Short Film: Strigoi

This was a 2021 short film, directed by Florin Anghel and coming in at just under 14 minutes.

It starts with the sound of laboured breathing, and we see that a poorly man struggles for breath. His wife brings him food, but he knocks the plate out of her hand and threatens her. Telling her she won’t get away from him so easily and he will return as a strigoï and haunt her.

A young woman is at work, a bouquet of flowers is brought in for her. Her phone rings and it is her mother – her father has died from cirrhosis. They are the couple from the opening. Her mother asks her to come and says she is afraid at night. The daughter exits onto a balcony (for a cigarette) when she returns to her office the flowers are withered.

the daughter

Not a lot more is said about this – the sender of the flowers drives her to her old village, and she suggests they arrived withered, we saw them fine and then withered. Could it indicate her father’s influence. Maybe she is (unknowingly, perhaps) a strigoï vii? Also on the drive her companion questions her atheism (though she does wear a cross) and asks what happens to evil doers after death if there is nothing else.

equine vampire detection

The funeral arrangements were interesting, he lay open casket but with his hands bound and holding a candle and the open casket continued at graveside. A man with a horse comes by but the horse is skittish by the grave (this is a stripped-down version of the traditional vampire detection method, as the horse carries no naked virgin, boy or girl). He is returning to mother and daughter (we see a shadowy figure as he visits the daughter) and so the grave is opened. The corpse has talonlike fingernails, his heart is cut out as a ritual (which names him both strigoï and moroi) is spoken. It is suggested that the heart be cut into 9 pieces and scattered to be fed on by nine dogs.

strigoï's nails

What is interesting about this is that the filmmakers based it on the real case of Toma Petre – a Romanian vampire killing that happened in the 2000s, the film suggests between 2005-2007. As well as outlining the event, the film contains a snippet of an an interview with Mircea Mitrica who was one of those involved in the real life exhumation – I assume it is the actual gentleman and not a reconstruction, the credits do not say.

The imdb page is here.

Vurdalaki – review

Director: Sergey Ginzburg

Release date: 2017

Contains spoilers

This review comes with a health warning, as it were. I managed to stumble over a stream of this Russian film online. I then managed to find English fan-subs (with much searching). Those didn’t work but a bit of dibbling with the coding on the srt got them working (though I had to put a seven second delay on them). At first they seemed reasonable but as the film progressed it became obvious that some were literal translations and some simply gibberish. There was enough to get a fair grasp of what was going on but I will re-review this when I eventually find a DVD with properly constructed English subtitles.

vampire

The other reason that this was recognisable – in part at least – was that the film was loosely based on the Alexis Tolstoy short story the Family of the Vourdalak and whilst the lore and events were dibbled with it was still there. Of course that is where the original title of Vurdalaki comes from – it has also been released under the monikers of Prince of Darkness (Fürst der Finsternis) and Ghoul.

Lavr slays the vampire

It starts with a graveyard and a woman stands next to a grave marker that seems to bear her likeness. A monk, Lavr (Mikhail Porechenkov), walks to her and asks whether she cannot sleep. She suggests she has a troubled soul and asks him to pray for a family member. He recites the Lord’s Prayer and, as he concludes, drops a stake from his sleeve and lunges just as she vamps out. He stakes her but as she dies she announces that the Master is coming. Her corpse disintegrates.

Igor Khripunov as the servant

A carriage is driven through the village and people seem to avoid it. At the rear we can see it carries a coffin. As night falls the carriage is in woodlands and a bat flies by the worker that the driver (Igor Khripunov) has paid to help him. The worker calls the carriage to a halt and suggests the road will take the driver to his destination but he will go no further. He scurries off but the driver seems to move with unnatural swiftness (he isn’t a vampire, rather the vampire’s servant). He mentions the payment the worker is owed and also the carriage’s load. The worker didn’t know it contained a coffin.

tree hugging vampire

The driver opens the coffin and a colony of bats explode out, killing the worker (who’ll be soon up and about as one of the undead). The vampire Master – the Baron – appears old and withered but touches a tree (the tree changing from silvered bark to a brown bark) and becomes younger, declaring himself home. They go up to a castle and he uses a rod to open up an arcane, coffin-shaped contraption that reveals a goblet of blood. His plan is to bring about the resurgence of the vampires through a ritual involving a village girl Milena (Aglaya Shilovskaya) in a few days as there is a rare celestial alignment and an eclipse.

Aglaya Shilovskaya as Milena

Milena, the next day, is speaking to her little nephew as they watch the goats, and he asks for a story that night. She realises that a goat is missing and rides into the forest, finding it on a gravemound, where it seems to have partly sunk into the earth. She tries to pull it out but a bat buzzes her. The goat is sucked fully into the grave. She rides to Lavr to tell him – it is the grave of a young girl Marica, who died recently and the grave’s cross has gone.

Gorcha

A Tsarist official, Lyubchinsky Andrej Vasilevich (Konstantin Kryukov), arrives at the monastery with his servant Paramon. Lavr was exiled to this place but he is being summoned back to the city. He refuses to leave, intent instead on making stakes. As the officials leave they pass a lake that Milena is bathing in and she injures Paramon as he tries to spook her. They take him to her home that she shares with her father, Gorcha, brother Georges and Georges’ wife and son. Almost the same family unit as in Tolstoy’s tale (only another brother is missing) it won’t come as a surprise that Milena and Andrej quickly fall in love.

Marica throws Georges

The lore is very different, however… as well as summoning bats (and transforming into them, it appeared), the vampires burn in sunlight and avoid religious items. When Marica returns from the grave we see that they are super-strong (and later we get some vampire warriors who seem supernaturally ripped with extensive veins showing). The need to feed on immediate family is either gone or not mentioned and the fate of the family is dealt with very swiftly. The big change is that Milena is a moroi – Bane suggests that “The rarer moroi {is a} (“living male vampire”)” and is the child of a vampire. In this the Baron attacked her mother whilst she was in the womb and she has been born half-vampire (ala Blade). She has no vampiric traits (bar absorbing bat’s blood if touched with it) but the ritual will convert her to a full, daywalking vampire.

the Baron in repose

The parting with the lore and story offered by Tolstoy allows the film to move to a more action/adventure stance and it doesn’t necessarily suffer for this. There was a chemistry between the leads and Lavr reminded me of Brother Sandor from Hammer’s almost namesake film Dracula, Prince of Darkness. However, the action adventure side does mean the horror aspect is underwhelming – a shame as some of the night photography is rather atmospheric. The parts around the vampire warriors were confusing – but that I think was due to poor subtitling and this overall is a nice slice of action vampire flick. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Blood of the Dragon: The Journals of Vlad Draculya the Impaler – review

Author: David T Pudlevitcz

Illustrator: David St. Albans

Release date: 2015

Contains spoilers


The blurb: Being the only true journal of Vladislaus Tepes Bassarab called Draculya; Voivode of Wallachia, Knight Order of the Dragon, Defender of the Faith and the Realm of the Holy Roman Empire, Count of Transylvania, Protector of Moldavia, Bey of the Ottoman Sultans, Alchemist, Necromancer, Vampyre! Penned by his own dead hand.

The review: The first thing to say about Blood of the Dragon is that it is a tome of considerable length. Published as penned by Pudlecitcz and illustrated by St Albans the first conceit of the book is that it is a publication of the actual journal of Vlad III, bookended with chapters around the archaeologists forced to do so by the vampire.

This vampire is the creature of Stoker’s novel but it was Stoker who led the fight against the vampire and Dracula is (an inaccurate, according to the vampire) recollection of those events.

The bulk of the novel takes in the events surrounding the birth and life of Vlad III and ties vampirism in at an early stage in his life when Vlad and friends, whilst in Constantinople at age 9, are attacked by a vampire. Vlad is forced to help detect the grave and destroy the vampire – and this includes pouring the vampire’s blood over the boy. Unfortunately blood gets into a cut on Vlad’s tongue and the “vampiric ally” attaches itself to the boy – therefore much of Vlad’s bloodthirstiness in life was due to being a living vampire.

You can see this as a type of vampiric possession and Vlad is lucky to survive with soul/will intact and not become a minor undead. Eventually the ally is exorcised but Vlad will, subsequently, invite another ally to become a parasitic/symbiotic part of himself and this is what allows him to live beyond death.

The book invokes a variety of names and types of vampires, draws in some figures such as Erzsébet Báthory and the Comte de Saint-Germain (as periphery mentions more than anything) and layers fiction onto history (and some pseudo-history) in a satisfying way. The archaic turns of phrase actually work in context – especially compared to other books where they jar. Most fundamentally the book draws on Lovecraftian mythos at its heart.

This version of Dracula can walk during overcast days, when well fed, but temporarily dies in sunlight (the book actually misses, given it was supposedly written at the end of the 19th century, that sunlight was not listed within vampiric myth in any great measure, if at all, until the release of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens). This Dracula feasts on negative emotion as much as the blood it is conveyed on and steals souls for his master as he does so (to reveal more than this is too much of a spoiler).

The most important thing the book manages to do is give the character a strong voice; it is a narcissistic, egoist voice, prone to self-contradiction and repeating salient points – but it is a genuine voice. Worth the entry price, indeed. 7.5 out of 10.

Vampire Academy – review

Director: Mark Waters

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

Universally panned – it appeared – but still with some form of fan-base I walked into Vampire Academy cold, having never read the books it is based on, having zero expectation and not really too bothered about seeing it. I had read it was kind of a supernatural Mean Girls and I assume that is accurate (having never seen Mean Girls).

I was thus pleasantly surprised as I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it either, to be fair, but it had its moments and its confusing aspects, for the uninitiated, as well.

Zoey Deutch as Rose

The film starts with the Dragomir family, in a car. The focus of the film being daughter Lissa (Lucy Fry) and her friend/guardian Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) who also travels with them. A drunk driver careens across the road, causing a crash. Lissa crawls bleeding and clutches on to Rose’s hand… Two years on and the two girls are on the run from their school, St Vincent’s Academy. The two girls are psychically linked and Lissa was dreaming of the car crash that killed her family.

Lissa feeds

Lissa hasn’t fed and Rose offers her a vein (something we hear that is taboo), for Lissa is, of course, a vampire. In this case she is a type of peaceful vampire called Moroi and actually one of the royal bloodlines. Rose is a dhampir – a half vampire sworn to protect the Moroi. Rose spots a man outside and realises that the guardians from the Academy have found them. They try to escape and make a good fist of it, that is until Rose battles a particular guardian called Dimitri (Danila Kozlovsky) – who easily defeats her.

stake

Rose awakens in a car and Dimitri notices the psychic link between the two girls. They reach the Academy but the gates are closed and the guardians are soon fighting Strigoï. If the Moroi are peaceful vampires, who do drink blood but don’t kill and can walk in sunlight (with minor irritation) then Strigoï are those Moroi who have killed, they become ruthless, psychopathic and burn in sunlight. They are also very physically powerful. The dhampir are trained to protect the Moroi from them and Rose (who failed to stay in the car as ordered) is nearly got but Dimitri saves her – staking the Strigoï with a silver stake.

shopping

Once back at the Academy the two girls are deemed as pariahs as the social structure has shifted – in a high school way – during their absence. It is clear that there was more to their disappearance than even the girls know (and that they were manipulated psychically to leave) and Lissa struggles with an unusual set of magic gifts that do not fall in the normal elemental range. She is also rather good at mind control and manipulation and uses this to get her social standing back (here we have the supernatural Mean Girls aspect) but whatever they were being protected from is still out there.

psi hound

There were interesting aspects – vampire fans taking a year out as willing donors and then mind-wiped of the experience, for instance, and the taboo of drinking from vampires and half vampires (which leads to the donor being known as a Blood Bitch). But there wasn’t enough explanation of the Christian aspects (the Moroi go to church and have a patron saint), there were creatures called psi hounds that were not really explained either (other than they are difficult to train and dangerous) and it just felt occasionally that there were gaps in the backgrounds that a fan of the books would know but the casual viewer does not.

training

The overarching story was interesting enough, I guess, but the identity of the villain was fairly obvious. However I felt that Zoey Deutch gave a fine and sassy performance that lifted parts of the film when they flagged a little. The appearance of a vampire queen (Joely Richardson) was a bit excruciating as the film veered towards Monster High level of childish bitchiness. There was a further story ready to arc in the background about an army of Strigoï that was more interesting to me than the main film but so very sparse.

Strigoï

Over all it wasn’t as bad as some teen orientated vampire films, perhaps there was a punch it needed that wasn’t quite there but it was ok. I can’t really tell if it was novel accurate or whether it did the book a disservice. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Holy Knight (part 1 & 2) – review

Director: Jiro Fujimoto

First aired: 2012

Contains spoilers


Holy Knight is a (so far) two part ova, each part being just under 30 minutes. The lead character Lilith Kishimoto (Maaya Uchida) reminded me, design wise, of Moka from the anime Rosario and Vampire but, aside from a school uniform, pink hair and cross at the neck the two characters are very different. Artistically Lilith is branded on the chest also.

Lilith

The animation begins in a setting that seems medieval and a town is attacked. As Lilith’s parents try to repel the knights, Lilith is sent away in a boat. Her parents die making her the last Strigoï. Cut forward to modern times and, having been raised by her Aunty Camilla (Yukari Kokubun) – a moroi, Lilith is sent to Japan as a foreign exchange student. Her goal is to seduce a shy young man named Tokoroten Mizumara (Hiro Shimono).

Camilla

Her presence has led to vampire hunters from the order that attacked her village being there (the fact that the opening scenes seemed medieval makes the fact that they seem to be the same knights now in modern Japan seem odd, to say the least). Camilla is close at hand, and has the ability to turn into a bat, and Lilith has a dog (who is really a werewolf, it appears) as a guardian. Tokoroten also has a guardian, though he doesn’t know it, who takes the form of a cat. We discover that the brand on her chest was put there by the moroi.

mystical sword

Lilith has to sleep with him as he is the last of the Romualds, a family of vampire hunters. Her aim is to become pregnant by him, she will then bathe in the blood of him and the baby as that will allow the Strigoï to survive. Suffice it to say the two episodes that have been produce get nowhere near that point and this is where the show is disappointing – the story is thin and partial, it needs the length of a series to blossom and the two episodes don’t really get anywhere. Will there be more? For now that is unknown but as a two part ova this only deserves 3.5 out of 10.

At the time of review there is no imdb page.