Guest Blog – Rusalka, A key to Early Vampire Film – TMtV 20th anniversary

It’s with great pleasure I welcome David Anwnn Jones to the blog. Whereas with other guest bloggers for this 20th anniversary celebration I have put a little forward of how I met the guest, with David he wrote something on that himself and so I’ll hand straight to him:

It is a great pleasure to be asked to write a post for Andy Boylan’s ‘Taliesin meets The Vampires’ twentieth anniversary year. I have long admired this vampire film expert’s writing with its wide knowledge of vampire lore and cinematics. In 2016, I convened the World Vampire Congress, Whitby where Andy delivered his fascinating talk on Stoker and vampire bat iconography. Since then, I have followed his blogs which spread an awareness of film vampires over a wide range of transnational environments, often remote from Hollywood. I have also enjoyed our extensive correspondence.

In his appreciation of Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2018) from 9 Sept 2019, Andy writes:

 

Now mermaid is a misnomer here and it is what the title has been translated to from the Russian title Rusalka: Ozero myortvykh. The rusalka is from Slavic lore and is a form of restless dead. Zelenin (in Russian Folk Belief) suggests it is a suicide or murder victim who, in either case, was drowned. There is an entry in Bane’s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology that has it as a type of fae created when a child dies before baptism or an adolescent dies a virgin.

The foundation myth here is that of the malefic underwater female who lures handsome men beneath the surface to enjoy them sexually and then drains them of life. Andy certainly reads the Rusalka as an energy vampire. Bane goes on to write she’s a ‘vampiric fae’ and member of the Unseelie Court. Vladimir Propp and Linda Ivanits called the rusalka one of the ‘unclean dead’, a revenant. Thomas J. Garza in The Vampire in Slavic Cultures writes that the boundary between vampires and the rusalka as predatory outsider was porous in village lore. Such links reveal that the Rusalka is the oldest surviving vampire figure in cinema history in an extant film, predating F W Murnau’s Nosferatu by over a decade and Lugosi’s Dracula by 21 years.

The rusalka myth is perennially fascinating. galvanising directors and writers today. Podgaevskiy’s film is surrounded by other cinematic she-vampires of the deep: Petr Weigl and Václav Kaslik’s respective versions of Dvorak’s opera, 1963 and 77, Aleksandr Petrov’s animated Mermaid Rusalka 1996, Gary Whitson’s Destiny: Vampire Mermaid 1999, Sebastian Gutierrez’s She Creature 2001, François Rousillon’s Rusalka 2002 TV movie, Anna Melikyan’s Mermaid/ Rusalka 2007, Don E. Fauntleroy’s Bering Sea Beast / Beast of the Bering Sea 2013. Milan Todorovic’s Mamula /Nymph/ Dark Sea /Killer Mermaid 2014 and Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure, 2015. Nearer to the present, Perry Blackshear, Lona Fontane, Dale Thomas Cizmadia and Claudiu Mitcu’s have all made Rusalka films. Though the primary means of predation in these films is drowning, there is no shortage either of feeding, directly and by osmosis, strangulation, sharp fangs, blood-letting and sucking, and other vampiric depredation

I wish to make a bridge from these films, stretching back to the early dawn of Russian horror cinema. Vasili Goncharov’s foundational Rusalka film of 1910 is based on the play by Alexander Pushkin and stars Andrey Gromov as The Prince, Vasili Stepanov as The Miller and Aleksandra Goncharova as Natalya, the miller’s daughter and subsequently the Rusalka queen.

 

The film starts with Natalya, visibly longing for her lover, the Prince, who, when he arrives, throws her aside to marry a woman of royal blood. Distraught. Natalya drowns herself in the river. Yet, at the wedding feast, her ghost appears accusing the Prince, even within the nuptial bedroom. For eight years, the Prince obsesses over the dead working-class girl and finally rides back to mill, encountering her father who, driven mad with grief, imagines that he is now a raven. Led by Natalya, the rusalka spirits appear, amongst them a young girl who could be Natalya’s unbaptised daughter (unborn when her mother committed suicide). Natalya and the young girl and others lure the prince into the Dnieper river. His present wife arrives later only to find his clothes. On the riverbed, in what initially seems to be a Mélièsan tableau, Natalya, now queen of the Rusalka, caresses his corpse while other her maidens perform a swaying dance. For 1910, the same year as Frankenstein, the film, (which can be viewed here) is a considerable achievement, more indebted to the structure and rhythms of Pathé early films than Edison.

The cinematic Rusalka has survived perhaps because, whatever the seismic pull from Western horror cinema, it has proved difficult to Dracularize a Slavic female water-fiend. (Yet, the ‘feeding of the beast’ in Luc Besson’s Dracula (2025), whereby a feral mer-maiden rises to threaten horrified fairground visitors might hint that pressure is now being exerted in the opposite direction), The rusalka’s miraculous survival from a fractured and decimated Russian film industry also opens the gate for an awareness of the first female age of vampire films. She was originally part of a constellation of film’s female vampires, a whole distinctive age 1901-21: the Lilith of Lilith and Ly, Vera in Afterlife Wanderer (1915) the Pannochka of Goncharov’s Viy (1909) and the cat vampire of Nabeshima (1912), all notorious female monsters in their time but starring in films now lost. Yet their early dominance is still attested in surviving stills, scripts, reviews and posters.

I do not wish to be politically glib, but the story of a young woman mis-used by a prince and who subsequently commits suicide but takes her revenge from beyond the grave is not without strong resonance in 2026. Like any vivid revenant of the screen, even after 115 years and against all the odds, Aleksandra Goncharov’s vampiric mer-demon still rises towards us from the shadows of pre-Soviet cinema with a flickering intensity. She points at the feckless prince over his wedding feast. She follows her faithless lover right into his marital bedroom accusingly. She and her daughter stalk the shores of the Dnieper. They lure the royal philanderer into the river-depths. In her underwater apotheosis, she will instate her revenge and caress her man’s prone body, absorbing all his former strength. She will not lie down. Happy Anniversary ‘Taliesin meets the Vampires.’ Long may you run. The first age of vampire cinema was female.

David Annwn

David Annwn is author of Gothic Machine, Sex and the Gothic Magic Lantern and Gothic Effigy. He is also author of the first book on vampires in early film: Vampires on the Silent Screen, Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror and essays in each volume of The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic series. A magic lanternist, David is a recognised authority on E-G Robertson’s Phantasmagoria show, being the first to locate its original site. Sir Christopher Frayling called David’s work ‘fascinating materials and connections: Vampire archaeology.’ Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney has called his writing: ‘wonderfully sympathetic and accurate.’

Shark Girl – Review

Directors: Justin Shilton & Rob Zazzali

Release date:2024

Contains spoilers

I had been approached to consider Shark Girl for review, with co-director Rob Zazzali suggesting “while not a straight-up vampire movie, it definitely has consistent vampire vibes.” But I was concerned, not because it was the directors’ first feature but because I was still haunted by memories of Sharkula. Well, first off, as far as I am concerned this can be classed as a vampire film. However, more importantly, I was not only pleasantly surprised, but I was also rather impressed.

Ryan Bertroche as Ron

The film starts with an emergency at the SoCal nuclear reactor. With limited funds the filmmakers managed to give a fair sense of the emergency visually as well as in audio. A reactor fire, they vent coolant into the sea. A shark is caught in the ejected effluent – the shark isn’t brilliantly rendered but is on for a brief moment and not repeated and gives us enough but not so much it detracts. I will say at this point that I was also taken by very competent photography and it was the professional photography through that impressed me - too often it is a failure point in budget films.

looking for likes

Heidi (Alexandra Corin Johnston) is an influencer. Now it is interesting to me that influencer culture is being used so much in horror films generally and within vampire films specifically. It is not a shock, obviously the films are reflecting times, and I do look at influencer culture along with the vampire as capitalist and zombie as consumer in my contribution to the forthcoming Toxic Nostalgia on Screen. What was interesting to me, therefore, was the portrayal of Heidi, at this point, as pleasant and exploited – this is not the normal portrayal of an influencer.

Alexandra Corin Johnston as Heidi

For instance, she sees a flyer about a missing dog and wants to take time to share it with her followers. Her boyfriend and photographer Ron (Ryan Bertroche) has no such sympathies. They head to the beach for more shots, and he wants her in the water (to capture a wet hair flip). She does not want to go in but he bullies her in and again to make her go further out. He is distracted with his camera when something grabs Heidi and pulls her under – sensibly the filmmakers showed nothing here and leave it to the imagination of the viewer – when he can’t see her, he gets the hump and leaves – dropping a terse voicemail. He assumes she has left and has no real concern for her.

beach attack

A couple are on the beach at night, she’s a little freaked as it is so dark. After a while he notices something and realises it is a body. He goes over and it is Heidi, alive but unconscious. They have no signal, so he sends his girlfriend to get help. Heidi comes round, grabs the young man and bites his neck. When the woman comes back she attacks her also. Now we see her teeth have become sharp and shark-like, but that is the only transformation aspect used. We also only see her bite and feed like a vampire – there is dialogue about victims ripped apart and body parts strewn, this is all off screen but this decision works. With knowledge of the shark aspect we accept the unseen frenzy, with the aesthetic we accept the vampire feeding.

Sumayyah Ameerah as Sienna

So, as the film progresses we see Heidi transform more in personality than physically – she becomes more predatory, unwilling to be the victim to Ron, other influencers, agents or temperamental designers. This develops further where she becomes alien to the world, indifferent, even cruel. The word alien is useful as there is a thread that borrows from Species (1995). Also involved are Christopher (Nick Tag) a wannabe reporter who went to her high school and her best friend Sienna (Sumayyah Ameerah), a marine biologist. The film's narrative is underpinned with conspiracy theory, mostly around industrial conspiracy. 

shark teeth

There isn’t a lot of lore – she is a mutation and we can say created by science, or at least the detritus science leaves behind. Pressing her head in the right place makes her paralyse for a short moment (equivalent to striking a shark on the nose and disrupting the electrical sense). She is not the only one to have been mutated and there is a serum that can be personalised to revert the mutation, we also realise that a bite can turn another. There was nearly a staking moment – a harpoon is used – but it did not strike the heart.

Nick Tag as Christopher

What I liked about this, first and foremost, was the very competent photography. The acting was good and whilst the story was a tad on the silly side the filmmakers knew what they were doing with it. I liked the idea that Christopher’s suspicions get raised as wound bite diameters were too small for a shark large enough to do the damage found – the fact that it doesn’t seem that the authorities work that out isn’t overly commented on. Heidi leaves a trail, which is too close to her for getting away with her activities, but the timeframe is small enough that the fact we only see her friends tracking her does work. I also like the choice the filmmakers made to not have bad practical or CGI effects and work on a less is more basis. Is it the greatest film, nope, but it is a film called Shark Girl for heaven’s sake. However, it looks good, has a decent characterisation in Heidi and entertained. 6 out of 10 surprised me but is absolutely fair.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Piranha Women – review

Director: Fred Olen Ray

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

This one was suggested by my friend Leila but I did already have it on my Tubi watch list. In fairness I can see a fair argument to suggest this is not Vamp. We get flesh eating, but not particularly blood/fluid/essence eating and the transformation might be likened as much to a fish-like lycanthrope as a vampire. But I have decided to accept it, for no other reason that it contains vampiric breasts. Also the director is Fred Olen Ray, who is a stalwart of both low budget horror generally and vampire films specifically and so I suspect any genre merging was conscious.

Shauna and Gary

It starts in a bar, where else, and Gary (Houston Rhines, the Sisterhood) sits at the bar and orders a vodka rocks. A woman, Shauna (Keep Chambers), sits with him and mentions that her car has broken down. Gary is in town for a meeting and offers to drive her home and though she feigns reluctance we do notice that when she phones her friend (to say don’t pick her up) she actually doesn’t call. Cut to a pool and she goes underwater to go down on him, he starts to twist in agony as the water turns red. As she surfaces, she reveals sharp piranha teeth.

Sof Puchley as Lexi

Richard (Bobby Rice) is cooking breakfast when his girlfriend, Lexi (Sof Puchley), comes down. She looks tired and drawn and he explains he didn’t want to wake her. She has, it becomes readily apparent, cancer and is pretty much at end of life. She mentions meeting another cancer patient, Allison (Carrie Overgaard) who is almost cured thanks to experimental treatment. She has arranged an appointment with the Doctor, Sinclair (Shary Nassimi). He makes her promise to talk over what he says before deciding and goes to work. At work he discovers he has been passed over for promotion in favour of Jeff (Nathaniel Moore), who writes 'sexier' reports.

vampiric breasts

Lexi meets Sinclair and decides to go for the treatment – he has shown her an aquarium full of piranha and explained the treatment involves injecting piranha DNA. She calls Richard and says for him not to disturb her and so he goes for drinks with Jeff. Jeff and Richard meet Allison and Shauna. Jeff leaves with Allison, Richard blows Shauna off as he is monogamous. Jeff meets his end, of course, and we see that as well as piranha teeth in her mouth, her breasts also open and have such teeth – attacking with three mouths.

piranha teeth

The next day Lexi seems a million times healthier. At work, Richard gets Jeff’s promotion (as Jeff doesn’t turn up at work and plagiarised his reports), is questioned by the police over Jeff’s mutilated body and discovers Lexi has left him to go and live in a commune with the other piranha treatment women. As the film is just under an hour long the plot lurches from main point to main point with speed. The cops are sceptical and yet don’t fancy Richard for the crime. He knows what’s going on awfully fast. Richard learns from Sinclair himself that piranha’s need heat and can be killed by ethanol glycol (though a bullet sems to do the job just as well.

melting

So, with regards the ethanol glycol – some goes in the pool and a piranha woman in it seems to be being electrocuted until she turns into some kind of swamp thing (and still needs shooting). The other odd bit of lore was the idea that rain water will make a piranha woman transform and then melt – why that happens is anyone’s guess. This is just throwaway silliness but we get vampire like women (they seem to be able to control their transformation unless induced by an outside liquid source), with vampiric boobs and a short, unobtrusive running time lurching to an unsatisfying denouement. Cheese will carry it so far, however, 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On Blu-ray @ Amazon UK

The Vampire Dies in No Time: Season 1 – review

Director: Various

First Aired: 2021

Contains spoilers

The Vampire Dies in No Time is an anime based on a manga, and my thanks to Leila for pointing it out. It is a case of the (English) title being literally what happens in the show and it is a comedy, following the general anime/manga comedic strictures. If you generally find comedic anime amusing then you will genuinely find this so. I watched the dubbed version, due to the platform I caught it on, but the English voice acting is actually rather good. Due to this I will put the names of the English voice talent into the review.

Although there are frequently recurring characters (alongside the main characters) it is episodic without an overall arc, indeed each episode can be broken down into (up to) three short vignettes.

Ronaldo and Draluc

In the first episode the vampire hunter Ronaldo (Ian Sinclair) is called to a castle where the nearby townsfolk believe the vampire within, the invincible superior vampire Draluc (Frank Todaro), has kidnapped a young boy. Ronaldo takes on the job but, once he is inside and faces Draluc, the vampire almost immediately dusts. He then reconstitutes himself – this is the key to the title as Draluc will dust at the slightest thing - being hit, sunlight, a loud noise, a shock, harsh words etc. It then turns out that the boy has been sneaking in to play Draluc’s video games when he sleeps through the day and lost track of time.

John

A sequence of events in the castle leads to it being destroyed. When Ronaldo gets back to his office, he finds Draluc there, who has decided to move in as Ronaldo’s roommate. He has also brought his armadillo familiar, John (Ellie Dritch). Ronaldo quickly bonds with John – whose speech is made up of the sound “Nu” – but wants the annoying Draluc out of there. However, one person Ronaldo fears is Fukuma, the editor of his book series The Ronaldo Chronicles. When he is forced to write the second volume, it is discovered that the public love the team up and his publishers expect them to continue working together.

some inferior vampires

I mentioned that Draluc is a superior vampire and there are also inferior vampires – for instance we get a vampire cat, Bosatsu (Jeremy Inman), who has powerful hypnosis powers, a vampire mosquito, a vampiric parasite that latches onto the victim’s groin, looks like massive testes and releases powerful pheromones that makes the victim suddenly popular, and a vampire goldfish to name a few. I should note at this point that there are also vampire vegetables at a couple of points and Ronaldo has a terrible fear of celery. There are a weird and wonderful rollcall of other vampires too, as well as unusually attired hunters – to stand out most hunters wear outfits ranging from a baseball outfit, through lingerie to dressing as a duck. The hunters are freelance and there is an official governmental Vampire Control Division also.

The Vampire Nudenium

A couple of the notable (and recurring) vampires are The Vampire Nudenium (John Stimac) who is a mostly nude vampire whose groin is covered in geraniums, he can control plants and if he feeds a seed to a human he can control them. Another is The Vampire Micro Bikini (Christopher Guerrero), whose bite forces the victim to wear a micro bikini and puts them under his power. Tsujigiri Nagiri (Christopher R. Sabat) is a former serial killer who makes weapons out of his own hardened blood and put his essence int a doll, which made him invulnerable to attacks but it also became a weakness (voodoo style).

a chupacabra

The humour is often derived from Ronaldo’s antagonistic nature, especially with Draluc, but it is also frequently resulting from a particularly anime-specific sexual place. However this is neatly written and whilst the sexual humour can be surreal at times, it manages to walk the line rather than cross it – however it certainly isn’t for kids. The animation itself looks nice but isn’t necessarily anything special. However, if you like the comedic end of anime this one is definitely worth checking out 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Beast of the Bering Sea – review

Director: Don E. FauntLeRoy

Release date: 2013

Contains spoilers

I don’t know why Syfy do what they do. If they have money to make films then why, oh why not make good ones. When I heard they were going to do a fish/vampire crossover (sharknado gathering some cult following, of course) I did despair. When the title isn’t even right (because they are plural not singular) you know things are going to go horribly wrong.

Perhaps I do it a disservice. Perhaps, had I watched the film with companions of a like mind, with foaming beverages to hand, then it would have been so bad it was worthwhile. However I don’t think so and, even if it were the case, I watched it on my lonesome and it was simply so bad, it’s bad.

Donna and Owen

A guy, Owen Powers (Brandon Beemer) wanders up to a quayside looking for Glen Hunter (Kevin Dobson) and meets his hard-assed daughter Donna (Cassandra Scerbo). He is put to work on the boat with hand Jonas (Michael Papajohn) until Glen and son Joe (Jonathan Lipnicki, the Little Vampire) show. It seems that Glen and Owen’s dad new each other but that isn’t really expanded on.

Jonas is the first victim

The ship – the Black Drum – is a dredger and dredges the Bering Sea for gold. Glen sends the kids, Owen and Jonas out to a midnight dive to check out an area he wants to buy a claim for. Jonas and Joe dive and something is disturbed. Joe finds Jonas’ body, maskless and drained, on the seabed and surfaces. They assume shark, see a fin and go hell for leather back to shore, leaving Jonas’ body at sea.

Joe and Donna

As Glen doesn’t want to tip his claim area off (especially to local n’er-do-well Thorne (Lawrence Turner, Angel & Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter) until he wins the auction, Glen decides that they won’t inform the authorities until after said auction (which they lose because Joe has tipped Thorne off). Meanwhile the body is found by marine biologist Megan (Jaqueline Fleming, also Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter & Vegas Vampires) as it has washed to shore. She doesn’t inform the authorities either, but tells the crew that she has taken Jonas’ body to her lab. This is because she has been tracking a creature that has been exsanguinating seals up and down the coast and wants to run tests on the body. How his body conveniently washed up from the sea to that bit of coast isn’t answered.

in flight

Anyway… sea vampires… manta ray looking sea vampires. These little buggers have spines on their wings with which they hold their prey like a living iron maiden and siphon them dry. They also have somewhat sharp teeth and can function on land, and fly as well – in a move that goes to make them look like crap bats. They seem a damn sight more clever than they should as they are able to track, apparently, the crew and Megan wherever they happen to be.

exploding sea vampire

Allegedly sunlight is an issue – despite seeing one on the deck of a ship in the sun. Bright light (such as from a camera – or the sun, dagnabbit) stuns them and high intensity light, say from a sunlamp, causes them to explode into a cloud of blood. Being poked through with a large stick/pipe, when they are bloated from a feed, also causes them to explode into a cloud of blood. The modelling, mapping and cgi is bloomin’ awful.

chest burst

Their method of reproduction is interestingly unoriginal (in movies, at least, for a ‘vampire’ film it is fairly original). They implant their offspring into a chest and, after a couple of hours, they pop out like a low-rent Alien. Meanwhile the cast are stumbling over poor story, ineffectual villainy and plot holes that a bus could drive through. There seem to be hundreds of these little buggers, they’ve been the stuff of sea-faring legend (so they’ve been around) but no-one has seen them before.

in the sun

The film is rubbish. There is little more to say. I didn’t think it managed a “so bad it’s good” saving grace either. More a let’s throw concepts out and see what sticks than a seriously thought through film with lore to match, I really can’t recommend it. 1.5 out of 10.

The IMDb page is here.