strange_complex | Entries tagged with werewolves

So help me, it's a list of every single film I watched in 2023. I've put notes where I could remember anything particular about the film or the viewing circumstances, but haven't tried to do that consistently. This is more about record-keeping than reviewing now.

1. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher - deliberately chosen as our first film of the New Year so we'd be starting it out right!

2. Fright Night 2 (1988), dir. Tommy Lee Wallace

3. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968), dir. Freddie Francis

4. Hellboy II (2008), dir. Guillermo del Toro

5. The Vampire Bat (1933), dir. Frank R. Strayer

6. Vampire in Venice / Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), dir. Augusto Caminito - would be an amazing film about decay and ageing, if it didn't also have Klaus Kinski being actively peedy in it.

7. Caligula (1979), dir. Tinto Brass, Giancarlo Lui and Bob Guccione - the fullest, unexpurgated version, seen at Wharf Chambers as a Pervert Pictures screening, complete with a contextualising introduction. It's the logical extreme of the decadent Rome trope.

8. The Company of Wolves (1984), dir. Neil Jordan

9. Dracula Bloodline (2013), dir. Jon Keeyes

10. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), dir. Michael Carreras

( There's another 94 under here )

It's the time of year when, after a demanding term, I traditionally attempt to reconnect with LJ / DW - except, of course, with pandemic-sized bells on. There is so much going on in my own life and all around me which I could and probably should write about, but even in a normal year that usually feels like an overwhelming task, and as for now... well. Instead, I shall write about this film which I watched in parallel with

lady_lugosi1313 a couple of weeks ago.

It was produced by Columbia Pictures and features Bela Lugosi as 'I Can't Believe It's Not Dracula' - strictly speaking, a Romanian scientist named Armand Tesla who died in 1744 and became a vampire. The 'return' bit in the title refers not to his return after the action of a previous film, but rather from part one of this film, set in WWI, to part two set during WWII. In the WWI sequence, he is detected, tracked to his mausoleum and staked by a Professor Walter Saunders of King's College, Oxford, with the help of his physician friend Lady Jane Ainsley. But then in the 1940s the stake is removed from his chest after an air-strike on the cemetery where his body lies by two well-meaning air-raid wardens who think it's a piece of shrapnel. Though Saunders has died in the meantime (Tesla claims because he cursed him), Lady Jane, her son John and Saunders' granddaughter Nikki are all still very much alive, so Tesla comes after them in search of vengeance.

It's a bit of an average film overall, but it has some interesting features. One is that the WWI sequence is introduced as being based on notes compiled by Professor Saunders, which then also have an important role to play within the story of the WWII part, as a source of in-story information for the characters on Tesla and how he operates. The device of introducing a story about the supernatural by saying it's based on some documentary evidence (common to Le Fanu, Stoker and M.R. James) has been catching my eye a lot this year, and I might try to tease out my thoughts about it a little more coherently in other reviews, but for now I just want to note the combination of having the documents attest to the story but also feature within the story, and look out for how often that is or isn't the case with other examples.

Lady Jane Ainsley is of course also a big plus. She is shown throughout as a fully competent medical professional, who plays the role of The Sceptic Who Becomes Convinced alongside Prof Saunders, the more Van Helsingish figure who already believes in vampires from the start. She is also beautiful, elegantly dressed, an accomplished organ player and an attentive mother to her son, John - so very much the 1940s image of the woman who has it all. In the 1940s sequence, she is even helping to receive prisoners smuggled in the UK out of Nazi camps, not to mention leading the response against Tesla once she realises he is back from the grave. Perhaps all a response to the greater recognition of women's capabilities which had come about because of the roles they were playing within the war effort, though it's noticeable that she still apparently has to be from the aristocracy for any of this to be plausible.

Tesla's vampirism is much in line with previous screen portrayals of Dracula, though rather more use is made of him appearing and disappearing out of mist than I think was the case in any of the Universal pictures. He even does the same drawing-room charm act as the 1931 Dracula, this time by stealing the identity of a prisoner rescued from the Nazi camps so that he can come to Nikki's engagement party, kiss ladies' hands and talk science with Lady Jane. One device I can't remember ever seeing in any other vampire film, although it seems obvious once demonstrated, is that when Prof Saunders and Lady Jane find Tesla in his coffin during the WWI sequence, he proves to her that Tesla is a vampire by simply holding up a mirror to the body - which of course reflects nothing. There are some effective visual devices, like when a single pane of glass in a child's bedroom window pops out, allowing the mist to enter, followed by an image of his shadow looming ominously over her bed; scenes of Nikki under Tesla's spell wandering through a graveyard in a long white nightie; or the use of what must surely have been an actual bombed-out church for the climactic scenes at the end of the film.

Other interesting bits and bobs include Andreas, Tesla's werewolf servant, whose werewolfism turns out to be a manifestation of Tesla's power over him which disappears on Tesla's death, but then returns once he is revived. Andreas ends up playing quite a similar role to Sandor in Dracula's Daughter (1936) at the end, when he turns against Tesla after he refuses to help Andreas when he has been shot. There was also an example of a doublethink about crosses which occurs pretty commonly in vampire films of this era - Tesla repelled by a cross in one scene, only to be shown standing in a graveyard full of cross-shaped headstones which apparently don't bother him in the least bit in the next. And the film ends with a breaking of the fourth wall, as the sceptical Scotland Yard inspector who still doesn't believe in vampires despite everything which has happened turns to ask the audience whether we do.

I suspect some members of the Hammer team had seen this film, as would be no great surprise given that they made their Dracula only 15 years later. Some familiar devices which I spotted included:

Visually confirming for us that a patient with suspected anaemia (actually a victim of Tesla of course) has died in Lady Jane's clinic by pulling a sheet over her face, much like Lucy in Hammer's Dracula.
Using a silhouette to convey Professor Saunders staking Tesla, like Jonathan Harker early on in Dracula.
Autumn leaves blowing in through the French window and across the floor of Nikki's bedroom, much like Lucy's.
Tesla saying explicitly that he will get revenge on Jane for her role in destroying him in the WWI sequence by working through those she loves, which is a bit there in Dracula, but really comes out in Risen, Taste, AD 1972 and Satanic Rites.
The attempt to show Tesla's face melting through special effects after he is destroyed by a combination of sunlight and staking at the end - not as effective as Hammers, but a good effort nevertheless.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/680020.html

This is the second book I read for the now-unlikely-to-happen DracSoc trip to Bath, again because its author lived there in the early to mid '70s. On one level it is a series of ten 'takes' on traditional fairy-tales, but even to say that rather over-simplifies and understates what Carter does with them. Most are entirely recast, reset, reframed - more riffs on the original stories than even retellings, and sometimes taking two or three iterations to explore different angles on the same archetype. All of them reflect her famously radical feminist perspective, but while that might now conjure up a vision of stories about women triumphing over patriarchy, perhaps with a queer emphasis, Carter's focus is more on demonstrating the workings of patriarchy, the ways in which women are often complicit in it, its damaging effects and (sometimes) the ways in which women can counter or escape from it. Most of the stories are also distinctly Gothic in nature, involving violence, the monstrous, isolated fantastical settings and a general sense of heightened drama and emotion. ( My notes on individual stories follow below )

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/660370.html

The lovely

lady_lugosi1313 spotted this book in a charity shop and kindly bought it for me, and I read it mainly while on last year's DracSoc holiday to the Czech Republic (LJ / DW). Other editions of the same book are entitled Vampire and Werewolf Stories, which is considerably more accurate, given that it actually alternates stories about the two throughout. The table of contents runs thus:

'Dracula' (an extract) by Bram Stoker
'The Werewolf' by Barbara Leonie Picard
'The Vampire of Kaldenstein' by Frederick Cowles
'Freeze-up' by Anthony Masters
'Drink my Blood' by Richard Matheson
'Terror in the Tatras' by Winifred Finlay
'Day Blood', by Roger Zelazny
'Getting Dead', by William F. Nolan
'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
'The Werewolf' (an extract) by Clemence Housman
'Mama Gone' by Jane Yolen
'Revelations in Black' by Carl Jacobi
'Gabriel Ernest' by Saki (H.H. Munro)
'The Horror at Chilton Castle' by Joseph Payne Brennan
'Count Dracula' by Woody Allen
'The Werewolf' by Angela Carter
'The Drifting Snow' by August Derleth
'Howl' by Alan Durant

Obviously I'd read some before, and I skipped the extract from Dracula (which covers Lucy's staking) for that reason, but generally I just re-read anyway, on the grounds that it had been a while with most of the others. And although I don't generally tend to seek out werewolf stories, I was quite glad of their inclusion, a) because I hadn't read any of those, b) because many of them were pretty good and c) because it later turned out to put me in a much better position to appreciate Gail-Nina's talk on werewolves at the DracSoc Whitby weekend in September (LJ / DW). I'm not going to try to comment on every story in the collection, especially since some were fairly average and forgettable, but these are some responses to those which most struck me:

'The Werewolf' by Barbara Leonie Picard - this was the one I was most glad of having read when listening to Gail-Nina's talk. It's basically a translation / retelling of this medieval French werewolf legend, and as such represents the genre in an early form (not, of course, the earliest - ask Petronius). Unlike many later werewolf stories, it says nothing about how people become werewolves: the main character just is one, and his condition isn't affected by the moon either. Rather, he goes off as a wolf for several days a week, but can only become a man again when he puts on his clothes - very symbolic! It's a simple tale, simply told, but very much worth reading if you're interested in the evolution of werewolf mythology.

'The Vampire of Kaldenstein' by Frederick Cowles - this story would have been fine if it had been written any time before 1897. Instead, it was written in 1938, and yet is nothing more than a collection of staple Gothic horror tropes. I ended up feeling profoundly irritated both by the fact that it had been written and by the fact that I had wasted half an hour of my life reading it.

'Drink my Blood' by Richard Matheson - I've read this one before, but I really like it and am glad to have the opportunity to say so here! It was published in 1951, and I don't know of any earlier example of story about someone who is inspired by vampire fiction to want to become a vampire themselves. In this case, our hero is a young boy called Jules who sees Universal's Dracula at the cinema (it has to be theirs because of the publication date), and thereafter becomes fixated on trying to become a vampire himself. In fact, in this respect it is a forerunner of Aickman's 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal', which I wrote about yesterday, and which likewise (on one level anyway!) presents a heroine whose willingness to become a vampire is probably strongly influenced by Lord Byron and his ilk. Matheson is also a little ambiguous about Jules' fate, but unlike Aickman he allows his character to recognise the range of possible outcomes for him, giving him a moment of stark horror when it occurs to him for the first time that the bat which he has let loose from the local zoo may not actually be Count Dracula after all: "Suddenly his mind was filled with a terrible clarity. He knew that he was lying half-naked on garbage and letting a flying bat drink his blood." He also uses an omniscient narrative voice to specify in the closing lines that the bat really was the Count, now freed and restored to human form thanks to Jules' blood. Whether Jules then simply dies, or dies and becomes a vampire, is a matter for the reader. As for Matheson, his tale of a kid inspired to irrational actions by vampire fiction was proved remarkably prescient by the case of the 'Gorbals Vampire' three years later - though that is generally considered to have been inspired by horror comics, rather than films.

'Day Blood', by Roger Zelazny - a nice little tale with a twist from 1985. We follow a male character who seems at first to be a human vampire-protector, but proves in fact to be their apex predator, keeping them alive so that he can feed on them in spite of their attempts to ward him off with a sprig of mistletoe and a statue of Cernunnos. It probably seemed cleverer on initial publication than it does now, but it's still worth a read.

'The Werewolf' (an extract) by Clemence Housman - an extract from an 1896 novel which is probably the best werewolf story in this collection. It is basically a chase to the death through the snow, with a female werewolf pursued by a human hunter bent on revenge for the way she has seduced his brother. The way Housman captures the wild landscape, the relentlessness of the pursuit, the growing pain as the human hunter ploughs onwards and his steely determination to see through his goal is beautiful. I wouldn't cast aside the full novel if it came my way.

'Mama Gone' by Jane Yolen - a strangely affecting story from 1991 which I hadn't come across before, about a little girl whose mother dies in childbirth and soon begins plaguing the village from beyond the grave. It had quite a lot of raw stuff about the family processing their loss, which certainly struck home with me. Indeed, that's what the story is 'really' about, under the cloak of vampirism - a little girl coming to terms with her mother's death, until it moves from a thing of horror to a memory of love. All this culminates powerfully in the girl going to the mother's grave at night to confront the grey corpse who rises from it, and to reach across the gulf between living and dead to ask her to stop harming them. It's a leap of faith which could as easily end in disaster as success, but the power of their family bond cuts through. The mother hears her plea, gives herself over to the sun and fades to become the Good Dead, rather than the Bad.

'The Werewolf' by Angela Carter - short but good, as you would expect from the author. It's basically Little Red Riding Hood, except that the grandmother is also the wolf. The young girl triumphs.

That'll do for this collection, I think. Good to read, and good to mull over here. Another one to sit on my shelf of vampire short story collections... :-)

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/596682.html

I got back on Monday night from a long weekend in Whitby spent in the company of around 40 Dracula Society members: including

lady_lugosi1313 whom I have now dragooned into joining! I went there with a smaller group of them two years ago, and managed a decent write-up of it afterwards too (LJ / DW), but this was a more formal gathering designed to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Society's first official visit there in 1977.

lady_lugosi1313 and I got there shortly before lunch on the Friday, but the official business didn't begin until that evening, so we spent the afternoon enjoying Gothic seaside fun in the sunshine. We pottered around the shops buying various treasures, and then headed down to the harbour front where she introduced me to Goth Blood milkshakes - basically ordinary milkshakes with bucket-loads of food colouring in them which turn your tongue blood-red after a single sip:

I also went through the Dracula Experience: a once-in-a-lifetime audio-visual presentation of the Dracula story. I say 'once-in-a-lifetime' because it is so rubbish that it is hard to imagine anyone voluntarily going twice (for all the reasons aptly articulated in these TripAdvisor reviews). They have a cloak at the beginning of the exhibition which they claim is one of Christopher Lee's Dracula capes, but I'm afraid it clearly isn't: it has a strong diagonal ridged texture which none of Lee's capes in any of the Hammer Dracula films ever did. Still, though, the whole thing only cost three quid, and I did chuckle most of the way through at how inept it was, so I guess it wasn't the worst thing I've ever spent money on. Afterwards, we spent one whole pound each on the tuppenny falls, where

lady_lugosi1313, who is an experienced competitive player, completely wiped the floor with me, winning more than double the amount of tuppences I had managed to score every time we compared our takings.

The evening began with the traditional gathering around the bench which the Society donated in 1980 (I suppose we'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of that in three years too!), where

lady_lugosi1313 encountered most of the Society's members for the first time, and was also introduced to tuica: Romanian plum brandy, and of course our preferred toast. The rest of the evening was informal, but Julia (the Society's very energetic chair) had laid on a wonderful programme of events for us at the Royal Hotel the following day.

We began with a screening of ( 27. Holy Terrors (2017), dir. Julian Butler and Mark Goodall )

We also had two talks given by members of the Society: Gail-Nina Anderson on werewolves and Barry McCann on Jekyll and Hyde. Both traced the evolution of their creatures and their stories through time, looking at how and why they have been treated differently in different circumstances, and what aspects of the human experience they have been used to explore. And although this wasn't particularly planned, both actually informed the other very neatly, and indeed made me realise something I had never really noticed before: that Jekyll and Hyde is essentially a werewolf story. As Gail had already shown us, werewolf stories have never actually been that prescriptive about the matter of how a person becomes a werewolf: many just take it for granted that they exist, and those which do try to explain how it happens offer a much wider range of possibilities than the now common idea of being bitten by an existing werewolf. Nor is the moon particularly consistently required to prompt transformations. So a story about a man who brings out his inner beast voluntarily through a potion of his own making fits right into the canon.

After lunch (roast pork baps from the Greedy Pig GET IN MY FACE!), it was time for a quiz. Given that this consisted of a ten-point round on Stoker's Dracula (which I have read multiple times and am reading right now), a ten-point round on Whitby (where I was sat while taking the quiz), and a twenty-point round on film adaptations of Dracula (which are basically the heart of

lady_lugosi1313's and my co-conspiratorial film watching), you would have thought I might manage to do quite well on this, but no! Somehow Julia managed to make it really hard. The winner, Kate, scored a fairly modest 26.5 points out of 40, while I scraped along with 14.5 and

lady_lugosi1313 bagged a mere 11.5. It's almost like we've been wasting our lives!

Oh well, at least we had plenty of opportunity to buy up books and DVDs which might help us to do better next time in the society auction - not to mention all sorts of other goodies, from the utterly tat-tastic to the actually very tasteful. ( This was my personal haul, including a notebook in the shape of Christopher Lee as Dracula )

That evening was the Society's formal dinner, so I grabbed the rare opportunity to dress up in full Gothic finery with both hands. We had allowed plenty of time to walk down from our guest-house and ended up arriving ridiculously early, so, as it was still light and I don't look like this very often,

lady_lugosi1313 indulged me with a little photo-shoot.

( Vanity, vanity, all is vanity )

Much wine was drunk, merriment had and patrons on a ghost walk of Whitby outside the window trolled by means of a green Frankenstein torch shone at them through a white napkin (though irritatingly they didn't seem to notice). None of this, though, stopped a hardy band of us from getting up the next morning bright and early to do the six-and-a-half-mile cliff walk from Whitby to Robin Hood's Bay. This of course was all in honour of Mina and Lucy, who do just this walk in Stoker's novel straight after the funeral of the Demeter's captain: a plan concocted by Mina with a view to tiring Lucy out and stopping her from fretting about the funeral and sleep-walking that night. She records her plan in an entry on the morning of 10 August thus:

She will be dreaming of this tonight, I am sure. The whole agglomeration of things, the ship steered into port by a dead man, his attitude, tied to the wheel with a crucifix and beads, the touching funeral, the dog, now furious and now in terror, will all afford material for her dreams. I think it will be best for her to go to bed tired out physically, so I shall take her for a long walk by the cliffs to Robin Hood's Bay and back. She ought not to have much inclination for sleep-walking then.

And you can read her post-factum report of the walk itself that evening here.

We grabbed a couple of group pictures before we set off, which I hope Michael won't mind too much that I have stolen from his FB page:

Cliff walk party selfie Michael Borio.jpg

Cliff walk photo Dutch angle Michael Borio.jpg

Then off we went, ( past many picturesque delights )

The conversation as we walked unfolded much as you would expect in the circumstances. I can't remember exactly who said what now, but the gist of it all went more or less like this:

"Presumably Mina and Lucy can't actually have walked to Robins Hood's Bay. They must have taken a horse and cart or something."
"Oh no, it says quite clearly in the novel that they walked."
"Yes, that's right - they're obviously going across the fields because some cows come up and give them a fright."
"Can you imagine doing this in heels and a corset, though?"
"Well, Victorian women did have sensible walking boots and country clothing."
"Yes, absolutely - the Victorians were very much into their physical exercise and fresh air."
"They would still definitely have been wearing corsets, though."
"Oh yes. Mind you, the whalebone corsets had quite a lot of give in them. You would only wear the steel ones in the evening."
"Well, my respect for Mina and Lucy is increasing with every step."
"You've got to wonder if Bram ever actually thought about the implications of doing all this in a corset, though."
"Hmm, yes - good point. Well, unless he dressed up in the full regalia himself and did the whole walk that way. You know, just to really get into the heads of his characters."
"Well, given that he was 6'4", that would have been quite a sight!"

In the end, we were not as hardcore as Mina and Lucy ourselves, though. They walked both ways, and had to suffer an unwanted visit from a curate in the evening. We got the bus back, before enjoying another final dinner together ahead of our general dispersal on the Monday morning. Not that

lady_lugosi1313 and I were in a rush to get home that morning, though - not least because she didn't have any house-keys, so couldn't get into the house until

planet_andy got home with his set anyway, and furthermore because their boiler had broken so the house would be freezing. Instead we spent most of the day in Filey, which I have never visited before, but which proved to be a charming seaside town with a lovely museum, some great charity shops, some excellent cafes, and a fountain with a surround designed like ( a compass showing the directions of all the locations mentioned in the shipping forecast )

They also had a crazy golf course, where

lady_lugosi1313 and I played a game so utterly inept that it more than once reduced us to tears of laughter; but I feel duty bound to note that she did beat me, with a score of 37 shots for 9 holes to my 40. Finally it was time to head home, playing games of "I Spy" and "I am a Hammer film: which one am I?" as we drove. All in all a very enjoyable and much-needed final summer jolly before term hits with a vengeance next week...

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/587844.html

I saw this at the weekend with the lovely

ms_siobhan and

planet_andy. It's an Amicus werewolf film complete with Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, a youthful Michael Gambon, an alsatian wrapped in a rug, some extremely spangly shirts and a soundtrack full of wacka-wacka guitar music. In other words, lots of silly '70s fun. And just to make the atmosphere complete,

ms_siobhan had used some brand new skull-shaped silicon cake cases which she got for Christmas to bake spongy pink brain-cakes with a delicious layer of boiled eye-balls (aka cherries) to eat while we watched.

The USP of this particular film is that it is (meant to be) as much a detective film as a horror film, with the viewer invited to work out the identity of the werewolf amongst a party of guests at a millionaire's isolated high-security mansion. We were instructed by a voice-over to be on the look-out for clues from the start of the film, and towards the end the narrative stopped for a 'werewolf break', during which we were shown pictures of the surviving guests, and then given thirty seconds to figure out which was the werewolf.

We did managed to narrow it down correctly to two possible suspects out of six, but most of the clues were pretty ham-fisted, and I'm still not convinced we'd actually been given enough information to identify the correct individual. And, disappointingly, there was no Sherlock or Poirot figure within the narrative to explain in detail how we should have been able to work out which character was the werewolf. The identity was revealed, but not the reasoning. Also, the narrative which we had been given up to that point didn't exactly match up with the parameters we were being asked to subscribe to anyway. The millionaire who had assembled the guests kept stating very confidently that he knew ONE of his guests was a werewolf - and indeed this turned out to have been true. But he also gave reasons for suspecting each and every one of them of being a werewolf, and it was never clear why he felt so sure that only one of them actually was, but still couldn't tell which.

Also interesting was the fact that the main character - the millionaire who had invited everyone to his mansion, and who got by far the most screen-time in the film - was black. In fact, so was his wife, which meant that the film passed the ethnic minority version of the Bechdel test - there were several scenes in which the two of them discussed their own goals and motivations with each other, without any particular reference to any of their white guests. That's extremely rare for a '70s British horror flick - but you still couldn't exactly call it a positive portrayal. This character is stereotyped into something of a Blaxploitation role, running about the place a lot in shiny PVC shirts and wielding enormous guns. He also plays right into the age-old trope of the nouveau riche social climber with more money than sense - he's shown as a slightly unhinged play-boy, spending thousands on his obsessive hunt to find a werewolf, and getting several people killed in the process. So, yeah.

And, for a film with such a stellar cast, it doesn't half waste them. Michael Gambon is all right, although he doesn't have terribly much to do except sit around looking a bit sulky. But Peter Cushing gets precious little screen-time; most of his dialogue is incredibly hokey and utterly boring faux-science; and he's obviously been asked to lay aside his trademark crisp English enunciation in favour of an annoying and completely unconvincing foreign accent. As for Charles Gray - to be honest, he was basically phoning it in.

So, not exactly what you'd call a masterpiece, but fun for an afternoon's entertainment. And it's hugely whetted our appetites for more of the same at this year's Bradford Fantastic Film Weekend, too. :-)

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