-Wars series; I make no secret of that. If you look at my reviews of the first three volumes (One, two & three). You’ll see that I have heaped praise (and 9 out of 10 reviews) on them.

It saddens me therefore that this volume sees a dip in quality. Now that is not to say it is bad. There are some damn fine stories in here. However, it isn’t entirely consistent. It does have some nice arc moments with the emergence of the Red Empire – a quasi-religious group who worship a messiah figure of the Red Emperor – that being patient zero Michael Fayne, who they believe will return and lead them. We also get a reveal, at the end of the volume, of the identity of the Crimson Queen.

For Mayberry fans there are cameos of Joe Ledger and other characters from the Ledger series. We get a welcome return of the V-Wars character Mooney in a tale and the stories range a little further internationally. We also discover that not all the vampires are as a result of the Ice Virus and that some strains had survived and were around before the virus activated junk DNA.

I was disappointed by the editorial decision to keep most of the shorts as complete pieces (bar Mayberry’s own Wet Works and Red Empire, which are split into the more familiar vignette format). There also seemed, despite containing a multitude of vampire types, less of a "who's who" list going on. One of the stories, Young Bloods by Mike Watts seemed slightly out of place, in that it felt that it was set out of the V-Wars at some point in the future, concentrating (as it does) on a vampire only school that had been around for over a decade. However this is the first volume where I have actually felt a story was not as well written as the rest of the volume. Silver and Lead by John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow just felt a little sub-par to me. Now that may be unfair as the quality of prose is so good generally, but it knocked my immersion in the volume.

8 out of 10.

The Sanguinarian Id – review

Author: L M Labat

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers


The Blurb: She’s been beaten, stabbed, poisoned, and shot, but Hael refuses to die. In her pursuit for vengeance and her origin, the dhampir Hael hunts down the madman responsible for her fateful transformation. As this half-vampire juggernauts her way through a world at war, Hael battles hordes of Nazi soldiers and struggles to maintain her sanity. However, while Hael gathers knowledge on how to trap and kill her target, her adversary’s network is expanding at an exponential rate; his sick obsession with Hael grows deeper. Will she have her revenge? Will she find her origin? Or, will she crumble beneath her own insidious bloodlust?

The review: Is hosted at Vamped.

V-Wars: Night Terrors – review

Editor: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers

The Blurb:

• The war is tearing our world apart. Instead of big armies with tanks in the field, the Vampire War is fought in the streets, neighbor against neighbor, family against family. Anyone can turn at any time. The blood hunger can suddenly appear in the middle of a kiss. The person who sleeps next to you every night could wake up in the dead of night...hungry. So hungry...



• V-Wars: Night Terrors collects all-new stories from the reporters embedded with the beats (humans) and the bloods (vampires). Each tale explores the nature of terror and peels back another layer of our comfort. Each tale bares our throat to the bite.



• New York Times Bestseller Jonathan Maberry and his team of front-line storytellers bring you all-new tales of horror and heroism, of pain and delight, of deadly despair and soaring courage. The war between beats and bloods is blazing. Pick a side.

The review: Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of V-Wars as a concept and a series and you can find my reviews of the first two volumes here and here. Whilst arguably the first V-War never really ended, this volume is set during the second V-War and one of the great things about the volumes is how the various authors pull your loyalties one way and another. One moment you may root for a human and the next a vampire. There are multiple shades of grey drawn and, even with a hint that there is a corruption within human Government encouraging the ethnic cleansing of the V-War, we are given the warning that even the most benign seeming V organisations – the court of the Crimson Queen – may not be the ideal it makes itself out to be.

This is underlined when, through the eyes of a truly innocent hybrid, we see the grassroots organisation Unity, which espouses mutual living and yet thinks nothing of holding humans prisoner as food for their interpretation of greater good.

Again it is a joy playing spot the vampire type. We are told there are 300 vampire species and 5800 known hybrids (plus hydra, a never before classified species and a one off. Hydra being a teenage girl whose regenerative powers are so strong she may be truly immortal). Lycanthropes generally are vampire types but there is a known (through DNA) true lycanthrope who has human and dire wolf DNA – this may be the person known only as Rancid and certainly Rancid is something else.

One interesting idea was allowing us to meet a male White Lady of Fau. Normally female this ethnically French type of vampire is a seducer and the male one we meet is gay. We meet a vampire (wurdulak) turned vampire hunter as she tries to stop the monsters she perceives herself and her kind to be. There are characters we have met before and new characters too.

V-Wars is begging for a TV series. It’s clever and sassy and there is a wild variety of vampire types that could be played with in that format. In the meantime we have the books and this one holds its own against the others in the series, the use of multiple writers with Maberry’s overall control allowing the series to remain fresh and yet follow its path without irrelevant meandering. 9 out of 10.

V-Wars: Blood & Fire: a Chronicle of the Vampire Wars - review

Editor: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2014

Contains spoilers

The blurb: When anyone can turn.

When every street is a war zone.

Our world will burn.

Our world will bleed.

There is nowhere to run!

It's been one year since a virus triggered junk DNA and people all over the world started changing. Becoming something else. Craving blood.

It's been 10 months since the word "vampire" stopped being something from old monster stories and Hollywood movies.

It's been six months since our world and theirs erupted into war.

It's been two months since an uneasy peace was signed.

It's been one hour says that peace was shattered.

War is here again.

The Vampire War.

The review: Regular readers will know that I thoroughly enjoyed the first V-Wars volume and also enjoyed the first V-Wars graphic novel, though admittedly less so than the prose. For those unaware of the series, V-Wars is set in a world where a virus, released from ice drilling, has activated junk DNA in certain people around the world mutating than into vampires. There are a whole range of vampires dependent on genetic background. Indeed in this volume we discover that in this world they have seen and 92 species, including 18 subtypes not in literature. Folklorist Luther Swann postulates that could leave nearly 200 species from folklore as possible new species and further hybrids are possible beyond this.

Like the first volume, this volume is made up of short stories by different authors set in the universe and interspersed between each other. The writing is tight throughout, and the stories entertaining. As somewhat of a vampire geek part of the joy is the wide variety of vampire types used, although purists who prefer their vampires Slavic may be a little disappointed. In this volume I noted the following vampire types: draugr, kyonsi, a snake vampire whose species is not named (but the character has featured in both volumes), upor, cihuateteo, mandurugo (with aswang mentioned in passing), craqueuhhe, neuntöter (which are said to be covered in pustules containing pathogens, making them a plague carrier), nelapsi (with alp mentioned in passing) and kallikantzaros.

Werewolves do feature in this, but as a creature born of the ice virus it is suggested they are a subspecies of vampire. In the V-Wars universe the humans had only come across a few werewolves including a loup garou, and were hunting a vampire killing werewolf serial killer of another variety. Swann does list folklore variants including vampire/werewolf hybrids such as the pryccolitch or the Haitian loogaroo, who were said to be witches that shed their skins at night to become vampire/werewolf hybrids. Others mentioned are the mjertovjec (said to become a vampire on death), the lobishomen and the farkaskoldus.

Whilst many vampires in the V-Wars universe are blood drinkers or flesh eaters the broader definition is a person who has an abnormal need to feed on one of several vital substances including energy. I liked the explanation of the mandurugo being thought to split in half due to their excellent chameleon-like skills, thus only revealing part of themselves to attack.

As I intimated earlier this is a superb volume, as good as the first volume. I do like the short story style breaking the book into vignettes. This could easily translate itself into episodes for a TV series or chapters in a portmanteau film. I think there is perhaps also room for dedicated single focused novels. That, of course, is a fan boy’s wish list, and for now I'll happily sit and wait for the next V-Wars volume. 9 out of 10.