New Film: Brand Upon the Brain!

This film by Guy Maddin is a black and white, expressionist horror, with vampiric elements and is a silent movie to boot. Concerned about Guy Maddin and the terrible secrets that lie below the surface of family life. Undoubtedly the use of vampires is metaphorical within the tale, his mother is described in one piece I have read as “Guy's lighthouse-keeper headmistress vampire mother”, and the film does look intriguing.

The full synopsis is: “Guy Maddin lazes away his under-stimulated youth with his teenage sister on the mysterious island that one day, he stands to inherit. They share this island with a horde of orphans all living together in the lighthouse which doubles as the orphanage. Their every move is vigilantly watched over by Guy’s overbearing and tyrannical mother from the top of the lighthouse while his father, a scientist and inventor, secretly works away in the basement morning noon and night.

When the new parents of recently adopted children discover mysterious head wounds on their young, teen detectives Wendy and Chance Hale – brother and sister sleuths known as the Lightbulb Kids – visit Guy’s island to launch into an investigation. Guy is weak at the knees as he falls hard into his first hormone driven crush for Wendy, while Sis, is rosy cheeked and flushed with love for chance, a love that must be kept hidden from Mother at all costs.

As the investigation progresses, it leads the kids into the darkest regions of revelation and repression and spins dangerously out of control as the terrible secrets of Guy’s family are laid bare…”

The films homepage is here and contains a trailer.

Vamp or Not? Brand upon the Brain!

This was a 2006 black and white and almost silent movie, directed by Guy Maddin – whose work we previously looked at when I reviewed Dracula: Pages from a Virgins Diary. I say almost silent as there is a narration to the piece. For this write up I listened to the narration by Isabella Rossellini. Watching this on screen is perhaps a lessening of the experience that Maddin created in ‘live performances’ where, I believe, narrators and musicians performed live to the film.

The film is subtitled “A Remembrance in Twelve Chapters” and sees Guy Maddin (played older by Erik Steffen Maahs) return to the island he grew up on, after a 30 year absence. He has been summoned by a letter from his mother (Gretchen Krich) that suggests that she is dying and asks him, as a last request from her, to paint the lighthouse.

He remembers the past, his childhood (played as a child by Sullivan Brown) when the island was an orphanage run by his mother. Also living on the island were his sister, Sis (Maya Lawson) and his scientist father (Todd Moore). One of the orphans, Neddie (Kellan Larson), was his best friend. His father had invented the aerophone – which had become the primary communication device on the island. It transmitted speech by using emotion to carry the words.

Into the mix comes the lightbulb kids Chance and Wendy Hale (both played by Katherine E Scharhon). The lightbulb kids are, I guess, a Nancy Drew or Secret Seven type brother and sister team. At first Wendy comes to the island. She is investigating the island as there have been re-housed orphans with mysterious holes in the back of their heads. Guy is smitten by the girl detective.

Wendy seems quite taken by Sis and decides that Chance would have more opportunity in the investigation. She therefore disguises herself as Chance, claiming Wendy had to leave. We get a convoluted courtship of Sis by Chance and the gender confusion felt by Guy as he becomes smitten with Chance also. We are, of course, more interested on this page by the vampiric elements and this revolves around Sis.

Whenever Sis misbehaves, in her mothers eyes, mother sounds a horn. Pre-programmed (presumably hypnotically) Sis walks trance like to her father. We know that she has the mysterious holes in the back of her head. Eventually Chance has Guy spy on what happens.

Father uses his ring to extract something from the back of the head – from the brain. We have seen the use of a ring to extract brain juices before in the movie the Leech Woman. In this case the juice is called nectar and the extraction, as father does it, seems to be non-fatal.

What is it used for? Father uses it to make mother younger (played younger by Cathleen O’Malley). Her aim is to be made pre-pubescent by the nectar – indeed she has acquired a cot should it be able to make her an infant again. The problem is that the effects are not permanent. Rage can reverse the effects. I found this idea really interesting.

When father becomes incapable of extracting the nectar, mother becomes desperate. Her reaction is that of the addicted, though whether it is the nectar or the effect of the nectar that she is addicted to we do not know. She attacks Neddie, biting into him and clearly suckling at the blood as she tries to extract nectar from him.

Is this vamp? There is much going on in this film, however concentrating on the nectar storyline only and taking it literally rather than symbolically, for the sake of this write up, I would have to say this is Vamp. We have the extraction of a precious fluid (in a way similar to another genre movie), that fluid brings a rejuvenation to the imbiber. The effects are not permanent and there is clearly some blood taking when the nectar is not readily available. It also adds an addiction element to the plot line.

An unusual film, for sure, and not to everyone’s taste, that much I can tell you. I actually did enjoy this but found that it was perhaps a little overlong and dragged towards the end segment. This was when the narration levels had fallen – perhaps missing Ms Rossellini’s voice was part of it. Perhaps it was also that the film was designed to be experienced in a different way. All that said it most definitely deserves a place on vampire filmographies.

The imdb page is here.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary – review

Directed by: Guy Maddin

Release Date: 2002

Contains spoilers

I must admit that when I first saw this I was a little disappointed. Not because it is an avant-garde cinema piece, in the style of a silent movie based around ballet… although the ballet was the source of the disappointment.

You see, some years before I had seen the Northern Ballet Theatre perform Dracula and what I saw in this, which features the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, was dissimilar. The choreography, the story and the score were all very different and I guess it was a case of expectation. I had to sit back down with this and look at it afresh. Forget the NBT’s live performance and watch something that was very much a stylisation and reworking of the Dracula story.

The story itself begins with the coming of Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang) to Whitby and we see that Maddin plays with one of the underlying themes of the novel. It is often recognised that Stoker played with the theme of the invading culture from the East that would corrupt the Victorian sensibility. Maddin makes this clear as we see narrative cards that tell us of immigrants from other lands, from the East specifically. These are designed to look like the graphical depiction of invading forces.

Lucy (Tara Birtwhistle) is quickly bitten and her suitors, Arthur Holmwood (Stephane Leonard), Jack Seward (Matthew Johnson) and Quincy Morris (Keir Knight) call in Doctor Van Helsing (David Moroni). Interestingly Van Helsing declares that she has “filled herself with polluted blood”. A strange addition to all this is the fact that Mrs Westenra (Stephanie Ballard) is so ill that she spends much of her time in a glass coffin hooked to a ventilator.

When Renfield (Brent Neale) escapes the asylum and the men are looking for him, gargoyles invade the Westenra house, scaring the mother and causing her to inadvertently re-invite Dracula into their home. His renewed invitation leads to Lucy’s demise. One of the more disturbing aspects of the film was how Maddin portrayed the Bloofer Lady, hereafter. Stoker’s beautiful woman who fed upon children was bad enough but here we see, in silhouette, Lucy snatch babies from their prams.

The men folk are guided, by Renfield’s words, to the graveyard. It was interesting to have Dracula specifically raise Lucy himself and for them to bite each other. Whilst this might have had more to do with choreography it added a fascinating element to the Lucy/Dracula dynamic. The actual slaying of Lucy was a powerfully portrayed scene, decapitation by shovel adding a macabre ending that is not normally so viscerally portrayed in Dracula adaptations.

Renfield is then tortured until he reveals that his master’s next target is one Mina Murray (CindyMarie Small). She is at a convent where her fiancé Jonathon Harker (Johnny A Wright) is recuperating. Of course we skipped the head of the book and, in a turn around, that long section concerning Harker and Castle Dracula is now visited in the briefest of flashbacks.

At the convent Mina finds Jonathon’s diary detailing castle Dracula and his ravages at the hands of Dracula’s brides. She not only forgives him what he has detailed but, in a complete turn around in the story, becomes clearly sexually aroused by what she reads within the detail of the diary – scaring her fiancé. Maddin uses the sexual medium here to portray Mina as the new woman and, whilst in other productions of the story this might fall flat, it is a brave and successful ploy especially given the lack of dialogue through which the new woman aspect could be otherwise explained.

Mina is captured by Dracula and taken to the castle and the men folk follow, however they do not arrive before she is bitten. Dracula clearly wants to seduce this woman not just through his own charisma but also by using money (stolen, we later hear, from England). What we then get is the progression of the heroes through the castle.

They dispatch the brides but are not so successful against the Count. Indeed they are eventually all defeated. Dracula is not above threatening Mina to force Van Helsing to re-cover the window he had smashed to let in sunlight. It is Mina who finds the strength to turn upon Dracula and force him back with a cross before uncovering the window herself.

The death of Dracula is unusual as the men then attack him with long stakes and, eventually, he is impaled in a manner reminiscent of the historic impalements meted out by Vlad Tepes.

The look of the film is remarkable with Maddin using many techniques, including smearing the camera lens with Vaseline, using tints on frames and adding in flashes of colour through the black and white imagery.

What is more interesting, however, is what was done with the story. No this is not novel accurate but there is a distinct attempt to reveal some of the novel subtexts in ways Stoker never dreamt of (or dared use), such as making Mina voraciously sexual with Harker. Clearly, as it is the only diary we see, Harker himself is the virgin of the title.

Performance wise I assume the dance was good – I am no expert – it did feel oddly immersive as we are within the performance rather than watching the stage. Zhang Wei-Qiang carries a commanding presence on screen

Musically the score is based around Mahler (his 2nd symphony I believe) and whilst this works the score created by Feeney for the NBT’s production of Dracula is more story fitting, to my way of thinking.

What we cannot escape, however, is that this is not going to be everyone’s thing. Maddin is an experimental, avant-garde director with a love of silent film techniques coupled with a modern content sensibility. The film is based around a ballet performance. This will be enough to put many viewers off.

I think, however, that it is worthwhile. I am glad that I was able to overcome my bias born of the earlier alternative stage performance that I watched. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mention: The Forbidden Room

Do you like arthouse movies? If the answer is no, you may want to move on.

The Forbidden Room is a creation by auteur Guy Maddin (the IMDb credits suggest that it is co-directed by Evan Johnson but that is only a section called “How to Take a Bath”) and was released in 2015. We have previously looked at Maddin’s films Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary and Brand Upon the Brain! Like those films, this owes much to silent movies – though there is certainly spoken dialogue in this. It is absurdist, psychedelic and bizzare and (to quote Jonathan Romney from the booklet that comes with the UK dual Blu-Ray/DVD) “this isn’t so much a film as an encyclopedic compendium of cinematic possibilities”.

Margot sings

So, why the honourable mention? After Marv (Louis Negin) tells us How to Take a Bath and we start to strip the layers of the film, meeting the crew of the submarine the SS Plunger, followed by the tale of the Saplingjacks who look to save the Vamp (in the silent movie sense) Margot (Clara Furey) from the Red Wolves Bandit Gang and then we end up seeing Margot’s story as an amnesiac. In a club she sings of the aswang, the jungle vampire.

Margot and Pancho

Later we see Margot as she is stalked by the aswang, its footsteps growing louder as the aswang moves away. This is a variant of the aswang type the tiktik, whose tiktik call sounds louder the further it is from its prey. Margot meets Pancho (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) but he is not the real Pancho – who lies dead – but the aswang.

intertitle

They return to her room and his scent triggers memory – his scent being sweet. He transforms into a peeled banana, the flesh blackened and is joined by a second and these are aswang bananas. Now this might seem quite surreal but vampire plants/fruit have a lineage – with fictional stories of vampire plants going back to the nineteenth century and vampire fruit being an alleged aspect of folklore (there is always the possibility that the locals were having the ethnologist, who recorded this, on).

the aswang bananas

That historian and ethnologist was Tatomir P. Vukanović and he related that amongst Slavic gypsies “there are only two plants which are regarded as likely to turn into vampires: pumpkins of every kind and watermelons.” (1957) Now, in this case the vampires are, of course, bananas but the principle is very similar. The appearance of the aswang bananas does not take too long – the whole scene is only a couple of minutes – and so this is a fleeting visitation in a film that will confound many but delight others.

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Taste of Night

This eight-minute Russian film, directed by Liudmila Komrakova and released in 2017, is not what you might first expect. Described on YouTube as a Tango Film, the concentration is on dance. Dance and vampires are not strangers, however. I remember watching the Northern Ballet Theatre’s wonderful rendition of Dracula many years ago and a similar production was given filmic treatment by Guy Maddin in the form of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. Hell I even looked at vampire belly-dance film The Bride of Dracula.

Of course, being a short this is a curtailed story but is lushly photographed and has an interesting lore moment.

dance

A motorbike pulls outside a large mansion. We see a dapper gentleman enter the hall where society meet and dance. He prowls the room until eventually taking the hand of a lady and leading her in a tango. At first enthusiastic we see his attention wander as a new person takes his interest. In a gold dress, with her blonde hair, she stands out in the centre of the room and soon he is dancing with her. They continue to dance as the rest of the room are drawn to the window to watch a fireworks display.

vampire revealed

The twist of vampirism is actually no twist, given I am featuring the short (and also given the poster prepared for the short). They are no longer in the room with the others but alone in what might be an abandoned wing of the mansion – lit by myriad candles. He pulls back a sheet and discovers the body of another beau, fang wounds in the cadaver’s neck. She approaches, no longer blonde but with dark hair. This was a fascinating moment. Of course, the answer might be that she wore a wig but… There is a potential implication in Dracula around Lucy’s hair – described early on as having its “usual sunny ripples” this might be read as dark hair with shine but some read it as being a blonde hair colour – once she is undead she is described as, “a dark−haired woman, dressed in the cerements of the grave”. Obviously, the language used does not help but I like the idea that, as the undead, she became darker in hair colour. Changing hair colour is a vampiric trait in Paul Féval’s the Vampire Countess (due to stealing the victim’s hair).

Be that as it may, the dance now changes to one where the dapper man tries to escape his fate…

The imdb page is here.

Enchiridion – review

Director: Mark Beal

Release Date: 2012

Contains spoilers

Enchiridion is a Latin word that means handbook or manual and the most famous enchiridions seem to be ecclesiastical in nature. Now Enchiridion is also the name of a vampire movie but how to describe it?

Imagine for a moment if Canadian auteur Guy Maddin and Salvador Dali conspired to create a lovechild and name it Kerouac, then perhaps we would have a general frame of reference. Mark Beal has created a surreal psychodrama that belies the independent budget it must have had and creates something that I found utterly compelling.

teeth

Set, I guess, in the early 1960s – a Jazz soundtrack brings the Beats to mind and there are moments of coffee shop poets and performance art but the date 1962 is definitely mentioned as a date passed by. We begin with newsprint being cut and pasted to create the Enchiridion of the title, the work being carried out by the primary vampire of the film, Doctor Condu (Jeremy Herrera). We note that he has a sharp row of upper teeth, the front two forming Nosferatu-like fangs (the other vampires have side mounted canine fangs).

Cory W Ahre as Noah

A Marshall drives to a coffee shop and passes an address to priest Father Noah Gregory (Cory W. Ahre). Noah drives to the address on the note and finds a group of Marshalls. They explain that they have captured a person of interest and he had a book with him. They show Noah the book and ask him to confirm if it is in Latin. This he does and says it is named the bloodsuckers’ handbook. He questions them about vampires and they ask if he believes in demons. It is explained that they want him to translate the book, they also want him to meet the author.

angered

After being given a blood-pack, he is taken into a windowless room where a man sits, bound and wearing a mask. When the man is unmasked we see his teeth and his wild eyes, it is Condu of course. To me he was reminiscent of Orlock/Dracula from Nosferatu. Noah gives him the blood-pack, which he drinks but complains about the temperature. He asks the vampire his name and the vampire demands Noah’s in return. Condu likes the biblical name, saying that Noah (in the bible) lived to 950 and then asks the priest how? He is playing games and admits that Noah was not one of his kind, people just lived longer then. Noah asks about garlic and holy water and Condu offers an insight into Noah's life that suggests he can read minds. He does become angry but quickly checks himself. For the most part the vampire is erudite and this astounds the Marshalls, the creature had kept his silence for three weeks until Noah came.

vampirism traces back to Vlad

Noah takes the Enchiridion home and starts to translate it. We get a background story – played out in stop motion, which really did work rather well – involving the creation of vampires in 1462. It surrounds Vlad Ţepeş and his anger after the suicide of his wife. It is suggested that he sold his soul to Moloch (the demon from Milton, which was originally a pagan God, is featured in the Allen Ginsberg poem Howl and thus adds to the Beat feel to the film). In this section we discover that sunlight kills vampires. There is an odd line suggesting that at a point Vlad Ţepeş became Vlad the Impaler… as Ţepeş means Impaler this seemed idiosyncratic but the language and symbolism in the film is carefully done and so I suspect this was purposeful.

Valentine

I could have actually watched a whole film based on the conversations of these two, they were so well done, but eventually Condu escapes and abducts a girl named Edie (Jessica Bell), who appears to be Noah’s regret, to force Noah to return his book. It appears that Condu uses mind control to escape and one has to question how much of what then occurs is in Noah’s mind as well. The film slips deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole with junkies addicted to licking toads, flamingos frequenting bars and a private eye that is a dog (voiced by William Myrick).

I seem to be addicted...

The surreal aspects will put many off but I was captivated as I was drawn into Noah’s nightmare with him. I was particularly impressed with Jeremy Herrera’s performance as Condu and was astounded to see that this was his first listed project on IMDb. Beal has created a film that poses questions and often offers only signposts to answers. It is a psychodrama and one wonders how much was literal. As an English line in the Enchiridion states, “I seem to be addicted to something that doesn’t really exist.”

This will befuddle many but beguile many also, lick the toad and follow the baboon as it is tracked by Valentine the PI dog. 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here. EDIT: the film has had a revision and re-release as the Bloodsucker's Handbook.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Resurrection – review

Director: Bi Gan

Release date: 2025

Contains spoilers

Bi Gan’s epic film is a 2 hour and 40 minute long meditation on cinema through the ages, an art film that explores its subject in an oneiric fervour, which demands viewer attention.

The premise is that humanity has achieved immortality by sacrificing the ability to dream but there are dissenters to this, known as Deliriants, whose dreaming threatens the fabric of both time and reality. A woman (Shu Qi) searches for a Deliriant (Jackson Yee)…

shadow of the Deliriant

The first section of the film sees her trying to capture him via a cinema, into an opium den – where he consumes poppy to help him dream and cries tears that supply the den. The film style here is expressionist and the Deliriant referred to as a monster. With his monstrous visage and the use of shadows there was a feel of Murnau and Nosferatu - though this isn’t why I’ve reviewed the film – and with the modern take on expressionism and the silent film I was reminded of Guy Maddin also.

the Deliriant

She eventually captures the deliriant and cannot understand why he wishes to dream but, digging into his back, she finds a projector within him and decides to allow him to watch the films/dreams as he dies – a process that will take two hours for her but be a hundred years for him. I will mention at this point that I think you can read Nosferatu as a meditation on film/cinema just as this is. The film then has four dreams in which the deliriant shapeshifts into a role within the dream (each lead played by Jackson Yee), It is the final dream that concerns us.

Apollo and Tai

The dream takes place on New Years Eve 1999 and the opening sees Yee’s Apollo awaken on a dock, that is drenched in red lighting and peppered with firework explosions. The cinematic style of this dream is that of a Long Take – a signature style of Bi Gan – and has Apollo meet a girl – whose first appearance consists of her shadow – and follows them through the streets. She gives her name as Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi) and professes that she has never bitten anyone and wishes to do that, he says he has never kissed anyone. The dream follows them together and individually at the times they are separated. It becomes apparent that she is “owned” by Mr Luo (Huang Jue) who seems to be a local mobster.

Huang Jue as  Mr Luo

In actuality, both Mr Luo and Tai are vampires, and he controls her as he holds her grave dirt. Apollo decides to fight for her -though he stands little chance and is severely beaten. They, by the end of the night, make a run for the docks and a ship that is meant to be there and, aboard ship, she admits what she is and shows fang. Mr Luo had not allowed her to drink blood unless it was filtered through him – there is mention of the idea that drinking from a human might make her human – but Apollo is willing to allow her to bite him…

lshowing fang

The vampire segment is technically brilliant, the Long Take working exceptionally well, and the whole film is beautifully photographed. The film, I suspect, will form a staple in some academic exploration of cinema and within vampire cinema texts. It can be like wading through a dream at times, and of course it is meant to be just that, with the film offering more and more, I suspect, on repeated watches. It is not going to be for everyone, certainly not a horror, it will be loved by some but its arthouse nature will make it inaccessible for others. I really enjoyed it, 8 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

Norway – review

Director: Yannis Veslemes

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

Norvigia, in the original Greek, this is an art-house film that had a very unreal feel – offered through the use of models and the design of the sets. Despite the title it is set in Greece, in Athens to be precise, but it is not an Athens that you would imagine.

The film is set in the 1984 and Yannis Veslemes does manage to infuse the film with an eighties feel but the film, itself, starts upon a train.

model train

Zano (Vangelis Mourikis) is placing newspaper against the window of his carriage. The train, when seen in external establishing shot, is clearly a model train on a model railway. There is no attempt to hide this, no kidology that the train is real and I was struck by a feeling of Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) that was imbued into the film. On the train we see a passenger who looks suspiciously like Einstein and several soldiers who seem uninterested in answering Zanos’ question regarding reaching Athens. Eventually they get there.

Athens

Zano gets to an Athens that looks much like a model that might have been used in a Fritz Lang film and heads to the Cine Star theatre – where his friend Jimmy (Yannis Bostantzoglou) is meant to live and who has invited him to stay. On his way in he meets an older hooker and, when he gets to Jimmy's, finds a plush coffin waiting for him. He is sat in the old theatre when the hooker approaches him. They kiss and off screen he feeds on her, leaving her bloody corpse in a bath. Following this he rings a funeral home, searching for Jimmy’s whereabouts.

seeing Alice

He goes to the Disco Zardaz and meets a variety of idiosyncratic characters including Theresa, an elderly lady who steals drinks, a virtually toothless vampire (bar his fangs) who hasn’t touched blood for ten years as he is addicted to heroin and the Captain, Marko (Markos Lezes), owner of the disco who used to be a film star and who rescues Zano from the dance floor when he collapses, stoned. Also in the disco is a woman, Alice (Alexia Kaltsiki).

yellow blood

Zano follows her into a restroom, whether out of lust or hunger is debatable, but he finds her sharing drugs with a Norwegian drug dealer called Peter (Daniel Bolda). In a perfectly protracted scene Zano attacks Peter and, as he feeds, blood spurts from the dealer’s neck. However, his blood is day-glo yellow and the scene becomes part surreal, part violent and works really well because of it. He tells Alice that he was going to bite her but he changed his mind. The two leave together, taking Peter with them as he starts to turn (he also seems to have become mentally simpler). This leads to a brief roadtrip but Alice meeting Zano was probably not as random as it seemed and leads to a meeting with a man who claims to be Bram Stoker but who may be someone far more sinister.

is he Bram Stoker?

It’s hard to explain Norway’s plot as there is a surreal element that would not be out of place in a Guy Maddin script. Werewolves are mentioned – but unseen – and Zano, who is forever dancing, claims he must keep moving or his heart will stop. He is physically very cold – something Alice points out during sex, has a reflection and he is fine with garlic. At one point we get a song, “Dracula, Dracula, Dracula” which is sort of an easy listening Mariachi track!

Zano reflected

Vangelis Mourikis keeps the viewer entertained as Zano and there is a chemistry that works between him and Alexia Kaltsiki. As to whether you’d like the film, well that depends on whether the idea of a surreal arthouse vampire film from Greece tickles your fancy. I enjoyed the film and think that 7.5 out of 10 would be a reasonable score.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

Honourable Mention: Northern Ballet Presents Dracula

Over two decades ago I went to the ballet. It was the first time I had ever been to the ballet and I watched the Northern Ballet Theatre present Dracula. For a ballet-philistine, such as myself, it was actually enthralling with a marvellous score by Feeney. It never toured to my home town again (though it was sold out for that production). Now, in the midst of the covid lockdown Northern Ballet’s production of Dracula was shown on the BBC. It had a different score, different choreography and a different story variation but it had to be watched.

Riko Itu as older Dracula

If you are wondering why it is listed as an honourable mention – well I don’t really know how else to approach an art form I know so little about. This will make the fifth ballet I have watched in 5 decades. The aforementioned Dracula, of course, was the first. Then the was Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, which is much less ballet (though it is one, of course) and more a Guy Maddin film. I’ve also watched Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, which was not a Dracula related piece but still had a vampire element. Indeed the only none vampire ballet I have ever watched was a broadcast of the Nutcracker.

biting Harker

Now, as mentioned, this was different to the first performance of Dracula I had watched, but of course held true to many of the story aspects from the novel beginning with Harker (Lorenzon Trossello) at the Count’s castle – where the Count begins older, and stylised, played by Riko Itu – it was a striking look and the dancer imbued his performance with alien movements. There are still the brides (Rachael Gillespie, Sarah Chun and Minju Kang). What is interesting is not the fact that he becomes younger (Javier Torres) – though the stagecraft was impressive – but that it is after repelling the brides and explicitly feeding on Harker.

Blooferlady

As for the England section we do have Mina (Abigail Prudameds) and Lucy (Antoinette Brooks-Daw) and the suitors are reduced to Seward (Joseph Taylor) and Holmwood (Matthew Koon) only. It was interesting that they have a transfusion for Lucy that fails, and is drawn from the two suitors at once. Dracula meets Mina at the Holmwood/Westenra engagement, and in this production they have the pair actually fall in love – with Dracula becoming reluctant to feed upon her – though we do get that eventually.

Mina and Dracula

What I will mention is that the very ending, the last moment of the ballet, was a new addition to the story and was shocking... When I previously saw Dracula live it was in three Acts (this was two) and it was fairly bloodless bar the last act where there was plenty of stage blood – I think avoided earlier as it would be a slip hazard. This is bloodless throughout, pretty much – though we do see the transfusion and the decapitated head of Lucy lifted briefly. It is, nonetheless, chock-a-block with atmosphere and is certainly inventive. Worth watching, even for a ballet-philistine.

At the time of writing there is no IMDb page.