Dracula before Dracula, the original of The Vourdalak, Aleksei Tolstoy’s The Family of the Vourdalak, was written in 1839, nearly 60 years before Bram Stoker sat down to write his tale of the Undead. It’s a refreshingly different take on the story we’re all used to, with a focus, unsurprisingly given the title, on how the average everyday vampire might get along with his relations, blood and otherwise.
This retelling of the story makes for a very drole movie, in the very French sense of the word. Not exactly comedic but prancing about in that territory somewhere and incarnated in the central character – the Jonathan Harker, if you like – an innocent 18th-century aristocrat lost in the woods who happens upon a strange family who live in a house in a clearing. There he is subjected to all manner of weirdness while waiting for a chance to get away from his new acquaintances.
Kacey Mottet Klein plays the powdered, bewigged Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe as two stereotypes in one – the upper-class ninny and the decadent roué, who first spots a pretty woman in the woods and is much taken by her comeliness. Through Sdenka (Ariane Labed) the marquis has soon also met brothers Jegor (Grégoire Colin) and Piotr (Vassili Schneieder), Jegor’s wife Anja (Claire Duburcq), her son Vlad (Gabriel Pavie) and, most significantly, patriarch Gorcha – voiced by director Adrien Beau, but represented by a puppet with a waft of CG assist. From the parchment skin, sunken eyes and skeletal limbs, Gorcha is clearly a vourdalak, an undead blood-thirsty creature who we first meet carrying a Turk’s head as a souvenir of a battle.
The Turks get a few mentions, in satirical nods towards French President Emmanuel Macron’s pronouncements on the civilisational challenges to la maniere de vie française, and there are other little teases suggesting we’re really watching a commentary on modern life on the downlow. These include the possibly non-binary Piotr’s arrival on the scene dressed as a woman, and the fact that Sdenka is underdressed to the point of ridiculousness – the marquis wonders aloud at one point if she isn’t a bit cold – nipples and jellymould breasts visible throughout.
This is Adrien Beau’s debut feature, and the onetime designer for John Galliano and Christian Dior knows how to be stylish. This extends to shooting the film on Super 16mm, which lends everything a grainy, fairytale, lost-in-the-woods quality. Hammer is there in the interiors, and Mario Bava too, to an extent (he adapted the same story as one third of his 1963 Black Sabbath movie), and there is gothic thunder and lightning and the creaking open of doors while the score (a reworking of Nino Rota’s for Fellini’s Casanova by Maïa Xifaras and Martin Le Nouvel) rumbles darkly. What Beau strives to avoid, and manages, is comparisons to What We Do in the Shadows, which was a “life with the vampires” movie tackled from a much more comedic angle.
Here, as well as atmosphere to burn, there is horror, which is spooky rather than nasty – the puppet helps – and some nice mumbo-jumbo, like the scene where a severed finger, a raw egg, a bowl of blood, some incantations and a sprig of smouldering herbs are pressed into service in an attempt to bring “gris-gris” into play against the rapacious father.
Modern Europe is here – exhausted, preyed upon, the young sacrificed for the old, aristocrats still gumming things up, Turks as the bogeyman – but the tale works well as a straightforward story in its own right, the sort of thing the Grimm brothers would recognise.
At 91 minutes it’s short by modern movie standards but would be pacier at ten minutes shorter. Less atmospheric, maybe, but hey…
The Vourdalak – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
