It's just psychological

[sovay]

I feel slightly as though I have been hammered into the ground: I watched just over twelve hours of vampire film, walked out into the grey morning and slept a couple of hours into the early afternoon. It has rained on and off all day, obfuscating the question of whether the sunlight would do anything exciting to my skin. I'd be surprised—I just ate some free gingersnaps around three in the morning, not any of my fellow audience members—but a movie marathon that programs itself to end with an apocalyptic sunrise wants you to wonder anyway. Let me see what I can say before I pass out again.

Considering its place in genre history as the first vampire movie to treat its subject with sympathy as well as horror, it is probably not inappropriate that I feel really conflicted about Dracula's Daughter (1936). It was conceived as an immediate sequel to Universal's Dracula (1931) incorporating elements of Stoker's "Dracula's Guest" (1914) and Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872). Its premise is full of innovations that would rapidly become tropes: the bisexual vampire, the vampire who wants to be human, the vampire turning to science for aid; its narrative descendants are as obvious and diverse as Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood (1961), CBS' Forever Knight (1992–96), and Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's What We Do in the Shadows (2014), not to mention the full gamut of angst from Anne Rice to Stephenie Meyer. Gloria Holden as the Countess Marya Zaleska is somber and luminous, her long classical face a haunting and haunted mask. The script even knows there's something witty as well as Freudian in the idea of a vampire visiting a psychoanalyst in order to be cured of her compulsions, for which the languages of drug addiction and sexual perversity are equally apropos. And all of this promising material just sort of exists in a not very taut 71-minute plot with a couple of murders and a lot of running back and forth between England and Transylvania and the especially frustrating kind of obligatory het couple where the only moment I believe their relationship is when she prank-calls him in a heavy fake German accent ("Please come right away . . . One of our elephants is seeing pink men!") and even then I dock it points because he's the ladykilling doctor who can't keep from mixing business with pleasure and she's his jealous secretary. It is impossible not to wonder what a director like James Whale could have brought to the material, instead of Lambert Hillyer whose career was mostly B-Westerns and the 1943 serial Batman. The queer content is not confined to the scene excerpted in The Celluloid Closet (1995), where the dark, gliding Countess, having previously solicited a handsome young man off the street, enthralls a beautiful young female model and the camera smashes upward on the girl's screams; on top of the psychoanalytic angle, which includes the Countess' conviction that the lingering spirit of her father compels her perverse lifestyle (following his staking by Van Helsing, she ritually exorcises Dracula's body with salt and fire and exults, "I can lead a normal life now—think normal things, play normal music!" but that night finds her cruising the foggy alleys of London again), it is notable that her final bid for the psychiatrist's attention involves kidnapping his beloved secretary and nearly turning her in a slow, spellbinding lean-in, interrupted right at the moment of the fatal kiss. But either Hillyer didn't know what he had or didn't know how to get it between the lines of the Code as effectively as other directors of transgressive horror, because the results are no Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The film has its own attractions, though, and I am not sorry to have had them looking out of the screen at me with the unblinking gaze of the woman who is a predator: "She was beautiful when she died—a hundred years ago."

I have written about Terence Fisher's Dracula (U.S. Horror of Dracula, 1958) before, in context of The Brides of Dracula (1960), and while I stand by my assertion that it's neither as weird nor as powerful as its sequel or possibly in some conventional senses very good, I don't care, I love it. I love its blithe disregard for its source material beyond a vampire named Dracula, a doctor named Van Helsing, and some people named Holmwood and Harker and Seward. I love what physical actors both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are, with their very different styles of movement and presence which dovetail so beautifully in their sole, justly climactic shared scene. I will never cease to be impressed by Lee's ability to project sexual charisma forty feet off the screen with blood in his teeth. Cushing has a wonderful voice, but I could look at him all day. Some of Lee's Dracula's most charged moments are stillness, but his vampire-hunting nemesis is constantly in motion, showing us more of his restlessness, his nerves and his determination, the cost of his work and its bittersweet payoff through small or sudden movements—the resolute resettling of his hands on a stake, a tired rub of the eyes that the next second flings the professor to his feet as a realization snaps into place—than really exists in the dialogue, from which we learn mostly what Van Helsing knows about vampires. Even the one direct personal statement he makes is by way of correcting another character's misapprehension: "The study of these creatures has been my life's work. I've carried out research with some of the greatest authorities in Europe and yet we've only just scratched the surface." Perhaps we know he's their adversary simply because he's so alive in his skin, even when he's only double-checking and correcting his own dictated notes. And yet he's their mirror, too, as mysterious for all his warmth as the nearly silent Count. We never even learn his first name. We don't need it. He can bring centuries of sunlight crashing into a long-haunted hall and tell a little girl, frightened of the dark and of vampires, that with his fur-trimmed coat snugged round her she looks like a teddy bear. I don't care if that's anachronistic, either.

Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983) shouldn't work. It has dreamy and violent erotic scenes of various sexualities, a science-edged and nearly subliminal take on vampirism, a plot which often appears to operate on correspondences rather than cause and effect, and a visual style which carries lushness to the point of nonlinearity, including symbolic doves and blowing curtains galore—there is an honest-to-God art department credit strictly for "Drapes." It scores its opening incidence of vampirism to a Goth club performance of Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" and employs the "Flower Duet" from Delibes' Lakmé as prelude to two women making love. Its glamorous, eerily depersonalized New York City was mostly played by London. The film should have been, at best, a glossily enjoyable piece of softcore '80's cheese. Instead it's not just a perfectly cromulent revision of the vampire mythos for the age of MTV and nascent AIDS, it actually uses its head-swimming style for substance. The way that time in this film is confusing, for example: either it passes in a vague lacuna that could be hours or weeks or the narrative is intensely aware of the seconds ticking by and in either case it reflects the experience of the nonhuman characters, either the original who hasn't aged an elegant day since she tore out a man's throat in ancient Egypt or her consort whose two hundred years of youthful companionship—the latest in a long, long Tithonos-line—are running out fast. Everything the audience is offered to look at, from the faces of the principal cast to an arc of blood splatter, is meticulously, self-consciously beautiful, which only points out the skull beneath the skin all the more keenly when it starts to show; it is a stroke of cruel brilliance to use David Bowie, rather than any of the film's female actors, as the memento mori specter of beauty overtaken by age and decay. I did not disbelieve Susan Sarandon when she said in The Celluloid Closet that under no circumstances would her character have needed to be drunk to go to bed with Catherine Deneuve (and she got her way in the finished film: most of that glass of sherry goes to a conveniently shirt-removing spill), but I appreciate how ambiguous she herself looks here, distractedly raking one hand through her short red hair exactly as Bowie did. Her boyfriend might as well have been captioned "Emergency Lunch," but I felt for Dan Hedaya's two-scene police lieutenant, who's just in the wrong genre for his street smarts to make a difference. Looking over Scott's filmography, I can't see that he ever directed anything else in which I was even interested, but I'm glad he managed this movie: I could have done with at least a third less blowing curtains and it took me a scene to get used to the strobe-cut flashforwards, but I can see why it's lasted beyond the aesthetic of its time. I am aware it derives from a 1981 novel by Whitley Strieber, but frankly the only way I can imagine it working on the page is if it was written by Tanith Lee. I'm not sure it didn't get into her Scarabae novels as it is. I like that no one in this story, not even Deneuve, has fangs.

I might have stopped Near Dark (1987) a spontaneous combustion or two sooner than Kathryn Bigelow does, but otherwise I had wanted to see this movie for years on the recommendations of lesser_celery and handful_ofdust and it delivered. It can be legitimately described as a vampire Western, right down to the perfect inversion of a high noon showdown; other applicable adjectives might include cowpunk, rockabilly, crime pulp, and whatever peculiarly American genre encompasses outlaw found family, into which our semi-hero unintentionally invites himself when he takes a waifish stranger out for a nighttime spin. Adrian Pasdar's Caleb is not entirely innocent prey, of course: if he hadn't pulled over to cajole a kiss out of Jenny Wright's Mae before dawn, she'd have made it home before her hunger sharpened enough to bite him. But he's soon surrounded by greater and far more casual predators, played by half the cast of Aliens (1986) as feral archetypes that strip the Gothic aristocracy off American vampirism and replace it with the strip malls and roadhouses and trailer parks and oil derricks and bus stations and motels of Reagan's heartland, where it might be a bitter joke that their almost post-apocalyptic levels of hardscrabble rootlessness do not actually attract attention until Lance Henriksen's blade-faced Jesse starts talking wryly about the Civil War ("I fought for the South . . . We lost") or Bill Paxton's Severen, all black leather swagger and chiming boot-spurs, kicks a bartender's throat in. Jenette Goldstein's Diamondback with her two-toned hair and her dance hall girl's bustier unfolds a straight razor for her mate to fill her a beer glass of blood with. Joshua John Miller's Homer is perhaps the oldest and eeriest of them all, perpetually and hatingly twelve years old. They're an extreme realization of the American dream, accountable to no one but their guns and their hunger; they have been abandoned by it and they exact their due in blood. Its violence alternates between the lyrical and the grotesque, nowhere better fused than in the roadhouse sequence where the Cramps' spare, snaky cover of "Fever" shivers off the jukebox while the bodies hit the floor. The danger of a shootout in a motel flips as soon as the audience realizes that the police bullets drilling the daytime walls are temporary inconveniences, but the shafts of light spearing in from their passage are causing the family to smoke. The film is noir, too, in politics as well as time of day—if it wouldn't have sounded like a remake, it could just as accurately have been titled They Live by Night. I wish the ending were better; it would be a stone classic if so. Maybe it still is, flawed as any other nightmare of this country. "Normal folks, they don't spit out bullets when you shoot them, no sir."

I had no idea what to expect from Michael Almereyda's Nadja (1995). I knew it was considered a partial remake of Dracula's Daughter; I had loved Almereyda's Experimenter (2015), but was uncertain how much I could reasonably generalize from a flamboyantly metafictional, self-interrogating biopic of Stanley Milgram. I don't know if I can make this film sound as good, and as haunting, and as fun as it was. Romanian-born Elina Löwensohn stars as Nadja, a stylish, imperious wanderer of the streets and bars of nighttime New York whose "family money" comes from stranger sources than the trust funds of the beautiful, jaded socialites she resembles; an impulsive decision in the wake of her father's death entangles her in the lives of Lucy and Jim (Galaxy Craze and Martin Donovan), the first of whom becomes her lover and inadvertent thrall, the second of whom turns out to have a direct connection to the man who staked Dracula. The family complications thicken with the introduction of Nadja's long-estranged twin Edgar (Jared Harris) and his live-in nurse Cassandra (Suzy Amis), herself another unforeseen relative; the Gothic aspects heighten with the kidnapping of a human character and a flight to the ancestral castle "by the Black Sea, under the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains" where both Nadja and Edgar were born two hundred years ago to the only woman Count Dracula ever loved. So far, so Universal. Now please imagine that everything I have described is filmed in high-contrast, lo-fi black-and-white that abstracts itself into Pixelvision at the most traditionally vampiric moments and played with such serious deadpan by the entire cast that absurdities become poignant and everything else is randomly hilarious. When we meet Van Helsing, he is played by Peter Fonda and he is the kind of tweedy, long-haired, embarrassing burnout uncle who has to be bailed out of jail for confessing to impossible murders and forgets that you can't order vodka in a coffee shop. About half of what he says, about anything, although most of the time he just talks about vampires, is dead on and the other half is totally disconnected: Lucy relaying the news of his arrest to her husband admits that "it didn't make sense, but it didn't sound too surprising, either. You know how he gets." This is the kind of movie that can close with real philosophical questions but also include phrases like "psychic fax" and two incredibly awkward reunions in the same family. Dracula at the end of his life is compared to late-stage Elvis. There's dying and then there's dying for a cigarette. It's not parody; it's irony done right. What with the trends of the last decade, I hadn't realized that I missed irony at all. It works because it's not all a hall of mirrors, even when executive producer David Lynch cameos as a tousle-haired morgue guard nonplussed by the appearance of a black-cloaked Nadja and her solemn, baby-faced Renfield (Karl Geary). Music is by Simon Fisher Turner, Portishead, My Bloody Valentine, and Spacehog, which explains why I have just played "In the Meantime" eighteen times in a row. A pixellated lesbian/bi vampire love scene can be extremely hot.

I may have to come back to Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day (2001), because I suspect I would have enjoyed it much more if I had had any idea what it was doing. rushthatspeaks (who joined me in time for the second feature) suggests that it may have been examining the different gender expressions of the vampire mythos, but if so I'm not sure why it took the form it did. There is a plot, although at first it looks like driftingly intercut scenes of gruesome murder and banal honeymooning; eventually it emerges that the narrative is tracking two parallel couples, three-quarters of whom were involved some number of years ago in neuroscientific research that went horribly wrong. Brilliant Léo Semenau (Alex Descas) now works as a GP in Paris, his former colleagues aware that he quit higher-profile work to take care of his sick wife; they do not seem to know that the beautiful, wolfish Coré (Béatrice Dalle) has a habit of escaping their house, seducing roadside strangers, and then eating as much of them as she can before her husband wearily tracks her down again, brings her home on his motorcycle, cleans her up, and puts her to bed, although does not ever take her there, however much she croons and reaches for him. Like a maenad or an especially grisly change on Cat People (1942), she cannot be safely aroused. Pharmaceutical rep Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) has flown to Paris with his new wife June (Tricia Vessey), ostensibly for the usual romantic reasons, really to try to reconnect with Léo, whose basement researches—a contemporary mad science homebrew of potted seedlings, pills and test tubes, and refrigerated slices of brain—might hold a feverish hope of quieting whatever Lustmord keeps Shane dreaming of his bride's pixie-like body naked in a bed of blood, eyeing the fragile back of her neck as though at any second he might sink his teeth through it. He watches the chambermaid with an appetite that she mistakes for the familiar roving eye of men away from home; with a soft-eared, new-bought puppy in his arms, he grinds up against an older woman on the Métro while other passengers stare at him in open disgust. "I would never hurt you," he reassures June, then wrenches himself away from her mid-coitus to finish all over the sink while she cries at the door. Maybe this is vampirism (if it is vampirism: by the time you're tearing flesh off with your teeth, I think the metaphor is slightly different) as emotional consumption, the exhaustion and danger of intimacy. Again, then I've seen that dilemma worked out with less cold and graphic nastiness. Coré and Shane are obviously foils, but I don't know what it means—mythologically, philosophically—that her cannibalistic encounters are opportunistic and, once triggered, apparently beyond her control while eventually we watch him knowingly seek out a substitute rape/food object so that he can return to his hotel room, step out of the shower down whose curtains a woman's diluted blood is still rolling, and for the first time embrace his wife without fear. I do not think of myself as having a low tolerance for sexual violence, incidentally, but I would call the rape scene in this film objectively rough, not least because it is so callously initiated. I have to assume it is part of the exercise for the audience to get a good look in both cases so as to determine whether they judge the characters differently, because there's no chance that anyone who has been paying attention to this plot will find Shane's turn to cannibalism shocking. To be honest, I expected the film to end with mutual devouring, but that might actually have closed the circle in a way I could understand. I hate not being able to read a film properly. Maybe I'll just go rewatch Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999).

There were no short films this year, but trailers screened throughout the night included Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), the glorious double feature of Planet of the Vampires (1965) and Lifeforce (1985), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (The Satanic Rites of Dracula, 1973). I had been going to write that I would in all honesty watch all of these except Lifeforce, but then I saw that Lifeforce was a Golan and Globus production, so really, I'd watch all of them.

Park Chan-wook's Thirst (박쥐, 2009) is the most adorable faithless priest vampire romantic comedy I have ever seen. I did not know it was any of those things when it started and definitely not that it was a loose version of Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1867), although after the fact I can see it: the illicit lovers, the sickly husband, the overbearing and then incapacitated mother-in-law, the drowning murder, the guilt, the inevitable tragic resolution. Only it turns out that when you add Catholicism, vampirism, and one of the funniest, most awful ghosts I have encountered on film to the love affair of Song Kang-ho's Sang-hyun and Kim Ok-bin's Tae-ju, the whole thing goes pleasantly, operatically sideways, passing through film noir, domestic comedy, several flavors of body horror, and non-anvillicious moral quandaries before concluding on a sea-cliff as the rising sun turns the ocean suitably to blood. I don't remember any of that in Zola and I think it's an improvement. Song is a remarkably beautiful man with his round priest's glasses or without them, reacting so often to the catch-22s of his new life with a kind of silent clown's stoicism that it shocks the story every time he flares with appetite or anger instead. As the stifled young wife, Kim has a slippery, live-wire intensity that twists right around any archetype she might embody, so that she never reduces to a statement about female victims or monsters. Park's version of vampirism is splattery and visceral without losing the capacity for beauty or humor, not infrequently at the same time; the film itself went on at least three twists longer than I was expecting, but see previous about not knowing to expect Thérèse Raquin. If it is at all representative of Park's work, I should see a lot more of him than just The Handmaiden (2016). If it's not representative, it was still the perfect choice to close this marathon.

And then Rush-That-Speaks gave me a ride home and neither of us burst into flame and I had the day previously described, plus work and cats and eating a real meal for the first time since Friday night. Now the dawn is coming around again and I should get back to bed. I like living in a city where the movies run dusk till dawn. This night life brought to you by my immortal backers at Patreon.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I think I'd like to see The Hunger, (I thought it was a different movie--The Hidden (1987), but when I realized it wasn't, I was able to discover the correct name of that second movie, which I'd seen), and a couple of others as well. With Trouble Every Day, what about the possibility that it's just not a very well-conceived film?

I like the idea of an actor named "Galaxy Craze," and the high-contrast tending-to-pixilation cinematography in Nadja sounds visual intriguing.

All in all, sounds like it was a good marathon!

[sovay]

I think I'd like to see The Hunger, (I thought it was a different movie--The Hidden (1987), but when I realized it wasn't, I was able to discover the correct name of that second movie, which I'd seen), and a couple of others as well.

I enjoyed everything I saw at this marathon with the possible exception of Trouble Every Day and even then I didn't hate it, I didn't want my money or my hour and a half back, I just have trouble seeing what it's doing beyond the obvious because the obvious does not seem very illuminating of the setup.

What's The Hidden?

With Trouble Every Day, what about the possibility that it's just not a very well-conceived film?

It's always possible! I've certainly seen well-produced, well-acted movies fall apart thematically. This one just doesn't feel like that, which is why I think it keeps itching at me: it feels like the writer-director had an idea of how it all went together and what it meant to itself, it just wasn't readily accessible to me. I don't know if it would have been easier to parse if I had ever seen anything else by Claire Denis. I don't tend to wonder that about movies that visibly had no clue.

(I considered whether I am giving the film too much benefit of the doubt just because someone at the archive liked it enough to program it for a marathon, but I don't think so. There was that year the entire marathon was late-career Joan Crawford. They program a lot of things I am fine with not liking.)

I like the idea of an actor named "Galaxy Craze," and the high-contrast tending-to-pixilation cinematography in Nadja sounds visual intriguing.

Galaxy Craze, whoever she is, was great. That whole cast was solid: it could have fallen to bits if any of the actors broke the tone and none of them did. I could have dialed back the Pixelvision a little—there were a few scenes it obscured rather than enhanced for me—but on the whole it worked for me. Najda was the film I had heard least about going in and possibly the film I came out having enjoyed the most. It was a strong lineup; it's a tough call.

All in all, sounds like it was a good marathon!

It was!

[asakiyume]

The Hidden was a film I watched because it had Kyle MacLaclan in it, and I have a fondness for him. IMDB describes it quite succinctly:

An alien parasite with the ability to possess human bodies goes on a violent crime spree in L.A. A human cop, detective Tom Beck, and an alien cop posing as a young FBI agent Lloyd Gallagher both pursue the parasite who frequently changes his human hosts.

The one visual I remember is a final transfer which, instead of involving slimy worms involved Pure!Light! because it was the Good Guys. That's literally it. And that it had Kyle MacLaclan in it.

[sovay]

The Hidden was a film I watched because it had Kyle MacLaclan in it, and I have a fondness for him.

I think it is entirely reasonable to be fond of Kyle MacLachlan.

(I didn't realize he had a pre-Twin Peaks history with the FBI.)

[asakiyume]

Yeah! Something from before he entered the orbit of David Lynch. Amazing.

[handful_ofdust]

You know, I too was disappointed when Kyle McLachlan's true form didn't turn out to be an icky, slimy slug-bug.

[asakiyume]

LOL--like, why can't slug-bugs express different moral valences?

[handful_ofdust]

Okay, so: re Trouble Every Day, I don't think it should ever have been programmed as a "vampire" film per se--it's a werewolf film at best, or maybe a zombie variant, a maenad/cannibal film primarily. The linking of the systems of arousal and hunger is key, but you're right, it brings some weird gender essentialist shit to the fore. I also admit to the lure of its "film maudit" status, its utter inaccessibility. At one point, I could only find it as a decayed videotape through the Suspect Video mothership store; I finally had to order it on expensive DVD from Japan. At the time it came out, if was also heralded as something you couldn't unsee, something you shouldn't see, or want to see. That's my jam, as we all know, so I was predisposed to cut it a lot of slack.

That said, what we're talking about is absolutely Claire Denis, Famous French Filmmaker, saying "But you know, of course this is not a horror film, so no closure for you!" Which is not an attitude that suits any narrative well, IMHO. Part of the problem is that she begins her narrative at a point where all the really important decisions have already been made--Leo knows his research isn't doing shit and isn't likely to do shit for Core, so what he's really doing is waiting to become guilty enough that he either lets Core out and lets her eat him, or he mercy-kills them both. Shane, ever the American, wants to think that Core's degeneration isn't a foretelling of his own future--he's used to making decisions for other people, and to some degree to thinking of other people as disposable, aside from those he considers "his."

Shane never seems to be afraid for himself, afraid he's going to lose his own soul/personality. The idea of celibacy never occurs. He wants to move forward with all his hungers intact, which is why he comes off as a bigger monster than Core, but Core is well past her moral event horizon. She's already decided that self-restraint is something she can literally trust to Leo, making him her enabler, her doctor, her partner by default, her hospice care-worker. It's like she's daring him to figure out when her terminal disease should stop having a body-count.

Anyhow. It's been a while since I've seen it--I know Core's imprisonment ends in fire, like Jane Eyre, but I can't remember much else about it. I was interested by the honeymoon to Europe as an organizing pattern, the way it hearkens back to every other Universal monster movie (especially The Black Cat, two young idiots blithely intruding on the end of another long, gothic story). But it was definitely made to be unsatisfying, so I'm not surprised that you found it so.;)

[handful_ofdust]

I covered Nadja, btw! My God, Elina Lowenssohn is gorgeous. And I'm really, really glad you liked both Near Dark and The Hunger so much. At the time, The Hunger was the most visually exciting film I'd ever seen, especially in its initial sequence--the idea of so much intercutting, all these vaguely sifted narratives commenting on each other, resonating with each other, providing imagistic assonance, made me dizzy and happy. The ending wasn't satisfying for me at the time, because it seemed just as unlikely and illogical as the ending of Near Dark, without the emotional closure. But I'm okay with it now, because I kind of have to be.

[sovay]

I covered Nadja, btw!

Oh, cool! Is there a copy of the review online?

And I'm really, really glad you liked both Near Dark and The Hunger so much.

I really did. I had expected to enjoy Near Dark at least whenever Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, or Jenette Goldstein were onscreen, but I had not been sure about The Hunger past its principal actors and the fact that Sarandon was insistent on her character willingly having sex with another woman rather than being glamoured or beer-goggled into it. If anything I had ever read about it online had likened it to Tanith Lee, I would have known what I was getting.

At the time, The Hunger was the most visually exciting film I'd ever seen, especially in its initial sequence--the idea of so much intercutting, all these vaguely sifted narratives commenting on each other, resonating with each other, providing imagistic assonance, made me dizzy and happy.

Your description of images as assonance is exactly right. One of the reasons I don't think it's a stupid film is that it trusts its audience to put these echoes together for themselves rather than spelling out the connections outright in the plot, where they would have felt just too on the nose—and if the script had been any more specific about Sarah's cutting-edge research, way outdated thirty-four years later. I do like that what she does with her inherited millions of vampire money is fund the clinic. If she stays in the field, she's just become her own best subject.

The ending wasn't satisfying for me at the time, because it seemed just as unlikely and illogical as the ending of Near Dark, without the emotional closure. But I'm okay with it now, because I kind of have to be.

It is a weird ending: I was talking to spatch about it in the shower. It doesn't totally break the film's own rules, but it requires the audience to accept that maybe even Miriam didn't know all of them. I think the transference of power works because Miriam ingests so much of Sarah's already-altered blood, turning the process back on her, but the attic of dust-rotted lovers coming back to life is a little more take-on-faith Gothic, or maybe H. Rider Haggard. rushthatspeaks thought it might have happened because there is so much vampire blood all over the floor, it can't help waking them. Does it match the ending of the novel or is this is not an applicable question? I don't know how closely the two relate to one another generally.

[handful_ofdust]

The novel ends with Miriam on top, as ever. I don't remember all that much of it, aside from a truly grotesque and memorable flashback where Miriam and her two younger sisters are touring Russia(?); the sisters act young and stupid, kill too many people to obviously, and end up getting caught, roasted and eaten by the peasants they're preying on. Miriam doesn't help out, because it'd get her killed, and Miriam is Satan-practical throughout--yeah, she purports to feel bad about things, but that never stops her from doing them. John is the least of it.

[sovay]

Miriam and her two younger sisters

Miriam having sisters is an interesting idea. In the film she's much more like a phoenix: there is—perhaps there can be—only one true vampire at a time.

[moon_custafer]

As an aside, I'd argue that the young couple in The Black Cat are neither stupid, nor intruders by choice. They both notice pretty quickly that the household they've been forced to stop at has more red flags than the Kremlin, but everything (well, mostly Poerzig and his servants) conspires to get in the way of them leaving.

[handful_ofdust]

Yes, I know I'm being reductionist to call them idiots. Though I do seem to recall that at least one of them can't figure out how to escape a hidden room whose controls are inside the room.

[asakiyume]

This is really interesting! Thanks for the added thoughts and insights.

[sovay]

Okay, so: re Trouble Every Day, I don't think it should ever have been programmed as a "vampire" film per se--it's a werewolf film at best, or maybe a zombie variant, a maenad/cannibal film primarily.

I would have had no difficulty with it in a werewolf marathon. It would have been a sort of Jacobean form of the werewolf, where the physicality of the transformation is less important than the compulsive appetite, but it would at least have felt in key with the surrounding archetype. No wonder I thought of Cat People.

I also admit to the lure of its "film maudit" status, its utter inaccessibility. At one point, I could only find it as a decayed videotape through the Suspect Video mothership store; I finally had to order it on expensive DVD from Japan. At the time it came out, if was also heralded as something you couldn't unsee, something you shouldn't see, or want to see. That's my jam, as we all know, so I was predisposed to cut it a lot of slack.

Heh. It definitely isn't something I'm sorry to have seen. And at least someone at the HFA feels the same way as you do.

It's been a while since I've seen it--I know Core's imprisonment ends in fire, like Jane Eyre, but I can't remember much else about it.

We're led to expect something dramatic when Shane and Coré finally meet again; there was an implication of personal as well as professional history between them and of course they are, to our knowledge, the only two of their kind in the world. (The details of the failed research project were hazy, but it seemed to have been the ethically borderline kind where the experimenters were ther own subjects.) By the time he finds her, she has already fucked and partly eaten one of the teenage boys who broke into her house and freed her from her freshly barricaded room; she's been playing with matches and the house is now on fire, very Bertha Mason-style. It is not possible to tell from their reunion whether she recognizes Shane as himself or just as male meat: they are seen embracing, but when she begins to nuzzle and snap at him and fight him when he doesn't let her bite, he breaks her neck and leaves her for the flames. Léo arrives just too late to see Shane, but not too late to take in the sight of his dead wife in their burning house, and neither rushthatspeaks nor I were sure that he actually left instead of going down with his laboratory like a mad scientist of the old school. That is not the film's finale; there's at least another half-hour, much of which is taken up with Shane's decision to stalk, rape, and consume the chambermaid. He really seems to think he can compartmentalize his hungers. Seriously, dude, have you never seen a vampire love story? Or werewolf? Or even serial killer?

Oh, my God, this is part of Peeping Tom (1960). I have to leave the house, but please remind me to say something when I get back!

But it was definitely made to be unsatisfying, so I'm not surprised that you found it so.

Honestly, it is extremely useful to hear that the inability to make the film resolve wasn't a failure of comprehension on my part. It felt like there were pieces missing; there were. Now I can decide whether I like it as an intended effect or not, but at least I know I was seeing what I was meant to see. Part of the problem I was having all along was the feeling that I wasn't. Thank you.

[handful_ofdust]

Shane's pursuit of the chambermaid is particularly horrifying because at least half of it is him allowing her to flirt with and pursue him, ie acting like he's a "normal" bored young husband doing "normal" Paris City Of Lights (And Extra-Marital Affaires, Hon Hon Hon) stuff. He makes her complicit in her own death, mainly because there's no possible way she could ever suspect he's going to up the oral sex stakes by biting off her damn clitoris.

[alexxkay]

I was at first confused by your description of Dracula's Daughter, but it turned out I was confusing it with Mark of the Vampire, a very different film.

Kes and I watched Nadja t'other day. Personally, I found the pixelation painful, and felt it detracted from an otherwise interesting movie. We much preferred his later horror film, The Eternal. We also found the ending unclear, as to just what Nadja/Cassandra's status was.

[handful_ofdust]

Ah, The Eternal! The first bog body vampire film I ever saw. There should be more, but it's basically that and From The Dark.

[sovay]

The first bog body vampire film I ever saw. There should be more, but it's basically that and From The Dark.

How's From the Dark?

[handful_ofdust]

I really love From The Dark. It's very small and almost silent--an old guy cutting peat pulls out the wrong stick and suddenly there's something bald dressed in a very pre-Mediaeval-looking robe biting him in the throat. Cut to two young lovers driving into the country to see her Da; they get lost, night starts falling, they're stuck in sucking mud, they end up at a farm that turns out the belong to old peat-cutting man. Someone's already broken all the light-fixtures, and things go from there. No explanations, no respite, the thing goes like a son-of-a-bitch.

[sovay]

No explanations, no respite, the thing goes like a son-of-a-bitch.

That sounds excellent and I will look for it.

[sovay]

I was at first confused by your description of Dracula's Daughter, but it turned out I was confusing it with Mark of the Vampire, a very different film.

I have not seen Mark of the Vampire. That's the sound remake of London After Midnight (1927), yes?

Kes and I watched Nadja t'other day. Personally, I found the pixelation painful, and felt it detracted from an otherwise interesting movie.

I didn't think it needed to use all the Pixelvision it did, but I didn't find it an inherent misstep. It worked very well for me in some scenes.

We much preferred his later horror film, The Eternal.

You made that sound very interesting on top of the innate attraction of the bog body. What I'm getting out of this is that my reactions to Experimenter were not a one-off and I should watch a lot more Almereyda.

We also found the ending unclear, as to just what Nadja/Cassandra's status was.

I read Nadja's spirit as present in Cassandra's body, although not in the sense of having replaced Cassandra. Her final monologue suggests a kind of double identity, merging, ambiguous:

"They cut off my head, burned my body. No one knew—no one suspected—that I was now alive in her. We were married at City Hall. At first I felt shattered, lost. But every day is better. I have walked behind the sky. We are all animals, but there is a better way to live. Sometimes, at night, I hear a voice in my head. Who is it? Is it you, Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can't hear you. Who's there? Is it only me? Is it myself?"

I think it's meant to be unclear to the viewer because it is uncertain for Nadja herself. She is and is not herself. I liked it as an ending; a more definitive case of possession would have collapsed possibilities in a way that I don't think would have suited the delicacy of the film.

[handful_ofdust]

That's the kind of possession Almereyda likes best, going by the rest of his oevre.

[sovay]

That's the kind of possession Almereyda likes best, going by the rest of his oevre.

Dude should make a dybbuk movie.

[handful_ofdust]

Almereyda's Hamlet is also well worth your time, Ethan Hawke notwithstanding.

[sovay]

Almereyda's Hamlet is also well worth your time, Ethan Hawke notwithstanding.

I don't actually have anything against Hawke as an actor—I haven't seen him in much beyond Gattaca (1997), Training Day (2001), and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)—so do you mean that he's not the best match as Hamlet for this production, or do a lot of people just not like him? The rest of that cast looks fantastic.

[handful_ofdust]

At the time, I think casting Hawke as a hipster Hamlet just seemed a bit on the nose. I agree that the rest of the cast is amazing.

[swan_tower]

I should watch that one again. At the time I mostly recall being frustrated that, like basically every film Hamlet except Branagh's, they pare down the script, often in what I felt were the wrong places.

[sovay]

At the time I mostly recall being frustrated that, like basically every film Hamlet except Branagh's, they pare down the script, often in what I felt were the wrong places.

What parts of Hamlet do you especially want not to lose?

[swan_tower]

The one that stuck with me enough for me to recall it seventeen years later was the bawdy punning Hamlet exchanges with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: I remember the scene working very well, and being annoyed that they didn't just keep going.

But this is because the first performance of Hamlet I ever saw, on stage or screen, was Branagh's, and I watched it something like three or four times before I ever saw another. So in general my subconscious is convinced that ALL THE LINES SHOULD BE THERE, and it is annoyed at every other production for not being four hours long.

[alexxkay]

Yes, Mark of the Vampire is approximately a remake of LAM. It's been a few years, but I recall there being lesbian vampires and some other neat stuff, almost all of which was driven out of my mind by a memorably atrocious ending, of the one step up from "It was all a dream" variety. Feel free to headcanon the last few minutes off the movie.

Your take on the end of Nadja makes me retroactively like it more (thanks!), but I'm still unlikely to sit through that pixelvisiom again.

I also want to see more Almareyda, but much of his work is very obscure. It took me a year to get my hamds on The Eternal. And no one but IMDB seems to have even *heard* of New Orleans. Mon Amour (with Christopher Eccleston!)

[sovay]

It's been a few years, but I recall there being lesbian vampires and some other neat stuff, almost all of which was driven out of my mind by a memorably atrocious ending, of the one step up from "It was all a dream" variety.

Congratulations, you have successfully made that sound like something I should watch, if only to see how much of a cheese sandwich the ending is.

Your take on the end of Nadja makes me retroactively like it more (thanks!), but I'm still unlikely to sit through that pixelvisiom again.

That's fair. I'm glad it was useful!

I also want to see more Almareyda, but much of his work is very obscure.

I recommend Experimenter for all the reasons detailed in the review; in hindsight it shares a lot of the same Brechtian deadpan as Nadja, minus the Pixelvision. [edit: And right now it's on Netflix.] His most recent feature, this year's Marjorie Prime, looks like straight-up science fiction and I am interested in seeing what he does with the genre.

It took me a year to get my hamds on The Eternal.

That does not bode well for my chances, but maybe I'll get lucky with libraries. New Orleans, Mon Amour must be a post-Katrina film; its title recalls Hiroshima.

[moon_custafer]

Terence Fisher's Dracula (U.S. Horror of Dracula, 1958)
Is that the one where the chemistry between Cushing and Michael Gough is also fabulous?

symbolic doves and blowing curtains galore—there is an honest-to-God art department credit strictly for "Drapes."
This description reminds me of nothing so much as the Literal Music Video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

[sovay]

Is that the one where the chemistry between Cushing and Michael Gough is also fabulous?

I have a hard time answering that question personally because as much as I love Michael Gough, I think his Arthur Holmwood is useless in a suit, but I understand why you ask.

This description reminds me of nothing so much as the Literal Music Video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

It is kind of that aesthetic. It just works for me in The Hunger (and in Blade Runner: I don't know what it was with the Scott brothers and dusty sunlight and symbolic doves, but there was something) and in "Total Eclipse of the Heart" I crack up a lot.

[gwynnega]

I agree that someone like James Whale would have made Dracula's Daughter a much more dynamic film. I'm still very fond of it--probably partly because I first saw it when I was around ten years old, but also because of the queer content and Gloria Holden's performance.

there is an honest-to-God art department credit strictly for "Drapes."

That is hilarious. I'd forgotten just how many billowy drapes there were in The Hunger. Now I want to watch that film again.

I've put Nadja at the top of my Netflix queue!

[sovay]

I agree that someone like James Whale would have made Dracula's Daughter a much more dynamic film.

Or even just more coherent. All the elements are present in Hillyer's version, but there's no sense that he's drawing them together in any conscious fashion, or that he even understands the existence of the symbol-set he has to work with. Whale, whatever else he might have done or not done with the movie, demonstably knew how to play the Code.

I'm still very fond of it--probably partly because I first saw it when I was around ten years old, but also because of the queer content and Gloria Holden's performance.

Those are completely valid reasons to be fond of a movie.

That is hilarious. I'd forgotten just how many billowy drapes there were in The Hunger. Now I want to watch that film again.

There are so many billowy drapes! 1983 New York! Eighteenth-century Europe! Ancient Rome! Pharaonic Egypt! Who knew blowing curtains were such a constant across cultures and time?

I've put Nadja at the top of my Netflix queue!

Enjoy!

[strange_complex]

Thanks for writing all this up. It sounds like a really well-programmed night. I've only seen the first three, and of those only Dracula (1958) on the big screen, so I am Quite Jealous of the rest - both that you got to see films I know would look amazing on the big screen, and that you got to see others I don't even know that about.

I think you're right to highlight how much more Cushing brings to his role than is strictly scripted in Dracula (1958). I mean, some of it is well-worn lore, like crossing the candle-sticks and pulling down the curtains, but the smaller points you note here like the rub of the eyes are very important, and easy to underestimate. He was such a professional.

[sovay]

Thanks for writing all this up. It sounds like a really well-programmed night.

You're welcome! It was a good mix of different tones and takes on vampirism. I can think of other vampire movies that I might personally have included if anyone ever gave me a strict theme and twelve hours in a theater (I am really fond of the original 1985 Fright Night), but about the only choice I feel ambivalent about here is Trouble Every Day and that's mostly because I'm not sure it's really a vampire film.

I've only seen the first three, and of those only Dracula (1958) on the big screen, so I am Quite Jealous of the rest - both that you got to see films I know would look amazing on the big screen, and that you got to see others I don't even know that about.

I am thankful to the HFA for introducing me to Nadja, which I don't think I'd even heard of. I hope you get a vampire marathon near you. It is pretty much the ideal theme for all-night movies.

He was such a professional.

I have no tag for any of these, since I have been writing about film on DW-formerly-LJ since long before I had a Patreon and the thought of going back and tagging thirteen years of entries fills me with existential dread, but I discovered Peter Cushing rather abruptly in 2010 and wrote about movies of his on and off for several years afterward:

Cash on Demand (1961)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954)
The End of the Affair (1955)
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
Twins of Evil (1971)
Horror Express (1972)

I also dreamed once of something I wish he had starred in and fancast him as a character in a novel by Evangeline Walton. He's always present; he's always doing something beyond what's on the page. He was wonderful.

[strange_complex]

Tags are quite troublesome after a long blogging history, aren't they? Either you're really into something and tag it consistently, but because you use it so much it becomes less and less useful for actually finding a particular entry (e.g. my Christopher Lee tag has 88 uses and Dracula 80). Or you only realise the need belatedly and face exactly the problem you describe. :-( I actually resorted to a catalogue entry for all of Christopher Lee's films, and go back and link in new reviews periodically when I write them.

All of which obviously reflects my even greater preference for Lee over Cushing (my tag for whom has a mere 23 uses), but that is not to diss Cushing by any means. I have a very harmonious and productive friendship with a local chum, lady_lugosi1313 / ms_siobhan, who is more of a Cushing girl, which has involved many happy hours spent watching their films together - as well as many other vintage and / or Gothic horror films of all kinds. Either of them on their own is a guarantee of a good screen experience, no matter how bad the material around them might be, while obviously any of their collaborations is golden.

BTW have you ever seen this interview with Cushing, Forrest Ackermann and Leonard Wolf from 1975? The picture quality is appalling, the host is a typical TV lightweight and Forrest Ackermann is only really there to show off, but thankfully most of the actual talk time goes to Cushing and Wolf, and what they have to say is wonderful: some very interesting insights into what Cushing thought he was doing as Van Helsing in particular, and some perceptive analysis from Wolf.

As for marathons... there were zombie all-nighters for a few years in Leeds, but those seem to have stopped now. However, we do get plenty of horror festivals within a reasonable radius, so we manage well enough! :-)

[sovay]

I actually resorted to a catalogue entry for all of Christopher Lee's films, and go back and link in new reviews periodically when I write them.

I think that is a very sensible way of handling the problem. I've thought about doing something similar with my film reviews, although then I'd still have to keep track of the damn thing.

All of which obviously reflects my even greater preference for Lee over Cushing (my tag for whom has a mere 23 uses), but that is not to diss Cushing by any means.

I do not feel slighted! People either seem to come with a preference or they fall headlong into both of them, like handful_ofdust and her Hammer Pirates series.

Either of them on their own is a guarantee of a good screen experience, no matter how bad the material around them might be, while obviously any of their collaborations is golden.

Agreed.

BTW have you ever seen this interview with Cushing, Forrest Ackermann and Leonard Wolf from 1975?

Never, thank you! I don't think it was available online during my initial discovery. I look forward.

However, we do get plenty of horror festivals within a reasonable radius, so we manage well enough!

Excellent. I would not want you to be deprived.

[swan_tower]

I've been meaning to ask for ages now: do you take notes when you watch films, or have you simply trained your memory to a fare-thee-well?

[sovay]

I've been meaning to ask for ages now: do you take notes when you watch films, or have you simply trained your memory to a fare-thee-well?

I don't take notes. I have a good memory for dialogue, but it's not infallible: I double-check lines I'm not sure about with the internet if I can find them, although sometimes I can't, and if I have the ability—DVD or TCM—I do sometimes go back and transcribe important passages to make sure I don't get them wrong. I did that with Robin Redbreast (1970), for example, because it was on YouTube and because so much of the double-speaking of the dialogue is relevant to the manner in which the story unfolds. Everything this month so far, by contrast, is from memory. [edit] It isn't that I've been making an effort, I just couldn't rewatch some of these movies at my leisure if I wanted. Anything I see in theaters is generally memory-limited. Even TCM depends on me remembering to watch the movie sooner than right before it disappears. [edit edit] I note that you asked about memory in general and I focused on my ability to spot-memorize dialogue. Did this actually answer your question?

[swan_tower]

It did, yes. And I'm impressed: I have a reasonably good memory, but wouldn't be able to recall dialogue or describe specific moments the way you do, not unless I'd seen the moment in question many times. Even if it was a DVD, by the end of the film I'd probably have forgotten half the things I wanted to go back to -- they'd be overwritten by the later parts of the movie.

[sovay]

And I'm impressed: I have a reasonably good memory, but wouldn't be able to recall dialogue or describe specific moments the way you do, not unless I'd seen the moment in question many times.

This is useful because I tend to think my memory is terrible; my head is a sieve; I can't think of things when I want them and (if the movie is any good) I feel there is always more in the story than I have successfully recognized or described. I like writing about movies, and I like that people enjoy my writing about them, but it is easy for me to assume that this is real amateur-night stuff and that I don't have even the technical skills of a person who watches movies for a living. Thank you.

[swan_tower]

You're more than welcome! I can't say what kind of skills a person who watches movies for a living might have, but I certainly respect what you pull off in your posts. I mean, yeah -- of course there's more in the story than you've successfully recognized or described, because anything that can be wholly encapsulated in a single viewing followed by a blog post is pretty weak sauce. But when you review a movie I've seen, I'm always left with the feeling you've cut right to the heart of it. It reminds me of when my husband had lunch with a friend of mine from high school: I'd known her for something like six years back in the day, but when I asked him afterward what he thought of her, his description left me going "man, you know, I never thought of it that way -- but you're right; that's exactly what she's like." AFTER ONE LUNCH. Him with people = you with movies.