Vamp or Not? Ghost Nursing

Directed by Wilson Tong and first released in 1982, Ghost Nursing was a Hong Kong film (set mostly in Thailand) that centred on black magic. It focuses on Jackie (Shirley Yim) who, when we meet her, is the mysterious woman being sought by police after a triad hit killed the man she was with. She decides to make a break of it and go to Thailand.

She gets to her sister’s place during a Mahjong game and explains to her that she had amassed gambling debts and her luck generally is bad. Her sister works as an escort in a bar and Jackie gets a job there too. First night she attracts the attention of a businessman but also a gangster, who demands the house give her to him. He then takes her for a car ride, once out of the car his henchman holds her at gunpoint and the gangster rapes her.

the fetish

This is proof, if proof were needed, that her luck is bad and so she is taken by her sister to a temple and they speak to a seer who divines that she was a violent criminal in a past life and the bad luck is karma. The only way to escape it is to adopt a ghost child, he suggests. They go to a sorcerer who pairs her with such a ghost. He gives her a fetish of the child, a spell cloth that binds him to her and she must treat him like he is her child, for example putting a place out for dinner for him (and we see foodstuff vanish), talking to him but, most importantly, there is a regular ritual she must carry out where she feeds him three drops of her blood (by dripping them onto the fetish).

the ghostly kid

We see interventions when people are negative or exploitative to her, and the killing of the gangster and his henchmen including the ghost possessing the corpse of one and controlling both corpses to get the gangster. The child also, at her request, intervenes to get her a businessman she fancies. Things nearly go wrong, however, when she forgets the ritual and this leads to her boyfriend, behind her back, arranging an exorcism that gets botched and leads to the child attacking the exorcist, him and then her. So, is it vamp?

exorcism kit

My thought sits around the child being a vampiric ghost. An offering of blood to the spirits of the dead was something found, for example, in Greek myth where allowing a spirit to bathe in, or drink, blood temporarily restored their memories and allowed them to communicate with the living. Three drops of blood seems a small amount but in Theophile Gautier’s la Morte Amoureuse the vampire Clarimonde took much the same, “A few drops of thy rich and noble blood, more precious and more potent than all the elixirs of the earth, have given me back life.” Interestingly the exorcism kit contains a cross and garlic.

the sisters

I think you can look at this as a vampiric ghost and probably as an infant vampire also. Some may not consider it so but for me it manages to tick a box. That said, there is an appearance of drinking blood from a person when the infant possesses someone, though that isn’t overly clear. The film itself is a fair melding of exploitation – the gangster/escort side – and black magic movie. The last part of the film ramps up the gore.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

The Terror – Devil in Silver – review

Director: Various

First aired: 2026

Contains spoilers

The Terror is an anthology TV series, where each season is a standalone story. Devil in Silver is season 3 and is the first in a contemporary setting. It locates itself in a secure mental health facility, and an underscoring theme is systemic failure in the US mental health services and healthcare generally. However, there is a presence in the hospital also.

Dan Stevens as Pepper

The primary character is Pepper (Dan Stevens, Abigail, Apostle & Vamps) a mover by trade, he was in a heavy metal band, as the drummer, and wants to do drum lessons for neighbourhood kids on the side. His girlfriend, Marisol (Juani Feliz), isn’t quite onboard with buying a drumkit – which he impulse does – and their call regarding the purchase is interrupted by her physically abusive ex. Pepper gets back, ends up assaulting the boyfriend, and fighting with a group intervening – who happen to be cops.

Judith Light as Dorry

The cops arrest him but they don’t want the paperwork and so take him to New Hyde hospital, a run down facility, whose chief doctor, Anand (Aasif Mandvi), admits him. Comply with treatment for 72 hours and he can leave, but compliance proves impossible, partly because it is made to be so - for instance he must take all his meds, but the meds knock him out so he can’t take certain doses and is thus non-compliant - and partly because his personality doesn’t handle compliance with authority well. What we have also seen is that something is haunting the hospital and is feeding on the misery of the patients.

CCH Pounder as Miss Chris

We see very early on two presences, later revealed to be one and the same. One is tied to an apparently comatose patient and seems to be capable of assaulting patients. The other seems to be the apparition of the founding (and deceased) doctor Walter (John Benjamin Hickey). It is head nurse Miss Chris (CCH Pounder) who later identifies the presence as a duppy – which is an Afro-Caribbean spirit that is sometimes thought to attach itself to someone and feed on their vitality and emotions. Later the duppy says the hospital had once provided good eating. Interestingly the lore she offers is that they can be stalled by throwing rice they have to count, this arithmomania being very much a trope of the vampire genre, along with a need to retreat to the spirit world when the sun rises.

the duppy in Dr Walter form

What we eventually discovered is that the duppy had attached itself to Dr Walter and became trapped in the hospital when he was murdered by an inmate. Walter was no angel, compulsively lobotomising patients, but this seems to be the influence of the duppy, which now takes his form, though his flesh often sags, offering an uncanny air. Towards the end of the season we see the duppy rip the flesh from his face to horrify the witness. He will take other forms and also communicates through payphones. With the duppy we also get vampiric possession, something akin to a vampiric ghost (the actual folklore has the duppy as the earthbound one of the two souls a person has), and the physical creature terrorising (and sometimes killing) the patients is the murderous and apparently comatose inmate when possessed. The duppy needs inviting in to a person.

the duppy in creature form

The season isn’t long – 6 episodes in total – with a denouement that perhaps speeds at the viewer a tad quickly. However it takes its time to build the characters and Dan Stevens gives a great performance, special mention should be given to Chinaza Uche who plays Pepper’s roommate Coffee and Judith Light who offers a fantastically nuanced performance as Dorry. The scares, however, were low with the season reaching for atmosphere and perhaps pulling away from being too visceral. The UK Blu-Ray has minimal special features, consisting of a picture gallery and a very brief inside look at the season. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? The Night Sitter

Directed by Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco, this 2018 film features witches but there can be an overlap into the vampire or use of vampire tropes. In this case I think there is an inference that we can look at and, if that inference is accepted we may well class this as vamp. However, it also needs pointing out that the three witches are referred to as the Three Mothers and this directly refers to the witches of Dario Argento's Three Mothers series – and the lighting through this film reminded me of Suspiria, deliberately so I’d say.

The film follows Amber (Elyse Dufour, Drakul), a woman entering into a rich area to babysit – however it is clear that the name is a pseudonym and in reality she intends to rob her employer. The employer is Ted Hooper (Joe Walz) a paranormal investigator whose show hasn’t really got off the ground and who hasn’t seen a genuine supernatural event in twenty years of investigating. His wife died a year before and Amber is to sit for his son Kevin (Jack Champion). Kevin spends most of his time in his room drawing sinister pictures of three dark figures – later he tells Amber he is being haunted by them, they come in his dreams but his mother saves him.

pizza time

Also in the house will be Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), son of Ted’s date Charlotte (Deanna Rashell), he is a bit of a tearaway. Amber has noticed a door that Ted says leads to his office and is locked and so Amber has contacted her friend in crime Rod (Jermaine Rivers), telling him to bring both his van and lock picking kit. Ronnie also wants in to the office, to see what cool stuff is in there, and he actually finds the key (which seems all too convenient and, by the end of the film, we discover it was). The relationship with Kevin and Amber is interesting in that he sees her take watches and money from his father’s room and whilst he mentions it he seems keen to believe her “Robin Hood” excuse and they do seem to quickly, and naturally, bond.

the grimoire

Anyway, Ronnie and Kevin get into the office and Kevin looks at a grimoire regarding the Three Mothers (we later discover it was written by the witches' acolytes, after they were executed, and the ink contained their ashes), gets a papercut and bleeds on a page, which absorbs the blood and summons the Three Mothers who then terrorise the people there including Amber’s not quite boyfriend, Martin (J. Benedict Larmore) who is trying to talk her out of crime, neighbour Vincent (Ben Barlow) and Rod’s girl Lindsey (Amber Neukum). So how are they vampire – well we discover they were child killer witches who were executed at Salem and so we have the trope of blood reconstituting from ashes (in the ink, of course). This is a different background to Argento’s Three Mothers, who are living (if ancient) and scattered across the globe. But I mentioned an inference…

Ronnie's end

They kill Ronnie first and we see him strung over a tub and his throat slit, with them catching the blood in it. Later we hear them say of Kevin that “We've already tasted his blood. Soon we will bleed him dry.” That also comes with the knowledge that, back in the day, they bled children either quickly or over weeks. The inference comes into it when we are told “They tend to play with their food.” The inference being that bleeding the children is the source of their food – in other words their blood. If we accept that inference, we accept them being vampiric witches and, as one of them possesses Lindsey, we also get vampiric possession.

a witch

If I had an issue with the film, it was the fact that they chuck in the kitchen sink. The family dog Finley is killed (off screen, we hear its whimper) but then it seems that it is now some sort of Hellhound, in his kennel with glowing eyes, but they do all that to do nothing with it. Equally the possession seemed odd when we see they can take on other people’s forms and are corporeal. However, the film kept a good pace after a slower start and the lighting that reminded me so much of Suspiria was gorgeous. As for the Vamp or Not, if you accept the inference their food is the blood of children then it is Vamp.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Feed – review

Director: Marco van Bell

Release date: 2026

Contains spoilers

This Irish release mixes the world of influencers with the legend of the dearg-due (in variant spelling dearg-dul). Quoting Bane, it “is a type of vampiric REVENANT from Ireland that has been feared since the days before the introduction of Christianity. These ancient creatures are described as looking like a beautiful yet pale woman who can be seen strolling aimlessly through graveyards at night. It uses its beauty to lure men to it and then kisses them on the mouth. When it does so, it drains them of their blood. To stop a dearg-due from continued assaults, its grave must be found and a cairn erected ond top of it, trapping it beneath. Ireland’s most famous dearg-due is said to be buried beneath a strongbow tree. About four times a year it is able to escape from its grave and feed.”

The film changes the mythology but the changes work (mostly). The influencer side did threaten to undermine the film as the film portrayed them as unlikeable – but one particular ex-influencer worked really well, adding depth to what could have been a vapid cast of characters. However the film begins in 1897 – which, of course, was the publication year of Dracula, though there is no connection with Stoker other than that. We hear banging, it is night and two guys wearing blindfolds on carry a woman (Niamh Hogan).

the boy

The man banging a stick against the rock of a dolmen is also blindfolded and says they must close their eyes to her lies. The men manoeuvre her headfirst into a deep narrow hole dug into the earth. In, she begins to scream. The reactions are different, the man who was beating the dolmen with a stick starts to bash his own head against the rock, one runs into the wood and the third frantically claws dirt into the hole, burying her. The camera follows the running man and he suddenly stops, he says it is done but he has been stabbed by a boy holding a sword. The boy runs his finger through the blood on the blade and rubs it over his teeth…

messaging

A vehicle drives through the Irish countryside. We see the text conversation between Nessa (Daisy Jelley) and Sean (Oskar Smith) bitching about *her* being silent – referring to passenger Orla (Grace Collender). Sean is ordered to do something. Nessa is an influencer, Sean her assistant/collaborator. He starts to film the people in the car, the driver is Austin (Rhys Mannion), Nessa’s boyfriend and photographer. Also in the car is the aforementioned Orla and her boyfriend Lorcan (Clinton Liberty) – he gets angry when the camera is turned on them. Later we discovered that Orla was an influencer with a large following but the use of her camera caused an accident, a year before, where her family died and she was pulled back from the brink of death. Whilst the trip is to shoot footage for Nessa it is also an intervention – though the accusation levelled later that it is less for her and more to enhance Nessa’s following is probably accurate.

Orla blurred

Getting to the house – in the middle of nowhere – we see the awful influencer attitude when Nessa berates Austin for not driving in slowly enough for her to get intro footage. The house is locked but soon Nora (Charlotte Bradley) arrives to give them a key. They start setting up but Orla is literally haunted by her PTSD and wanders off into woods, following a voice only she hears, the others following to get footage. In some respects Orla is the true undead of the film; pulled back from the brink of death, she wants to die but is afraid to because she remembers death as nothingness. At one point a photo of her and Nessa has Orla blurred, as though she can hardly be captured and another time her reflection vanishes, though that is a vampire induced illusion. She leads everyone to the dolmen – which has dearg-due carved into it. There is an icon hanging and fashioned from hawthorn, on which Orla pricks her finger – some blood falls to the ground.

the dearg-due

Things escalate quickly with the dearg-due emerging from the earth and going to the house. Before that Sean has looked up the name and found a mythology that suggests it is the first vampire and was a fallen angel that merged, initially, with a Celtic warrior. It preserved the body of its host for an unnatural span by drinking blood and when the body finally rots it moves to a new host – we discover later that it is Orla’s presence and blood that have brought it back as it wants her body. They are trapped by being buried headfirst under hawthorn and stones. What didn’t quite gel for me were those locals living nearby and awaiting the dearg-due's return – we are told they have tried rituals to bring it back, I don’t think anyone asked why they didn’t just dig her up.

the entity emerges

Other lore we get is that she can make people see what she wants (and the blindfolds at the beginning was to try and prevent this) and her blood getting in a person's eyes, which burns, gives her control of that person. We see her start to haemorrhage deliberately and essentially turn into a pool of blood, in which form she escapes from a room through a drain and reconstitutes as a hand emerges from the blood to touch into someone's spilled blood – this struck me as a more visceral form than the standard fog/mist often used. Sunlight burns the host but not the possessing entity.

influencer culture

The acting in this works – Nessa bugged me intensely and she was meant to. The ranges needed generally were limited and the actors flexed comfortably in those ranges but much more was needed for Orla and, whilst she started as a listless revenant of a character, the full film saw her as a nuanced character (and the only one who elicited true audience sympathy) - Grace Collender carried that transformation well. The effects worked well enough for a budget production, and I liked the use of the dearg-due as a vampire type. A message about the darker side of influencer culture was a tad on the nose but I did enjoy this. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

Blood on Her Tongue – review

Author: Johanna van Veen

First published: 2025

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: "I'm in your blood, and you are in mine…"

The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate.

The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harbouring secrets of her own, too.

Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behaviour takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry…and hungry.

Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth – or risk losing her forever.

A haunting gothic tale for fans of all things supernatural, Blood on Her Tongue is refreshingly biting and unashamedly chilling, taking its place as a horror story for the ages.

The review: This novel by Johanna van Veen is, first and foremost, a masterclass in Gothic literature. Whether the theme was vampirism or not, the prose, describing events out by Dutch peat fields, drips with a heavy atmosphere, the novel conjuring the thick black waters of the bog. Told from the point of view of identical twin Lucy, the book contains a Byronic character in the form of Sarah’s husband Michael, with overtones of Heathcliffe in his character. It is a novel where the overtures of madness, and fear of being mislabelled an hysteric, haunt the primary female characters. It also has a vampire.

And yet, what a vampire… though it is a spoiler, I trust not too much, that the vampirism comes from a bog woman, found with brick in mouth and stakes pining her to her boggy grave. Yet, as we discover more we discover that it is not the outer body but an intelligent, sentient parasite, dependent on human blood and flesh, which eats at the host’s brain assimilating thoughts, memories and personality. From the blurb you’ll be able to tell that it is Lucy’s twin, Sarah, who becomes infected but Lucy, as close as she is to her sibling, struggles to see where the human ends and the parasite begins. Weak and starved, after enforced hibernation, we discover that the parasite can, when recovered, heal the host and prolong the physical lifetime of the body. A starved parasite can eat a whole victim, and quickly, which includes bones as well as flesh. However, it is not drawn as physically overpowered, which was a nice touch. The parasite is a separate species but there are overtones of vampiric possession.

The book does have a queer aspect, which doesn’t reveal until late in the narrative, and explores themes of betrayal and secrets within the Gothic wrapper. This was a fabulous discovery, and I really did enjoy it. 8.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? Monster House

For those who are unaware, I have a keen interest in the idea of the vampiric building and wrote a chapter, Vampiric Buildings: Life Soaked into Mortar and Blood into Earth for Palgrave’s Handbook of the Vampire. I was aware of the 2006, Gil Kenan directed, Monster House and think I did see it back in the day. However, I decided to take a look with pretty fresh eyes (I remembered next to nothing about the content) and a view to see whether we could call the house of the title a vampiric building.

The film starts the day before Halloween in US suburbia, within a nostalgia dictated timeframe. It starts with a very young girl riding her trike and greeting inanimate objects. Suddenly the speeding trike stops, the animation follows a leaf but the inference is that she has flown off the bike. She hasn’t, but she is stuck on the verge of a lawn, for some reason unable to move (I’ll return to why later). Suddenly the door flies open and house owner Mr Nebbercracker (Steve Buscemi, Paris Je T’aime, Hotel Transylvania 1, 2 & 3) comes screeching out of the house, yelling at the girl and in the tirade asks if she wants to be eaten alive – she runs off crying and he breaks and takes the trike.

Steve Buscemi voices Nebbercracker

This is watched from over the road by DJ (Mitchel Musso), a young boy who has been observing the antics of Nebbercracker and logging them. His parents are going away for the weekend and have arranged for Zee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) to babysit. Meanwhile, his friend Chowder (Sam Lerner) arrives but his ball ends up on Nebbercracker’s lawn. DJ notices that he hasn’t reacted and goes to retrieve it but the old man emerges and, in the tussle, collapses – DJ thinks dead. Paramedics come and pick him up – the viewer notices that grass seems to grow and grasp one of the gurney wheels, which breaks off and is then consumed by the earth. That night DJ receives phone calls from the house – making him believe that the ghost of Nebbercracker is haunting him.

the house awake

Now, we have heard local rumour from Bones (Jason Lee), Zee’s boyfriend, who lost his kite, as a kid, to Nebbercracker, who suggests the old man had been married, fattened her up and ate her (bringing in a cannibal theme – though the story is gossip and not truth). Kicked out by Zee he taunts the absent old man (and by default the house) only for the front door to open and his kite be there. With a similar lure used later with Chowder’s ball it indicates an intelligence (and memory) at play. The house consumes Bones. The next day DJ and Chowder save a prep school student selling candy, Jenny (Spencer Locke, the Vampire Diaries), and the three realise they have to neutralise the house before trick or treaters arrive.

the gang

Getting some half-baked advice (that is accurate) they are told they have to “strike at the source of life – the heart”. This is, of course, a vampire trope. They decide that the heart must be the furnace and they have to douse it (the house chimney has been active despite being empty). We have also seen that the house can morph its physical self and the front door becomes a mouth, with teeth (and the veranda can widen the maw), it opens a gullet within the hallway and the hall carpet becomes a tongue. 

Constance's grave

When Nebbercracker is released from hospital (and the kids have just escaped from inside the house) DJ realises that the house is Nebbercracker’s wife Constance (Kathleen Turner). We get the story that she was an unwilling circus freak – the Giantess – and war veteran Nebbercracker helped her escape. He was building the house when trick or treaters caused her to fly into a rage, fall into the foundations and be buried in concrete – that has become a shrine/grave for her. He soon realised that her spirit had possessed the house, that she would attack those who approached and hated Halloween. Nebbercracker was actually protected the neighbourhood and had been essentially a prisoner of his own making for forty five years.

with legs

So – is the house a vampire. Well, possessed by Constance’s spirit it is certainly a monster and arguably (through Constance) undead. It is sentient, intelligent, remembers both what happened to Constance and those who have been near. It is polymorphic, able to change from a creepy house into an animated creature – at the end of the film it takes two trees as legs and becomes mobile. The idea of striking the heart was correct. The question is, does it feed on the victims? That isn’t clear. We do know that those it consumes in the course of the movie all survive but that does not mean to say that normally it would not digest them or drain their energy – the film is silent and probably deliberately so as it is a PG movie. Assuming it does, I think we can call this a vampiric building and one whose source (ie the possession) is communicated to the viewer – in other vehicles these things can be simply alive and bad.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Round the Decay – review

Director: Adam Newman

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

A creature feature, the creature within it had overtones of the wendigo and aspects that seem vampiric but is actually called a wrexsoul (Rachel Pizzolato). A google only revealed the name used for a boss in Final Fantasy VI. The film suggests that it is a possession of a dead individual and that it feeds both on flesh and souls.

The opening of the film sees a native woman (Kamarra Cole) running through forests. She is captured and brought before colonial leader Whelon Newport (Roger Clark) and his wife, Mary (McKenna Parsons). The woman doesn’t respond to his questions, despite the fact that he supposes she does understand him. He starts lecturing her and mentions a sacrifice being needed – at which point he stabs Mary. He explains that only monsters can hunt monsters (clearly equating the indigenous people with monsters), Mary seems to come back to life and the woman screams.

Victoria Mirrer as Kenzi

In a modern day setting we see a gazebo at night, Kenzie (Victoria Mirrer) sits in it and is approached by a man, Zach (Topher Hansson). She is engaged but, it becomes apparent, her fiancé is Zach and his approach is a game, but one she is not responsive to. As the film goes on we discover this is a flashback to a vacation where she broke the engagement off, he went missing in a cave and she has returned for closure. The hotel she stays at has just been bought by Bart (Cary Hite). At a town meeting he tries to offer his vision for tourism but is shouted down by a hostile audience of locals who have heard it all before. Also staying at the hotel is Munroe (Damian Maffei, Nikos the Impaler) a professional monster hunter.

booby trap

The town leader is Gregory Newport (Jamie Dufault), descendent of Whelon. He and the town are aware of the wrexsoul and feed people to her – they arrange for itinerant hotel worker Roz (Sienna Hubert-Ross) to be knocked out and dropped down a shaft into her cave. There are also a group of hikers, some of whom enter the (poorly blocked) cave. The cave has booby traps – one of the hikers (Sassan Saffari) is garrotted on razor wire and another, Aida (Alexis Safoyan), flees with Roz… The wrexsoul is on the hunt and no one in town is safe.

the wrexsoul

The creature itself is clearly what has become of Mary’s body. It has heavy feet, claws and a face that is all teeth and monstrosity. The practical effect was good except for the times it wasn’t. The wrexsoul’s head is clearly a mask but the shooting uses darkness and not showing the head often to maintain an illusion of the monster. Unfortunately the body suit is clearly that, which is a shame. The creature feasts on flesh but eating the soul is mentioned, its speech is an echolalia of victims' words, and it has their memories – so it knows Kenzie as it ate Zach. It hasn’t got the best vision (it might walk past someone staying still), though it detects movement and has sharp ears.

wrexsoul vision

Munroe has been called in by a disgruntled group that live in the town, who themselves had been drafted in to boobytrap the cave (a precaution after Zach became lost there), His sources suggest that, to kill the creature, he first needs to end the bloodline of the one who created it – in other words kill Gregory – and then kill it. Due to its toughness he thinks that fire should be employed. The creature, as I mentioned, feels a tad wendigo but the spirit at the heart of the wrexsoul is vampirically possessing the body of the sacrifice (Mary) and eating flesh and souls and so the film has that vampire aspect though for the most part it is creature feature.

Cary Hite as Bart

And it does the creature feature well enough, though it is pretty by the numbers. The central characters are quite numerous but the filmmakers keep track of them for the viewer competently. The issue with the characters is that had there been fewer they would have been able to be expanded on them that bit more. The gore, when we see it, is done well, but more may have been better. Overall, competent but it won’t set the world on fire. 5.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Cursed Hearse – review

Director: Matthew Luke Tucci

Release date: 2026

Contains spoilers

Vampire machines appear in genre films on occasion and, on some occasions, those machines are cars/motor vehicles. In this case, the vehicle is a hearse and that seems rather apt. As I’ll explore, we don’t see the hearse feed, nor do we get a sense of any supernatural healing that some variants of the trope show. We do get a definite impact on the driver/owner though. Perhaps we might consider it possession even.

hearse for sale

As the film starts, we find ourselves in small town USA and we see a hearse with a for sale sign, the vehicle looks derelict. Willoughby (Louis Rocky Bacigalupo, Vampz!), or Will, is sat in a tow truck. It is the third time this week his car has died. The sheriff (Johnny Halloran) stops on by before Will gets the tow truck to drop the car off at his Uncle’s garage and drop him off at work.

co-workers

Work is a tele-sales place, with his friends Lavash (Marat Shad) and Sid (Anthony Mcgee). After shift they are walking, for his part Will is off to his second job at a Halloween store. As they walk he spots the hearse and is distracted by it. His boss at the store is a dick. However, there is something good there in the form of co-worker Rosemary (Arina Bacigalupo). She gives him a lift home and asks him on a date. Home life is weird; he lives with his Nana (Marnie L Hall) but she has a young lover, Greg (Justin C. Schilling). Lavash and Sid are coming over but he runs out on them determined to buy the hearse.

Will and Rosemary

He crosses a bridge, where a blind man seems to sit vigil, and goes to the couple who are selling the hearse. The man is creepy, but his wife comes out and essentially offers him the hearse for $400. When he has left it is clear that it is a set up and they refer to the hearse like a living being. He doesn’t have $400 and so convinces Sid to loan him the money as an investment – Will suggests he will convert the hearse into a limo as a business venture.

vampire breath

So, the car is a vampire and starts whispering to him, making him offers. The car is described as hungry and when we get the backstory it consists of a funeral home director who was part of a cult that fed the hearse the blood of the dead, but it wasn’t enough and she insisted on fresh blood. She is able to somehow possess Will, which gives him long talons, red eyes and a maw full of fangs. When he attacks a victim he expels breath into them, which seems to sedate them. Later he will say he thinks he drank blood, which he did, and a cult member says “How do you think we feed her?” This suggests that she consumes blood through a possessed servant. I’d have liked to have seen the hearse become pristine as it gained blood but it remained as is, and I suspect that was a budget thing.

Vamp face

The film has a neat idea – though some of the lore such as the breath and the symbiosis between car and servant are under-explored. Unfortunately it isn’t sure what it wants to be. It feels like it pulls its punches when it comes to horror and much more atmosphere and tension could have been explored. This may be because it styles itself as a comedy too, but that fell flat for me. There are pregnant pauses and awkward silences in scenes between the actors, as though they are waiting for direction and, to me, it really felt like it could do with tightening up. Not terrible, just shy of what it might have been. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Guest Blog - “If it doesn’t look like a vampire, or sound like a vampire, can it still be a vampire?” – TMtV 20th anniversary

We’ve come to the end of the 20th anniversary celebration and, last but not least, I’d like to welcome Simon Bacon to TMtV. We met through vampire groups on Facebook, becoming firm pals, and have had many discussions regarding our toothsome friends. An author and editor, I have corresponded over his vampire monograms and have been lucky enough to be included in several of the academic volumes he has edited.

In discussing the mutability of the vampire the much cited vampire scholar Nina Auerbach writes “we all know Dracula, or think we do… .” Although she was using Stoker’s Count as an example of how even the most “recognizable” of the undead doesn’t remain a fixed character in the popular imagination, it is just as true for what constitutes a vampire. Indeed, in many people’s minds Count Dracula is synonymous with the idea of the vampire with the implication that they must all drink blood, can transform into a bat (and possibly a wolf), are very sexy, wear evening dress with greased back, black hair and speak with a broad Eastern European accent—it should be noted that this is predicated far more on Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s 1931 film Dracula, than Stoker’s 1897 novel (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula about to enjoy a night-time snack with Lucy (Frances Dade) in Dracula, directed by Tod Browning. Universal Pictures, 1931.

However, the cinematic vampire, although providing what some see as the quintessential representation of the King of the Vampires (Count Dracula), seems to be continuously unsure about what a vampire looks like or what makes it one. What follows is an idiosyncratic selection of (and some of my favourite) films that have a very non-canonical view of what a vampire is.

Two of the earliest representations of vampires on film aren’t really vampires as we’d think of them now. They were from the early 20th century and both represented the “dark” side of society. The first features what was then known as a “Vamp,” that was a more sexually malevolent form of the New Woman from the end of the 19th Century and who asserted their independence by preying on wealthy men for their money. Theda Bara was one of the most well known of these and A Fool There Was (1915) the best surviving example of her playing her vampy best. In many ways her credentials as a vampire were more explicit in the marketing around the film and of Bara herself so that there was little to distinguish between her on- and off-screen personas. Apart from being called “The Vampire” in the films titles there is nothing else in the film that would really mark her out as one of the undead (see figure 2).

Figure 2. A triumphant Theda Bera (The Vampire) enjoys the sight of her latest victim who has lost his wealth and his family because of her in A Fool There Was, directed by Frank Powell. Fox Film Corporation, 1915.

Similarly the French serial Les vampires takes another yet equally oblique turn in what constitutes a vampire. Here, the titular “vampires” are in fact a gang of crooks led by the Grand Vampire that prey on the people of Paris and who think nothing of murder, kidnapping, and terrorism to get what they want. Although the film is well known for a sequence featuring a dancer dressed as a bat (see figure 3), once again there is little to connect the film to actual vampires apart from their metaphorical “feeding” on the wealth of their “prey.”

Figure 3. Marta Koutiloff, played by Stacia Napierkowska, dancing as a vampire bat in the ballet “The Vampires” in Les vampires, directed by Louis Feuillade. Gaumont, 1915.

Back in Hollywood, vampires became one of the pantheon of classic monsters in the 1930s, though even within that there were no strict borders between the various forms of creatures that could be called undead which could range from someone brought back from the dead (by whatever means), to a ghost, a ghoul, a zombie...or even a mummy. As mentioned above Lugosi’s performance solidified the idea of what Dracula was, and consequently, vampires, but even here the Count himself wasn’t sure of what exactly made him a vampire. In House of Dracula (1945), the second film starring John Carradine as the Count, sees the vampire looking for a cure for his vampirism (in reality he wants to sink his fangs into the pretty nurse assisting Dr Edelmann who he seeks help from). What is of interest here is that the doctor takes blood samples from Dracula and under the microscope we see vampiric blood cells attacking human blood cells marking out vampirism as a disease of the blood (see figure 4).

Figure 4. Dracula’s blood under the microscope showing the black tendrils in it is the true vampire as it attacks human blood cells, in House of Dracula, directed by Erle C. Kenton. Universal Pictures, 1945.

We could argue it is Dracula’s blood that is the vampire, not the Count himself. This is a curious idea that has been picked up since in a few screen narratives such as Dark Shadows (1966-71) and the Dracula (2013-14) series by Cole Haddon. The importance of blood, and what we might call the medicalisation of the vampire, is also seen in The Return of Dr X (1939), featuring a rare turn in horror films for Humphrey Bogart. Here at least the “vampire” in question needs fresh human blood, though rather disappointingly for its undead credentials it’s not from biting a beautiful young woman in the neck, but rather transfusing her blood into his own body (the reverse of Stoker’s use of transfusions where they are to combat vampirism rather than promoting it). Here, Bogart as the eponymous Dr X (Maurice Xavier) is brought back from the dead using synthetic blood, however, this no longer works and he needs a special type (type one) of fresh human blood to stay alive. His vampy credentials highlighted by his pale white skin and greased back, black hair--his monstrosity emphasized by a bride of Frankenstein white streak running through it (see figure 5).

Figure 5. Humphrey Bogart as the suitably deathly pale Dr X, in The Return of Dr X, directed by Vincent Sherman. Warner Brothers, 1939.

Post-WWII and the rise of science fiction on film only increased the complications of identifying vampires—even Dracula is affected by the appearance of aliens as seen in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) where humans are brought back from the dead as zombies and one of these “zombies” is non-other than Bela Lugosi in full Dracula costume. In some ways this was exampled earlier by the science-gone-mad idea in Dr X, but the involvement of aliens would only exacerbate the problematic nature of vampire identity. A good one to start with is The Thing from Another World (1951) where the “Thing” is a Frankenstein’s monster style alien (see figure 6) that has been cut from beneath the Arctic ice where its ship had crashed an unknown time ago.

Figure 6. “The Thing,” played by James Arness, as a vegetal vampire from outer space, in The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby. Winchester Pictures Corporation, 1951.

Once defrosted the creature is driven by a need for human blood, and it exhibits a kind of immortality as parts of it, when cut off, regrow when fed blood. Perhaps more strikingly the creature is in fact a plant of some kind—this correlates to other vegetal aliens that crave human essence such as the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956/1978), and The Queen of Blood (1966). While the creature cannot change its shape in this film—other than its severed parts being able to take on their own lives—later adaptions of the story, The Thing (1982/2011), make such transformations explicit to how it survives and multiplies. Indeed, just as the first “Thing” required human blood to live, the later “Things” require human lives to thrive—oddly echoing the BBC Dracula mini-series from 2020 in which the Count requires blood as “lives” to sustain himself.

Something of this is repeated in Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985) where alien vampires, whose spaceship hides in the tail of Halley’s Comet, awaken to feed on human essence each time it returns to the vicinity of the planet Earth (every 74.7 years). The aliens themselves are huge bat-like creatures but can possess the bodies of humans and consume/suck-out soul/lifeforce by putting their mouths over that of their victims (see figure 7).

Figure 7. A guard (John Keegan) having the lifeforce sucked out of him by an unseen Space Girl (Mathilda May) in Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper. London-Cannon Films, 1985.

These are then “sent” back up to the mother ship for the rest of the colony to feed on. An earlier example of a similar kind of vampiric possession as a means of survival was seen in Planet of the Vampires (1965) where the survivors of an alien race are trapped on a barren planet after its sun has burnt out. Using the distress signal of a crashed space ship they attract 2 other ships and then inhabit the bodies of the humanoids piloting them. Of note here is that their vampirism is purely predicated on the possession of humanoid bodies (see figure 8), which although deadly to the hosts—if they’re not already dead—does not provide any kind of sustenance to them (such vampiric possession, though often non-deadly is a more recent feature of vampire narratives such as The Vampire Diaries (2009-17) and The Originals (2013-18).

Figure 8. A deadly game of “guess whose body is possessed by a vampire” featuring Wes Wescant (Ángel Aranda), Sanya (Norma Bengell), and Captain Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan), in Planet of the Vampires, directed by Mario Bava. Italian International Film, 1965.

Returning to Lifeforce, and its idea of feeding off of human essence and “draining” their victims, this is not a million miles away from psychic vampires, most recently and famously seen in the figure of Colin Robinson from What We Do in the Shadows (2019-24) where he purposely bores people to death and/or annoys them to distraction so that he can feed on their emotional energy (see figure 9). This has returned such forms of untypical vampirism back into the popular imagination—it’s actually something that has a longer history in literary vampires seen in The House of the Vampire (1907) by George Sylvester Viereck and “The Transfer” (1911) by Algernon Blackwood.

Figure 9. Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) as the person in the office that everyone tries to avoid, in What We Do in the Shadows, created by Jemaine Clement. FX Productions, 2019-24.

To sum up this rather eclectic list of some of my favourite vampire films, and to mangle and repurpose a well known phrase about ducks, “if it doesn’t walk like a vampire, or quack like a vampire, it doesn’t mean it’s not a vampire!”

Bio: Simon Bacon has authored/edited/co-edited 40+ books on vampires, monsters and gothic horror in popular culture and his Amazon Author page can be found here (US) and here (UK).