Daddy, Santa Claus is Dead – review

Director: Yevgeny Yufit

Release date: 1991

Contains spoilers

Family of the Vourdalak (1843) by Count Alexis Tolstoy is a classic 19th Century vampire tale. Most famously it was made into one of three short films in Mario Bava’s anthology Black Sabbath and was the source for the film Night of the Devils. Both were blooming marvellous films but neither could prepare you for the surreal Papa, umer ded moroz.

That isn’t to say that the film is a bad film, it certainly isn’t. But it is most definitely strange. Tolstoy’s story is recognisable in the film and the vampiric elements are hiding in plain sight. If you dislike arthouse films then you are probably better looking away now. However the film has a way of catching a hold of you and drawing you into its eerie landscape – made all the more sparse for the lack of musical score.

trap

It begins with a man underground – possibly in a sewer or water logged bunker. He trips and falls head first into a wire noose, the trap killing him. A young boy with dead eyes and a one legged man go to him. His watch is stolen, his suitcase emptied of the metalwork contents and filled with the clothes stripped from his body. His naked corpse is wheeled away on a trolley and disposed of in fast flowing waters. The trap, it is clear, was constructed by this pair.

on the train

A biologist is investigating a rodent, a shrew-mouse he says. He plans to stay with his cousin in the countryside whilst working on his paper about the mouse and so takes a train out to the country. As they travel, the passenger next to him peaks around a curtain and announces, “Forest” and then “Lake”. When the biologist disembarks he sees a group of men in black suits, stood in a field, crowded around what is clearly a body. They finish wrapping and leave. The biologist approaches and removes some of the shroud bindings. It is a woman, still alive.

silent reunion

Having helped her he goes to his cousin’s house. A woman (his cousin's wife) lets him in and his cousin, on hearing of their familial bond, hugs him fiercely and then sits with him in silence. The wife returns and also sits in silence. Their young son eventually makes an appearance. The film deliberately sits with them, the silence pregnant, the dialogue sparse throughout the film, and yet somehow you are pulled into this sordid, dirty world with peeling wallpaper and muddy clothes.

vourdalak takes the grandson

A man enters the house, the boy calls him grandfather and we recognise this from Tolstoy. The biologist later sees the old man and the boy outside and, later still, clears grasses away to find the boy left languid and deathlike, softly imploring his grandfather to bestow more kisses. Later we see the father with an axe, sharpening a long trunk of wood into a stake. When the mother deliberately throws it into the river the father is angered and inconsolable – the son, of course, has died and the stake is lost, while the dreamlike quality of the film means that the idea of simply sharpening another stake is not appropriate.

Mother with the stake

With strange rituals from the men in the fields, homosexual lust hidden behind a closed door, an existential dentist who stuffs the mouth with cotton and a child’s suicide; this film guides us along rare paths. The film, to some degree, reminded me of Vampyr in timbre and in that the actors seemed chosen for their faces as much as anything, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they were chosen because the director felt they looked the part. Yet the film achieves an hallucinatory cohesiveness because of this.

carrying the coffin

This works so well because it is a dreamscape (or should that be a nightmare), because it might be purgatory or worse, because it refuses to explain but forces speculation and because it is undoubtedly Tolstoy’s story. The Grandpa is most definitely a vourdalak, his grandson the first victim. Of course, there is also the joy of being able to post about a film called Daddy, Santa Claus is Dead. 7 out of 10, with the health warning that it is arthouse, with all the entails.

The imdb page is here.

Vampire Riderz – review

Director: Dan Garcia

Release date: 2012

Contains spoilers


Now, when a film contains the rapper turned actor Sticky Fingaz (Blade the Series) and also mentions a daywalker in the blurb then it is only natural that certain connections are made. In this case these would not be accurate, this is neither a Blade film nor Blade rip off and the whole Blade franchise can breathe easier for that. Originally called Speed Demons when available to purchase for download, the DVD has changed the title to Vampire Riderz.

Walter Jones as Terrance

The film starts with a woman in a car (it seems) with a man and he attacks after she encourages sex. This is a flashback scene. Some attack scenes (from later in the film) over the credits and we see a girl hitching (ignore her, she’s vamp bait for later). We also see two guys Terrance (Walter Jones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Tiny (Smalls). Terrance is concerned about finding ‘the one’ (in a romantic sense) and both drink, play pool and bicker.

staked

Actually, however, they are vampire hunters and see a male and female preying on a woman. They confront them (in the bar), attack them, and finally leave the victim with the female vampire (never thinking to go back as far as I can tell) as they chase after the male vampire. He leads them a merry dance until Tiny tosses a stake that brings him down. He isn’t dead though. Terrance stakes him and woosh, he vanishes in a flash of light (later killed vampires do not die as noticeably; perhaps the cgi budget would only stretch so far?)

Sticky Fingaz as Wade

In the meantime we see a woman, Jane (Marina Sirtis), being followed by biker vampire thugs led by Wade (Sticky Fingaz). She ducks off behind a car and the vampires, being crap hunters, lose her. She calls daughter Lala (Angela Sarafyan, also Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and tells her they have to go. They end up at a bus and we see Wade burst into their motel room (how he finds it after failing to spot Jane when stood next to her is beyond me) where he finds a timetable. Hitcher girl gets propositioned by a sleazy driver, somehow gets away (it sounded like she used a taser though the film shows nothing) and ends up on the same bus with a boxer (who is fodder as well), two comic geeks, Chance (Al Santos), a sarcastic salesman and a priest, Father Lemoine (Terry Kiser), who has lost his faith.

Nick Gomez as the Master

Anyway, they are attacked, the bus bursts tires and they end up at a junkyard where a solstice (sic) party celebrating New Year is occurring. We have had punctuated moments through the proceedings with a vampire Master (Nick Gomez) who is dying and who was contracted, it appears, to act very poorly. It seems that every five hundred years the vampires (or just the Master – it doesn’t make too much sense) must sacrifice a daywalker (who happens to be Lala; Jane being the woman at the head of the film, I guess) by burning them and then consume their ashes for a further five hundred years of immortality. Lala doesn’t know who she is.

a bite

Bad plotting and dialogue abound. Positively, Terry Kiser was particularly good but his dialogue was awful – one moment refusing to bless Jane as he has lost his faith, the next leading a round of prayers. The good guys and the hunters hold up in a shed, with half a dozen tyres providing a particularly ineffectual looking barricade. Yet again the hunting-deficient vampires don’t find them and so the humans decide to go out and fight them anyway. The hitcher was built only to die and whilst some characterisation was entered into it didn’t really go anywhere. There won’t be cops out here, warns a hunter, this is vampire land and they avoid it... and yet cops had already been out (and immediately died).

Marina Sirtis as Jane

If you cut out the Master section, tightened the script, re-wrote the dialogue and just made the scenes make a bit more sense, then this might have been a passable movie. They had a fair bit of talent in front of the camera (though Mister Fingaz simply growled a lot). As it is, the film was absolutely rubbish, poor camera work, bad lighting and all in all shoddy. 2.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Hao! Hao! Kyonshi Girl – season 1 – review

Director: unknown

First aired: 2012

Contains spoilers

Hao! Hao! Kyonshi Girl was a Japanese series that was based around the Chinese hopping vampire the kyonsi (or variant spellings thereof).

This review is tempered with the fact that the DVD set I bought did have English subtitles but they were literal translations and so this made them tough going at times. However the programme was pretty simplistic in format and so I don’t think I missed much - though a couple of gaps are mentioned in the review.

Kawashima Umika

The lead actress is Kawashima Umika, who is an idol and part of the idol pop group 9Nine. She essentially plays herself in the series (and the group is also featured) and at the very beginning we are introduced to her, the fact that she is in the group, at college and an actress in Japanese dramas… oh, and hunts kyonsi. This turn of events started because she was looking in a store room at her parents’ café and accidentally opened an urn with a Taoist seal on it.

Bambam captures a kyonsi

The kyonsi had been trapped inside and were now free but the seal became a young boy named Bambam – how he became the seal did come into the show but, to be honest, it was not very clear via the subtitles (however it doesn’t matter really). A layer of comedy is added through with the fact that when he sneezes he becomes adult and reverts back to child with the next sneeze (although an exhausted Bambam became a geriatric at one point too). It is his job to convince Haihe (as she is known) to hunt the kyonsi – she is classed as a priest and did wear a yin yang pendant prior to the accident.

King Kyonsi

This leads to a double life for a young woman who already has a rather full plate. There are over a hundred kyonsi loose and each bite creates more, plus they have to be retrieved before an evil moon (that occurs once every hundred years) or the king kyonsi will come to power and destroy the world of man. First of all her reluctance gets in the way, then her career and even her heart but (except for the two part finale) each short episode is self-contained.

child kyonsi and spell scrolls

The kyonsi follow pretty standard rules. They can be pacified by spell scrolls (which can be mass printed from a jpeg) and, in such a state, guided by the priest ringing a bell (one, obsessed with running a marathon he was going to run when still human, has enough will power to ignore the bell). They are destroyed by sunlight (though they also seem to be around in the daytime but the rules are a little loose). Haihe has a coin sword which does them damage, you can hide from them by holding your breath and if one stands on your shadow you can’t move.

thug kyonsi

A bite will kill and turn a person – though if sticky rice is placed on the wound in time it can be healed and a virgin’s urine can either delay or heal the wound (that wasn’t too clear). What was amusing was the fact that they ran around in one episode trying to get a virgin’s urine and one would have assumed Bambam and Haihe to be virgins. I think, with Haihe, using her urine couldn’t even be contemplated due to her idol status.

It is Ed Milliband... isn't it?

It is quite difficult to score this as I may, due to the subtitles, being doing it a disservice but whilst it was nice to see kyonsi and it was mildly amusing, it was a bit of pop-culture fluff. The idol culture hasn’t really transposed to the West so much (our celebratory culture seems far more seedy, at least as far as the participants are concerned… the audience may be a different thing altogether) and so the central tenant is, whilst understandable, a little unusual. That said the kyonsi could be stiffly amusing in their own right (and for a Brit, especially the one I screen-captured that looked remarkably like Ed Milliband) even if the makeup/mask effect for the King Kyonsi was poorly rubber. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The Fourth Bride – review

Author: Carole Gill

First Published: 2013

contains spoilers

The Blurb: After the tragic and sudden death of her groom, Dia, cursed by Dracula as a babe, is taken to his castle. Once there, she is seduced and turned by the count, and she becomes his fourth bride. The other brides are to be her sisters, and they are all to love and feed upon one another. As her master says: "The joy is in the blood...the passion is in the blood...endless life is in the blood...!"

And so she finds it is.

Dia's tale is full of erotic sex and graphic violence. It is a tale of love and lust but mostly of blood, for the blood is everything.

The review: When I read Carole Gill’s The House on Blackstone Moor I was taken with the fact that she wrote a very gothic prose but merged it with a nastiness aimed at her primary character that was reminiscent of Clive Barker.

This is the fourth book of the series, but whilst it uses the characters of Louis and Rose as a jumping off point the book itself concentrates on a new character, Dia, a young woman cursed from birth to be the fourth bride of Dracula. It is a brave move, certainly, tying her series into that of Stoker’s masterpiece and, in many respects, it is a natural fit as Carole Gill has always had Satan as the source of vampirism and has tied in Dracula’s education at the Scholomance with another mainstay character Eco.

If I had a criticism, however, it is this. The author writes a fantastic victim and this worked so very well in the first book – when the primary character was human. With the primary character being a vampire I was less comfortable with the “female victim”. It was ok when she was under the thrall of Dracula (or another powerful vampire) but I was less comfortable with the vampire being the victim of human men too. There was an in-built layer of misogyny and I would like to see the author write a strong female lead, one who isn’t the victim and doesn’t need rescuing by a man (vampire or human). That is, perhaps, for another book.

That criticism aside (and I hope it is taken as constructive) this was more rounded as a book than the third volume and took an interesting route by attaching itself to the Dracula mythos. 7 out of 10. Note the review was based on a complimentary copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

The Black Water Vampire – review

Director: Evan Tramel

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

Found footage films are still rather popular but they do tend to be a love them or hate them form of the horror genre. There can be a level of crow-baring the reason for use of the camera within a given film and there is a deal of false exposition that sometimes gets thrust in.

By that introduction you can tell that this is a found footage film and I’ll get to some of the pros and cons of that later in the review. However I’ll say at this conjecture that if you like that genre of films you may well enjoy this and, with an element of suspending belief, I rather enjoyed what I saw.

bite on Millicent

The film begins with police shot footage from early 2003, having found the body of Millicent Barnam (Emma Anderson) who had vanished two weeks before. She was found at Black Water Creek, an area many miles from the nearest town, Fawnskin. Her clothes had mainly been torn away, there were no footprints leading to her, there was a bite pattern in her neck, a symbol carved in her leg and a distinct lack of blood.

Danielle Lozeau as Danielle Mason

Ten years on and Danielle Mason (Danielle Lozeau) is leading a documentary crew to look into the murders. It transpires that there had been a similar abduction/murder every ten years since 1972. After the 2002 murder police arrested local man Raymond Banks (Bill Oberst Jr., Death Valley) and, having questioned him for 16 hours straight with no attorney in order to get a confession, he was convicted with no physical evidence and now sits on death row. Danielle believes him innocent.

the crew

Travelling with her are producer Andrea (Andrea Monier), who has worked on a couple of documentaries with Danielle before. On sound is their friend Robin (Robin Steffen), who comes across as quite snarky and not on board with hiking three days to get footage of the creek. They have hired a cameraman Anthony (Anthony Fanelli) who is unknown to the group. Before they go to the creek they head to Fawnskin to interview people connected with the case and also to the prison to interview Banks.

symbol in Millicent's leg

En route we begin to see the weirdness of the town. We have already seen interview footage including a man talking about a “rat man” creature and hunters suggest that there is something in the woods. It is revealed that the main road is known as Bloodsucker highway because legend mentions vampires in the woods – much to Robin’s chagrin. As Anthony is driving at night, towards Fawnskin, he swerves because something (he doesn’t know what) shot out across the road. They burst a tire and can hear strange animal noises they don’t recognise. Having tried to flag a car for help the driver stops a distance from them and then tries to run them down.

old newspaper cutting

They arrive late at the property they have rented and the landlady seems… odd. After we discover that Danielle has made a virginity pledge (is this important – we’ll discuss that soon), we see odd behaviour from the landlady who seems to be standing out in the road staring at the house. Something that struck me, as the crew interview family and friends of the murder victims, is the ease for which they believe a man might be the killer (despite low evidence) and the passion for vengeance (as opposed to justice). The film captures this well.

Bill Oberst Jr as Banks

When they meet Banks we have to suspend belief as I don’t believe that Bill Oberst Jr looked nearly old enough to be the killer of all four women (in reality he’d have been roughly 48 when the film was shot and the story staged the first murder was 40 years before). However that thought is lost with a performance that summoned thoughts of a man suffering paranoid delusions, and yet also had knowledge such as the design of the sign carved on the last victims leg (which he draws in blood from his own bitten fingers).

first view

I don’t want to spoil too much. The sign is painted on his abandoned cabin and on trees, someone even paints it on the crew’s tent during the night (after hiking a day). There is a vampire out there, almost manbat like it seems to be another species preying on people in the woods and we see it first of all at night, hanging in the trees, and also in daylight. What it wants and what relationship the town has to it is largely down to viewer conjecture and this is both a pro and a con of the film. Indeed the lore is limited (and that which we do get is too much of a spoiler to relay here).

a daylight encounter

You see, because it is a found footage film there is little in the way of actual exposition. Let us look at Danielle’s virginity. I assume it to be important – due to it being mentioned – but as no character actually explains whether it is important (or why) it is entirely my own conjecture. The fact that the filmmakers leave much exposition out is quite right as, being found footage, anything else would seem forced so and they leave a trail of breadcrumbs for us and so is much more pro than con.

strange signs

The film is quiet derivative of the Blair Witch Project (the granddaddy of found footage films) – lost in the woods, strange signs, etc but was much more cohesive – thanks in large part to the leads – than the BWP, a film I believe to be overhyped and quiet poor, to be honest. The single-minded pursuit of the story despite the events (by Danielle) was an aspect that I just had to suspend belief with, but did find I was able to. The last scene (which I won’t spoil) did make me wonder how the footage ever “was found” but, again, as the film is silent we have to take it on trust.

night vision attack

I have said before that I am not a huge fan of found footage films and this remains true. However I found myself caught up in the Black Water Vampire and I put this entirely down to the trail of breadcrumbs left by the scriptwriter (Jesse Baget) and the natural feel of the main actors. As a con, the use of camera at times seemed a little forced, but that is always going to be the case with this style of film (even the more magnificent examples such as the Rec series had their clunky moments in this regard). But if a film keeps you truly interested then that is certainly a big plus. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mention: Let the Old Dreams Die

Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist

English Translation: Marlaine Delargy

First published (Sweden): 2005 as Paper Walls

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: From the acclaimed author of Let the Right One In comes a collection of mesmerising shorts stories.

A woman finds a dead body and decides to keep it for herself; a customs officer has a mysterious gift that enables her to see what others hide; and a man believes he knows how to deceive death.

These are the products of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s rich imagination. They are about love and death and what we do when the two collide and monsters emerge.

The Mention: This collection of shorts by John Ajvide Lindqvist is a remarkable volume, all the more so because some of them touch onto very Swedish themes and mythology and thus seem fresh to a UK reader. The book contains a coda to Let the Right One In hence being mentioned here but, before I look at that specific story, there are some genre interesting stories also. The story Border contains a species within it that is not named (though elves and trolls are mentioned in passing) but remained me very much of the Scandinavian myth of the Huldra, which we looked at the Norwegian film Thale. The story Village on the Hill has nothing to do with vampires but is set in the same buildings as Let the Right One In.

The coda to the earlier book is the actual story Let the Old Dreams Die (written in 2011 and added to the volume for this publication) and is interesting as it focuses on entirely different characters (one being the ticket collector from the train at the end of the main story) and the impact of Eli and Oskar on their lives. The story is narrated some 28 years later and is a love story but, from a fan of the original story’s point of view, it contains something we didn’t see between Oskar and Eli. In an afterword Lindqvist tells us that when the book was filmed as Let the Right One In he watched it and was surprised by the inference that Oskar was Håkan’s replacement. He understood how the filmmakers had picked up on this inference but it wasn’t his intent. Of course the US/UK remake, Let Me In, this recruitment of a replacement becomes a central element, and Lindqvist notes that this is natural and right for the film. However he wanted to make clear his thoughts on the relationship.

So this is a spoiler but not of the story in the book – as it is about other characters – but about Lindqvist’s thought process. Far from making Oskar the new Håkan we discover that Eli makes him like her – Oskar becomes a vampire. Perhaps that will be the thrust when the book is filmed again, for I am sure it will be.

The entire volume is excellent. It is nowhere near as harrowing as the novel Let the Right one In was but it is a well written and unusual collection of shorts (Lindqvist suggests that most readers weren’t keen on To hold you while the music plays, but I rather enjoyed it in its brevity). Well worth your time.

Vamp or Not? Island of the Living Dead

A film from 2008 (according to IMDb even though the poster they show says 2006) and directed by Italian horror and exploitation director Bruno Mattei and you might be forgiven for wondering why the ‘Vamp or Not?’ given the title (and the German DVD cover) quite frankly look like this is a pure zombie flick.

Well, in the first instance I had seen the IMDb cast list and it had a character called Lady Vampire (Hervana Hernandez). Given that, you may be thinking that there is little point to a ‘Vamp or Not?’ but the reason I am looking at the film under this auspice is because of the general living dead shown in the film as much as anything.

coming to get you...

Now I have to say at the outset that this film is pretty much a big pile of cinematic waste-product. It really has no clear rhyme or reason and, more than this, it has some of the worst dubbing I have heard on a modern film. I am guessing that the acting was pretty poor anyway (the dubbing makes it difficult to tell but hilarious at the same time) because some of the physical acting is up there with some of the worst I have seen.

conquistadores

We begin with conquistadores escorting a cart of corpses, whilst voodoo rituals are heard through the night. Now, before you go to thinking that these living dead are voodoo produced… I just don’t know. Later we get a story of a Spanish treasure ship and a curse too. Further, we get a certain undead leader who seems to be a source of the outbreak and who we’ll mention very soon.

look fangs

Anyway the corpses all begin to sit up. They are shot in the head to put them back down (this does not appear to be a permanent solution) but there are too many and the monks are overwhelmed as the conquistadors retreat and start fighting with a group of armed men who look like pirates but are actually undead. They attack and the leader reveals fangs.

landing on the island

Modern day and a group of treasure hunters are looking to find sunken treasure. The divers Sharon (Yvette Yzon) and Fred (Alvin Anson) have found a treasure chest but as it is lifted out of the sea the bottom rots away, dropping all its coins back into the sea. That night the ship is in fog and seems to hit a reef. In the morning they see that they are near an uncharted island and – having left Max (Thomas Wallwort) on board to fix the ship – they go to the island to explore.

Max attacked

The crew splits into two groups. Tao (Miguel Franco), Mark (Gary King Roberts) – I think – and Sharon go to get water (they have one handgun between them). Captain Kirk (Gaetano Russo), and I am not kidding about the name, Fred, Snoopy (Jim Gaines) and Victoria (Ydalia Suarez) go exploring and are armed to the teeth. Before long they encounter zombies but Max – on the ship – is also attacked by a horde of zombies. Now you might wonder how they got to the ship – especially as they are dry – but it appears they took the motor launch (so, intelligent 16th to 17th century walking corpses then). Max manages to blow the ship up.

scream Sharon

As the night descends the crew look for shelter and find themselves in running battles. We see one zombie gets its hand blown off and look at the wound with shock (not normal zombie behaviour) and another one loose an arm and start regenerating it (again not a trait often associated with zombies). Some seem like the mindless dead but others can hold conversations. We see things move as though affected by invisible spirits, the crew hallucinate at times (Kirk thinks Sharon is a zombie come to kill him) and we get moments that seem like pure witchcraft – like an old woman corpse (Lilia Cuntapay) spontaneously combusting for telling too much.

vampire lady

So there are moments that are definitely not zombie – nor vampire for that matter. Then there is actually a scene that apes Zombie Flesheaters deliberately as well as reference to Night of the Living Dead. However we do have the vampire lady, who is in a portrait that becomes empty when she appears and who seduces Snoopy with dance (and not looking dead) before showing her true face and biting him - that said her attack leaves him as a zombie. Further we have the main living dead dude who claims to be a "collector of lives", offers immortality and does actually bite a victim on the neck, leaving two punctures, before passing her to his minions to feast on. A skeleton in a dungeon appeared to have a stake in its chest (it is picked out but not commented on).

Sharon turned

Spoilers-a-plenty when I say that only Sharon gets off the island but, after being picked up by the coastguard (from a raft) she is pronounced dead and then sits up with fangs and eyes red – looking pretty darn vampire. So, what are they… there is no clear answer as the filmmakers do not seem to know themselves. The vampire lady would seem to be a vampire and the general living dead would seem to be zompires with a leaning towards the vampire side of things – they have fangs, they regenerate limbs and we see neck bites.

This, I would say, will have to be included on vampire filmographies. It’s a pity that, as a film, it is so bad; then again it is very funny at the same time.

The imdb page is here.

Just a Bite: A Transylvania Vampire Expert’s Short History of the Undead – review

Author: István Pivárcsi

First published: 2012

The blurb: Historian and Transylvania traveller István Pivárcsi addresses the essentials in more than thirty bite size chapters: How did the vampire legend emerge in Eastern Europe? Did a disfiguring illness play a part? To what lengths did people go to keep vampires at bay? Who was the real Vlad the Impaler – and what tortures titillated him? Did “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Báthory deserve her reputation? What other bad things have melded with vampires in our imaginations? How have the undead come truly alive in literature and film?

A chronology of historical events and a glossary of terms further make Just a Bite a must for anyone who seeks a user-friendly short reference to the un-dead that separates facts from fiction.

The review: Oh dear. I wanted to like this I really did and, despite some misgivings from the start, up to a point this was going to get a reasonable review. Then we got to some certain chapters and the whole thing fell apart – not just around those chapters, they caused the misgivings about earlier chapters to come fully to the fore.

The misgivings started around the fact that Pivárcsi says the book is to be “not so much a scholarly work… rather than providing citations throughout I opted to write it more or less as the information came to me.” You may ask ‘what is wrong with that?’ I would say that it suggests the possibility that it is a bullshitter’s charter (quite frankly). That there is every possibility that the information within is not based on fact nor supported by sound research. As we will see this misgiving proved to be all too true…

Yet, at first, I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, despite some issues. For instance Pivárcsi seems to suggest that Transylvania is the birth place of folkloric vampires (in the strictest sense of the word) – but then does qualify that it is actually the Slavic regions that is the source area. Despite contradicting himself like that I was taken by the chatty, easy to read style – but I was not too sure about the veracity of all his assertions.

When he reached historical figures my defences went up but he was quick to point out that Stoker new little of Prince Vlad III and conflated aspects of Vlad II in with his knowledge – on the other hand he indicates that Stoker’s knowledge was wider than it really was and doesn’t mention Wilkinson as the source of his information. Pivárcsi was also refreshingly even-handed when discussing Báthory. I should also note here that his chapter “Will the Real Dracula Please Stand Up” bears almost the same title as my article about the identity of Count Dracula – pure coincidence and Eminem (as per my article, at least) has a lot to answer for.

I did, however, get the impression that folklore and filmlore merged into one for Pivárcsi. The chapter on “Pellagra and Porphyria” underlined this as (whilst he seemed less than convinced about Porphyria) it was the reaction that suffers of Pellagra had to sunlight that figured as one of the central arguments and, as we know, the vampiric reaction to sunlight was born of the movies and not part of most folklore.

A chapter on real incidents (presumably in Romania) had no referencing at all – no dates, names (or pseudonyms) or locations. Frankly they could have been fiction rather than alleged witness statements, as we had nothing to go on. The chapters on other “creatures” (zombies, golems etc) had no real point and showed no myth bleeding as the blurb reproduced above suggests.

Then things went really wrong. He suggests that Méliès’ Le Manoir du Diable is a vampire film – it isn’t but it does contain many tropes we would see later. He also says that it was from 1896 (it was) but then suggests it was released at the same time as Dracula (ie 1897). He goes on to give a synopsis of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens that indicates that he hadn’t seen the film for some time (at the very least) prior to writing the chapter, given that it is inaccurate – as an example he suggests that Hutter escapes the castle and is pursued by Orlock.

A more thorough synopsis of Dracula Halála (a lost film) than I have ever seen before makes us wonder, given the poor quality of this entire section of the book and the fact that his synopsis of a film readily available is wrong. He mentions a paucity of vampire films through the 1950s until Polanski’s the Fearless Vampire Killers in 1967 – conveniently forgetting the very important Hammer output (amongst other films). Then we get to the novel Dracula…

I’ll pick out some prime rubbish… and I quote… “Stoker also revisited the material, publishing the sequel titled Dracula’s Guest in 1913”. Stoker did not revisit the book that we are aware of. Dracula’s Guest was not a sequel (more an unused prologue). Stoker did not publish it from beyond the grave (he died in 1912). Florence Stoker, however, did publish the “missing first chapter” as a short story.

He then says, “After some analysis it can be stated that he [Stoker] wove four separate threads.” These were? 1) The historic Vlad Tepes. No. We know he used the name and a tad of back history, he was far from a thread that led to the writing of the novel and Pivárcsi does at least admit (again) that Stoker could know very little about the historic figure. 2) Emily Gerard’s Land Beyond the Forest. Actually Stoker used her Transylvanian Superstitions and the Scholomance examples Pivárcsi gives are from that second volume. As for Land Beyond the Forest there is no evidence that Stoker read the book and it does not appear in his notes. 3) Attending a series of presentations by Arminius Vambery – after the first he met him and had a private chat and met him several more time. This is complete fabrication. We know exactly how many times they met (twice, though the second time may have only been watching Vambery speak) and roughly what was spoken about (neither Prince Vlad III as some maintain or vampires as Pivárcsi suggests). How? Stoker tells us in Private Reminiscences (1906). 4) Stoker’s imagination – this, at least, is correct.

As an inspiration to Stoker he also directly mentions I Vampiri, an opera from 1812 by Silvestro Palma. This is intriguing, it is possible that Stoker saw the opera (not when written, of course, as he wasn’t born… but then Pivárcsi does have him acting from beyond the grave so why not before birth…) but I am not aware of any evidence that he actually did. When Pivárcsi gives a very sparse synopsis of the novel we again wonder whether he read the book, ever – suggesting, as he does, that Harker escaped the castle and returns to England “with the goal of preventing the Count from carrying out his diabolical plan.” Rather than his stay in hospital, with brain fever, and then helped home by Mina, doubting the events that happened (until they meet Van Helsing). Lucy, with her fate, and (other than Van Helsing) the other characters who hunt Dracula are not mentioned at all.

The inaccuracies and (quite frankly) fabrications really spoil this work. I cannot, therefore, recommend the book. 2.5 out of 10 reflects that the chatty narrative is very readable.

Classic Literature: The Lady of the Shroud

Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud was published in 1909 and like his great novel Dracula was an epistolary novel. Unlike Dracula, it was uneasy as a piece of literature but, from a TMtV point of view, the reason it is a piece of classic literature is for some of the insights it may offer to Stoker’s thoughts on vampirism.

The book prologues with an extract from “the Journal of Occultism” about a mysterious vision that occurred off the Balkan coast adjacent to the (fictional) “Land of the Blue Mountains”, in which the crew of an Italian ship spot a small vessel that turns out to be as follows:

“…the boat, which had all along seemed to be a queer shape, was none other than a Coffin, and that the woman standing up in it was clothed in a shroud.”

After the marvellous Gothic opening we found ourselves wading through the writings of Ernest Melton – a most dislikeable chap – and his thoughts surrounding the reading of the will of Roger Melton (and associated family histories). The book gets in to the meat proper, as it were, after we discover that Ernest’s cousin Rupert Sent Leger inherits the lion’s share of the estate (the size of which the Meltons are ignorant of). That inheritance has stipulations that suggest he must stay at the castle in the Blue Mountains.

Now, one issue with the book is that Stoker covers a massive range of styles. It is an adventure, a mystery (with a Gothic twist), a science-fiction (we get radium powered aircraft later), a dynastic novel and a discourse on the shape of Europe through fictional means. Here we are interested in the Gothic elements and, specifically, the vampirism. There is, however, no vampirism involved – just a belief in vampirism and acting like a vampire.

Rupert (a strapping seven foot tall Englishman with a heart of gold and a courageous line in adventuring) has moved to the castle with his Aunt Janet (his old governess and a Scottish lady with the Second Sight – that aspect of the supernatural is real). He is approached one night by a woman in a shroud knocking at his window.

She never gives her name and it is Rupert who supposes she is a vampire (not helped by Aunt Janet’s second sight who assumes that, because she wears a shroud, the woman she sees in her visions is the walking dead). He decides that the mysterious woman fulfils the rules of vampirism, which are set out as: 1) her coming at night – when vampires are free to roam, 2) wearing the shroud – a necessity of coming fresh from the grave (though it is maintained this is not occult in nature), 3) being helped into his room and thus fulfilling “vampire etiquette” – we could liken this to being invited in but Stoker’s notes for Dracula actually go further and have the vampire in need of assistance crossing a threshold. This would seem to resurrect that idea. 4) leaving with the cock-crow and 5) seeming preternaturally cold.

All things, however, are explainable later on and, despite suspecting that she is a vampire, Rupert is concerned that she doesn’t catch a chill and also falls in love with her. This leads to him being married to her (whilst still believing her to be a vampire and not knowing her name) in a wonderfully evocative midnight ceremony.

It later transpires that she is the voivodine Tueta, daughter of the Voivode Peter Vissarion, and her acting as a vampire was all part of a convoluted plan to distract the country’s enemies (Ottoman Turks) following her accidentally being buried alive when she went into a cataleptic trance.

From our point of view we get a view into Stoker’s thoughts about vampires (note that he makes them active at night, but this does not preclude daylight activity as he included in Dracula). The only aspect that hasn’t been covered does enlighten part of Dracula to us. When Stoker describes Dracula a part of the description was clearly inspired from the description of werewolves as researched by Stoker in Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves, being an account of a terrible superstition (1865). In this novel Stoker categorically states, “The Wehr-Wolf is but a variant of the Vampire.” Whilst an author can have multiple variants of a given trope that needn’t inform one book to the other, this would seem to me to be telling of his general thoughts on the subject.

The book itself might prove disappointing to a reader wanting to read a supernatural mystery, given it is not and the faux-supernatural element makes up only a small part of the novel. It does, as I say, suffer from covering too many bases but it is still an interesting read.

Eight Immortals – review

Director: Hung Min Chen*

Release date: 1971*

*Note, the IMDb page, details of date and director are based on the supposition that the Fusian DVD release is of the film "Ba xian du hai sao yao mo". If I have mixed films up with another then please leave a comment.

Contains spoilers

The eight immortals are a group of legendary Xian, transcendent heroes of Chinese mythology. Revered by Taoists they have become very much a part of pop culture as well. As such the film opens in a modern day scene, with street storytellers rousing a crowd to come and listen to their tale that is illustrated with painted tiles.

Lu Tung-Pin

The story they tell is that which we see. Set within the Tang dynasty, following a period of peace and prosperity, a rebellion is led by An-Lu-Shan. With that scene set the film spends time exploring the eight immortals (either singularly or in groups) and the impact they have on mortal lives (some of whom feature in the main story. It shows them using their powers to help the helpless, those in danger and overcome adversity.

drinking blood

The story then moves to the adventure proper and the region, where most of the individual stories took place, has been invaded and taken over by Red Demon – who is described as a ravenous blood sucker. So this is our vampire, a blood demon who we see sucking the blood out of victims in his dungeon. One victim he spares is a woman called Pai Mou-Tan as he desires her sexually. In the very first story we saw her as a reluctant courtesan in love with her childhood sweetheart Tu Teh-Fang. The immortal Lu Tung-Pin tricked the brothel owners so that she and her love could be together.

demon pig

Pai Mou-Tan is saved from the Red Demon by the jealousy of his wife and the fact that Pai Mou-Tan can massage well (a skill the Demon's wife is in need of) and ends up as a handmaid and in a position, along with a wine seller and fellow prisoner, to help both the immortals and Tu Teh-Fang who has become leader of the rebels. Unfortunately I must spoil the ending – but you should have guessed that good triumphs – by saying that, once defeated, Red Demon takes his original form – that of a pig.

Pai Mou-Tan

The film is slightly disjointed due to the jumping between stories but, of course, is designed that way. There is a whole level of morality tale in some of the stories and a fondness of song (apparently). That said it is a fun Taiwanese movie and the subtitles (in both English and Mandarin and hard-coded) are readable for the most part (only in one scene did a couple of lines become indistinct). It was also nice to see Chinese mythology being used. The DVD is labelled as digitally remastered, however the print is patchy in places but still watchable and the quality of the story distracts from this once the viewer is sucked in. 6.5 out of 10.

The *imdb page is here.

Interesting Shorts: The Making of Marea

When I reviewed Romance to Rippers: An Anthology of Risque Stories Volume 1* I made special mention of the Making of Marea by Scarlette D’Noire saying it “was a tale of being turned and was, perhaps, less erotic but it was certainly interesting – especially around the power plays described – and I would very much like to read more of the story.”

The author contacted me to say that the short is available as a kindle download in its own right – with a bonus essay, under a full title of Vampire Historia a Series of Revelations: the Making of Marea – and would I like to review it separately. I don’t (usually) review shorts but I do a feature on occasion called “Interesting Shorts” and as I genuinely found it interesting when first read decided to expand on my views.

The story is essentially a story of turning; the recently freed slave Marea (who married the, now dead, plantation owner) has been held in the plantation house by the vampire Delano. He has been feeding her his blood as a precursor to turning and this process is overwhelming, heightening the senses.

As we walk into the tale he is about ready to feed on her for the full turning and intends to do it whilst copulating (the erotic element).

Whilst the setting of the book was fun, it was not entirely unique; films as diverse as Interview with the Vampire and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter have used slavery and the plantations as a backdrop to their tales (to a greater or lesser extent). More importantly the Gilda Stories featured an African American woman, escaped slave and vampire.

But more than the setting, it was the character dynamics that interested me with the Making of Marea. Delano has waited for Marea to gain her freedom before turning her (so she is not a runaway) but he does not deem that she will be free. By the sharing of his blood he will always own her. Conversely Marea has feigned ignorance, she knows what he is but with the help of the beliefs of her people, a potion and an incantation, she intends to take the immortality but be free of him. The resulting dynamic was what was so fun about the short and, in its relatively small length, D/Noire manages to impress that dynamic upon us. This is why I want to read more in this world.

I mentioned that the short comes with a bonus essay, which is essentially Scarlette D’Noire’s views on the genre, what she loves about vampires. This is an interesting insight into what parts of the genre have inspired her.

*Remember there are only a few days left to enter the giveaway for the full companion anthology, Vampires: Romance to Rippers an Anthology of Tasty Stories. - closing date 7th January 2014. See here for details.