Use of Tropes: The Dark Below

Also known as The Creature Below, this 2016 film was directed by Stewart Sparke and was either extremely brave or unwise in its tackling of a giant tentacled creature that was akin to a Lovecraftian horror. My friend Leila contacted me about it and said it was a “Blood drinking Cthulhu monster” and the film “certainly (had) vamp tropes”. I can’t disagree, whilst it doesn’t necessarily fully veer into that wider vampiric arena it has tropes on display.

opening scene

After the appearance of a blood-spattered woman and something crawling around (a moment from the film’s denouement), we cut to Olive Crown (Anna Dawson) who is on a video call to Dr Fletcher (Zacharee Lee, Young Dracula). She lays out her credentials – she is a marine biologist who was the only civilian on a US military project to develop an exo-suit. She knows that Fletcher is honing the tech and she wants in.

the dive

We next see her in an exo-suit as she is lowered deep into an oceanic rift. She gets as far as the tests suggest are safe but orders the operator Dara (Johnny Vivash) to lower her further – towards the source of unusual seismic readings they’ve had. Something is down there, something with tentacles that wrap around her… She awakes on the surface spitting water (how they were able to get her up from so deep, despite pressure and a ruined suit and without a decompression chamber isn’t explored). She can’t remember what happened.

the egg

Fletcher isn’t happy with the destruction of a multi-million-pound piece of equipment and sacks her (like all the characters, he is a 2-dimensional construct – bad boss and angry man). Olive goes to check the helmet and it has an oily residue on it. The breathing apparatus is ruptured. Inside she finds more residue and something round and organic. She hides it in a tool box and steals it as she leaves.

gunk in eyes

She gets home but hasn’t told boyfriend Matt (Daniel Thrace) that she was back (or that she almost died and was fired). Nevertheless, he is delighted to see her but has to work (I think in a hospital). She sets up her lab in the basement, discovering that the organic something is an egg and it contains something that is distressed by light. The next day the egg has hatched and something with tentacles is crawling around. It spits black gunk (it seems more than simple ink) into her eyes and she has a flashback to the accident. When she comes around, she captures the creature and puts it in a tank but Matt is home and she has lost time. On the way to a restaurant, she is bothered by headlights at full beam and once there she eats ravenously but is then sick.

creature attacks

So, she becomes obsessed with it – one might say she is a thrall to the creature. She confides in Dara and he suggests it looks malnourished and she needs to find what feed it eats. She tries all sorts but nothing is right, until she purposefully cuts her finger and it reacts and she gives it her blood. This is the accidental feeding blood to the vampire infant trope, followed with her actually nursing it. It won’t drink blood from a heart bought at the butchers (presumably not fresh enough) and Dara has spilled the beans to Fletcher, and he wants the creature. The need to feed it leads to murder, sacrificing people to the creature for it to kill and feed from. We see, often, that her skin looks sallow and there are black rings round her eyes – this felt like a vampire trope. When passing one meal to it her eyes swim into black, suggesting the connection between her and it and the control it holds.

creature

The tropes then are the drinking blood (one wonders why a creature from the bottom of the ocean would rely on mammalian blood, but, hey), the look of sallow skin and blackened eyes that fit the pale vampire trope and finally the fact that she is in thrall to the creature (vampire). For that last point it is worth noting that she thinks herself more important to it (as a high priestess, almost) than she actually is and she is actually rather disposable. She does taste blood herself, at one point, but the film doesn’t suggest she needs it. The film itself isn’t the greatest but this will have had a lot to do with creating a feature that required loads of effects (bodies in the basement do look pretty dope though) and leaps of faith in the plot are required in order to vault over the all too apparent holes.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? Flesh Contagium

I would be interested to see the development timeline for this 2020 Italian flick, which was directed by Lorenzo Lepori, as the concept has a world devastated by a flu virus and the vaccine causing mutation amongst humans. It would be interesting to know whether development started pre-covid pandemic and how much the ensuing world events influenced the production. Certainly, the tiny cast can indicate both shooting within lockdown and/or the tiny budget that comes with the film. It is a short one, so doesn’t outstay its welcome, but has some strong themes, including rape. In fact, it reminded me somewhat of Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series in that regard – though, of course, fifty years have passed in the intervening period. The film was brought to my attention by Leila as a potential ‘Vamp’ some time ago but it has only recently been viewed.

Executors

It starts with scenes of Udolfo (Pio Bisanti) and Vera (Simona Vannelli) sat playing piano together and skinny dipping in a pond – drawing a sketch of a couple in love. However, in this idyllic scene is a discordant moment when we see a human skull within undergrowth near the pond. Later we will get an explaining intertitle about the world we are in, the pandemic, vaccine and the Government sending out Executors to deal with the mutated threat, but for now...

murdered for food

...From a small building we hear gunfire. Helmut (Lorenzo Lepori) comes out of the building, brandishing a gun, seeming to drag Ornella (Shiri Binder) along with him (though it later becomes clear they are together, after a fashion). In the small stone structure is the person he has shot and a woman who clings to him – this is a robbery, and Helmut has stolen cans of food from them. The gunfire has attracted three men wearing yellow hazmat suits, their faces obscured by gas masks and carrying weapons (a shotgun and a machete for starters). They go into the structure and finish the murder – they are, we assume, Executioners.

Vera mutated

After a run in with the Executioners (and forcing Ornella to fight, using a machete and then, having not killed her target, picking up a shotgun to save Helmut), they reach a building and break in. Helmut leaves Ornella by a door as he explores the place. He finds a room with picked clean bones and a woman, she turns and we see her face is an unnatural grey (and also that it is Vera from the start). She stabs Helmut and then bites at his neck. Elsewhere Udolfo grabs Ornella, drags her to a room, chains her ankle and then rapes her. We later hear that he is the third man to rape her, the second was Helmut and she is pregnant.

Ornella and Udolfo

He explains their situation. The vaccine has mutated Vera and she now has a hunger for blood and flesh. Whilst she acts strangely, she is still capable of speech and seems sentient. Later we see him give her a blood bag and she complains that it is his blood and particularly wants Ornella’s blood. For Ornella’s part, after being raped a couple of times by Udolfo, she seems to offer herself willingly, even developing feelings for him – she helps him hunt prey (for blood) and even binds a wound whilst he is unconscious. Vera seems jealous of Ornella.

the creature in the shoulder

He also explains that Vera has procreated with him by biting his shoulder. This has caused a thing to grow on his back, mostly eyes and sharp teethed-mouth, though it is also developing claws. He feeds it blood and keeps it dormant through drugs injected into it. Ornella calls it a tumour but he believes it to be a separate creature growing upon him and eventually it does separate from his body. It is regarding both Vera’s feeding habits and the shoulder creature that we must look at whether this is ‘Vamp or Not?’.

drinking blood

With regards Vera, she has been changed by the vaccine and despite a look that might be a low budget zombie, she uses tools (the knife), can speak, reason, feel emotions and procreate (not by turning someone but by using them as an incubator for her spawn – a thing she seems to genuinely care for). Whilst she will eat flesh, it seems to be blood that is the main draw – the same for her offspring. These are definitely vampiric and, one would argue, ‘Vamp’. The film itself is low budget splatter with themes in it that will be triggering to some.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Reign of Chaos – review

Director: Rebecca Matthews

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

Give director Rebecca Matthews her due, she and her partners in crime are pumping out the low budget films (Matthews has, at time of writing, 51 producer credits since 2016 and 15 director credits since 2019). I have looked at a couple of them before… Hellkat was flawed but was also interesting, and Bats was pretty poor. I’ve also watched a couple of flicks that weren’t suitable subject-wise for this blog. I get that they are low budget affairs (and the filmmakers have done much more than I could ever do) but in Reign of Chaos we have a new low to come out of Proportion Productions.

Mark Sears as Chaos

We start with a narration talking about Chaos (Mark Sears) wanting to take over the world and releasing a plague upon mankind… Ok this wraps everything into Greek myth and suggests that he was opposed by the Gods (the descendants of Nike are the ones who can stop him). Its just… what’s he been doing for a few thousand years? That’s never answered.

a joiner

So the Guardian, Rhodri (Peter Cosgrove), leads three sisters into battle against Chaos and they get their arses kicked. Only one sister, Alina (Rita Di Tuccio), survives. So it’s off to find more girls then… Which he does in the form of Lindsay (Georgia Wood) and Nicole (Rebecca Finch). Now, bear in mind the ‘plague’ is essentially a zombie thing with those bitten becoming Joiners (now it might have been more interesting if the bite made them experts in woodwork but I assume it is because they’ve joined Chaos).

Peter Cosgrove as Rhodri

So Rhodri finds Lindsay who’s just fighting a guy who offered to trade food for sex in an underpass. The fact that she then goes off with Rhodri essentially without question and leaves the food is hinkey to say the least. As for Nicole, we first see her scavenging food and losing it to a desperate woman – mostly because she gets a psychic flash, when they touch, showing how the woman will die. Following that she goes home to suburbia, where electricity is apparently still on and dad (Mike Kelson) is ill (she gets a flash of his death) and mum (Kate Milner Evans) is worried about starving (but not about the fact that the house hasn’t been barricaded).

Rhodri and Nicole

She is found by Rhodri during her next trip looking for food, who helps her out with a Joiner. We don’t see the killing stab hit home – but it looks to be around the heart. Later he mentions always taking a head or heart shot with Joiners. She is a little more resistant than Lindsay was to the idea of going off with him, but not that resistant and soon follows him to a hotel – for the purpose of making a brew it would seem. Then she takes him home to meet mum – having discovered she is adopted and mum always knew she was special… Off then to meet the other two Nike descendants and enter the world’s worst training montage. So why is this a vampire film?

the heroes

Well, the Joiners are a bit zompire, I guess, due to the fact that heart shots kill – though they are mostly standard, mindless zombies. Rather, it is because of chaos. He bathes in the blood of the Nike descendants and from doing so is gaining power (and will soon ascend to be a God). This makes him a vampiric entity of some sort. He also suggests that his minions will drink the blood and, whilst the Joiners are minions, I think he meant his sentient sons.

catsuits of the apocalypse

So the post-apocalyptic world doesn’t seem too post-apocalyptic (we do get a scene of buildings ablaze in London but I suspect they are burning through embarrassment at the bad fire cgi). Apparently, as nothing looks too grimy, the heroes still have access to washing machines, the Joiners must repel dirt off their clothes and Rhodri has a stock of latex catsuits that he can fit to random women he meets. The fight choreography is weak, the acting not great – melodrama is the order of the day, with Rhodri channelling his best pirate into his accent, and there is a supporting role that is one of the most wooden performances I’ve seen for some time. Still, there was an effort made, at least. 1.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? No One Gets Out Alive

I was put onto this 2021, Santiago Menghini directed film by Simon who suggested it was ripe for a ‘Vamp or Not?’ Based on an Adam Nevill novel, the story is transplanted from the West Midlands of England to continental USA and looks at illegal immigration within its running time.

The first scenes are archival footage from Mexico in 1963 and the archaeological expedition led by Professor Wells, we see varying scenes and an ornate stone box being lifted out of an underground chamber. Before the film moves to primary character Ambar (Cristina Rodlo) it sees another young woman (Joana Borja) sat in a house phoning home – she made a mistake and has been having bad dreams. Strange things happen, the TV picture seems to warp, footprints appear on the floor, the electric fails and in another room the box comes into view. Off screen we hear her scream, we see pinned butterflies and moths on display and one comes back to life. The lights come back on…

Kinsi and Ambar

Ambar arrives in the USA in the back of a truck, smuggled in by human traffickers. She, we learn later, spent time and money looking after her very ill mother and now, with the little she has left, she has travelled to the US to make a new life. The film quickly establishes her getting a job in a sweatshop and developing a friendship with Kinsi (Moronke Akinola). She has to get a new home when the hotel she is using asks for ID and finds her way to a house run by Red (Marc Menchaca, The Outsider). He has just inherited the house (it is the one from the prologue) and only women are being given rooms – though there is only one other resident currently. Because of her status (from south, as it is put, and paid cash) he asks for a month’s rent in advance.

Cristina Rodlo as Ambar

Ambar is after a fake ID and Kinsi knows a guy. Unfortunately, the Texas ID she wants has suddenly jumped to $3000 – though other State IDs could be got for $1000. We eventually discover that the reason she wants a Texas ID is because she had contacted a distant family member, Beto (David Barrera), who had said he couldn’t help with a job interview because she wasn’t a US citizen and so she lied and said that she had been born in Texas. Ambar is suffering from vivid bad dreams (often involving her dying mother and featuring the box) and thinks she sees/hears people in the house. She sees a man, Becker (David Figlioli, Angel) and confronts Red about his presence but Red explains Becker is his brother and lives in the private rooms with him.

Marc Menchaca as Red

Eventually Ambar wins the award for the most naïve character when Kinsi offers to loan her the difference for the ID, hands over all her cash and Kinsi absconds, quitting her job. Ambar gets fired and has no money and the house is oppressive… So, what we know – that is pertinent to the ‘Vamp or Not?’ – is that Red and Becker are Wells’ children. They came home when Becker’s treatments had become too expensive (its not clear what the treatments were for). The box has cured Becker and he is as obsessed with it as his father was – Red is complicit out of love but there is also an apparent tension with Becker, who has told him he only needs ‘a few more hits’ the language being deliberately that of addiction, and Red trying to help Ambar despite that being against his brother’s design. The ghosts we see in the house are the victims of the box – much like the ghosts in Oculus are victims of the mirror.

emerging from the box

The box would seem to be a conduit – with a front face removed we see two views inside it, one where it stretches off forever and allows a creature to appear passing through the box to our place, and one where it is a normal box with the skeleton of an infant in it (interestingly, when we see this there is a butterfly at the rib cage, remembering that some vampire myth has the butterfly as the vampire’s soul). The box (or the creature probably more accurately) has been invading dreams and when its victim is left (on a stone altar) it comes out and the victim sees the loved one they have often been dreaming of – there is a moment of consent needed, consent to the loved one (and staying with them) consents to the attack. The creature itself looks absolutely fabulous and I wish we saw more of it.

the creature

The vampiric aspect comes in with the creature seemingly taking the head of the victim (there is a set of teeth under the fleshy hood it lifts the victim into) and through this, apparently, they steal their energy and soul, if the ghosts are anything to go by. It can then use that energy to renew life (the butterfly at the head of the film) or heal its human ‘priest’ – we see a snapped leg move back to shape and heal. I say priest as there seems to be a ritual aspect to this, the victims in robes with a green dust coating their flesh and their face painted with streaks of blood. There is a more direct association of butterflies, with them gathering near the box, and one wonders whether the filmmakers wanted to suggest a definitive connection to the soul? I think the vampire/butterfly connection is coincidental to this motif but this entity appears to be vampiric.

The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? Bingo Hell

This 2021 release was directed by Gigi Saul Guerrero for the Welcome to Blumhouse movie run that the production company were doing in association with Amazon. I watched it as the trailer looked fun, not expecting to do a ‘Vamp or Not?’ – and that aspect is a bit blink and miss at that.

The film is set in Oak Springs a rundown neighbourhood where businesses are selling up and people moving out. The hipsters are moving in and it is, of course, a cautionary tale about gentrification on one level – for a traditionally vampiric take on this try Vampires vs The Bronx. Before we meet the primary characters, we see Mario (David Jensen) dancing round his living room, he has a case full of money and tells a picture of his wife (who we discover later had recently lost her battle with cancer) that he loves her. He starts stuffing his face and we see it seems to be bingo balls he eats, there is plenty of green slime and he falls down dead.

Adriana Barraza as Lupita

We meet Lupita (Adriana Barraza, the Strain), a formidable, cigar smoking woman and she becomes our primary protagonist through the film. Through her we meet her friends; mechanic Clarence (Grover Coulson), Morris (Clayton Landey), Yolanda (Bertila Damas) and Dolores (L. Scott Caldwell). Lupita is devastated by the decline in the neighbourhood – a place we learn that she and Dolores had cleaned up of drug dealers and gangs years before. For the moment, however, they have bingo.

the vanity plate

When Lupita arrives at the Hall to set up she notices a fancy car with the vanity plate “B1G W1NN3R” but it quickly drives off. She steps on something and discovers a $100 dollar bill covered in green slime – that goes in her bag but she subsequently puts it in the Hall’s donation box. Mario, who runs the bingo hall, is missing of course – his keys left in the door. Lupita does the bingo calling and, once the game is won, she announces that the donation box funds will go to Yolanda to help with keeping her hair salon running. Before they are done the lights go out – as though Mario forgot to pay the electric.

Let's play bingo

The next day there are fliers for Mr Big$ Bingo. The hall has been taken over by Mr Big (Richard Brake) and Lupita is less than happy. Inside it is glossy, all flashing lights and flashier owner and its offering big prizes. There is a free play voucher but each player gets a dollar sign hand stamp (which seems to infect the hand). The first prize given is £10,000 and, over the next couple of nights that increases ever upwards. Winners die – they die horribly whilst they believe they’re happy. So, why the ‘Vamp or Not?’

surveying his kingdom

Well it centres on Mr Big – at best guess he seems to be some form of devil or demon (we’re never told) and he is after souls but, importantly, he states that he seeks “All the desperate souls… We feed off them.” Later he reiterates that, after manipulating the system so desperate souls need him, “…we feed off ‘em”. It is only two lines but important enough to repeat and this creature – whatever he is – feeds on souls and that makes him vampiric.

bleeding green slime

Interestingly, the money he gives seems to melt into green slime after a while and he also seems to bleed said slime. He is connected to the money and, therefore, when a whole bunch of it is burnt it actually seems to cause him pain, causing him to whimper and protest the destruction of the money. It is as though they are connected, somehow it is his essence – and we can see a similar situation in Dracula, where Harker cuts at the Count, catches his coat and he seems to bleed money: “the trenchant blade had shorn through his coat, making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank notes and a stream of gold fell out.” Coincidental, I’m sure, but an interesting intertextual connection nonetheless.

L. Scott Caldwell as Dolores

The film itself was fun and I wasn’t bored for the running length – this was driven by the powerhouse characters of Lupita and Dolores, especially the former but also helped in great part by Richard Brake’s suitably OTT performance as Mr Big. However, a fun film isn’t automatically a great film nor one worth repeat watches, and the jury is out on that one. 

shotgun Lupita

In honesty, it actually felt to me that the film wanted to emulate some of Rob Zombie’s oeuvre but that might also have been because of Brake’s presence, as Zombie has used his presence and acting chops to great effect a couple of times. Unfortunately, this lacked a certain je ne sais quoi that would have pushed it into that arena of genre film but enjoyable enough nonetheless and, with the consumption of desperate souls, certainly vampiric.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Revisited: Terrified – review

Director: Demián Rugna

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

This Argentinean film was looked at by me a couple of years ago as a Vamp or Not? under its Spanish title Aterrados. Be warned that the link to the previous article will lead to full spoilers as I explore whether the film has a vampire element – suffice it to say, for this review, that there very much is both vampiric beings and the restless dead involved. However, with the UK Blu-Ray release upon us I thought it was a good time to revisit the film as a review (just to note that the stills are from the previous review and not illustrative of the Blu-Ray’s print).

the restless child

This is part a psychic investigation film, which then throws several elements into the fray with a sort of haunting element, a restless dead element (with a child corpse that just will not stay in his grave), interdimensional entities and a dose of body horror element at the end of the film. The latter was really interesting and we were beginning to verge on Clive Barker territory (as I mention in the previous article). Perhaps the shame is that such a direction wasn’t exploited but I suspect that was as much budgetary restraints as anything, with the film offering a few moments of body horror but sparing with that use.

Elvira Onetto as Albreck

The film has a genuinely creepy edge, although because it is an investigation (to a degree, the paranormal investigators are fairly certain in and of themselves as to what they’ll find) that a second watch isn’t as captivating as the first but it is still worthwhile. The film is relatively short (at 85 minutes) and there was certainly scope for the film to have been longer and not outstay its welcome. The acting is competent throughout, but the characters could have been fleshed out much more – two of the three paranormal investigators are absolutely paper-thin – however, even without well drawn characters for the most part, the atmosphere is maintained well.

brutal opening

Less exciting was the actual Blu-Ray package. The film is there in a nice print, both in original Spanish and English dub. The English subtitles are SDH – whilst I applaud and support including SDH subs to make the film more accessible for the Deaf and hard of hearing, it should not be beyond wit and wisdom to also include standard subtitles for those who don’t need to be told when (for example) ominous music comes on – load both types onto the disc. There are absolutely no other extras and this is a shame as this is a film that is begging for a director’s commentary to explore his thinking.

Nevertheless, the film is the main event and this is still a very worthwhile horror film and one that certainly falls in the vampire realm – just not your standard Hollywood undead. 7 out of 10 is for the film.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? Aterrados

Aterrados (or Terrified) was a 2018 film hailing from Argentina and directed by Demián Rugna. The film takes a haunted house (or houses) premise and does some interesting things with it. There is an argument to be had that it could have gone further, that as it shifted vision from haunting to something else it might have flipped itself into Clive barker territory (more) or even a Lovecraftian territory.

It was mentioned to me by Leila as she had been told about it and it was suggested that there was a blood element (which there is) but is that blood element enough to draw it into the vampire genre? Let’s see.

It starts with Clara (Natalia Señorales) at her sink, she thinks he can hear something gurgling (it sounds like to us) in the pipes. Later when her partner Juan (Agustín Rittano) gets home he talks about this and that (including the mysterious survival of a dog he ran over). He realises there is no dinner cooking and asks if she changed her mind. She replies she couldn’t cook as she heard voices in the kitchen who said they were going to kill her.

killed by the invisible

They go to bed and Juan awakens with Clara not in the bed. He doesn’t really comment on that as he can hear banging and assumes it is his neighbour Walter (Demián Salomón). He bangs on the wall but the noise doesn’t stop and eventually he goes to the neighbour’s house and starts pressing the intercom to no avail. He returns home and realises that the banging is not coming from Walter’s but the bathroom, where water is running. He goes in and sees Clara floating over the bath being thrown wall to wall, blood everywhere and she likely dead…

Elvira Onetto as Albreck

It’s a great opening and sets the scene. Juan is, of course, arrested, but he is approached by three investigators (in the hospital or jail he is in); Jano Mario (Norberto Gonzalo), Mora Albreck (Elvira Onetto) and Rosentock (George L. Lewis). They believe him innocent, show him a picture of a similar occurrence in America and then our story goes back in time to look at events centred on Walter. As we meet him he is at work, scared and exhausted and being given the run around by Albreck’s secretary who asks him to call back the next day.

its under the bed

I won’t point by point the plot but will cover some salient parts. Walter is being haunted by a being who, apparently, lives under his bed. Indeed we see him look under the bed, nothing being there, and then as he lies back down the viewer sees the humanoid figure. When refused by Albreck’s secretary again, and told he needs proof, he buys a camera with night vision and actually captures the entity on film. The encounter leaves him screaming in agony…

moments before

The next day a young boy runs into his yard to retrieve his ball. Whilst there he drinks from an external faucet. Walter shouts, from behind blinds, for the boy to leave. He backs away into the path of a bus. Flipping forward, we get a brief glimpse of people returning from the boy's funeral and then his mother, Alicia (Julieta Vallina), hears something outside the house. There are small muddy handprints and footprints. Alicia had a relationship with a cop named Funes (Maximiliano Ghione). He is called by the patrol who attended the house and he calls retired forensics expert Jano. In the dinning room, sat statue like is the rotting corpse of Alicia’s son – the cops swear that they saw it move.

the restless dead

The boy has ripped fingers, where he has scratched at coffin and earth, and Jano recognises what has happened – as a coroner he has witnessed restless corpses before. He arranges for Funes to cover up the event (suggesting Alicia will be locked up as mad) and rebury the corpse. To prevent it walking again Jano suggests concrete – it would have been neat is he had suggested staking the corpse to prevent movement but the idea is the same, prevent the corpse from being restless.

Jano and Funes

So we have had something reminiscent of night time visitations by shadowy persons (Walter’s story) and a restless corpse. The investigators set up shop in the three houses (with Funes). Their hypothesis is that there are two worlds sharing one space and the entities from the other world can cross over through the medium of water and have nested in the three houses. They can use our bodies and this idea of an other-dimensional (or alien) entity brought Lovecraft’s the Shunned House partly to mind.

These beings like blood

What about blood though? Rosentock has a knife penetrate his hand and pin it to the bottom of a kitchen cupboard. He and Funes can hear something slurping and the blood is being sucked up into the cupboard. Rosenstock tells him to clean every trace of blood up and later it is said that “These beings like blood”. The slurping suggests that it is being consumed and the connection is explicit. Reading between the lines, the little boy walked backwards into the bus’ path after consuming water (the medium the entities pass through) and presumably it is they who reanimate his restless corpse as a host. That would make a sense of the restless dead (in this worldview) and it is the entities themselves who like to drink blood. They also like to torture those they take, apparently, and a push through to something out of Clive Barker might have been a natural step as we see a few moment of body horror as the torture is mentioned.

I think this is enough to say they are vampiric beings.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon US

On Demand @ Shudder via Amazon UK

Ghoul – Season 1 – review

Director: Patrick Graham

First aired: 2018

Contains spoilers

This is an Indian mini-series, made for Netflix and combines a dystopian future with the supernatural and – if we are going to be honest – a large dollop of the Thing (1982) and does so with a massive amount of style. The horror (and gore) building through the three episodes until it crescendos.

First thing, of course, is I am going to have to tackle the fact that it is based on a version of the Arabian Ghoul before someone comments and says “it’s a ghoul not a vampire”. The fact is the two creatures have been closely linked for quite some time. The ghoul as a creature from Arabic myth entered into Western consciousness as it was mentioned several times in the Arabian Nights, as translated into French by Antoine Galland in the 18th Century. The story of most interest is The History of Sidi Nu’uman, which tells of a man suspicious because his new bride never seems to eat. Long story short he follows her to a cemetery and witnesses her indulging in eating the dead with the other ghouls.

fanged teeth

Cut forward to 1821 and E.T.A. Hoffmann published a story entitled Vampirismus as part of his Die Serapions-Brüder. There is every chance that the story title was added by an editor as the story is essentially a reworking, into a modern Western setting, of The History of Sidi Nu’uman. Jump forward a century and Dudley Wright adds the same story into his reference book Vampires and Vampirism and Summers conflates ghouls and vampires in The vampire, His Kith and Kin (1928). Ghouls were used in the work of HP Lovecraft and his ghoul story Pickman’s Model (1927) was reworked by Neil Gaiman, with a vampiric twist, in his film A Short Film About John Bolton.

the squad

In this case we start with a man cutting into his own flesh so that he can gather his own blood to paint out a glyph, a blood ritual that will summon the ghoul – we’ll come back to this. We are in an India of the near future, a radically different place from now. There is a military clampdown and a rampant (and I daresay popularist) nationalism. We follow a military raid on a terrorist base, looking for terrorist leader Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj). A man approaches the squad, saying “they’re all dead”. When they get to where Saeed is there are bodies and he sits there. He whispers something to the squad leader.

Radhika Apte as Nida

Jumping back a month and Nida Rahim (Radhika Apte), a young Muslim woman, is in a car with her father (S.M. Zaheer). He is taking her back to the academy of the National Protection Squad, where she is being trained in interrogation techniques, but he is complaining about raids and the burning of books. He reveals he has books that he has rescued in the car and his lecture notes – he’s been teaching off-syllabus. They reach a checkpoint and he becomes defensive but Nida intervenes to get them past. However, she thinks on his actions and the propaganda she is fed, and reports him – he is sent to a re-education centre but not before she reveals she has done this to him.

torturing Saeed

Nida is pulled out of the academy early and posted to a detention centre (the one her father was sent to). There is a difference of opinion of how to treat her. Commander of the post, Colonel Sunil Dacunha (Manav Kaul), wants her put on the squad who are to interrogate Ali Saeed (who is being transported there that day), but his Lieutenant, Laxmi Das (Ratnabali Bhattacharjee), doesn’t trust her and thinks she is a terrorist/sympathiser. It soon becomes apparent that Saeed is more than he appears and this is shown at first through mind games that get his interrogators turning on each other. Quickly it is revealed that he is the ghoul.

it's behind you

So, what are its powers – having been summoned, its purpose is to reveal their guilt and eat their flesh. There seems to be some level of telepathy involved, so that it can manipulate people – causing fights and generally freaking people out. However the primary power is that the ghoul will eat the flesh of victims and take the form of the last person it bit (hence dropping the pronoun to it). This transformation can occur whether the victim is alive or dead. This leads to the Thing aspect, with the series playing with the “who is it” card a few times. The ghoul can reveal sharp teeth, talons and black eyes. It does also appear to be very physically hardy.

hunting the ghoul

I really enjoyed this. It had a dark atmosphere with the dystopian setting, the torture/detention centre, the characters who were all fatally flawed one way or another and the gore and violence that built through the three episodes. It was superbly acted and, yes, it was derivative but in a good way. Whether you’d throw this into vampire filmographies depends on how wide you cast your vampire net but this ghoul certainly eats fresh flesh and not longer dead corpses (as is the norm through a lot of ghoul material) and can shapeshift (again not a power normally put in ghoul related material, more a vampiric power). 7.5 out of 10 and recommended.

The imdb page is here.