My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, I'm Out for Revenge! – Season 1 – review

Directors: Musashi Sakai and Katsushi Sakurabi

First aired: 2025

Contains spoilers

If you think that the title of this anime series is a mouthful, it is, though it is wonderfully descriptive of the plot and is a breeze next to the title of the light novel series it is based on: Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World!

the Concord of the Tribes

It is set in a fantasy realm with nine tribes and main character Light (Nina Tamaki (Japanese)/Shannon Emerick (English)) is a human who gained an innate gift of an Unlimited Gacha – a power that allows him to summon unlimited cards that become real and offer support to him and his comrades. Unfortunately, every card seemed to be a dud. After being mugged by Beast Men he was offered a place in a party called the Concord of the Tribes whose stated aim was to work together across the nine races – as an adventuring party – in order to fight inter-tribe discrimination.

Light betrayed

This discrimination is, to be fair, mostly aimed at humans, who find it difficult to level up particularly highly (each character and card has a level, much like a RPG/video game, humans max at around 100) and are treated as slaves in many kingdoms. However, in one of the most dangerous dungeons (known as the Abyss and, given its danger calling it a backwater seems off), Light’s companions betrayed him and tried to kill him. They had been tasked to see if he was a Maestro (a predicted, powerful being) and after deciding he was no threat they look to kill him.

Mai rescues Light

Luckily, Light accidentally triggered a teleportation trap during the attack and ended up in the lowest part of the abyss. About to be killed by a Hell Hound he released a card and gained the Level 9999 support character Mai (Ikumi Hasegawa (Japanese)/Molly Searcy (English)), a super ultra rare card. It turns out that the gacha uses ambient mana to summon and there is little on the surface but, in the lowest abyss, it is abundant. Mai kills the Hell Hound and then spends three years training Light to level 9999 – he uses magic to suspend aging to remain as he was when betrayed. The aim is to get revenge on the party. He uses the unlimited gacha to create a whole kingdom in the abyss and it is here the vampire element comes in.

Nazuna and her card

Including Mai, Light has four level 9999 allies (allies may be the wrong word, every summoned person has fierce loyalty to Light) and this includes Nazuna (Hana Hishikawa (Japanese)/ Chaney Moore (English)) a true vampire knight. She is ridiculously strong and – if the anime character follows the novel version – a half vampire and so does not need to drink blood. We certainly never see her do so. She is displayed as a little bit slow-witted, light-hearted but, like the others, fiercely loyal. She is not used overly much in season 1 but she is very much there.

sacer arbor and victim

I also need to mention that another of the four, the witch Ellie (Ayumi Mano (Japanese)/Ginger Sue (English)) summons a sacer arbor – blood sucking trees that feed off her enemies and the more they are fed the further they can grow. The show has a touch of harem to it, with the summoned female characters all focused, sometime romantically or sexually, at Light - that said it is not nearly as obsessed with sex as some vehicles. There is a large undercurrent that discusses racism openly and a lot of characters are drawn negatively. The most negative thing around Light is his single-minded aim at revenge both at the party (he gets two of them in season one) and the world but, by the end, he gets a redemption narrative aiming at ending discrimination.

Nazuna shows fang

The UK Blu-Ray hasn’t much in the line of extras (just clean opening and ending title animations) but does have both English and Japanese audio. The English audio was actually excellently done – special mention to level 5000 character Gold (Katsuya Miyamoto (Japanese)/John Gremillion (English)) whose English dialogue was excellent, funnily written and great to see British colloquialisms like chuffed and twat creeping into the dialogue. The series really held my attention, indeed I absolutely binged it, the animation was as good as one would expect from a modern anime and this was definitely worth a watch. 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Sete da Vampira – review

Director: Roger A. Fratter

Release date: 1998

Contains spoilers

An Italian very low-budget film, this had pretentions of arthouse and reminded me as I watched it of Chris Alexander’s more auteur output – though Alexander came later and his output is much more solid. I think perhaps it was in the scenes of walking, dreamlike, through the film – though the more deliberate attachment of a narrative in this vehicle (which was perhaps not as successful as it might be) undermined the more dreamlike quality that Alexander engenders. This also had a character, and a specific moment for that character, which felt like Jess Franco was being invoked.

wandering

It starts with a man walking through a snowy landscape, a voiceover suggests he had received a letter from artist Marco Spaccesi (Carlo Girelli) who is missing. The film then moves to a woman in bed, she gets up and searches a building until she opens a door and sees a female vampire, later revealed to be Carmilla (Elisabetta Principe), feeding on a man. The woman is grabbed by an unseen man who slits her throat with a knife.

Carlo Girelli as Marco

The film then has quite long ponderous moments of Carmilla wandering around, victims running (the first through a wood being followed by Carmilla’s limping manservant Samuel (Mirko Riva)). We also get Marco wandering around, having dreamed of Carmilla. He goes to Virginia Thompson (Marta Bordino) to try and locate Carmilla – at the end of the film we discover the vampire is Carmilla Thompson, so not Karnstein. He even gets involved with a séance.

Elisabetta Principe as Carmilla

There isn’t much narrative, so the dialogue struggles to express it. We get an odd moment of Carmilla whipping Virginia but they are clearly shot in different rooms, likely even different buildings. It gave the impression that it was a psychic attack, especially as Virginia seemed unmarked – though in a scene after we see they have applied some very faint makeup weals. Equally Virginia later stabs at Carmilla, in an inversion of the scene. Samuel is abused by Carmilla, who speaks disdainfully of him and at one point makes him don a hat and dance for her pleasure – and it was the treatment of Samuel that reminded me of Jess Franco’s work.

licking

There isn’t much more to say about this – though the vampire can be temporarily killed, she will return and the idea is that this is a curse for the ages, I think. She is a little sloppy, getting a bowl of blood and pouring it down her naked torso rather than drinking it and then rubbing blood on her lips after the fact. The photography wasn’t great but there was at least a dreamlike quality to the affair. The version I watched is apparently the director’s cut but that didn’t stop it dragging in parts. However, it is definitely a curiosity. 3.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Sins of the Sire: Agripina's Firstborn – review

Author: Dan Klefstad

Release date: 2026

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Ever thought you were a oneling, only to discover you have a sibling? Now imagine you're a vampire who learns the one who created you sired another a century earlier, and never told you. This is Fiona's predicament.

The undead star of the novel uncovers this news while reading a manuscript by her late creator, Agripina. More disturbingly, these pages reveal that Fiona is subject to a rarely invoked clause in vampire law, Sins of the Sire, which allows her older sister to exact revenge on her for offenses committed by their mother.

During this time, Fiona learns that her former guardian, Daniel, has abandoned her daughter, Camilla, and murdered a new vampire she sired. This betrayal sets the stage for Fiona's mysterious elder sister to use Daniel and Camilla to lure Fiona to Mexico for what she expects will be the final confrontation, one she expects to lose.

Will Fiona find the allies she needs to defend herself? And could she gain an advantage from risky DNA experiments that might allow her to walk in daylight?

Sins of the Sire: Agripina's Firstborn, the much-anticipated sequel to Fiona's Guardians, immerses you in a world where loyalty shifts constantly, and family ties can be a deadly liability.

The review: I have previously reviewed the first book in this series and this perhaps focuses a tad more on the vampires than the first, though Daniel, previous mortal guardian to vampire Fiona, is also front and centre. He has killed a vampire – the newly turned progeny of Camilla – and abandoned Camilla for whom he was guardian. Both are capital crimes in vampire society. The blurb reveals the fact that Fiona’s sister (by turning) is looking to seek justice on her for the sins of their sire. The sin committed was turning the vampire, not naming her and abandoning her to fend for herself immediately after turning. In this series the vampire loses all mortal memories when they turn and naming offers them an identity.

The antagonist is wonderfully deranged. She is a penanggalan, a floating head and torso with hanging viscera, but this is by design not by turn – she has literally cut her own flesh away to carve herself into such a vampire. There is also a nice contrast between science and the supernatural. A bio-medical research company are involved in this volume. Aware of vampires they are looking to experiment on vampire DNA, proposing to use it for human facing cures and longevity as well as trying to alleviate the vampire reaction to sunlight (but in a particular big pharma way, where the cure is temporary and the vampire has to pay over and over again). It was interesting to discover that each vampire has exactly the same DNA as their sire – with the memory loss that occurs when they turn, this suggests that they are not the person they were. This juxtaposes against things such as the aware, self-carving Aztec knife – definitely a supernatural element.

The prose is strong, the book speeding along throughout. Definitely worth your time. 7.5 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? Ghost Nursing

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

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

the fetish

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

the ghostly kid

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

exorcism kit

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

the sisters

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

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Exhibition: Quite Shameless: Cultural Reflections on the Vampire

Illustration 1

I have been contacted about a new exhibition due to open 27th October 2026 at the University of Leeds’ Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery. Quite Shameless “features handwritten manuscripts and first editions of Gothic literature, but also looks to ancient folklore, science, medicine, theatre and contemporary cultural anxieties to piece together a picture of a truly immortal fiend.”

Why the title? “In a celebrated letter written after the publication of Dracula, Bram Stoker jokes, “Lord forgive me, I am now quite shameless!” This and other unique items from Leeds’ impressive holdings of Stoker correspondence and manuscripts pinpoint the zenith of the literary vampire. The author’s expansive fund of inspiration is seen in source material ranging from books on Hungary and Transylvania to Sabine Baring-Gould's 1865 Book of Were-Wolves, documenting canine teeth, pointed nails, transformations, wolves and eerie blue flames. Animal skulls from the University of Leeds School of Dentistry Museum show further sources for the vampire’s most distinctive attribute.”

Illustration 2

The exhibition also looks to other vampire works, has stage designs from Northern Ballet Theatre, “Playbills, photographs and scrapbooks from Hamilton Deane’s play”, It looks to the University’s collections of manuscripts to content regarding revenants and the “medieval fears of the dead walking again”. It also examines the medicalisation of the vampire as a creature used to “give disease a face, and {evidence} how those faces can frighten and exclude.”

Illustration 1: First edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker in its original yellow cloth binding with red lettering, 1897, London: Archibald Constable and Company.

Credit: University of Leeds Cultural Collections, BC Gen STO

Illustration 2: E.M. Lilien, illustration from Lieder des Ghetto by Morris Rosenfeld.
Berlin: S. Calvary & Co, 1903.
Credit: University of Leeds Cultural Collections, Post-1850 Additional A004

Back from Grimmfest 2026

Greetings from the other side of Grimmfest and I’ve had a fab four days of horror and there were, indeed, some vampire and vampire adjacent films to report back on.

First of all, of course, the festival opened with Horror of Dracula, which looked great in its 4K remaster, and it was brilliant to see on the big screen. The Blu-ray set has been delayed after Hammer discovered a printing error and so it being on was a big bonus.

Under Your Feet

The next film to mention was the Spanish film Under Your Feet, directed by Cristian Bernard. Single mom Isabella (Maribel Verdú) moves into an apartment with her kids, but all is not right. This is a witch orientated film but the three weird sisters feed on the mechanically extracted essence of children and trade with the parents for them, offering property (the apartment) or success in return. The essence offers them youth. Next to mention and vampire adjacent was the film Grind, directed by Ed Dougherty, Brea Grant and Chelsea Stardust. An anthology, it critiques late-stage capitalism. (which is famously vampiric) but in one specific section we meet social media content moderators who are chosen specifically because they’ll react to the content viscerally, which the corporation feeds on.

Motherwitch

One of the highlights of the festival, if not the highlight, was Cypriot folk-horror film Motherwitch, directed by Minos Papas, a film that also explored the historic colonisation and exploitation of Cyprus by the British. Artist Eleni (Margarita Zachariou) loses all three children in a freak accident and decides to bring them back. The medium is through paint, but paint that includes the use of blood and they return as kalikantzari, a creature that does appear in Bane’s Encyclopedia of the vampire. We have met them before (under the variant spelling kallikantzaros) in The Field Guide to Evil, though in that they were more goblin like. In this, however, they feel more revenant – though as violently mischievous as the goblin variety. This was certainly of genre interest, given the inclusion in Bane and the restless dead status, though they do not do anything particularly vampiric.

Ithaqua

Horror of Dracula was not the only Hammer film over the festival and the resurrected company’s new film Ithaqua, by Casey Walker, also showed. Ithaqua of the title, or the wind with teeth, is a Manitou, though the, mercifully brief, CGI for that at the end was poor and marred an otherwise well shot, fun film. However, the film also has wendigo – and these are of the turned human variety. They are drawn much like those in Ravenous being turned humans (though these barely pass) after eating human flesh. Like that, one mouthful consumed is enough to turn – though this has the influence of Ithaqua to thank for that – and they are essentially vampires within a Western winter setting.

The Whisper

The festival opened with a vampire film and ended with one (sort of, the last slot each day had two screenings to choose from, and so it was one of two ending films), The Whisper is a joint Uruguayan/Argentinian production directed by Gustavo Hernández. Lucia (Ana Clara Guanco Aguilera) flees her vampire father Victor (Luciano Cáceres), with her little brother Adrian (Marcelo Michinaux). These are born vampires, who turn when they die, and the intimation is that the curse follows the male line (with Lucia playing clean up for her father before they flee). Unfortunately, near the isolated house they move to (left to her by her mother) is a gang who make snuff movies and so she soon ends up on their radar. The whisper is the ability the vampire has to insinuate themselves into a human’s head and control them. They must kill those they prey on, or they turn into “abominations”, which are feral killing machines and sunlight rules hold. A solid vampire film, it is relentlessly dark, given the human trafficking/snuff storyline.

Grimmfest 2026

It is that time of year and I’m off to Grimmfest 2026. Whilst I’m gone, I will not be posting reviews, though I will check for comments occasionally. Normal service should resume 12th October and I will, of course, let you know about any new vampire or vampire adjacent films I see. The first film today is the new 4K remaster of Horror of Dracula and so I am really looking forward to seeing that, as you might guess.