Honourable Mention: M (1951)

I looked at the classic Fritz Lang film M (1931), which is by no means a vampire film, because the film was produced whilst the crimes of Peter Kürten, the so called Vampire of Düsseldorf, were in the public mind – it seems likely that the killer of the film was partially based on Kürten, though it was denied. The film dialogue also mentions another serial killer who was dubbed vampire, Fritz Haarmann (not mentioned in this remake).

The original film was stunning and there was an English language version released. It was not, however, planned as a dual language project and Lang never acknowledged the English version – produced in 1932. The film is on the M Blu-Ray, is shortened (90 minutes against 110) and whilst it had some scenes reshot with new actors is mostly a dub. Interestingly Peter Lorre was dubbed by himself – making M (technically) his first English language film. The film immediately hit me with an inherent racism – the children’s song that opens the original shoot of the film about a murderous man in black, sung by the kids in response to the ongoing murders, becomes a song about a murderous “Chinaman” – racially othering the killer. This article is not about that film, however.

David Wayne as Harrow

M was remade and moved to America in 1951 and directed by Joseph Losey. Mostly a faithful rendition we get some differences – such as opening credit scenes where the murderer, Martin W. Harrow (David Wayne), is seen stalking several children. The whistling is still included but it is no longer the Hall of the Mountain King and this murderer takes a trophy – the children’s shoes (which is instrumental in the police learning his identity, the letter to the press is removed from the plot). Very different is the fact that he seems to simply kill them (like the original, we do not actually see a murder) – we get the dialogue that the victims “were neither violated nor outraged” – whereas the suggestion was that the murders in the original film were bloodier. When the local hoods searching for him find him with his last abduction, the M on his coat seems large and is drawn on with billiard chalk rather than transferred across, and he takes that child into the hiding place with him.

struggling for control

This version of M is absolutely competent as a piece of cinema but it lacks the underlying brilliance of the original. That said, David Wayne is very good as Harrow – showing a man conflicted, pushed to commit devastating crimes and struggling to control himself. A scene as he watches a toy trainset, with a young girl by him, is a superb acting scene by him and we see him at another point find a grounded bird, pick it up, be on the verge of destroying it and managing to control the impulse long enough to release it. This is worth seeing, but it can’t escape the shadow of its progenitor.

The imdb page is here.

Interesting Short: Wild Hunt

A short by Nancy Kilpatrick, this sits in the modern world (starting at the Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival) and follows L, a partially sighted fortune teller who truly head the Second Sight.

As we meet her, she is packing to leave the festival when Vlad, a vampire of the Ţepeş line, comes in and demands a reading. She has been expecting him, we discover, both because she was visited by one of his vampiric relatives early in the festival and because her Grandmother had predicted it.

Vlad tries to bite her but cannot penetrate her skin for mystical reasons, equally he discovers other sorts of penetration are closed to him. She knows that if she gives herself to him, she'll regain her sight but it is not the time – but her fate is to go with this, often brutal, vampire. As the story is from her viewpoint the story uses a brevity of physical description, which is stylistically interesting and handled with aplomb.

The vampires are playing a fratricidal/patricidal game and their society is mired in misogynistic and violent tradition. I loved the idea of luring a rival around sites associated with historical figures Peter Kürten & Fritz Haarmann simply as a way of mocking a supernatural vampire. This showed a twisted humour that really worked and could be expanded on – the story, however, is marvellously enclosed and eschews the need for follow up (whilst opening a vista that could also legitimately be explored).

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Honourable Mentions – M

The 1931 movie by Fritz Lang is barely an honourable mention as, whilst it is alleged that it was based on the crimes of Peter Kürten, the so called Vampire of Düsseldorf, Lang himself denied it. Of course, that denial may have had much to do with how fresh the crimes were in the minds of the population, Kürten was executed on 2 July 1931 and the film’s first release was 11th May of the same year.

Be that as it may, I felt it worthwhile mentioning the film as it is a stunning piece of cinema, starring Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, the killer in the movie. The film has a definite expressionist element to it but also marks one of the earliest film noir’s and psychological thrillers.

There is the trademark expressionist use of shadow in the film but also some stunning use of sound. The film is a very early talky, but you will find little to no soundtrack. What music appears within the film is actually incidental to the scene. The obvious theme to mention is The Hall of the Mountain King, as whistled by Beckert, that actually leads to his capture.

There is also some stunning use of visual, when the child Elsie Beckmann (Inge Landgut) is killed we see nothing of the crime but we see empty halls, an untouched dinner setting and her balloon, bought by Beckert, floating against pylons. The use of sound here, with the mother calling for her lost child, is wonderfully realised.

The film uses silence also, creating a sense of dissociative paranoia within the film. The film itself follows the attempts to find the child killer both by the police and by the criminal fraternity. Kürten himself was not solely a child killer and whilst we only hear, rather than see, Beckert’s crime of murder we hear nothing within the film that would lead us towards thinking of the character as a vampire styled murderer. Kürten, according to The Crime Library stated that his “chief satisfaction in killing was to catch the blood spurting from a victim's wounds in his mouth and swallow it.”

The film does mention another notorious ‘vampire’ murderer Fritz Haarmann – and we have previously mentioned the film based upon him, Tenderness of the Wolves - as well as cannibalistic murderer Karl Grossmann.

A stunning, disturbing film, not vampiric really but worth a mention on this blog. The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mentions: Tenderness of the Wolves

The main thrust of Taliesin Meets the Vampires is to look at vampires in popular culture, books, TV and cinema in the main. However, as well as the supernatural vampire and other media spin-offs, there have been real life killers who have displayed vampiric tendencies – in other words a lust for drinking (and sometimes bathing in) blood.

One of the most infamous was Fritz Haarmann, known in the press at the time as the Hanover Vampire. His crimes were sado-sexual and he was the murderer of at least 24 young men (or at least that is what found guilty of). For more information on the real-life Haarmann the Wikipedia page for him is here and a more sensationalist write up can be found here.

Haarmann has been the focus of, or mentioned in, several films, perhaps most famously the Peter Lorre vehicle, directed by Fritz Lang, M (1931), in which his case is certainly mentioned. He has also been mentioned in vampire vehicles, an allusion to him seemed to be made during the TV movie The Night Stalker. The “Tenderness of Wolves” was a 1973 German vehicle based on the case and directed by Ulli Lommel.

The film itself is somewhat of an oddity, probably due to how they portrayed Haarmann (or at least how I felt they did). Haarmann is played by Kurt Raab and there is a clash, I felt, between portraying a sexual monster and almost trying to make Haarmann sympathetic – in as much as he was almost portrayed as sad and pathetic.

The film’s timeframe is messed up. Whilst the historical blurb mentions 1925 the film itself seemed to be in another timeframe. A cast off remark about the Nazi period didn’t help, the earlier incarnation of the party was certainly around but there was no 'period', at the time of Haarmann’s crime, to refer to. EDIT 08/11/2015 - in fact the booklet with the Blu-Ray release mentions that the filmmakers transposed the story to just after the war due to budget constraints not allowing them to make a period piece.

Haarmann is, in the eyes of corrupt inspector Braun (Wolfgang Schenck), a petty criminal and black marketer with a long rap sheet. He was picked up for solicitation of a young boy at the beginning of the film and released under the condition that he worked for the police. I am not sure if that happened but it certainly helped his actions in the film, giving him an excuse to cruise the train station picking up vagrants.

Much of the film concentrates on the various scams indulged in by Haarmann and his partner Hans Grans (Jeff Roden), which included Haarmann posing as a priest in order to collect donations of clothes which they would then sell on the black market. Whilst there is a hint to a relationship between Grans and Haarmann, artistic license has been used, making Grans unsympathetic in his dealings with Haarmann and implicit in his capture. Grans (who is sometimes called Graf, depending on the source) was imprisoned in real life due to his involvement in the crimes.

Much of the horror of the case is hinted at. Haarmann’s ability to get meat for a nearby café – and to throw dinner parties – hints at cannibalism, that he butchered his victims, without being explicit. That is fine, in that there is only a suspicion that he did so in real life. As hinted as it might be, the concept is still stomach churning.

His interaction with his victims builds, visually, as the film goes along. We see him throttle one boy, bite his neck, strip him and then drag the corpse into the bedroom. Offering a cornucopia of sado-sexual concepts that are not, necessarily, shown to the audience. Reading about the real crimes, however, the visuals do seem mild – perhaps just as well.

We hear tell of a werewolf stalking the streets – and are reminded that as well as being accused of being a vampire, he was also labelled as a werewolf by the contemporary press. The only transformation we actually see is one of gender, when Haarmann wears drag. Whilst this is a queering moment within the narrative the idea that gender fluidity is associated with homicidal tendencies is, of course, unfortunate.

The conclusion of the film sees a more vicious attack, when the boy is still alive/conscious. This attack is during a sting operation and thus the boy survives. The impetus driving the criminal is shown here as he continues to lunge for his victim, even though he is held by the police. It suggests that he was driven to do what he did.

Raab does give an extraordinary, and in many respects understated, performance. One couldn’t help but wonder whether the decision to have Haarmann portrayed bald, as they did, was to draw a simile with Nosferatu - perhaps, at this point, I am reading too much into the visuals.

I mentioned that the film tries to develop a sympathy level, however do not get me wrong. The film never tries to make us relate to Haarmann but shows him in a sad light, abused by those he is closest to and driven to perverse impulses. The man himself, still comes across as repulsive and that is where the film fails as the pathetic character never gels with the repulsive character. There is some lovely atmosphere generated in the shots but the film does meander in an arty way without drawing the thriller aspects, which are necessary, to the fore. Interesting, flawed and an insight into a dark piece of criminology.

The imdb page is here.

The Night Stalker - review

Director: John Llewellyn Moxie

Release Date: 1972

Contains spoilers

Based on a, then, unpublished novel by Jeff Rice, “The Kolchak Tapes” released in 1973 as “The Night Stalker”, the film The Night Stalker was a made for TV movie written by Richard Matheson (author of I am Legend). The film would spawn a sequel, The Night Strangler in 1973 – for which I have written a bonus “Vamp or Not?” at the bottom of this review - and two series: Kolchak: The Night Stalker which ran between 1974 and 1975 and the ill fated Night Stalker, starring Stuart Townsend in 2005. The first series contained a vampire story in its run, the second, disappointingly, did not.

The story begins with Kolchak listening to a tape of the story we are about to see, a story that was buried by the authorities. We begin with the murder, in Los Vegas, of Cheryl Hughes and move to her autopsy where it is clear that something is odd. Kolchak’s editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) recalls Kolchak from his vacation to cover the story. Checking his sources Kolchak discovers that she had lost a lot of blood. Victims come in quick succession, one found in a sandpit, loss of blood again apparent and no footprints leading to her body. Then another murdered in her house as her roommate slept. All had marks on their necks.

Kolchak starts calling in favours. He speaks to Bernie Jenks (Ralph Meeker) of the FBI and asks him to look into other murders with similar modus operandi, he also asks him to check with mental hospitals to see if there has been a release of any one who thinks they’re Count Dracula. Bernie tells him of a special report being presented by a Dr Makurji (Larry Linville), a pathologist who has been flown in. Kolchak then discovers that a hospital has had its blood supplies stolen.

Makurji states that the bites are almost dog like and that all the blood seems to have been siphoned within a minute. Kolchak asks whether the killer drank the blood, much to the disgust of Police Chief Ed Masterson (Charles McGraw) and District Attorney Tom Paine (Kent Smith) but Makurji says that it is possible and begins to mention a case in the 1920s in Germany, before being cut off by the DA. The case that I believe this was likely referring to was the real life case of Fritz Haarmann (pictured), known as the Hanover Vampire due to his cannibalism and habit of biting victims on the neck. Haarmann was executed for his crimes in April 1925. Makurji tells them not to dismiss Kolchak’s theories but the DA makes it clear that nothing concerning vampires should be printed. He also, privately, threatens Kolchak off the story. We find out later that Kolchak has been fired in several major cities.

Another victim is killed, but this time there is a witness, the girl’s mother. During this scene Kolchak says, “Looks like Bela Lugosi has struck again.” Kolchak’s paper prints a sketch of the attacker. Up until now we have not seen the attacker, but with the next victim we see his eyes. This victim, Shelly Forbes, releases a Doberman from her car which the attacker kills with ease. She is not classed as a victim, however, as she simply goes missing – only Kolchak makes the connection.

Kolchak’s girlfriend, Gail Foster (Carol Lynley), is becoming worried, fearing it is really a vampire and gives Kolchak a book on the subject. Another hospital is raided for blood, this time the raider is caught red handed and fights his way out. Kolchak arrives in time to get pictures and see the man shot without apparent injury.

Another press conference is called and Bernie reveals that they have identified the man. He is Janos Skorzeny (Barry Atwater) and, according to Interpol and Scotland Yard, he is a millionaire born in 1899. Wherever he has been there have been mysterious deaths and he is an international fugitive. Kolchak asks how a seventy year old man could outrun a police car, survive being shot and bleed clear liquid from a head wound – suggesting he is a real vampire, but is shouted down by the DA.

The police find Skorzeny, the attempted arrest is witnessed by Kolchak, but Skorzeny escapes, surviving several shootings and killing at least two officers. Kolchak has an idea of how the authorities might stop him, so long as they give him the exclusive story. They have to hunt him as a vampire rather than a fugitive and all the police should be issued crosses and stakes. The DA agrees to his suggestion with the caveat that, should he be wrong, Kolchak leave town within twelve hours. In the meantime one of the reporter’s sources has come through and discovered where Skorzeny lives.

Kolchak goes to the house, with a delay in telling the police the location. He finds blood in the fridge, broken mirrors and a dirt filled coffin upstairs. He also finds Shelly Forbes, tied to a bed and hooked to blood. This was slightly confusing to me as Kolchak intimates that she is being used as a blood farm, for want of a better term, but the vampire seems to hook new blood to her when he arrives home. (Edit, perhaps the vampire needs blood fresh from a victim and he is using the hospital blood to keep her alive and then draining straight from her?) He discovers the reporter and Kolchak uses a cross to try to escape but, eventually, falls and drops the cross. The vampire leaps on him, trying to bite him. Bernie rushes in and pulls the vampire away. A big fight occurs which ends when Kolchak pulls a curtain.

The vampire retreats from the sun and is herded by Kolchak, with his cross, until he is able to stake the vampire – just as the police come in. As a result his story is buried and he is ordered to leave town or he will be arrested for murder.

We cut back to Kolchak in his motel room, his tape still playing as he notes that Skorzeny, and all his victims, were quickly cremated, plus the evidence was buried.

The film is great, and McGavin is fantastic as the wise-cracking, overly passionate reporter. He really comes across as irritating and yet someone you’d want on the side of the truth. Given the way he is played it is not hard to imagine that he would have every authority figure in the city against him. The interaction between him and Vincenzo is brilliantly done, the editor dismayed to the point of explosive anger at the stories Kolchak is producing. That said, I feel that the Kolchak character developed over the other instalments and this is perhaps, with hindsight, Kolchak as his weakest as a character.

The point of view of the reporter made, for the time, a refreshing angle. It is an intelligent story that cleverly looks at what the reaction would be should a murderer really be a vampire. It seems clear to me that such an event would really be buried by the authorities for "our own good" and there really would be a Kolchak trying to reveal the truth. I do wonder, however, if Kolchak wants the truth for himself or for the greater good, it is clear that he believes the story will get him back on a major New York paper. That cynicism is washed away when he puts himself on the line to defeat the vampire, however.

The vampire himself seems an interesting character but we never see that much of him, this is all from Kolchak’s point of view. What we learn is through observation and second-hand anecdotes such as the car seller who said that he would not take the asking price for a car. He is also cool as a cucumber, despatching Shelly Forbes’ dog without breaking a sweat (with moments of explosive violence when cornered). To a degree I would have liked to find out a little more about this vampire, but the Kolchak point of view was so good that it doesn’t seem to matter as you watch the movie. I do like the way that, despite standard fangs, the neck wounds on the victims are full teeth sets.

Looking at the film now it is clearly very 1970s in style and feel, but that actually adds to its charm.

I’ll happily give this 7.5 out of 10.

Exclamation Mark has also reviewed this film, and his thoughts can be found here. Mark, in his personal observations notes that, despite being an ace reporter, Kolchak seems unable to find Gail who is run out of town separately to him. I have to say that it is something that struck me also. Further I have to wonder what happened to his new girl in Seattle, in the Night Strangler, after she left town with him and Vincenzo at the end of the movie, she certainly wasn’t in the subsequent series.

The imdb page is here.

Bonus Vamp or Not? The Night Strangler

The sequel sees Kolchak in Seattle, where Vincenzo is now editor of a paper. The editor gives him a job and puts him onto a murder case.

Again things are strange. The victims are strangled, a needle mark is found in the base of the skull and a small amount of blood removed. As Kolchak investigates, and as more victims appear, he discovers that there have been 6 murdered women, with the same MO, every 21 years since 1889.

An eyewitness describes a corpse like face and rotting flesh is found on the ligature marks. The killer must be incredibly strong as the necks are broken, the bones crushed.

Much like the first film Kolchak fights disbelieving police as well as a disbelieving publisher (played by John Carradine).

The killer, it turns out, is an alchemist named Dr Richard Malcolm (Richard Anderson). He has discovered an elixir of life, that also bestows massive strength, but its effects must be replenished every twenty one years. The ingredients are many but it must contain some blood (six victims worth) drawn from a woman’s brain within seven seconds of her death.

If the elixir is not taken within the prescribed time the user will massively age and die, in fact this is why rotting flesh is found on the early victims as Malcolm is rotting from the moment the previous elixir runs out of power and the more doses he takes the more restored he becomes.

It is very tempting, given the use of blood and the preternatural strength of the elixir user, to say vampire. However I have shied away from this as blood is only one small ingredient of the alchemical formula and it is only needed every 21 years. Also, there is a distinct lack of other vampire like motifs in the film, save rapid aging on death – except, of course, in this case it is the rapid aging causing death not the other way around. This, however, is a great film with a script that I would say is probably tighter than its predecessor.

The imdb page for Night Strangler is here.