It’s with great pleasure I welcome David Anwnn Jones to the blog. Whereas with other guest bloggers for this 20th anniversary celebration I have put a little forward of how I met the guest, with David he wrote something on that himself and so I’ll hand straight to him:
It is a great pleasure to be asked to write a post for Andy Boylan’s ‘Taliesin meets The Vampires’ twentieth anniversary year. I have long admired this vampire film expert’s writing with its wide knowledge of vampire lore and cinematics. In 2016, I convened the World Vampire Congress, Whitby where Andy delivered his fascinating talk on Stoker and vampire bat iconography. Since then, I have followed his blogs which spread an awareness of film vampires over a wide range of transnational environments, often remote from Hollywood. I have also enjoyed our extensive correspondence.
In his appreciation of Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s The Mermaid: Lake of the Dead (2018) from 9 Sept 2019, Andy writes:
Now mermaid is a misnomer here and it is what the title has been translated to from the Russian title Rusalka: Ozero myortvykh. The rusalka is from Slavic lore and is a form of restless dead. Zelenin (in Russian Folk Belief) suggests it is a suicide or murder victim who, in either case, was drowned. There is an entry in Bane’s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology that has it as a type of fae created when a child dies before baptism or an adolescent dies a virgin.
The foundation myth here is that of the malefic underwater female who lures handsome men beneath the surface to enjoy them sexually and then drains them of life. Andy certainly reads the Rusalka as an energy vampire. Bane goes on to write she’s a ‘vampiric fae’ and member of the Unseelie Court. Vladimir Propp and Linda Ivanits called the rusalka one of the ‘unclean dead’, a revenant. Thomas J. Garza in The Vampire in Slavic Cultures writes that the boundary between vampires and the rusalka as predatory outsider was porous in village lore. Such links reveal that the Rusalka is the oldest surviving vampire figure in cinema history in an extant film, predating F W Murnau’s Nosferatu by over a decade and Lugosi’s Dracula by 21 years.
The rusalka myth is perennially fascinating. galvanising directors and writers today. Podgaevskiy’s film is surrounded by other cinematic she-vampires of the deep: Petr Weigl and Václav Kaslik’s respective versions of Dvorak’s opera, 1963 and 77, Aleksandr Petrov’s animated Mermaid Rusalka 1996, Gary Whitson’s Destiny: Vampire Mermaid 1999, Sebastian Gutierrez’s She Creature 2001, François Rousillon’s Rusalka 2002 TV movie, Anna Melikyan’s Mermaid/ Rusalka 2007, Don E. Fauntleroy’s Bering Sea Beast / Beast of the Bering Sea 2013. Milan Todorovic’s Mamula /Nymph/ Dark Sea /Killer Mermaid 2014 and Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure, 2015. Nearer to the present, Perry Blackshear, Lona Fontane, Dale Thomas Cizmadia and Claudiu Mitcu’s have all made Rusalka films. Though the primary means of predation in these films is drowning, there is no shortage either of feeding, directly and by osmosis, strangulation, sharp fangs, blood-letting and sucking, and other vampiric depredation
I wish to make a bridge from these films, stretching back to the early dawn of Russian horror cinema. Vasili Goncharov’s foundational Rusalka film of 1910 is based on the play by Alexander Pushkin and stars Andrey Gromov as The Prince, Vasili Stepanov as The Miller and Aleksandra Goncharova as Natalya, the miller’s daughter and subsequently the Rusalka queen.
The film starts with Natalya, visibly longing for her lover, the Prince, who, when he arrives, throws her aside to marry a woman of royal blood. Distraught. Natalya drowns herself in the river. Yet, at the wedding feast, her ghost appears accusing the Prince, even within the nuptial bedroom. For eight years, the Prince obsesses over the dead working-class girl and finally rides back to mill, encountering her father who, driven mad with grief, imagines that he is now a raven. Led by Natalya, the rusalka spirits appear, amongst them a young girl who could be Natalya’s unbaptised daughter (unborn when her mother committed suicide). Natalya and the young girl and others lure the prince into the Dnieper river. His present wife arrives later only to find his clothes. On the riverbed, in what initially seems to be a Mélièsan tableau, Natalya, now queen of the Rusalka, caresses his corpse while other her maidens perform a swaying dance. For 1910, the same year as Frankenstein, the film, (which can be viewed here) is a considerable achievement, more indebted to the structure and rhythms of Pathé early films than Edison.
The cinematic Rusalka has survived perhaps because, whatever the seismic pull from Western horror cinema, it has proved difficult to Dracularize a Slavic female water-fiend. (Yet, the ‘feeding of the beast’ in Luc Besson’s Dracula (2025), whereby a feral mer-maiden rises to threaten horrified fairground visitors might hint that pressure is now being exerted in the opposite direction), The rusalka’s miraculous survival from a fractured and decimated Russian film industry also opens the gate for an awareness of the first female age of vampire films. She was originally part of a constellation of film’s female vampires, a whole distinctive age 1901-21: the Lilith of Lilith and Ly, Vera in Afterlife Wanderer (1915) the Pannochka of Goncharov’s Viy (1909) and the cat vampire of Nabeshima (1912), all notorious female monsters in their time but starring in films now lost. Yet their early dominance is still attested in surviving stills, scripts, reviews and posters.
I do not wish to be politically glib, but the story of a young woman mis-used by a prince and who subsequently commits suicide but takes her revenge from beyond the grave is not without strong resonance in 2026. Like any vivid revenant of the screen, even after 115 years and against all the odds, Aleksandra Goncharov’s vampiric mer-demon still rises towards us from the shadows of pre-Soviet cinema with a flickering intensity. She points at the feckless prince over his wedding feast. She follows her faithless lover right into his marital bedroom accusingly. She and her daughter stalk the shores of the Dnieper. They lure the royal philanderer into the river-depths. In her underwater apotheosis, she will instate her revenge and caress her man’s prone body, absorbing all his former strength. She will not lie down. Happy Anniversary ‘Taliesin meets the Vampires.’ Long may you run. The first age of vampire cinema was female.
David Annwn
David Annwn is author of Gothic Machine, Sex and the Gothic Magic Lantern and Gothic Effigy. He is also author of the first book on vampires in early film: Vampires on the Silent Screen, Re-envisaging the First Age of Cinematic Horror and essays in each volume of The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic series. A magic lanternist, David is a recognised authority on E-G Robertson’s Phantasmagoria show, being the first to locate its original site. Sir Christopher Frayling called David’s work ‘fascinating materials and connections: Vampire archaeology.’ Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney has called his writing: ‘wonderfully sympathetic and accurate.’
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