In his essay, South African Vampires that he produced for The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire, Simon Bacon argues that Richard Stanley’s 1992 film Dust Devil is a vampire film. I’ll leave that for you to decide but the film, which has long been a favourite, certainly uses genre tropes in its running length.
Set in Namibia (with a brief moment in nearby South Africa), it was partly inspired by the story of a serial killer known as Nhadiep, aka Klaas Pieters alias Klaas Tekkies. He was a serial killer who was ascribed magical powers due to his ability (until the shoot out that killed him) to avoid capture. However, it is also rich with a folklore of its own. The film opens with a narration from the Sangoma Joe Niemand (John Matshikiza) and it is worth reproducing it.
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| John Matshikiza as Jo |
“Back in the first times, in the time of the red light; the desert wind - Soo-oop-wa - was a man like us. Until, by mischance, he grew wings and flew... like a bird. He became a hunter, and like a hawk, he flew to seek his prey; taking refuge in those far corners of the world where magic still lingers in the earth. But having once been a man, so does he still suffer the passions of a man. The people of the great Namib - me and my ancestors before me - we have another name for those violent winds that blow from nowhere. We call them, 'dust devils'.”
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| symbols |
So, Soo-oop-wa is the wind but also controls the weather, like a vampire, and the antagonist of the film, the Dust Devil (Robert John Burke), is forced to keep moving (hitching mostly) as that is how his ritual is performed. We see him picked up by a woman and they return to her remote house (her husband working away). They have sex but he kills her during it by snapping her neck. In the morning he has painted symbols across the walls in her blood, dismembered her, taken her fingers and then burns the house down. Later we hear that he takes those who have nothing to live for, that they are drawn to him. We saw this kind of behaviour with the feeding pattern of Eleanor in Byzantium, who was drawn to those who were ready to die.
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| Zakes Mokae as Ben Mukurob |
The main players of the film are drawn in during the night with both policeman Sgt Ben Mukurob (Zakes Mokae, Vampire in Brooklyn) and South African dissatisfied wife Wendy (Chelsea Field) receiving strange phone calls that seem to emanate from the house that the Dust Devil is in and we also see an owl associated with the scene – owls, of course, are sometimes included as a thing a vampire might turn into. The next day Wendy leaves her husband Mark (Rufus Swart), accusing him of sucking the life from her (which, obviously, carries a vampiric overtone in simile form), and heading over the border into Namibia. Mukurob is called into the murder case.
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| Wendy and the devil |
Mukurob visits Joe for advice around the pictograms and symbols drawn in the murdered woman’s house and is told they are magical symbols – but Ben is not a believer and so Joe warns him “My friend, you, you've got to stop thinking like a white man and start thinking like a man instead. Otherwise, you're going to be in big trouble with this.” Incidentally Joe works at a drive-in movie theatre and one of the films being shown is Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. Joe, through the length of the film, explains that the dust devil is a naghtloper and is seeking power through the murders, and suggests that he draws the weak and the faithless and sucks them dry, also suggesting he steals their souls. This is touching very close to him acting like an energy vampire, as is the idea that he is growing fat on the world’s pain.
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| shifting shape |
The naghtlopers are shapeshifters and we do see him with fangs and pointed ears and also another of his kind in a sort of anthropomorphic dog-like form. Mukurob gets case files with similar crimes going back to the early part of the twentieth century. Joe suggests that the dust devil can be defeated by rooting it to the spot by tricking him to step over a kierie stick, this then serves the part of a stake holding a vampire down or the use of things like Hawthorn and wild rose to trap a vampire. There is a warning that the naghtloper, if they die, will try to take a new host (and we do get instances of vampiric possession).
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| true form in the mirror |
This possession aspect also ties in to mirrors where the naghtloper can see its true form in the mirror – this being a twist on the genre’s mirror trope. Although he is drawn to Wendy because she has lost hope (he observes her almost slitting her own wrists) another aspect of him that she speaks to is his loneliness and he confesses, when she discovers that he is a killer, that he has stretched out their time together because of that very loneliness. Dust Devil is a fantastic film, and I don’t deny that a case can be built for it being a vampire film, but it carries tropes from the genre for sure.
The imdb page is here.
On DVD @ Amazon US
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK
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