The Commercial Vampire – Diesel Jeans

This foray into the world of the commercial vampire sees one of our toothsome friends advertising diesel jeans.

That said, it is kind of a sad advert and you have to feel sorry for the vampire trapped as she is by a dastardly hunter, who clearly is a sociopathic murderer who takes trophies from his victims!

Without further ado, the commercial vampire…

The Commercial Vampire: Give Blood

It has been a while since I did a Commercial vampire spot – the section on the blog where I look briefly at a vampire orientated advert.

This time commercial seems a strong word, as it is for the National Blood Service – nevertheless it is an advert and it features a vampire. Let’s face it – blood donation and vampirism, it’s been a staple of the vampire film genre, especially the comedy end. It is right and fitting that the National Blood Service took the concept and used it themselves.

Ten years of TMtV: Taliesin Meets… Jean-Marc Lofficier

For this post on our Ten Years of TMtV series I have the great honour of posting this interview with Jean-Marc Lofficier. Jean-Marc and his wife Randy are veterans of the comic book world, having worked on DC and Marvel titles. For me, however, Jean-Marc will always be the editor of Black Coat Press, a singularly brilliant enterprise that has made a large number of French Language 19th Century pieces of literature available to the English reading world, including many vampire titles.

TMtV: Jean-Marc, welcome to Taliesin Meets the Vampires I know you through Black Coat Press but you have also worked in the comic industry. Could you tell us a bit about that?

JM: Randy and I began writing comics in the early 1980s, usually filling in for our friends Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, who at the time had gotten very much involved in writing movies. Roy and I have continued collaborating over the years on numerous projects; the latest being a Marvel Arcana issue devoted to the Original Black Knight, and a French comic featuring a WWII group of heroes called Les Partisans. We have also collaborated with Marv Wolfman and Len Wein.

In France, I took over the editorship of what has become Hexagon Comics around 2007 and I am still the main writer for that line.

TMtV: Do you have a preference for writing prose or writing for comics/graphic novels?

JM: I can’t say that I have a particular preference for either, but when one is lucky enough to work with a terrific artist—and I’ve been privileged over the years to work with Joe Orlando, Ted McKeever, Ladrönn, Alfredo Macall, etc.—then writing comics can be an exhilarating experience because of the merging of two visions into one; the result is usually superior to what I had envisioned in my mind.

TMtV: You work a lot with Randy, could you tell us a little about that collaborative work?

JM: When we write in English, I tend to do the plotting, the first draft, as it were, and then Randy takes care of the actual style and dialogues, although even then, there is always a certain amount of back and forth. When we do something in French, we discuss the concepts and the ideas, but I usually take it from there.

TMtV: I know you have worked for both DC and Marvel, and that there was vampire material with both companies. Could you tell us which you were involved with?

JM: Several vampire-themed stories, indeed. At Marvel, I was responsible for a back-up feature in Dr. Strange called “Tales of the Vishanti” and one of the things I did in it was a multi-part story called “Curse of the Darkhold” that retraced the origins of the vampires in the Marvel Universe since their origins in the pre-cataclysmic Atlantean era.

In 1995, Topps asked Roy to do an adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula movie, and that led to a three-issue Frankenstein-Dracula War mini-series which I plotted, following Roy’s instructions regarding the interplay between the two monsters, but adding Count Saint-Germain as an additional foil.

In 1999, DC asked my friend the artist Ladrönn and I to modernize the concept of Transilvane created by Jack Kirby in Jimmy Olsen in the 1970s. Transilvane is a miniature planet inhabited by monsters from classic horror films, led by a Dracula look-alike called Count Dragorin. So we did two issues with that.

Also that same year, we wrote the second book in a trilogy of Elseworlds drawn by Ted McKeever which took place in a futuristic universe resembling that of the pre-war German expressionist cinema; that book called Batman – Nosferatu mixed Murnau’s classic vampire film with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, both featuring imagery reminiscent of Batman and the Joker.

Recently, for Hexagon Comics, I wrote a story entitled Los Frontizeros (The Frontiersmen) that takes place at the Texan-Mexican border in the 1860s in which a trio of heroes fight a nest of vampires—and dinosaurs to boot!

TMtV: Batman: Nosferatu is a particular favourite of mine. Can you tell us a bit about how that came to be and how you pulled the story together?

JM: The original concept was to do merge Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Siegel & Shuster’s Metropolis into a single universe. We recast the film into a DC universe story finding analogues for all the film’s characters, but generally following the plot of the movie. That led to a lot of thinking about that universe: Where is it? When is it? Why is it like that? Once the world-building was one, it then occurred to us that there was room for other keystone DC characters such as Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. DC was generous enough to give us the green light for a trilogy, despite the fact that neither the story (relying on knowing rather obscure movies), nor Ted’s art, were being particularly commercial at the time. (These were the times of Wolverine and The Punisher, if you remember.) I did have two more books plotted, but they didn’t go for it.

TMtV: To me, the volume did owe a lot to the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, why did you look to both silent films for inspiration?

JM: As I said, the core concept was to recast German Expressionist cinema, so the first book owes its story to Metropolis, the second to Nosferatu and Caligari, and the third (which stars Wonder woman) to Mabuse and The Blue Angel. Had we continued the series, we would have used The Blue Light and Queen of Atlantis.

TMtV: You also do translation work, what was it that led you into this?

JM: In comics, we translated (and received awards for) most of the best comics France has produced: stories by Moebius, Philippe Druillet, Jacques Tardi, François Schuiten, Andreas, etc. Our stuff was published by Marvel/Epic, Dark Horse, NBM, etc. We also translated a French humor comic called French Ice or Renegade Press.

When we started Black Coat Press, Randy and I decided to retranslate some of the classics of French pulp literature, including Arsène Lupin, the Phantom of the Opera, Rouletabille, etc. We have also dug up two obscure French pulp characters which we more freely adapted and modernized: Doctor Omega, which is a Dr. Who look-alike, and Doc Ardan, which is kind of like a young Doc Savage.

TMtV: Does an amount of the author’s craft remain in the translating process?

JM: Very much so. Ideally, a good translation should not read stilted or awkward, as if it is indeed a translation. It should be a smooth read, just as if it had been written in English, while respecting the intentions and the narrative of the original.

TMtV: Looking at Black Coat Press, how did this come about as a concept?

JM: We got tired of offering excellent, ground-breaking French materials to American publishers and being turned down. The advances made in POD (print-on-demand) technology made it possible us to start a small press and do what we wanted to do without needing anyone’s permission. We were soon joined by Brian Stableford, who had also experienced the same problems, and who has built up 90% of our catalog over the years.

TMtV: For me, the Press has been a Godsend, providing access to 19th century vampire tomes that either would have been outside my language skills or just totally unknown to me. You also produce translations of a wide range of French Imaginative Fiction not just vampire works. How do you decide which books should be translated and released?

JM: Brian decides what he wants to translate, and he does it. Once in a while, I may suggest a text to him, and he is kind enough to do it as well. Obviously we both choose texts (or authors) that we consider as ground-breaking, or even merely significant, in the history of popular literature: science fiction, fantasy, horror, and detective fiction. French popular literature has a unique and distinctive “voice” going back to the 18th century. When I was an adolescent in France, the paperback imprints I bought published both French and British or American books side by side. You could find both Holmes and Lupin, or Fantômas and the Saint, Hercule Poirot and Rouletabille in the Livre de poche, or Bob Morane and Doc Savage, the Black Coats, Dracula and The Scarlet Pimpernel at Marabout, etc. I always felt very sad that you—in England or America—did not have the same experience and in effect grew up with only “half” of all the wonderful stuff there was out there. So I made it my mission—as in “missionary”—to export as much as I could so that you could belatedly become acquainted with all the books I read.

TMtV: Do you have a favourite translation published by Black Coat?

JM: There really are too many to list here. In the mystery genre I’m particularly proud of having published Paul Féval’s Black Coats series and John Devil; in the science fiction genre, the complete works of Maurice Renard, J.-H. Rosny and André Couvreur; in the horror genre, Féval’s vampire trilogy of novels (I look at them here: the Vampire Countess, Knightshade and Vampire City - Ed.) and Lamothe-Langon’s The Virgin Vampire. I’m also happy to have introduced (or in a few cases reintroduced) such wonderful pulp heroes as Doctor Omega, The Nyctalope, Sâr Dubnotal, Harry Dickson, Judex and Doc Ardan to an English-speaking audience.

TMtV: I find the variety and array of pre-Stoker vampire lore fascinating, are there any pre-Stoker vampire rules you particularly like?

JM: I thought that the whole Vampire Countess lore and her interface with what is basically the Medical Examiner of that era was fascinating; and also the vampire as an agent of divine wrath in Lamothe-Langon’s was a wonderful concept. We’re so far away from Dracula that one can’t help speculate that the field would be like today had other writers grabbed these concepts way back when and ran with them. But the French were never any good at commercially exploiting and developing their own works. The history of French popular literature is a graveyard of lost opportunities.

TMtV: Are there any books (vampire or otherwise) you particularly want to translate and publish?

JM: We’re working on them! :-) There is a big novel by Arnould Galopin who pits his own Harry / Allan Dickson detective against a Fantômas-lookalike called Tenebras. Brian will be translating that one. Randy and I are working on more Doc Ardan novels, and another Galopin novel featuring Dickson, Holmes and the mystery of Jack the Ripper. We also have an anthology of classic French Fantasy works in the works.

TMtV: Black Coat also publishes the Tales of the Shadowmen, tell us a little about them and how they came about?

JM: Again—my love of French pulp and desire to share them with fellow fans from all over the world, ho don’t read French. Basically, it’s a yearly collection of original short stories in which we respectfully crossover characters from French fiction with other characters—Lupin / Holmes was the basic model initiated by Maurice Leblanc at the start of the 20th century. We’ve had some wonderful crossovers over the years. We just released Volume 12 last December.

Some of the TOTS stories featuring classic vampires, plus a bunch of new stories, were collected in a two-volume series called The Vampire Almanac which you were kind enough to review very positively. (see Volume 1 and Volume 2 - Ed.)

TMtV: Generally do you have a favorite vampire novel and/or film and what do you like about them?

JM: I have great, equal fondness for Féval’s Vampire City (as a concept) and Vampire Countess (as a narrative with great characters); both have tremendous potential, which some of the authors of TOTS have indeed developed in the past.

In the movies, I like the classics: Nosferatu, Horror of Dracula, and Dan Curtis’ TV adaptation with Jack Palance in the role. I’m not enormously fond of Bela Lugosi’s, John Carradine’s or Francis Ford Coppola’s versions. I also like the Hammer’s Karnstein movies. More recently, we were great fans of the Buffy TV series, although its portrayal of vampires wasn’t particularly ground-breaking.

TMtV: What is coming up from yourself?

JM: As I mentioned above, The Man in Grey (the Arnould Galopin Holmes.Dickson/Jack the Ripper novel), the French Fantasy Treasury, and more Doc Ardan (at least two more). Also, a second collection of short stories entitled Pacifica 2.

TMtV: My thanks to Jean-Marc for graciously answering my questions and for agreeing to be a part of 10 years of TMTV.

Bio: Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier have been a writing team since 1979, first covering the Hollywood scene for American and foreign cinema magazines. They co-authored a dozen books on movies and TV series, including The Doctor Who Programme Guide, as well as an 800-page encyclopedia on French Science Fiction. They have written several novels, edited over a dozen anthologies, penned animation scripts for television and feature films, and scripted numerous comic-books for US, French and even Italian publishers. They won the Inkpot Award for Outstanding Achievement in Comic Arts for their translations of Moebius’ works in America. Since 2003, they have been the publishers of two SF imprints, Black Coat Press in the US and Rivière Blanche in France, as well as the French comics company Hexagon Comics. The Lofficier homepage is here.

Commercial Vampire – Delissio Pizza

It’s been a little while since we had a vampire commercial break and so, for those who don’t know, these adverts just prove my point that vampires get everywhere. We are avoiding the Volvo/Twilight ads – just because it is hardly surprising that there is a commercial aspect in respect of Twilight.

That said, using a vampire in an ad for pizza with garlic crust would seem to be a no brainer as well. This has a nice bit of Crap Bat Syndrome to make us feel good about life!

Vampire hunter - review

Directed by: Sean Gallimore

Release Date: 1995

Contains spoilers

Before I watched this film for review I tried to find a little something about it on the net. Difficult as there isn’t even an imdb page for the movie that I could discover. Sticking the DVD in for a second I jumped to the credits and discovered it was directed by Sean Gallimore. A tad more googling and I find the smallest amount of material on Gallimore’s own site. So, before we enter the fray (so to speak) let us note that this film was shot for a mere $5000, it was shot on Hi-8 video and edited on a primitive PC. This truly is shoe-string stuff.

The other thing to note is I think that this had previously only had release on video before ending up on the Brutal Bloodsuckers set and it wouldn’t surprise me if the print was taken from VHS, we get bands of pink down the side of the screen occasionally and the dialogue sounds like it was recorded in the toilet. However, despite limitations Gallimore has created something for very little and it is better than many of the low budget movies out there.

The film itself is a bit of a fantasy play-out for Gallimore. Ex-marine, weapons expert and martial artist John O’Ryan (Sean Gallimore) has now settled to civilian life as a fantasy artist. Gallimore himself is a fantasy artist and a martial artist, which is why I say that it is a bit of a fantasy fulfilment movie. However we get ahead of ourselves. The film starts with a woman in a gallery, bound and gagged. A man enters holding a gun and suddenly a vampire, Morgan Bane (Leonardo Millan), appears. Given the budget, to have him appear from animated smoke was a brave move. Bane admonishes the man for being armed with a gun, he takes his jacket off and reveals garlic and stakes. A second vampire, a kind of heavy metal comedy vampire servant, also joins in. The man is quickly despatched. It seems that Bane is bored of immortality and is looking for a challenge.

He insinuates himself with John and his wife Heather (Erin Leigh), through John’s artwork. However when they first meet a man, Ramone (Frank Swarez), attacks Bane with a stake. John stops him and Bane’s bodyguard pulls a gun. Aiming a water pistol at Bane (filled with holy water) Ramone is able to escape. When he gets back to his apartment the long-haired vampire is waiting for him. Ramone despatches the vampire but I did like the idea of the vampire spitting blood at his enemy to distract him.

John decides, through his instincts, that he dislikes Bane and refuses to do business with him. However he left his portfolio at the gallery and returns the next day to retrieve it. He is prevented entering a back-room by the bodyguard but fights his way in and sees a coffin. On his way home he is followed. He stops the car and is approached by Ramone who warns him that Bane is a vampire and after Heather. When he gets home Bane is in his house. John places a cross on the table before him but it has no effect and Heather wonders why John, an atheist, has a cross. As he leaves Bane tells John that you have to have faith to make a cross work. John gets his cop pal Ray to break into the gallery to check Bane out.

The next night Ray turns up at John’s house and he has been vampirised. After some fighting John kills his friend and discovers that Bane has taken Heather. It is up to John, with Ramone’s help, to get heather back and stop Bane.

Gallimore, as I said, is a martial artist and you can tell. There are at least two long practice sequences, a sparing sequence as well as fights with his martial arts buddies who are in the film. The martial arts look good, the choreography of the fights perhaps not so as it is clear on many occasions that no contact is really made. This is, of course, the inexperience of an amateur filmmaker. There is some gore involved and, given the budget, it works quite well.

As for the vampires well they are standard - crosses, holy water, garlic and stakes through the heart, as well as needing an invitation to enter a home are all present and correct. They can hypnotise, appear from mist and (we hear but do not see) turn into bats. After staking their bodies dissolve to bones within 24 hours – again unseen but given the budget that is not surprising.

At the end of the film Bane changes into a monster vampire. As you can see from the screenshot, the makeover isn’t brilliant but again we are talking budget restrictions. It was a brave move, perhaps, and given the level of the film not too shoddy compared to what it could have been. That said the glowing red eyes of the vampires actually worked well and put other low (and some higher) budget productions to shame.

The direction is functional but nothing special and the acting isn’t the greatest ever, but again I’ve seen worse. Unfortunately this could have been better if played more for laughs – the long hair vamp was quite a comedy character and probably underused – though I’m unsure as to whether the actor could have sustained full comedy. It is a labour of love but everyone seems so earnest and that gravitas makes this fall apart a little, it is difficult to look moody when grasping a super-soaker as a weapon.

My biggest problem was within the scripting, however. The story is basic but, worse than that, there are things within it that don’t ring true. John is told Bane is a vampire and, whilst he might not accept it immediately, he does produce a cross before Bane – why would he do that, especially as an atheist? John wants Bane checked out and so his cop friend Ray immediately offers to break into his gallery, surely he’d do background checks and such like? Also Bane wears a Kevlar vest, making him impervious to stakes. Kevlar is great for bullets but, as far as I know, useless for such things as knives (and presumably, therefore shards of wood). Modern Kevlar has been developed that is good with knives but this movie was eleven years ago. I wait to be corrected by someone who is a Kevlar expert, however, as I admit my knowledge of the ins and outs of body armour is limited.

All in all, in the grand scheme of vampire movies this is not great (though certainly not the worst) as it adds nothing really to the genre. I recognise that this is a labour of love, I recognise that Gallimore did more with $5000 than I could ever contemplate doing myself and therefore I feel that the 2 out of 10 I am going to give this is slightly unfair but ultimately justified, if this were for free streaming I'd be singing its praises but as a commercial piece it didn't really cut the mustard. The one thing I will add is that I respect the tenacity that went into making this film and the fact that they did a lot with (virtually) nothing.

Gallimore’s page for the film, with trailer, is here.

The Commercial vampire: anti-smoking

When we’ve looked at the commercial vampire before they’ve always been trying to sell us something. This time it is good health in this French Canadian anti-smoking advert courtesy of You Tube.

Slaxx – review

Director: Elza Kephart

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

I didn’t sit down to watch Slaxx with the view of viewing it as a vampire film, it just looked like a fun watch. It became clear, however, that it can be viewed as such on a couple of levels. This necessitates a broad view of what a vampire is, of course, but the tropes are there.

When I mention a couple of levels, one is within the primary subject of the film – a pair of homicidal possessed jeans but the other true vampire of the film is the company, the commercial entity and, of course, I will explore both in the review.

picking cotton

We start in India and Keerat (Pritha Mazumdar), a young girl, is picking cotton. The crop is designated “Experimental Field 357” and is owned by Canadian Cotton Clothiers. We move from there to see a box, labelled with the company name being delivered to the stock area of a store. It contains jeans with a distinctive “SS” logo (standing for Super Shapers), which are placed into storage as a sign reminds workers that “employee theft hurts us all”.

store worker

CCC as the company is known is a clothing chain that prides themselves on the fact that they use fair trade, organic produce, that they are ethical and espouse a view to their staff that they are a family. They are the sort of store that calls an area of the shopfloor an ecosystem and expects their staff to display a certain (and insincere) attitude, whilst wearing this season’s line. I previously looked at the vampire tropes used in the film In Fabric and whilst the stores are very different (one classical 70s the other very modern) beneath the surface they are very similar.

Romane Denis as Libby

Into the store comes Libby (Romane Denis), a fan of both the store and the philosophy of founder Harold Landsgrove (Stephen Bogaert); she is a new hire and this is her first day. A store worker (who is one of the few staff who doesn’t display the sickly cult-like attitude expected by CCC), Shruti (Sehar Bhojani), takes her through to see store manager Craig (Brett Donahue), in turn he sends her to see Hunter (Jessica B. Hill, Being Human (US)) who has no time for the new hire. Eventually she finds herself having to buy a new wardrobe as her clothes are last season, without staff discount (it starts the next day).

the first kill

Meanwhile Jemma (Hanneke Talbot, Rabid) has taken a pair of the new jeans and puts them on. As she does the zipper she catches her finger – this feels very much like the accidental cut in a standard vampire movie that resurrects the undead. There is a staff meeting to tell the team that Harold is coming to the store to launch the new line but Jemma gets cramps (she believes an early period) and goes to the bathroom. In a stall the jeans squeeze to eviscerate her and a panel in the “SS” logo turns red. Unfortunately the staff are locked in until the launch in the morning.

the jeans dance as Shruti sings

So we have a killer pair of jeans. As the story unfolds we discover that the cotton was GM (used for profits), the cotton is one that is meant to mould to the wearers body shape, though that is not really explored as part of the lore. Once Libby discovers that the jeans like Bollywood music and (after giving itself a mannequin head and torso) wears a bindi, the pieces start to come together and they eventually discover that the jeans are possessed by Keerat, who was a child labourer and died in an industrial accident. Keerat is after justice and/or revenge.

lapping blood

Why vampire? Well, the jeans are specifically after blood it seems. We see them ‘lapping’ blood from the floor and when they awaken other pairs, they do so with blood also. However, the jeans may be vampiric clothing (and represent a form of vampiric possession) but the bigger vampire is the company itself. Certainly immoral and dishonest about its trading practices and how it treats supplying labour, the expectations of its store staff is cult-like (bringing Hammer’s cult of the vampire to mind) and through influencers they try and embroil consumers into that cult.

death of an influencer

This was fun. Perhaps not as artistic or involved as the aforementioned In Fabric, this is a slasher at heart but with a nice lore that uses vampire tropes and a healthy cynicism about consumer culture. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Frightmare – review

Director: Norman Thaddeus Vane

Release date: 1983

Contains spoilers

There was a question mark in my mind as to how I’d treat the film on TMtV. Whilst main character Conrad Radzoff (Ferdy Mayne, the Fearless Vampire Killers & the Vampire Lovers) is an actor famous for playing a vampire (and so we have a fleeting visitation at the beginning of him acting as a vampire), there is a question mark on what he is when he comes back – I’ll discuss that in review.

In fact Mayne – who has starred as a vampire himself – played a character who was modelled quite strongly on Christopher Lee – to the point that old film footage of Conrad used early Christopher Lee footage rather than actual Ferdy Mayne footage.

about to bite

So, we have established he is an actor and in the first scene we see him creeping around in formal dress prior to putting the bite on a woman (Twyla Littleton) sat at a dressing table. The director (Peter Kastner) yells cut – Conrad has missed his mark, again… and its take 18 of the commercial. The director calls for a break and is sat looking at the script on the wall of a balcony. Using his walking stick, Conrad nonchalantly pushes the director to his death and then saunters off to his Rolls Royce.

addressing the college

Cut forward and a local college – and specifically the students who are in a film society – have invited Conrad to give an address. He seems charmed by the proposition but early into his speech it is clear that something is wrong and he suffers a heart attack. He is revived by one of the students, Meg (Jennifer Starrett), giving (almost perfunctory) CPR. Not long after this he awaits death and yet manages to kill the director (Leon Askin, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew) he was discovered by, from his death bed, and get himself, resplendent in his cape and formal wear, to his own coffin.

getting into his own coffin

The funeral features a pre-recorded eulogy from himself and his mausoleum had to be fought for but is massive and replete with flashing neon star. The film class attend the funeral and then, whilst driving around, return to the cemetery. The boys leave the girls as they climb the wall and then break into the mausoleum – by one of the gang, Stu (Jeffrey Combs, Necronomicon: Book of the Dead & Dark House), smashing a skylight. Inside the mausoleum is lit, with messages being given by Conrad on video. They decide to steal Conrad’s corpse and take it for a last night out, at the house where many of his films were made (and where he murdered the director).

the sceance

This is where we wonder just what Conrad is (and what the students were thinking, to be honest)? His corpse sits quietly, as one would expect, but his wife (Barbara Pilavin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ) soon discovers the corpse is missing and calls in a medium. It is the contact she makes with his spirit that allows Conrad to escape (what we assume to be) Hell and possess his own body and he then goes on a murder spree, avenging himself on those who desecrated his tomb.

dark, but you can see fangs

Undoubtedly he is undead and, at least in one shot, he has obvious fangs (though they could have been his fake movie ones). He displays powers of pyrokinesis, telekinesis and telepathy (with a hypnotic element). He seems to be able to manifest a mist or fog. All that said he does not display any overtly vampiric traits. He is certainly undead and most certainly looks the part of the Lugosi-esque vampire but we have no evidence that he is actually a vampire. However, with the fact that he acted like one as a human and that he looked like one when undead I pitched in at review level for the film.

Jeffrey Combs as Stu

As for what the kids were thinking, that is one of the flaws with the film. The fact that a bunch of film students desecrate a tomb and steal the corpse of their hero made little sense, except in terms of setting the film up. Despite it all, however, I actually rather enjoyed myself as I watched it. Ferdy Mayne was a primary reason, he looked like he was enjoying himself and was chewing the scenery like the pro he was. It was also great fun to see a young Jeffery Combs in one of his earliest films. A film that held no sense of reality but revelled in that, it wasn’t great cinema but was good fun. 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Taliesin Meets… …Brian Stableford

Having sold his first short story to Science Fantasy in 1965, Brian Stableford has been publishing fiction and non-fiction for fifty years. His fiction includes eleven novels and seven short story collections of “tales of the biotech revolution,” exploring the possible social and personal consequences of potential innovations in biotechnology. He has published three novels featuring different kinds of vampires: The Empire of Fear, Young Blood and The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires, and numerous short stories widening the range further, most notably “Rent,” “Emptiness” and “Sheena”. He has also translated numerous early vampire novels from the French, including Vampire City, Knightshade and The Vampire Countess by Paul Féval, The Virgin Vampire by Étienne Lamothe-Langon and The Vampire and The Devil’s Son and The Immortal Woman by Ponson du Terrail. He is presently researching a history of French roman scientifique from 1700-1939, translating much of the relevant material not previously translated into English.


TMtV: Brian, you have been a professional author for a long time, how has the ‘business’ changed, and on balance have the changes been positive or negative and how so?

BS: It’s been fifty years now, and absolutely everything has changed in terms of the technology of production and consumption, with concomitant changes in the way the market works, in terms of submission, patterns of demand, money, etc. There are pros and cons; the writing process is much easier, the chances of selling anything one writes much worse. I can produce much more than ever before, but I’m very glad that I’m an old age pensioner and get paid simply for being alive, so that I can write exactly what I like, with the certainty of publication, and don’t have to worry about getting paid. The biggest shock to me, personally, was the total collapse, virtually overnight, of the reference-book market, where I’d always made a substantial slice of my income; sketchy, corrupt and unreliable as it is, Wikipedia is free and easy, and it has driven all competitors out of the marketplace

TMtV: You’ve written some vampire genre books and I’d like to ask you about The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires as I looked at it in in my book the Media Vampire because of the “overmen” and the connection to Nietzsche’s Übermensch– was the connection deliberate and why did you use the overmen idea?

BS: The use of the term “overmen” reflects, or is reflected in, the fact that M. P. Shiel—who used the term a lot, having adopted it from Nietzsche—is a minor character. H. G. Wells is also there, reflecting the kinship between the story and The Time Machine--the original seed of the story was the thought that it was a pity that the characters listening to Wells’ time traveller are a bunch of nonentities; I thought it might be interesting to gather a more interesting set, including someone who had a real stake in the news brought back from the future.

TMtV: I really enjoyed the way you brought literary figures such as Stoker, De Maupassant and Stenbock into the story – what was the thought process behind that?

The character who was first on my list of interesting listeners was Oscar Wilde—Stoker and Stenbock are both referenced because of their connection with him, and he was a convenient way of introducing the mysterious Count. Wells and Shiel both had an interest in future evolution, and I could hardly leave Sherlock Holmes out. Jean Lorrain is in there because I’d just done some translations of his work. When the sequel, “The Black Blood of the Dead,” switched the action to Paris, I was able to widen the net of French Decadents.

TMtV: The story was eventually included as part of Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity, did you alter Hunger and Ecstasy for that volume and would you say it was now a definitive version?

BS: That title was the publisher’s—I disapproved, but he said he’d sell more copies if Sherlock Holmes was in the title (and he did). I didn’t think about doing the portmanteau version until after I’d done the second part and began to consider possibilities for its expansion. I tried hawking the novel around with a straightforward linear scheme, simply printing the three short novels one after another, but when it became obvious that the book was going to have to appear as a non-commercial project, I figured that I might as well go for the portmanteau idea. I don’t know whether it works, with all the embedded first-person narratives, or whether it’s too confusing, but it’s certainly unique. The longer versions of the second and third parts never appeared independently, so there’s no opportunity, in any case, for anyone to compare the alternatives. I probably changed “Hunger and Ecstasy” slightly while producing the various versions, but I doubt that there’s much difference between them.

TMtV: You have written using Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, including stories featuring Erich Zann and Pickman amongst others. What do you like about Lovecraft’s mythos and do you enjoy working within that universe?

BS: I was always fascinated by Lovecraft’s work, and the way in which he helped to develop and seed a whole school of distinctive weird fiction, with many elements of which I approved wholeheartedly. I’ve been particularly intrigued by Lovecraft’s notion of “cosmic horror” and his attempts in his later work to fit his horrors into a more rational and coherent quasi-scientific context. One of my own enduring quests has always been finding ways to redesign science and metaphysics in such a way as to make any or all of the characteristic figures of supernatural fiction rationally plausible. Extrapolating Lovecraftian materials provided a useful way to approach that, and led via “The Legacy of Erirc Zann” to a whole series of novellas and novels in which Poe’s August Dupin gradually learns the ins and outs of a multiverse that contains Cthulhu, the Crawling Chaos and much, much more.

TMtV: In 1999 the Paul Féval novel Vampire City was published and you were the translator, what led you to translating novels as opposed to writing them?

BS: I first started doing translations for the small press Dedalus, who were specializing a the time in Decadent material, and I taught myself to translate using a dictionary in order to translate stories by Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain and others for use in showcase anthologies. I was alerted to Vampire City when Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi said that they came up with idea of their Dictionary of Imaginary Places because they desperately wanted to include Féval’s city of Selene. My interest in Féval developed from there and brought me into contact with Black Coat Press, for whom I did several other Féval translations and then started on antique roman scientifique. I translated several other early French vampire novels for them, and eventually did so much roman scientifique that I thought I ought to finish the job and write a definitive history. Crazy, of course, but it helps fill in the time between here and the grave. It’s suitably absorbing, although sometimes a trifle frustrating, when I think “Well, I wouldn’t have done it that way….”

TMtV: That’s not to say that you don’t continue to publish your original work, of course, how much of your time do you split between writing and translating?

BS: For the last few years I’ve been translating roman scientifique almost full time, in order to write my history, but I hope to finish that this year, and then divide my time much more evenly between translation and original work. I need to publish another 22 novels to clock up the hundred, so I’ve been busily scribbling down ideas while doing the translations, and I hope to get seriously busy on some of the missing 22 next year, hoping I can get through the lot before the grim reaper comes knocking.

TMtV: How much of the author’s craft remains in the translating process?

BS: Translating is a little like driving a car with a satnav—you have to go where the machine tells you to go, but you still have to steer, change gear, keep your eyes on the road and so on. You have to choose the most appropriate alternatives from sets of available equivalents to various French words and phrases, and you have to reconstruct the sentences so that they work in terms of English grammar and syntax, so there is a considerable artistry to it. It also helps to have a strong sympathy for what the original writer is trying to do, which not all translators have.

TMtV: Having read several of your translations, I have to say that I have found you have kept (what I assume to be) the original author’s voice – or should I say I don’t detect Brian Stableford’s voice. Is it difficult to maintain the original voice?

BS: Literary voices do tend to be language-specific, but I try as hard as I can to maintain the flavour and tone of the original text as well as the meaning. Wordplay tends to be difficult—footnoting untranslatable puns is obviously not a satisfactory substitute—but I do what I can, and keep my own whimsicality strictly to the supplementary material.

TMtV: Yes, I noticed that in some of the translations you’ve added footnotes explaining aspects, where a word doesn’t directly translate for instance. How strictly does the translation follow the text as a general rule?

BS: I try to keep it as close as possible, while maintaining an appropriate fluency. It’s arguable that I overdo the footnotes, but my feeling is that the additional explanations do help readers to get a sense of material that it’s impossible to bring across directly

TMtV: For a vampire genre enthusiast like myself I have to say that the translations you have released through Blackcoat Press have been a godsend, allowing access to works previously unavailable. Is it yourself or Blackcoat who decide which books should be translated?

BS: In the beginning it was mostly Jean-Marc Lofficier who indicated works that he’d like to publish in translation, and he still puts in occasional requests, but since I started developing my own agenda he’s been kind enough, most of the time, to let me follow my own inclinations. Borgo Press was taking the material that overflowed Black Coat’s schedule for a while, but since Rob Reginald died Black Coat have been building up quite a backlog, so I’ll probably have to start self-publishing some material next year, which will allow me to cast my net even wider and do some seriously idiosyncratic projects.

TMtV: Which of the Translations have been your favourites?

BS: I’ve been very pleased to be able to do some books whose existence I’d known about for a long time and always wanted to do—the sets of titles by Maurice Renard and André Couvreur, for instance—but since I started researching the entire history of French imaginative fiction obsessively I’ve been particularly delighted to stumble across various things that were totally unknown—the works of Henri Austruy, for instance. I keep coming across wonderful surprises, like the twentieth century’s first great epic fantasy, Les Atlantes (1904; translated as The Last Days of Atlantis), by Charles Lomon and P. B. Gheusi (due out soon).

TMtV: You seem to have a particular fondness for Féval’s material, what is it you see in his work particularly?

BS: I’m fascinated by the curious craftsmanship of producing daily serials for newspapers, making it up as you go along, adapting to editorial and reader demand, and so on; Féval was one of the great pioneers as well as one of the great experts, and he’s also a very self-aware writer, often commenting sarcastically on the things he’s being forced to do. He was a writer of great imagination who was always being ordered by his employers to rein it in and stick to the clichés, and I have a good deal of sympathy with his struggles. I love it when he just lets himself go and has fun, as he does in Vampire City and Knightshade.

TMtV: I find the variety and array of pre-Stoker vampire lore fascinating, are there any vampire rules you particularly like?

BS: In terms of the early history of vampire fiction I’m not so much interested in the “rules”—most adapted from Calmet or adopted for narrative convenience—as the improvisations, and the strategies by which something imagined in folklore as straightforwardly horrible was very rapidly adapted and elaborated by writers as something intensely erotic.

TMtV: Are there any books you particularly want to translate and why those volumes? In particular are there any vampire novels you wish to bring to the English reading world?

BS: I’ve done most of the early French vampire stories that hadn’t been translated previously, although there’s one more Ponson du Terrail title, L’Auberge de la rue des enfants rouges, which I’ll try to do next year, and there might well be some as yet “undiscovered”. I keep an eye on the calendar to see what material is falling into the public domain year by year, but I’m not aware of any significant vampire material due to make the fall imminently. I have a long list of supernatural works I want to do when I’ve finished the roman scientifique—enough to keep me going for at least five years, should I live that long; I am desperate to survive until 2023, when Rachilde falls into the public domain, so I can do La Princesse des Ténébres, and I shall never forgive myself if I die before then.

TMtV: What is coming up from Brian Stableford?

BS: My definitive four-volume history of British scientific romance, New Atlantis: A Narrative History of Scientific Romance, should be out from Wildside Press fairly soon. The Black Coat Press history of the equivalent French material will be a companion of sorts, out some time in 2016. Black Coat are currently publishing two translations a month—in the next few months, look out especially for The Last Days of Atlantis, Jules Hoche’s The Maker of Men and His Formula, Albert Robida’s The Engineer von Satanas and two volumes containing the four fantastic novels of André Arnyvelde. My next original novel will probably be the next in the Dupin series, of which the present working title is Cthulhu’s Child, but that plan might change.

My sincere thanks to Brian for both his time, answering my questions, and for the works (both vampire and not) that he has made available to the English reading world.

The Commercial Vampire : Tabasco Sauce

Another example of the vampire used to sell products, this time it is the turn of the comedy vampire, and sees the vampire destroyed by a liberal helping of garlic Tabasco sauce.

The ad can be viewed here.

The Commercial Vampire: Mazda

Vampires are so "it" that they’re even being used to sell products. Let’s face it from the suave vampire, through the sexy vampire all the way to the comedy vampire, there are plenty of things to get an ad-man’s creative juices flowing. In this case they’re selling a car from Mazda. The advert is on UK TV at the moment and can be viewed here.

The Carriage or Dracula & My Mother – review

Director: Benjamin L. Gordon

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

I’m often in a quandary when it comes to short films, should I review them or just give them an Honourable Mention. The short film is an art form in its own right, like the short story. The pressing of character, story and lore into a very limited amount of time takes a consummate skill. We can also forgive more in a short, I feel, for the very same reasons.

Ben Gordon as himself

Nevertheless, sometimes a short comes along and bam… this was a bam moment. I had approached Ben Gordon, from La Zona Productions in Spain, having spotted his short, and he was good enough to allow me early access to it (the film is now on YouTube and is embedded below). I had a read through the press pack and discovered that he had “inherited” the actual carriage from a commercial shoot and decided to film a story, with his family and a family friend as the talent, over Christmas – the vampire sections were reshot later and, given the really interesting thing he did with lore in the re-shoot it was well worth it.

investigating the carriage

The opening premise is that Ben Gordon’s (himself) mother (Charlotte Gordon) discovers that someone has parked a horse-drawn carriage (sans horses) outside her Spanish home. She phones Ben and tells him as he and his wife Laura and baby daughter Cloe are flying over for Christmas. On arrival he and Charlotte go to look at the carriage but the door is locked. Charlotte mentions Dracula in connection with it. The genius here is the Ben is recapturing older vampire movies where, to one degree or another, the carriage is more than just a conveyance. In Nosferatu, for instance, the shrouded carriage is a sinister omen and in Dracula Prince of Darkness it is a driverless honey trap.

bait

The family dress the Christmas tree but, early the next morning, Laura becomes freaked out when she hears something on the roof of the house. Ben becomes obsessed with the carriage. He has Laura pose before the carriage, holding Cloe, as a lure for anyone inside. He then suggests that as Cloe is sleeping she go for a walk. With her out of the way he parks Cloe’s pram near the carriage and waits, a piece of string attached to pull his daughter away! When Laura returns she sees this, realises what he is doing and understandably leaves the country! That leaves Ben and (an unimpressed) Charlotte plus whatever is in the carriage.

Francisco Aguirre as the vampire

It is actually a vampire (Francisco Aguirre) within the carriage and, when we finally get to see the inside of the carriage, we see it is filled with earth. This reminded me of the Night Flier, in which the vampire’s plane was filled with earth also. However it is the vampire that is the most fascinating character. Almost hobo like in attire he is capable of acts of shockingly physical violence but it is his method of feeding that I have to spoil as it is so unusual.

roots retracting

Tendrils of roots emerge from his mouth and sprout from his hands reaching to the victim and burying into the flesh to suck the blood. This almost plant like attribute feels natural given the earth in the carriage. It also reminded me of the quote from Mansfield I read cited in Michael Bell’s Food from the Dead (pg 219), “Among the superstitions of those days, we find it was said that a vine or root of some kind grew from coffin to coffin, of those of one family… …and when the growing vine had reached the coffin of the last one buried, another one of the family would die…” The vampire can be warded by religious iconography, in this case Jewish, and seems to have some form of psychic connection with his victims. He can also turn into a bat.

Ben's mother

This was a fantastic little short, well shot and able to both summon reminiscences of genre staples and also very fresh ideas (such as the feeding method). The acting was naturalistic and the dialogue free-flowing often (the bickering over the cooking of Christmas dinner was actually real, the press release reveals). Gordon describes the film as a “self-portrait taken to a fictionalised realm of perversion.” I describe the film as a cracking little vampire piece. 8 out of 10.

The imdb page is here. 

Short Film: Ashes of Doom

I nearly ran this under the title of “Commercial Vampire” as it is a commercial – or at least a public information film disguised as a commercial, disguised as a film and created for the Canadian Department of National Health and Welfare in 1970 by Grant Munro.

Roughly the first minute is taken up with credits (hence saying this is disguised as a film, before we get into the action. The action itself is a woman (Nadia Salnick) chain smoking and lighting her cigarettes from every available means. Eventually, she is on her bed, smoking a cigarette, as midnight chimes.

Cigarettes, a new apotropaic

At the French window is a vampire (Grant Munro) in the classic Lugosi-mould. He enters, glides to the bed and descends upon the woman (who passed out at the sight of him but still has a cigarette in her mouth). After a chomp on her throat he stands and then clutches himself as he exhales smoke and (we assume) expires.

Short, sweet and to the point. This has an imdb page here and you can see the short for yourself below.

Beyond the Rave – review

Director: Matthias Hoene

Release date: 2008

Contains spoilers

Hammer is back! It was a clarion call. It was a moment of nostalgia fuelled hope. It was always going to carry a big risk of disappointment.

The first film was going to be a vampire film… Okay it was going to be contemporary, not the period setting Hammer had been most famous for but that’s okay, we have to move with the times. Then it was released in serial format on MySpace and whilst there was a cameo by Sadie 'Lucy in Dracula' Frost (that was pretty much a waste of her talents) the promised Ingrid Pitt cameo had vanished and…

I was, quite frankly, rather disappointed with the whole thing. I decided not to review it until it became available on DVD and they re-edited the damn thing… and I waited… and I waited… and finally we have a DVD – a limited DVD (mine is numbered 0012). And… it isn’t re-cut. It is still in its poxy little chapters and the chapter number flashes up with logo as it goes along. If you remember my 30 Days of Night: Blood Trails review you’ll already know that keeping it episodic like that bugs me. This isn’t as intrusive as Blood Trails but it is still a pain. Worse because the thing needed a good re-edit, even worse because the expunged scenes are not added in but extras… Now the one with Ingrid Pitt does have a plot important aspect to it (she gives Ed (Jamie Dornan) a Green Man medallion that saves his life and, without the scene, we wonder what the Hell he pulls from his pocket that stopped a crossbow bolt) but… let us get to plot.

We start with Ed on army manoeuvres in a forest. He sees something in the dark and it is the vampire Melech (Sebastian Knapp) taking a bite out of Ed’s girlfriend Jen (Nora-Jane Noone). It is a nightmare and he is in a military hospital He has been injured in Iraq as he planted a flag (the significance of the flag, whilst it features in the film as stands, is lost unless you see the extra scenes in the DVD extras). A detective wants to ask him questions. It cuts back to a month before.

Ed has 16 hours compassionate leave before he ships to Iraq and is picked up by his friend Necro (Matthew Forrest). Now, the character is called Necro and drives a hearse but any significance (or even why he has a hearse) is sacrificed to the Gods of let us not develop characters. Of course the absolute lack of proper character development is probably down to writing 5 minute episodes but it is annoying. Ed and Necro want to go to a rave – though they do not know where it is going to be. Jen is not returning Ed’s calls and it turns out he stood her up the week before for an army night out. Jen and Necro went to a rave, where she met and got off with Melech. Necro met a girl – for girl read vampire, though he doesn’t know it at this point – called Lilith (Lois Winstone, yes, Ray’s daughter).

Now they pass, early on, a US army truck driven by Melech – that has a girl tied in the back as a snack and I did go back to the scene and confirm that it was Melech. Why? Because at the climax of the film… a vampire burns up in the first light of the sun. So why is our vampire driving a truck during the day? Who the Hell knows. Perhaps because it is overcast – though we question why he would risk immolation? We also meet the Crockers. First of all we meet Rich (Tamer Hassan) and Terry (Lee Whitlock) and later Danny (Lee Long) and they are the most stereotyped Mockney type drug dealing gangsters you’d have the misfortune to watch but they do underline one aspect of the film – the blooming awful dialogue that bears no resemblance to how people actually speak.

Anyway Necro and Ed are in the hearse with Big Jim (Jody Halse) and Tina (Katie Borland)… Hold on, where did they appear from. Suddenly they were there, no explanation, as if by magic… but actually it was sloppy filmmaking. The Crockers have had a run in with a couple of vampires – who eventually carve a code on Terry’s stomach. Necro has the same code, in Lilith’s lipstick, on his – it is a mirror image of the radio frequency the rave will be advertised on, broadcast from a pirate radio station. Jen, meanwhile, is already at the rave site, invited by Melech.

The crux of this is that the vampires have decided to go away – why, we don’t know. They are sailing to an island that is “off the grid” near Africa and they need some snackage for the journey – so they are going to harvest all the humans at the rave. Well all of them bar Jen – ‘cause Melech wants her (she reminds him of someone from the past it seems) – and Necro – because Lilith wants him. To do this they are first going to gas the humans…

Now I want to hold off here and question why the Hell the vampires needed to wear gasmasks? After all they have no need to breath and… but wait they can get stoned on weed – indeed the best line in the film is uttered by the vampire Uncle Leopold (Trevor Byfield) when he mentions that he has been “smoking this shit for 768 years” – so I guess the undead do breath in this film. Anyhoo they are going to gas them, knock them all unconscious, mechanically drain their blood into a big container and then neatly put the bodies in body bags. Will Ed and Jen make up and how will they escape?

If I sound disparaging it is because I am. Perhaps naively I had high hopes for a new Hammer film. I hoped they would pull out all the stops and shout at the world, "We're Back!" Bad dialogue, plot gaps and, candidly, weak acting was not what I wanted. Okay, I wasn’t expecting Academy Award level stuff but... I did expect, for example, vampires who got covered in blood (and I mean their clothes, face and hair absolutely plastered in the stuff) to not suddenly be clean in the next scene we see them in. As an aside, I must mention the scene where a guy is approached, whilst in the toilet, by two hot vampire babes and then taken off to be fed on – as soon as he said that he was a ‘cheeky monkey’… well lets just say being fed on by two vamps was a fate better than he deserved.

There are positives. Sebastian Knapp really looks the part as Melech and steals scenes just by being there. The actor has a really strong presence and I hope he does some fine things in the future. The film is rather bloody, which is good, and there are some nice vampire moments. This brings us to lore… The vampires can be photographed. They are resilient and very strong. Beheading or a stake through the heart will kill them as will sunlight (unless driving a truck). An extra scene on the DVD indicates that failure to feed causes feverish sickness and then death.

There is some indication of psychic powers – Leopold tells Ed “I can smell death on you, soldier”. They may be selling drugs laced with vampire blood – one of these pills leads Ed to have a vision of an Iraqi girl riddled with bullets asking him to “play with me”. A foreshadowing of events to come or just a bad trip brought on by his anxiety about his posting. The film doesn’t say or do anything useful with the moment. Perhaps it was simply a political comment regarding civilian casualties in Iraq or the theatre of war generally, if so it was poorly handled and out of place.

This is no longer just a freebie on MySpace, where excesses might be forgiven; this is now a commercial exercise where folks are asked to shell out hard earned money. As such this needs the surgery of a blooming good re-edit with scenes put back in, the flow of the film improved and… even then it might still be on the critical list. 3.5 out of 10 – and it breaks my heart to have to give Hammer’s comeback film a low score. The imdb page is here.