The Plight of the Vampire

For most of my film-watching life I have avoided Vampire movies.  I was never ‘bitten’ by the Hammer Horrors or the Universal Studio’s offerings.

During the last ten years, however, I have seen some really engaging ‘vamps’ in films that connected and begun to explore the genre’s roots and development.   If you have never considered such movies as worth watching, please read on; I assure you there are treasures here.   Even if you are already a ‘Vamp fan’ you might find something interesting, though of course I will probably ignore you favourite movie, or seem to undervalue it.

It has been said that every age finds its own vampire themes.   I think that during the last ten years or so movies have explored ‘the plight of the vampire’; what it might be like to be a vampire.    In  Vampires are us  Margot Adler writes  “let us ponder what it would mean to live a truly long life. How would that change one’s view of everything in society?  …What does one value more and what does one value less with along human life?  Would we become bored?  Would we become less compassionate? …Would it increase of decrease  our reverence for the planet?”

But lets start with;

‘In the London Journal, of March, 1732, is a curious, and, of course, credible account of a particular case of vampyrism, which is stated to have occurred at Madreyga, in Hungary. It appears, that upon an examination of the commander-in-chief and magistrates of the place, they positively and unanimously affirmed, that, about five years before, a certain Heyduke, named Arnold Paul, had been heard to say, that, at Cassovia, on the frontiers of the Turkish Servia, he had been tormented by a vampyre, but had found a way to rid himself of the evil, by eating some of the earth out of the vampyre's grave, and rubbing himself with his blood. This precaution, however, did not prevent him from becoming a vampyre himself; for, about twenty or thirty days after his death and burial, many persons complained of having been tormented by him, and a deposition was made, that four persons had been deprived of life by his attacks. To prevent further mischief, the inhabitants having consulted their Hadagni,  took up the body, and found it (as is supposed to be usual in cases of vampyrism) fresh, and entirely free from corruption, and emitting at the mouth, nose, and ears, pure and florid blood. Proof having been thus obtained, they resorted to the accustomed remedy. A stake was driven entirely through the heart and body of Arnold Paul, at which he is reported to have cried out as dreadfully as if he had been alive. This done, they cut off his head, burned his body, and threw the ashes into his grave. The same measures were adopted with the corpses of those persons who had previously died from vampyrism, lest they should, in their turn, become agents upon others who survived them.’

So begins the ‘birth certificate’  of  Dracula in  The Vampyre;   a Tale, by John William Polidori, 1819.     Polidori did not start the vampire legend, but he transformed and focused it.   As I am sure you know, at the time - the summer of 1818 -   he was employed as Lord Byron’s doctor (and/or drug dealer).  In an act of deliberate or subconscious revenge for Byron’s cruel scorn and refusal to recognize any worth in his writings, Polidori  made his vampyre a decadent, womanizing, Byronic aristocratic figure rather than the monsterous, virtually zombie creatures of folklore.    During his long stay at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1916 with Lord Byron, Persse Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her step-sister Claire Clairmont, he had seen at first hand the way Byron used and abused the adoring teenager, Claire,  by whom he fathered a child, Allegra.     Subsequent vampire literature has always been about sex, and the Villa by Lake Geneva must have reeked of sexuality.  

The Vampyre is Byronic, but this story is surely also a critique of the parasitic aristocracy of this time.    That dimension was certainly appreciated in 19th century Ireland, a province continually ‘bled dry’ by the landowning English, an exploitation that included and exacerbated the tragic Irish famine of the 1840’s.    It is no wonder that the Irish writers Sheridan le Fanu and Bram Stoker  were the two writers to revive Polidori’s creation with their own vampiric novel  Carmelita and Dracula.

The Vampyre was one of the two eventual results of Byron’s challenge to Shelley, Mary and the young Polidori to each write a ghost story.  The other was, of course, Mary’s Frankenstein.   Are either of them actually ghost stories?    Well, the Vampyre is certainly one of the ‘undead’  and Frankenstein’s creation’s parts have all been dead, so he is a kind of revenant, but not the revenant of any one human individual.  Neither of them are classic ghosts, but both have an ambiguous connection with ‘the living’ and that is part of their fascination.     I note that in Elizabethan England suicides were buried, or reburied, in unconsecrated ground, often at a cross-roads, and their fate was sealed with a wooden stake though the heart.

 

But in 1845, long before Le Fanu and Stoker’s novels, came Varney the Vampire, a British penny dreadful series that established many of the familiar vampire tropes,  including the fangs and twin  puncture marks, the physical strength and hypnotic charisma.   

As I said earlier I was never engaged by the  blood and boobs, cheap sets and hammy performances of the Hammer franchise.   I simply did not see any of the Universal Studio’s series, which ranged from Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi through  Dracula's Daughter  (1936),  or Son of Dracula  (1943) starringLon Chaney Jr.  through to Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).      I have chosen to never allow the wan light of Twilight to fall on me.    

There have, however,  been many remarkable vampire films.   I would  include Nosferatu  (1921), and Werner Herzog's  remake Nosferatu the Vampyr (1979),  Carl Dreyer’s 1932  Vampyr,  Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Tony Scott’s  The Hunger (1983), Katherine Bigelow’s  Near Dark (1987), the French  Irma Vep by Olivier Assayas(1996),  Irma who? I hear you ask, be patient I will come back to it; the Russian Night Watch (2004) and  Day Watch (2006),  the Swedish Let the Right One In (2008) by Tomas Alfredson,  the Korean Thirst (2009) Chan-Wook Park, Michael Spierig’s  Daybreakers (2009), Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2012), the amiable American Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) by Timur Bekmambetov,  and Jim Jarmush’s 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive.

In 1932 the Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer produced Vampyr,  as much an exercise in style as a narrative.   But style can terrify, and Hitchcock deemed this to be ‘the only film worth watching….twice’ and was obviously informed and influenced by its dreamy – almost surreal – images.  Dreyer made three versions of the film, each suitable for dubbing into a different language, with the mouthing following the languages spoken, English, French and German.   Sadly none of the original English prints survived, and again a restoration had to be made.

In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola produced Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Gary Oldman as the Count.   This was the first time a vampire movie impressed  me,  and did so even though it had Keanu Reeves miscast (again?).  Oldman, however, was magnificent,  and the love story shone through the horror.   I also  enjoyed Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) in which Alfie Bass, when confronted by a defensive crucifix, gloats over his hapless victim, telling him in an exaggerated Jewish accent  ‘Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!’

So my favourite vampire movies (and even ten years ago I would not have dreamt of ever writing that phrase!)  include Thirst, by the Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook,  in which a Korean  Catholic priest volunteers to test a cure for a deadly plague (shades of Ebola)  but finds that it infests him with vampirism.   He fiercely resists its effects, but when he infects his girlfriend she relishes her condition, tipping us Teresa Raquin  country - a very bloody landscape.  I think that Neil Jordan’s  Byzantium is so much better than his Interview with a Vampire.   Byzantium  stars Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as mother and daughter, two women caught in time.   This was adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini from her own stage play.   As she also scripted Tamara Drew I wonder if she always had Gemma Arteron in mind?   It is similar to the Swedish Let the Right One In as it explores the devastating consequences of becoming a vampire, dependant on human blood, unable to love ‘normal’ human beings, in fact excluded from ‘normal’ society- and its troublesome bureaucracy -  without the prospect of death to give meaning to life, and having to keep the same company for centuries.

But I also love Irma Vep, (remember, I said I would get back to it), starring the wonderful Maggie Cheung, playing herself, recruited from Hong Kong by a French film maker who is obsessed with her to play a latex clad cat burglar in his remake of the French silent classic Les Vampires.   It was written and directed by Olivier Assayas, who was himself obsessed with Maggie Chueng - who he had never met - and wrote the film for her, even though she spoke no French, and he no English.  After the movie they  lived together for some years, the fulfilment of his (and admittedly my) fantasy.   Maggie, as Maggie, as a stranger in a strange land, trying to work out what the hell is going on, is wonderful and amazingly the film works.  And Irma Vep is of course an anagram of...

And so we come to  Jim Jarmusch’s vampire movie “Only Lovers Left Alive”.   Being a Jarmusch production it is of course different to other  people’s vampire movies.    Surely someone else must have asked Tilda Swinton to play a vampire before, but maybe their script was not as good as this, by Jarmusch, or the director so attractive to the taste of this elegant actor.   She was  the (almost unrecognizable) ‘trailer-trash’  girl Penny in Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.  Here she plays opposite Tom Hiddleston, as wife and husband, married for a (very) long time.   They are called Eve and Adam, but they are not quite that old, and Eve is much older than Adam. Maybe because they are so comfortable with each other they do not need to live together, each offering the  other the freedom to find their own best place to live, in her case Tangier, in his Detroit.   She collects rare books – some of which must have become very rare since she first found them centuries ago, and he collects and plays musical instruments ancient and modern.    Eve oldest and best friend  is Kit Marlow, and Jarmusch enjoys a few 6^th form jokes about the Marlow/Shakespeare connection.    A more interesting aspect concerns their need for good quality blood,  hard to find in the polluted and disease ridden world.    But the plot is unimportant.  This is a cinematic poem, and what matters is the tone,  one of elegant,  poised beauty, reflecting the isolation and loneliness that being surrounded by short lived humans engenders.    Adam calls them (us)  zombies.   As far as Eve and Adam are concerned  their kind are the only ones (the only lovers) truly alive.    The  production design and music are immaculate, as elegant and beautiful as the leads, whose performances  are effortless.   The scripts occasional indulgences are forgivable.    Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright and Anton Yelchin’s supporting roles are all in tune with this fugue.  The cinema-photographer was Yorisk Le Saux,  who shot Tilda’s 2009 film  I am Love so immaculately.    The editing was in the  hands of  Affonso Goncalves (Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter’s Bone, two of my favourite films) and the Art Direction by Anja Fromm, who also worked on The Reader and A Dangerous Method.     Jarmusch  is responsible for the atmospheric music.

So this is not your normal vampire movie.  The closest to it might be Tony Scott’s 1983 The Hunger,  with Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and  Susan Sarandon,  but this is really a far remove from any Tony Scott movie, thank goodness.    It is as Jarmusch as you can get, and if that pleases you, so be it.  It certainly pleased me, and gives me a high point to end my little review of this rejuvenated genre, an injection of fresh blood, dry humour,  elegant insouciance and fine actors quietly enjoying themselves and pleasuring their audience. 

I will consider the important sexual politics of the genre in a later article , but at least you may find something in the above to while away an evening  - or a vampire  weekend. 

The National Theatre's Frankenstein

I now know why Danny Bole was invited to direct the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.     Whoever did so had seen his production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre in 2011.    I had to wait over three years to see it being rebroadcast in a local cinema, (well, by local I mean 50 miles away).    Having seen it I checked out the team Boyle used for both, and saw that he worked with the same Set Designer, Mark Tildesley,   Costume Designer, Suttirat Anne Larlarb, and Director of Movement, Toby Sedgewick.      If you saw the Olympics you might have some idea how well they used the National Theatre’s resources and the  magnificent Laurence Olivier stage,  with its rising, falling, revolving  centre.   I saw the two episodes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials there  a few years ago, which was terrific – but this production was something else.    

And it  had Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch on board.   Cumberbatch had  already played a ‘high achieving sociopath’  Sherlock Holmes in the 2010 BBC series.   At the National he played another ‘high achieving sociopath’, the driven genius Victor Frankenstein.  At least he played him on alternate nights,  as Miller and Cumberbatch swapped the roles of the scientist and his unloved creation.    This adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel  was written by Nick Dear and broadcast live to cinemas in March 2011.   More than a quarter of a million people, in over thirty countries, saw the original cinematic event.   I think the delay in rebroadcasting it was due to a lack of agreement about which version to use; the one with Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature, or Benedict Cumberbatch.    Both actors had been praised in both roles, but for the rebroadcast it was Cumberbatch.    

He was a revelation .    I had hugely enjoyed his Sherlock,  been quietly surprised by his casting as Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, and remembered him from a few earlier TV shows and films, but nothing had prepared me for his performance as the Creature.    First of all his physicality.   The long opening sequence shows the Creature learning how to move, crawl, stand and walk, how to wrest control of his new body.     Cumberbatch is almost naked, and his writhing, rising and falling reveal his remarkable physique.   His power does not come from massive muscles, but from spun steel cords.   And this was not simply an actor thrashing about in free form,  it seems plain that every contorting bruising, muscle stretching movement was choreographed by the actor and Toby Sedgewick.   Later in the play we see Cumberbatch’s  remarkable grace, agility and athleticism as he leaps, bounds, climbs, spins, gestures and wrestles with his creator.    At one point, a real coup de theatre, the Creature is hidden on stage, lying on his back, completely covered, until he leaps, springs, levitates into sight faster than any  Vertical Takeoff fighter plane.   No wonder the actors swapped roles; to perform this every night would have been exhausting.    

Jonny Lee Miller playing another modern Sherlock in the current American series,  has impressed me, and his  playing of Victor Frankenstein was impressive.    We clearly see who the real monster is,  and it is Victor’s  lack of humanity that monsterises his unloved creation.  But I can see why the actors vied for their embodiment of the creature to be the one broadcast.    The Creature, not Frankenstein, is the main event.   

The rest of the cast are simply very good; Karl Johnson is de Lacey, the impoverish – and blinded – professor who educates the creature, and Naomie Harris is Frankenstein’s ill-fated fiancé, Elizabeth.  But the evening belongs to the two stars, Danny Boyle and the other directors.  

The script is sometimes a little bathetic, sometimes unintentionally funny, and sometimes it has lines I could only call banal, but no matter.   I have waited three years for this; and it was better than I could imagine.  But if I could have imagined such a production I would be Danny Boyle.   I am glad Danny Boyle is Danny Boyle, and that the National Theatre shares its riches with the world.  

Don’t tell them your name, Pike! The Gone Girl.

Well, actually Rosamund Pike has been telling us her name for a least a dozen years now, and shouting her versatility out loud.  From here on it will be really well known.   She was the Bond Girl Miranda  Frost in her debut film Die Another Day, (2002), then  Austen’s Jane Bennett in  Pride and Prejudice, (2004),   in Made in Dagenham, Barney’s Version and An Education, (all released in 2010), then she moved from Bond to Johnny English,  Reborn (in 2011),  to America for Jack Reacher in 2012, and  home to an Ealing comedy (well, as near to an Ealing comedy as we get nowadays) in The World’s End, 2013.    But her performance in David Fischer’s latest, Gone Girl, is really something else.  May she  follow in the footsteps of Emily Blunt, the other Brit currently wowing Hollywood. 

David Fincher must have known that Rosamund was in Terry Johnson’s 2003 play Hitchcock Blonde, as the actress auditioning to be the body-double for Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower scene.    Rosamund also plays a naked shower scene in Gone Girl, and has said that she  ‘is intrigued by characters like the icy blondes who seduce and deceive in Hitchcock’s films- women who are compelled by their power as objects of desire.’ (an interview in W Magazine).   

The influence of Hitch on Fischer is well documented, (just Google ‘Fincher and Hitchcock’ and enjoy the links)  and can be seen here in the film’s theme and in particular shots - not just the naked shower scene (which actually plays a knowing joke on Psycho fans).     Fischer says that  he learnt from the Master that ‘as a director, film is about how you dole out information so that the audience stays with you when they’re supposed to stay with you, behind you when they’re supposed to stay behind you, and ahead of you when they are supposed to stay ahead of you.’ (Fincher quoted on IMDB).   Gone Girl is very good at doling out information, in truly Hitchcockian style, but how reliable is the information?   Much of it comes in flashbacks, and well into its running time the whole film turns on a swivel, just as in Psycho and Vertigo.  Gillian Flynn, who adapted her novel for the screen,  is also a keen Hitchcock fan.  In her novel she even puts to use the name Madeleine Elster, taken from Vertigo.

Ben Affleck is the Gone Girl’s husband.   She has gone, but has she joined the departed?    And if so did he have  any part in her departure?     Affleck plays the ambiguity well,  and there is a running theme about public performance and private feelings.    The voracious American media want to stage their own trial – and his performance as the anxious husband does not convince them.    But does it convince us?

This is a slow burning psychological thriller, and as Fischer says about Flynn’s source novel, when you peel back the layers and get to the kernel, you think, Wow, I feel queasy for a whole different set of reasons I thought I would’.   He has also said that he wanted to put onscreen “disturbing ideas about very disturbed people and their facades of normalcy, (people who are) irredeemable and yet intensely human”.    He has certainly succeeded in that, keeping the audience on edge, uncertain about what it knows and does not know,  what is truth and what is illusion, who is the victim and who the villain.  

These ‘disturbing’ themes are amplified by the grey/green colour palette of Fischer’s usual DP Jeff Cronenweth, and the music from his collaborators on The Social Network, Trent Rezzno and Atticus Ross.   Among the cast Neil Patrick Harris takes a step up from a busy TV and voice-over career (Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs),  as do Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens and Tyler Perry (a busy writer, producer and actor who is given an opportunity to play it big here and takes it).  Fischer has always looked for new talent.    Se7en was made in the same year as The Usual Suspects, catapulting Kevin Spacey to stardom and was a big break for Gwyneth Paltrow,   Fight Club took Helena Bonham-Carter to Hollywood,  The Social Network unleashed (sic) Jesse Eisenberg and  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made Rooney Mara a star.    

At one level this can be seen as a film about sin, not just the ‘breaking the 10 Commandments’  kind, but sin as a falling short of who we truly are.  Failing to be authentic - and the consequences of that failure.  Hell is not just living with other people, it is sometimes living with ourselves.    If you are willing to be entertained – and disturbed – I recommend this film; for Ben Affleck’s  best performance for (too) many years; for being what I think is Fischer’s most interesting film to date; and for Rosamund Pike achievement in fully inhabiting – and developing – the Hitchcock Blonde for the 21^st century.   

(Sorry for the joke in the title, which must be a total blank for my non-British readers.    You see there was this TV comedy series about the Home Guard, and they captured a German Officer, who asked Captain Mainwaring......oh, never mind.)

On the edge of my seat for the Edge of Tomorrow

Within minutes of this film starting I was on its side.  Why?

It is about an alien invasion of Earth, but not of the USA;  this time it’s  Europe. 

A multinational force has been fighting these aliens, led by – an Irish General.

And Tom Cruise was playing a cowardly, malingering, mendacious American Officer,  Major Cage, a PR man who wanted to stay as far away from the action as possible.

When Cage was demoted and sent to the front lines to be insulted and demeaned by Master Sergeant Bill Pullman I cheered up even more.    And I was always aware that Emily Blunt was just waiting to make her entrance.  

OK, so I knew that the premise of this movie was the Video Game conceit that when you die you get another life, and can use whatever you learnt before you died to help you survive this time,  and the next -  that is was essentially Groundhog Day meets Halo, but the pace and wit of the movie, and the way it expected the audience to keep their wits about them, rather than being led gently by the hand through any difficult transitions,  all encouraged me.   And then Emily did arrive - and she was magnificent.   Sgt Rita was the real warrior.   OK, so the aliens were very similar to the robots of The Matrix 2, and the warriors wore exo-skeletons that reminded me of Ripley in her Waldo suit in Aliens, in fact Emily Blunt’s character has a lot of the later Ripley about her, but no harm in that, and this movie played its frequent and witty references and tropes without becoming a parody, unlike, for instance, Cruise’s last SF effort, Oblivion, which just seemed like a mix and match script written by people who might have read SF but had never written any of it; utterly lacking in originality.     I even enjoyed the timing of the release, enacting an invasion of Europe on screen to save it from terror and destruction, so close to the commemoration of the original D. Day.

I liked the way Cruise slowly becomes a hero  not by becoming a killing machine but by being prepared to die, time after time until his goal is reached.   I like the way his character became likeable by not trying to be likeable.   I also liked the way Emily Blunt became impressive without trying to be impressive.   I remember that when I saw her in The Adjustment Bureau and saw her dance I  assumed she had trained before becoming an actor.   But then, when I discovered that she had no previous experience as a dancer, I was even more impressed by her physical authority.   The same goes here.   She completes her choreographed moves with grace and power. 

Despite the inevitable reiterations of the day of invasion, the battle that has to be repeated until  Cage and Rita get it right,  I was kept on the edge of my seat.  And I laughed a lot.  Not at the movie, but with the movie.  At one stage I was even tempted to cheer, and felt a similar frisson in the audience around me.   In fact I was so satisfied that I even forgave its Spielbergian ending.    Spielberg always gives us what we want.  He just makes us wait for it, and then delivers it in ways we did not expect, as when ET and Peter take flight in his bicycle.

So congratulations to  Doug Liman, who directed it using the skills he honed during the Bourne franchise; to  Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the labyrinthine The Usual Suspects, and Jez Butterworth, who wrote this and Fair Game with McQuarrie;  to  Dion Beeb who filmed this and had previously shot Collateral and Chicago;  and perhaps most of all to James Herbert, who edited it with daring and precision  (just the characteristics displayed, as it happens, by Emily Blunt, and Rita, the warrior).     Herbert edited both the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, and the two of the terrible films he has edited, Sweeney and Gangster Squad, were not bad because of the editing.  No blame there.

I am dismayed by the poor viewing figures for Edge of Tomorrow.  It deserved much better, but maybe sank in the wake of Oblivion and maybe asked a little too much of one of its target audiences.  But you are an intelligent and discerning readership and watchership, so  get the DVD and enjoy yourselves.