Dear Halloween reader,
I hope you’re enjoying your Halloween, even if you’re ambivalent about the holiday. I know people who don’t enjoy the chaos, imagery or its ancient echoes from a pre-Christian era. To each their own, and if they want to begin watching winter holiday movies early, let them.1
I have many friends who cannot tolerate horror films, and I appreciate their aversion. It’s not one I share, but I will confess that I would watch a hundred gory films over documentaries dealing with real-life atrocities.
At the beginning of my recent trip to Sitges, while on the line to drop off my suitcase for my flight to Spain, I fell into conversation with a lovely Dublin couple who were repeat visitors to Barcelona. We chatted about a lot of different things and they offered a number of travel tips. I kept bumping into them in lines before we finally parted at the baggage carousel in Barcelona.
As is often the way they were curious when they discovered my occupation and my reason for visiting the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival, and the lady indicated her inability to watch horror films (her husband on the other hand, rather enjoyed them on occasion). Then she told me about the recent documentary they saw in the cinema, which was about human trafficing… I paled. She had voluntarily left the house to watch it and brought along her husband — he could not even comment on it, shaking his head in mute disbelief as she lightly outlined its focus.
I am familiar with the dark well of true human viciousness; most people have stood upon its edge. Some have been pushed in and others merely splashed by it.
This is why fictional monsters fascinate us. In them we can engage (by proxy) with terrible scenarios and an unrelenting pursuit by inexplicable foes without direct harm. At times it might provoke fear and nightmares, but those unconscious battles are temporary, and on occasion, cathartic if you ponder the symbolism and figure out why you were so scared.
Many monsters can be vanquished.2 They have rules and sometimes you can evade their grasp if you understand their systems. (As a future placeholder I’ll simply note that movies about curses often have monsters, but the curse aspect is its own engine. Those monsters are manifestations of the hexing and have a different interaction with the afflicted victim.)
Again, I am amused at how my mind omits and remembers things at certain times. I’ve reported twice already on films I saw at Sitges, and yet forgot to mention two that I enjoyed and are relevant to the topic.
First is Gueules Noires (The Deep Dark), a French monster movie that was in my personal top three of the films I watched at Sitges. Written and directed by Mathieu Turi, this is literally a trip into the seam of the dark unconscious, to traverse through time to the ancient darkness of human history. It’s set in a mine in 1956 in Northern France, where men face gruelling conditions every day in order to fill their quotas. An archeologist (Jean-Hugues Anglade) arrives and offers everyone a fat bonus to delve into unstable sections of the mine. He won’t reveal what he’s looking for, and of course, a team is assembled because the cash is too good to turn down.
The two main characters in the group are Amir (Amir El Kacem), a French-speaking Moroccan who has just been smuggled into the country, and is desperate to take any labour, and the ex-soldier Roland (Samuel Le Bihan), who is the stalwart expert who leads his men and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Eventually, the team encounters a frightening creature, and they realise it has been trapped in the earth for a reason. If it is released, the world will suffer…
Issues to do with racism and poverty are directly tackled, but Turi doesn’t reduce these difficult subjects into flat scenes, thus making the characters believable and multi-dimensional. All the miners are disposable: their jobs are hazardous and back-breaking, but their circumstances don’t allow for other options. Thus the chance to nab random treasure is too good to pass up.
The monster at the centre of the movie doesn’t lurk in the shadows for long, and it has a number of memorable scenes, with Turi drawing upon a previous fictional mythology, which I won’t reveal in case you decide to watch the film. This kind of claustrophobic drama is perfect for a horror film, and Turi and his cinematographer Alain Duplantier, make terrific use of the setting and the miner’s conundrum to craft tense scenes.
I particularly liked the era chosen, the profession, and the creation of a novel monster (which people will either like or not, but it worked for me). As a someone who loves monster movies, this was a great example of what you can do with the genre with a smart script, a talented cast, and a memorable setting.
The next one up is There's Something in the Barn which is a fish-out-of-water story, where a family of clueless Americans inherit a house in Norway, and must contend with the local folklore about how you treat your resident elf in the barn. This elf does not appreciate poor hospitality, and dishes out a number of awful retributions on the unsuspecting newcomers. Eventually, he calls in back-up and it escalates into mayhem.
This Norwegian/Finnish coproduction is directed by Magnus Martens and co-written by Aleksander Kirkwood Brown, Josh Epstein and Kyle Rideout. This darkly amusing Christmas story falls into the stupid fun category, and you can look forward to ridiculous gore and a multitude of elves running amuck and beating up a lightly dysfunctional but mostly likeable family. It’s the type of film that will be a welcome antidote for some during the holiday of enforced jolliness.
There’s nothing new here, but it acquits itself nicely and doesn’t over-stay its welcome. In Sitges it played well, especially as it was a (mostly) pan-European audience who enjoyed laughing at themselves and at American naïveté.
Watching silly monster movies is another form of exorcism, but without the dread and with an expectation of a clear resolution (or truce) at the end.
I’m all in favour of having a variety of entertainment. Serious stories have their place, as does gross-out humour.
While at Sitges I was asked what was my favourite monster, and after a moment of white-screen panic, my brain pointed to one of my perennial favourites: the vampire. In fact, when I was a teen I was a connoisseur of vampire fiction, reading pretty much everything I had access to — which compared to now was a paltry trickle.
For my first M.A. I examined Irish 19th century supernatural fiction, and just in that period we had two important contributions. ‘Carmilla’ by Sheridan Le Fanu, and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Stoker’s vision of vampires became so influential partly because it had an early and hugely successful stage adaptation, and transferred quickly to film (so many times).3 Now, we have a ‘Bram Stoker Festival’, which runs every Halloween bank holiday weekend in Dublin, Ireland.
Vampires — blood drinkers — are an international phenomenon that appear in many cultures, but they are configured differently depending on the country and its mores. Vampires, above all monsters, are essentially transgressive. They die, return from the grave, and feed off the living. That is their most basic configuration.4
One of the reasons that societies developed funerary rites was to offer a ritual to the mourners so they could begin to process their grief, and it was also envisioned as a way to establish boundaries between the living and the dead. Appeasing the spirits of the deceased was serious business in most societies. It was considered unhealthy for the living to be overly-occupied by those who had passed on. This was a basic recognition of the fact that humans live in the moment. The grim reality is that no matter how much we have loved them, the dead recede in memory as we continue to live.
Or so they should…
Thus the vampire breaks that most sacred of barriers. It also drains the living and resurrects them into a hellish existence. It’s no surprise that many vampire films centre on that tension: the amoral liberation of gaining superpowers and longevity versus killing everyone you love or watching them die of old age. Psychopaths make great vampires but poor characters for humans to read or watch on the screen.
(Anytime you think vampire cinema is (un)dead, just watch A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour.)
The fascinating aspect about the vampire is its flexibility as a monster5: it can be a tortured soul, damned but unable to gain acceptance, it can be a hedonistic, ruthless predator, it can be a funny metaphor for the outsider… and since vampires are at their core human blood drainers they are sexually liberated — i.e. they feed from anyone. Thus they are endlessly malleable as a creature and can be morphed, transfigured and altered to fit your fictive desires.
Vampires never go out of style. They have cycles of fascination, but we keep returning to them. At Sitges our jury gave the Méliès d’argent to La Morsure (Bitten), a French vampire film, plus I also enjoyed the other French vampire film, The Vourdalak, and I managed to get to a screening of Blood the latest American vampire movie from director Brad Anderson, and written by Will Honley.6
On my return, I watched the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows, the playful vampire sit-com, which ventured into gross new territory regarding experiments on the nature of vampires and their potential evolution... yet the conundrum at the centre of the season remains the debate over the pros and cons of being a vampire. Not everyone is suited to be a killer.
I am intrigued that Irishman Neil Jordan has directed two different but equally interesting vampire films: Interview with the Vampire (1994), an iconic adaptation of Anne Rice’s bestselling novel, and Byzantium (2012) — written by Moira Buffini — a lush, complicated mother/daughter story. But Jordan’s fascination with the eerie started early with his adaptation of Angela Carter’s A Company of Wolves (1984) which Carter co-wrote, and and has carried on with other examples, such as his wonderfully adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1997), which McCabe also co-wrote.7
And if you were wondering, why yes, I have written vampires. My short story, ‘Bone Mother’ is about an encounter between two myths — available in my short story collection The Boughs Withered. It was adapted into a stop-motion animated short film by Sylvie Trouvé and Dale Hayward (See Creature animation company), and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It’s now available to watch online:
I also wrote about the Irish vampire in the Róisín Dubh comic book (Atomic Diner Comics). Weirdly enough, I haven’t written any vampires in a considerable time, which makes me think that I should revisit that fiend’s realm.
Anyone looking for an amazing series of vampire novels should check out the Anno Dracula books by the lord of vampire fiction: Kim Newman (plus you can get them as audiobooks and he also has an original graphic novel in the series). Kim has been running a ‘Daily Dracula’ set of images on his social media accounts for several years, and is unlikely to run out of fodder any time soon. Our love of the vampire8 is eternal.
Long live the undead!
Finally, I’m attending the Ballinasloe Library ComicCon, on Saturday, the 4th of November at 2.15pm. I’ll be part of a Comic Book Creators Panel moderated by Gar O’Brien, with Paul J Bolger, Paul Carroll and Fiona Boniwell, discussing the art and business of making comics.
I’m looking forward to returning to the wonderful Ballinasloe Library for this event!
No doubt I will get into this in a later Substack, but I have a weakness for cheesy holiday movies. Yes, you can love horror and squishy romantic fare. We all contain multitudes and paradoxes. It’s one of the fun aspects of meeting people and remembering they are not easily categorised.
Not all, of course. Many narratives enjoy throwing creatures at us that keep returning (especially for lucrative sequels). In this regard the monster is a reminder that there are some hard aspects of life we cannot escape, such as death itself; it will conquer us eventually.
People forget the importance of radio drama in the early 20th century, and it’s noteworthy that Orson Welles adapted Dracula for the first episode of the CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast on 11 July 1938.
Although the ‘energy vampires’ in What We Do in the Shadows TV series is a welcome variation.
I think the sheer unearthly, inhumane quality of vampires often is diminished in recent accounts, and there’s a frisson missing from them. In the end, for me, vampires are monsters — clever, seductive, yes — and like the elf in There’s Something in the Barn, not to be allowed into your house. I will note that The Strain (2014-2017) worked on this quality of the vampire, and even Anderson’s Blood examines the decidedly horrible aspect of vampirism—and its dreadful knock-on affects of the family of those afflicted.
Other vampire films at the festival included Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person and En attendant la nuit.
Other examples include High Spirits (1988) and Ondine (2009).
Especially the classic Dracula ‘look’, cemented by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 black and white classic. It is instantly recognisable and is the vampire brand icon of the modern era.