An audience's response to The Vourdalak (2023, directed by Adrien Beau) will hinge entirely on how it reacts to the title character, presented in the film as an elaborate puppet. Perhaps it's better to call it a puppeted practical effect? I don't know. Its closest cinematic relatives are The Crypt Keeper from the old Tales from the Crypt series, and Death in Jim Henson's The Storyteller, the episode that combines the soldier and the devils story with "Godfather Death" from Grimm's Fairy Tales. This effect isn't necessarily a deal breaker. It's a good puppet, and creepy as hell, but it might break the movie's spell if an audience doesn't believe it. Other films have overcome similar effects, even some well-known ones. Otherwise, this is an art house horror movie that's more related to Eastern European horror movies like Viy or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders than it is to a western special effects-driven horror movie. It has a touch of Jean Rollin's Gothic sensibility, too. It is a far cry from this century's extreme horror movies from France, though it's not shy about the cruelty and blood in its source text.
Like the more famous Carmilla, Aleksey Tolstoy's vampire story, The Family of the Vourdalak, predates Dracula by half a century. Its influence on Stoker can be seen in its portrait of a Western European traveling in the wilds of Eastern Europe and encountering the old monsters of the Slavic imagination. Unlike Carmilla and Dracula, The Family of the Vourdalak hasn't attached itself to the massmind of Western pop culture in quite the same way. It's not for trying, though. There have been at least fifteen film versions of the story. Prior to this film, there was an Argentine version in 2022. The most famous version is in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, with Boris Karloff playing the vourdalak. This latest version is from France. Appropriate, given that the original story was written in French even though Tolstoy was Russian. The original story was written while Tolstoy was a diplomat in France and the lead character can be seen as autobiographical. The new version is remarkably close to what one finds in the original text with some departures at the end. But whatever. Bava took liberties, too.
The story follows the Marquis d'Urfé, a French diplomat lost somewhere in Serbia after an encounter with bandits has deprived him of both his horse and his companions. At the film's outset, he is pounding on the door of a peasant cottage at night. The man inside refuses to admit him, but tells him that he may find aid down the road at the house of Gorcha, and that he shouldn't tarry in the woods. In the woods, he encounters a beautiful girl who is wary of him, and a beautiful young boy he mistakes for a fair maiden. These are two of the children of Gorcha. At the house he finds another, Jegor, the eldest son of the family, and his wife and young son. The patriarch, Gorcha, is not at home. He's off fighting the Turks. He has promised his family that if he returns in six days, then all will be well, but if he returns after six days are up, they should shut the house against him. The Marquise arrives on the sixth day, and waits for Gorcha to arrive. He does, after a fashion, in a way that confounds the timekeeping of the family. He is an emaciated wreck of a man. His appearance so alarms the family dog that he demands his son shoot the dog. Soon, he begins to dominate his family, and one by one, they succumb to him. The Marquis is smitten with the Gorcha daughter, Sdenka, and begs her to flee with him, but she will have none of that. When at last, he escapes, he can't bear to leave her behind. He returns to find her. She is waiting for him. But she is not as she seems...
At its core, The Vourdalak is about toxic patriarchy. I mean this literally, and not just in a feminist theoretical way. The film has a patriarch and he is toxic. An outright monster, no less, and not just of the human variety. Many of the traits of toxic fathers are on display here, whether it's a creepy defense of a daughter's virtue, the domination of an older son who acts as a kapo in the family, and the queerness of a younger son despised by a traditionalist father. Sdenka, the daughter, is obviously attracted to the idea of escape even if it means running off with The Marquis against her father's wishes. Jegor, the eldest is a portrait of the sins of the father repeating in the son; he's as domineering toward the family as his father, in his father's absence. The younger son, Piotr is obviously some variety of queer. The Marquis mistakes him for a young woman when they meet, and when Sdenka and Piotr plot to thwart Gorcha with hawthorn boughs and a wooden stake, Jeorg excoriates them as superstitious women, Piotr not escaping this condemnation. Piotr escapes the fate of his family--perhaps because the vourdalak myth suggests the monster feeds on those it loves. Piotr gets the same fate as the dog who yaps at Gorcha. The Marquis's final confrontation with Gorcha suggests queerness of a darker sort, but The Marquis is a sexually ambivalent figure. He's done up like a pre-revolutionary fop, with lace and white make-up. In some ways, his image is a mirror of the vourdalak. He's also a weak hero, though that's part of the film's overall method. Actor Kacey Mottet Klein performs exactly as the film demands. For most of the movie, he's more Ichabod Crane than Dr. Van Helsing (the character in Bava's version is much more robust).
The film's visual style mostly suggests a genteel folk horror story. Much of it takes place in the woods and it has the structure of a folktale. The costumes, designed for the film's setting in the late 18th century, further suggest a folk horror provenance. Other scenes suggest a different idiom, though. One of the nighttime scenes uses the shadow play one finds in German expressionism, including a shot of a shadow of the vampire that is borrowed from Dreyer's Vampyr. The scene set around the family table at the end of the film when The Marquis returns for Sdenka might come from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The film has the same critique of the family structure itself as a source of horror. The very end of the film, which repeats the motif of a vourdalak chewing on its shroud, is suggestive of the radical horror movies of the late 1960s, in which the contagion is not contained, the rightness of the universe is not restored.
In spite of its stylistic flourishes, this is a relatively slow film, something it borrows from current fashions in art house cinema. As with many contemporary art films, it doesn't use music to intensify its effects and it is cut at a deliberate pace in order to give the viewer time to process what she is viewing. It prefers to let the composition of the frame tell its story. In spite of the blank deadpan it affects, it manages an autumnal mood, like it should be shown at Halloween or at other occasions when storytellers gather around fires to tell spooky stories. It is often an elegant film. It's not a bloodless film, either. The third act is as sanguinary as a vampire movie ought to be. Whether all of its good qualities are blown up by its choice of special effects is likely to be an individual preference. For myself, I got used to it. The vourdalak here doesn't have the personality of, say, Yoda or The Crypt Keeper--the puppet isn't nearly as articulated as those characters--and it certainly doesn't have the same charismatic force of Boris Karloff, but it's creepy enough. Your mileage may vary, of course.
The Vourdalak is in theaters on June 28 from Oscilloscope Laboratories.
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