Honourable mention: Lore: They Made a Tonic

This was the first episode of the first season of a made for Amazon series (based on a podcast, I understand) and directed by Darnell Martin. It is, going by this episode, a dramatized documentary and this episode roots us into the folklore of the vampire – specifically the folklore (and events) emerging from 19th Century New England.

As it opens a simple animation takes us through the story of Mary E Hart who died but was disinterred (due to a dream, apparently) and was found to have been buried alive – if the scratches on the coffin and the horror etched into her features were to be believed.

The fear (and reality) of being buried alive was fascinating, of course, but had little to do with the case the episode goes on to explore – that of Mercy Brown (played age 10 by Pamela Riley Sauve and age 19 by Hannah Culwell). I assume most readers will know the story but for those who don’t Mary’s mother and sister (Mary Simmons) died of consumption (tuberculosis). Her brother (Connor Hammond) later became ill and was sent away for treatment. Whilst he was away Mercy sickened and died.

Ill again

On his return he became Ill again and her father (Campbell Scott) was approached with the idea that a demon could rest in the heart of a person, kill them and then have them continue to kill from beyond the grave. If the corpse of a recently deceased was found to be fresh – with blood in the heart – then the demon resided there. Reluctantly he allowed his wife and daughter to be disinterred and then they opened Mercy’s coffin, declared her the one (despite, as he points out in the dramatization, that she died after her mother and sister), cut out her heart and liver, incinerated them and gave the ashes in water to the sick brother as a tonic – he died despite this (unsurprisingly).

a spectral Mercy

Mercy’s case made American newspapers and so is rather famous – though the idea that it inspired Dracula is a stretch. Stoker certainly knew about the case (and had a press clipping in his notes for Dracula) but the likelihood is that the writing of the book was well underway when he found the clipping and, whilst it may have played a little into the novel's ideas, its role of “original inspiration” is unlikely. The dramatization does see a spectral Mercy walking the halls and grounds of the family home but the episode does not suggest this is actually happening and is for atmosphere (nothing I have read suggests that her father was anything other than sceptical but resigned about the desecration).

checking the corpse

The actual dramatization moments are well shot but I found the veering off onto concerns about being buried alive to be superfluous. The narration by Aaron Mahnke was nothing special but did what it had to do. There was more that could have been explored around other acts of disinterment of suspected American vampires – the excellent work of Michael Bell indicates this was not an isolated case, just the most publicised.

The imdb page is here.

Classic Literature: The Vampire of the Val-De-Grace

A friend bought me, a couple of years ago, Le Vampire Du Val-De-Grace as that print of the novel by Leon Gozlan was listed, on Amazon, as being in English. It wasn’t… So I was most excited when the wonderful Blackcoat Press announced an English translation by Brian Stableford.

I think it is worth taking time to reproduce the blurb, though there are some dating issues within:

“I wasn’t able to steal her away while alive: “I’ll come and steal her away when I’m dead!”

In 1849, the mysterious Doctor Salomon Kanali and his family arrive in a Paris ravaged by a cholera epidemic. But is this Kanali the same embalmer who claimed to have the power to resurrect the dead? And why does his wife fear that her daughter Marthe is being wooed by the same vampire who once destroyed her mother.

The Vampire of Val-de-Grace (1862*) is a horror story, a love story, a mystery, a comedy and, marginally, a scientific romance; unique in its excess and its bizarre absurdity, it has a certain precious verve and a capacity to make the jaw drop. It belongs to the cynical and tongue-in-cheek tradition of Ponson du Terrail’s The Vampire and the Devil’s Son (1853*) and Paul Féval’s Knightshade (1860), which teasingly refuse explicitly to confirm or deny the existence of vampires, but play extravagantly with the idea, while merrily exploiting its sinister fascination.

Concerning dates, I have marked two in the blurb. With regards the date of this novel, whilst the blurb suggests 1862, Stableford’s introduction states the first appearance in book form was 1861. Stableford puts forward the idea that it was originally printed piecemeal within a periodical but, if it was, the evidence of that is now vanished. I also marked the date of Terrail’s novel as the volume I have suggests a date of 1852, though that volume says it was when it was ‘written’ and it could have been published a year later.

The blurb plays with us somewhat, whilst Kanali (the son-in-law of the famous man mentioned) has inherited some advanced embalming techniques he is known as a doctor and his father-in-law searched for a method to resurrect the dead but did not find it.

The story follows the family as Marthe is romantically pursued (with her own encouragement) by César Caseneuve, a young doctor whom the mother and father disapprove of for different reasons. For the father it is the fact that he sees him as a man without courage (though truthfully it is because his nervousness had wrecked an experiment by the good doctor). The mother thinks him a vampire.

Interestingly, whilst the blurb mentions the vampire who pursued her mother, she too believes she was pursued by the same vampire and that this is the third generation of women he has fixated upon. The form, it seems, changes, but there is a tell-tale sign of his vampiric nature and – in this case – it is because he shares a mark (like a spot of blood at the corner of the mouth) that another vampiric suitor also sported.

We hear of the first vampire, the Graf von Markfeld, whom the first generation of haunted women was to marry – though she would be his third wife. The first two had died, two years into their marriages, of languor. The Graf seemed no older than he did when he first married, carried the red mark (mentioned above) in the corner of his mouth and never offered anyone his right hand. Just as they were to be married she grasped his right hand and found it to be as called as ice as a warning shout rang out ”Beware, mademoiselle; you are about to marry a brucolaque, you are about to marry a dead man; you are about to marry the vampire Ben Strombold.” The wedding ceremony ended and the church had to be purified for 40 days as it had hosted a vampire.

The brucolaque would appear to be a variant of the Brucolaco, which according to Bane’s Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology is “Strictly from the lore of the Epirus and Thessaly regions of Greece, this vampire would seem to answer the age- old question of “Can a werewolf be a vampire?”” It is a variant of the vorvolaka which is central to the film Isle of the Dead.

Whilst it would seem that Gozlan simply used the name brucolaque, rather than ascribing any distinctive lore to it, he does also make a distinction when mentioning Hungary as the fatherland of ”redivivi, brucolaque and vampires.”. Redivivi is the plural of redivivo and is Italian for 'restored to life' and is used to describe someone who is the living image of a dead person.

As for Strombold he was killed in a duel but they failed to stake him through the stomach. He came back and preyed on several families. The woman married Salomon Kanali and had a daughter (Marthe’s mother) before she died. This daughter (who later married Marthe’s father, who in turn took his wife’s surname) fell in love with a Hermann von Rosanthal who died during a hunt.

She went into a decline, described as a “rapid consumption” (as we know consumption, or TB, was often blamed on vampirism and, past the date of this novel, suspected vampires were still unearthed and 'dealt with' to try and save the consumption victim. The practice was not restricted to Europe and occurred in the USA. Whether she had the disease is not mentioned.). She described to her father Hermann coming to her in her dreams, his cold lips kissing her and the sound of her blood leaving her (note that no mention was made of teeth and this would almost be an osmotic version of suckosity).

Her father was persuaded to try and resurrect the corpse and went to the crypt during the night, the corpse was gone. Thinking her father was making an excuse not to experiment on the corpse she went during the day and found the corpse intact and present. Both father and daughter then returned at night and, of course, the corpse was gone again. They relocated to Italy but somehow the woman decided to associate Hermann with Ben Strombold and decided they were one and the same.

Which takes us to the book’s present day and Madame Karnali’s decision that César Caseneuve is Strombold, making an attempt on the third generation of women. There are other bits of lore mentioned, whilst a stake through the stomach has already been mentioned, a stake through the heart is suggested as a means of destroying a vampire, as is cremation. The, at the time (Edit - see comments), semi-mythical tome Magia Posthuma is cited, as is the song Le Morte Vivant by Béranger.

I rather enjoyed this volume. I agree it was probably first published piecemeal, the structure and some inconsistencies lend it that appearance, but more importantly it is another pre-Stoker source that shows how vivid and varied the vampire genre was in nineteenth century France.

The Book’s page at Blackcoat Press is here

Vamp or Not? Vampire Horror!

"Vampire Horror!" is a professionally read audio book containing four stories. Two are classics of the vampire genre. Polidori's The Vampyre: a Tale being the first English language vampire prose, excellently read by Bill Wallis, and F. Marion Crawford's For the Blood is the Life is a sublime little tale read by John Teffler and a story that may well form the basis of an ‘Interesting Short’ article in the future.

The other two stories are by M R James and their part in the vampire genre is debatable, hence this ‘Vamp or Not?’

At the beginning of Wailing Well narrator Anthony Head informs us that this has vampiric overtones (as does, he alleges, the other M R James story in the set). "Wailing Well" has a welcome humour around it, within the style and content of the short as it follows, in the main, the misadventures of Stanley Judkins, an Etonian and Scout – though a poor student and worse scout.

On the Scouts' Midsummer holidays Stanley and his friends look out to Wailing Well, a feature that is ringed red on their map as out of bounds. A local Shepherd tells them the legend of the three women and a man who met their ends in that area but Stanley doesn’t believe him and resolves to go to the well.

When his scout masters go to his rescue figures are seen and one is described as “something in ragged black — with whitish patches breaking out of it: the head, perched on a long thin neck, half hidden by a shapeless sort of blackened sun-bonnet.” Later we hear that the “rim of a broken black hat fell off the creature's head and showed a white skull with stains that might be wisps of hair.”

So evidently these are skeletal creatures. As for Stanley, the scout master Mr Hope-Jones finds him: “Over his shoulder hung the corpse of Stanley Judkins. He had cut it from the branch to which he found it hanging, waving to and fro. There was not a drop of blood in the body.”

The exsanguination certainly suggests vampirism but we do not actually know what they do with the blood. At the end of the tale we hear that the figures lurking around the well now have a boy amongst their number – suggesting that Stanley becomes one of the creatures. Mr Hope-Jones fails to destroy the trees growing around the well, evidently stopped by a supernatural force. Are they vampires, deep down I suspect not but they certainly have some potential that could be exploited by a filmmaker adapting the story. You can read Wailing Well here.

The other story this article needs to explore is the Cornelius Garrett read, An Episode of Cathedral History and again there is little vampiric in the story of an altar-tomb found in a cathedral during a restoration, in which something exists. The something seems to be able to leave the altar-tomb at night, through a crack.

What resides in it? When they go to investigate the narrator’s father sees “A thing like a man, all over hair, and two great eyes to it”. It seems to visit people in their sleep spreading disease (possibly consumption?) and nightmares. At the end, James describes a cross affixed to the sealed tomb engraved with the phrase "Ibi cubavit lamia", which is from the Vulgate edition of the Bible, Isaiah xxxiv verse 14. A quick online research reveals that Rosemary Pardoe suggests that it translates as "there shall be the lair of the night monster". Pardoe connects the night monster to a witch or vampire and the lamia is often associated with the vampire genre.

To me there would seem to be a connection with the traditional, rather than the fictional, vampire within the tale, though that might not seem explicit on a casual listen/read. You can read An Episode of Cathedral History here.

I should say, however, that the two James stories are well read and immensely fun, just not explicitly vampire stories (though the second seems more vampiric than the first) and this may lead to some disappointment given the title of the set. Indeed there are other vampire stories that might have been used, I’d have loved to have heard an audio of the Tomb of Sarah for instance. Nevertheless it is a good audio set.

The set was first reviewed for the Amazon Vine programme and the review was expanded for this ‘Vamp or Not?’

Honourable Mention: Vampire (Ricky Kelley)

I stumbled over this one at Vimeo, it is a very short film directed by Rickey Kelley and released in 2011 (I’m guessing, though it may have circulated before that date). The flick is notable for its use of black and white interspersed with colour and for the primary performance.

Jon Minadeo as the Vampire

Said primary performance was given by Jon Minadeo as the vampire and, at the head of the film we see him sleeping, led on the bed still in street clothes including a hoody. A chink of light burns through a window; the vampire grimaces in agony. He awakens and a tap drips, in the toilet he falls to his knees and wretches. Later he sits on the floor, running his fingers across the carpet to sunlight, there is no visible effect. Is he a vampire, in our undead sense, or a clinical vampire?

colour moment

Either way he is a murderer and, when it comes to blood, a junky. At night he walks down the street and approaches a house. A man (Krishna Chaitanya) is up and about. He goes into the kitchen to wash up. We see the vampire in colour, blood at his mouth. Black and white; the man dead on the floor and, upstairs, a child calls for his father. In colour again and the man feels guilt but, as he reaches for his own head in anguish, he licks at the blood sticky on his fingers, greedy, remorseless as he tastes the substance he needs.

It is Minadeo’s non-verbal performance that narrates much of the above – serial killer or undead predator, sick due to the consumption of blood or because of the need for it? We can’t say, At the time of mention there is no IMDb page.

Blood Read – review

Edited by: Joan Gordon & Veronica Hollinger

First published: 1997

The Blurb: The vampire is one of the nineteenth century's most powerful surviving archetypes, owing largely to Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula, the Bram Stoker creation. Yet the figure of the vampire has undergone many transformations in recent years, thanks to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and other works, and many young people now identify with vampires in complex ways.

Blood Read explores these transformations and shows how they reflect and illuminate ongoing changes in postmodern culture. It focuses on the metaphorical roles played by vampires in contemporary fiction and film, revealing what they can tell us about sexuality and power, power and alienation, attitudes toward illness, and the definition of evil in a secular age.

Scholars and writers from the United States, Canada, England, and Japan examine how today's vampire has evolved from that of the last century, consider the vampire as a metaphor for consumption within the context of social concerns, and discuss the vampire figure in terms of contemporary literary theory. In addition, three writers of vampire fiction--Suzy McKee Charnas (author of the now-classic Vampire Tapestry), Brian Stableford (writer of the lively and erudite novels Empire of Fear and Young Blood), and Jewelle Gomez (creator of the dazzling Gilda stories)--discuss their own uses of the vampire, focusing on race and gender politics, eroticism, and the nature of evil.

The first book to examine a wide range of vampire narratives from the perspective of both writers and scholars, Blood Read offers a variety of styles that will keep readers thoroughly engaged, inviting them to participate in a dialogue between fiction and analysis that shows the vampire to be a cultural necessity of our age. For, contrary to legends in which Dracula has no reflection, we can see reflections of ourselves in the vampire as it stands before us cloaked not in black but in metaphor.

The review: In many respects Blood Read is a product of its age and it was interesting to read the discourses on the vampire as a metaphor in an age before the Buffy the Vampire Slayer phenomenon had gone full tilt and long before Twilight brought a sparkling teen romance angle to the genre.

The book is a series of essays and like all books built in such a way there are good and bad pieces within it. Mari Kotani’s look at the vampire within Japanese literature and culture was absolutely fascinating, for instance, whereas the essay by Jules Zanger irked because one got the feeling that the author had barely watched the Hunger, suggesting that Bowie and Deneuve “pick up three nameless, grungy young people” – its two and I’d hardly call them grungy – and take them to a “cheap hotel room” – it’s a house, and further suggests that we see “Catherine Deneuve’s beautiful mouth grimacing to reveal her growing incisors” - when, of course, there were no fangs in the film and the vampires used concealed knives.

That bad moment aside the rest of the essays were interesting and well researched. There was a moment when there were a series of essays by authors looking at their own work that gave me pause to thought. Brian Stableford discussed his own Empire of Fear and Young Blood, Jewelle Gomez wrote about the Gilda Stories and and Suzy McKee Charnas wrote about the Vampire Tapestry. The thing is, literally all those books are in my “to read pile”. I decided to read their contributions anyway and they have simply made me want to get to those books even more.

All in all a good read for the person looking for a scholarly look at the vampire as a metaphor – or at least as the genre had developed up to 1997. 7 out of 10.

Interesting Shorts: The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima

The cat is an infrequent but always welcome visitor to vampire lore. In 1871 Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford included a traditional tale that he entitled The Vampire Cat of Nabéshima in his volume Tales of Old Japan. This was, of course, a year before Carmilla in which the eponymous vampire could take on cat form.

I have seen it suggested that the original story dates to the Sengoku Period – approximately the 15th to the end of the 17th century – and I imagine that nowhere does the tale, in its traditional form, mention vampires. That is an Anglicisation but fits rather well to what actually occurs in story.

It tells the story of the Prince of Hizen, of the Nabéshima family, whose consort O Toyo is attacked by a large cat. The cat bites her neck and throttles her, then it scratches out a grave, buries the body and assumes her form.

From then on the cat, in O Toyo’s form, visits the prince “in order to drain out his life's blood. Day by day, as time went on, the Prince's strength dwindled away; the colour of his face was changed, and became pale and livid; and he was as a man suffering from a deadly sickness.”

In this we can see, firstly, blood drinking but more importantly a description of a wasting disease and we have explored several times on the blog the connection, traditionally, between vampirism and consumption.

The Prince also has vivid and terrible dreams, connecting the phenomena with nightmares. The Prince’s advisors start sitting with their lord to watch over him but each night they are overcome with a bewitching sleep.

Eventually the cat’s plans are thwarted by a lowly soldier called Itô Sôda, who watches over his lord and prevents himself from sleeping by stabbing himself in the leg with a dagger and, when the desire to sleep overcame the pain, twisting it in his flesh. He even puts oil paper under himself to prevent his blood staining his master’s mats! O Toyo enters the rooms, in human form, but does not feed whilst Itô Sôda is awake and eventually, after several nights, her secret is discovered.

The cat actually escapes at the end of the tale though later, we are told, the Prince sends a hunting party to track the creature down and destroy it but only after it caused much mischief amongst the general populace.

An ebook version of the 1910 edition of Tales of Old Japan can be downloaded free of charge from Project Gutenberg.

Interesting Shorts: The Shunned House

I like H.P. Lovecraft, but it was reading Michael E Bell’s Food for the Dead that had me revisiting The Shunned House – a story, I confess, I must not have read in over 23 years.

Bell is acquainted with the actual Shunned House, indeed the Benefit Street house described by Lovecraft is opposite his office. It was also clear that, within the story, Lovecraft had included aspects of both vampire and werewolf lore and that this was based on his knowledge of the folklore and knowledge also of the exhumations that took place in New England. Indeed the familial names of many of those involved in Lovecraft’s tale were familiar to me via Bell’s research into the real world exhumations.

The story (written in 1924 and published in 1937) surrounds a house that seems cursed; indeed he tells us that, “What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers.” We discover that no child was born in the house – those few that were delivered there were all still-born. Those adults and children who did die whilst living in that abode “were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have naturally had.”

Not everyone died, at least not at first, and those who moved away seem to improve in strength but whilst alive in the house they “displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption”. Consumption, of course, being the primary infection that led to the exhumations in New England.

During his investigations into the house, the storyteller tells us of a servant called Ann White, from Exeter (scene of the Mercy Brown exhumation, amongst others), who insisted that “there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires - the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living - whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ”. This, of course, conjures up images of exhumation and corpse mutilation due to the belief the corpse is a vampire.

Fuseli's the nightmare

White insisted, due to an amorphous fungal shape that regularly appeared in the compacted soil of the cellar floor and the unwholesome smell that seemed to emanate from there, that said cellar should be searched and was discharged for her trouble. The storyteller admits that White’s tales dovetailed with others he came across in his investigation. That an earlier servant, Preserved Smith, complained “that something "sucked his breath" at night”, that the death-certificates of four fever victims showed that “the four deceased persons [were] all unaccountably lacking in blood” and that the ravings of resident Rhoby Harris contained complaints “of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.” Bell tells us that it is common for tuberculosis (consumption) sufferers to “awaken, coughing in pain (sometimes described as a heavy feeling, like someone has sat upon the chest)”. This would also fit into folklore surrounding sleep paralysis that culminated in Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare.

The investigator uncovered the fact that the dying sometimes attacked the living, namely their doctors, for instance Eleazar Durfee who “transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician” The investigator describes things coming to a head, and the house being withdrawn as a rented property, when there was “a series of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrists.” Of course, these attacks are not typical symptoms suffered by the consumption victim but born of Lovecraft’s storytelling craft.

He does mention the werewolf legend and ties it in with the Roulet legend (chronicled by Montague Summers) – however I shan’t go into that here except to say both the vampirism and lycanthropy became ways for the uninitiated to explain the eldritch terrors that under-pinned the story – as they would do in a Lovecraft tale. The Investigator imagines “an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things” but uses both science and folklore to develop weapons. He creates an unfeasible piece of equipment, along the lines of a Crookes tube, should the thing prove intangible. However, should it be more physical in manifestation he has flamethrowers, “for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn.”

In the end the flamethrowers are not used – acid ends up being the order of the day, after wounding the thing with his unfeasible Crookes tube – however I should mention the fact that the investigator does liken the phosphorous luminescent cloud to a corpse-light, a “vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain church yards”. The idea of corpse-lights has become inextricably linked to some of the New England vampire cases.

So, Lovecraft and vampires… using more traditional folklore of course and remember that as Bell tells us, “In New England tradition the unnamed evil resided in the grave, perhaps locating itself within the corpse of a deceased family member.” Thus the idea that this might be some “intruder” as Lovecraft would describe it fits the tradition very well indeed.

A film version, The Shunned House (2003) directed by Ivan Zuccon, lost all of the vampiric elements bar a vague reference to “ghosts and demons who sucked a person’s soul whilst sleeping” and merged in the stories Dreams in the Witch House and the Music of Erich Zann. It did include a character called Estelle Roulet, however.

Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires – review

Author: Michael E. Bell

First published: 2001

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: Close your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind’s eye may conjure up Count Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But another kind of vampire was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Author and folklorist Michael E Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this forgotten vampire tradition. His discoveries will surprise and enthral sceptics, believers and all readers of this engaging book.

Bell’s odyssey began in 1981 when Rhode Islander Everett Peck told him a family story passed down for generations. In 1892, months after young Mercy Brown succumbed to tuberculosis, her body was exhumed from a local graveyard. Relatives cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her dying brother, hoping to cure him of the wasting disease. They feared that Mercy had become a vampire, sapping her sibling’s vitality to provide sustenance for her own spectral existence. Or, had she become a scapegoat, blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family.

While writers such as Henry David Thoreau, HP Lovecraft and Amy Lowell drew on portions of this tradition in their writings, Bell captures the tale in its entirety for the first time. He takes readers on the road throughout New England, as he visits legend trippers and outright sceptics, old cemeteries, and small town museums. With humor insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying people who some believed were food for the dead – the source of life after death for their vampire kin. Bell introduces us to extraordinary people confronted with an extraordinary illness that pre-modern medicine could neither explain nor cure.

Bell also makes comparisons to seemingly inexplicable forces in our own midst, like ebola, mad cow and AIDS, showing that while times have changed, our need for answers has not. He shows that our vampire-seeking ancestors battled disease with the most potent tools they possessed – an instinctual belief in their power to heal themselves, aided by their folk customs.

The Review: Lest we forget, the figure of the vampire so beloved on this page and on many others round the net is an evolution of a figure/figures from mankind’s myths and legends, from our own superstitious and supernatural beliefs. The vampire was transformed into the suave aristocrat by Polidori but, long after that, people still believed in vampires in a more traditional folkloric sense.

The name vampire may not have been used by those who either believed or sought the scapegoat that the concept of the 'vampire' provided, but the alleged modus operandi of the dead was remarkably familiar and the fear was all too real. Cases still occur today, for example the case of Petra Toma in Romania in 2004. Certainly, in the United States, cases were still occurring as far as the end of the 19th century and it is these cases that Bell’s book explores. Essentially it explores cases where corpses were disturbed in the grave because the person had died from consumption (tuberculosis) and others in the family were dying, the fear was that the living were providing sustenance for the dead and thus, if they dealt with the corpse - by burning the heart for instance, they could save the living.

I have seen Bell on documentaries and some of them are a little, shall we say, sensationalist – but that is modern media for you. In the pages of this book we see an exploration by a man sympathetic to his sources and material and often frustrated by the handling of the subject matter in the media. The book is very chatty in places and meanders through its subjects as a result. However it is no bad thing, pushing the text away from something that could have been all too dry and academic. Bell is a folklorist, after all, and the style has a rustic honesty underpinned with academia. The book carries extensive references (held at the back of the volume and sorted by page number, rather than carrying the citations in text) and is indexed.

If the book disappointed me on any level it was down to one omission, and this is not the book's fault as it is something Bell discovered the year after the book was published. In 2002 Bell received a lead and found a gravestone belonging to Simon Whipple, who died in 1841. Part of the inscription is missing but the lines “Altho consumption's vampire grasp -- Had seized thy mortal frame” are clearly visible.

This shows a deliberate connection between consumption and vampire belief, presuming authenticity, and I would have loved to have read more detail on this and Bell’s research thereafter.

That aside – and one cannot hold it against the author as he hadn’t discovered the grave until after the book was published, and I should also mention that the proposed sequel will be called The Vampire’s Grasp, so one assumes it will carry the detail I wanted – this was an interesting and informative volume. 8 out of 10.

Vampire Secrets – review (set of documentaries)

Release date (as a set): 2010

Contains spoilers

The History Channel releases a set of documentaries entitled Vampire Secrets – named after the lead documentary and containing 6 documentaries. Vampire Secrets is 90 minutes long and the others 45 and the review will look at each documentary in turn

Vampire Secrets

The Diana Zaslaw directed lead documentary was… well the best way I can describe it was sensationalist in nature. It began with a tale of James Spalding (Dan Higgins) and a failed execution. It touches on Kyonsi and even Jesus. It then returns to Spalding, when he joined the ranks of the Undead by not dying (I will remind folks that Stoker invented that word and so it wasn’t really appropriate for a story said to be from 1632). Onto Dracula and at least they state that Stoker took “the name, but not the actual history” but then insist on looking at Vlad anyway.

Christa Bella as Báthory

The tale of Erzsébet Báthory (Christa Bella) and span pretty much the same old Báthory story. Now, what I can say with certainty is that whilst I like the myth of Báthory, there is actually no totally compelling evidence that she actually did that which she was accused of. The 2008 film Bathory creates a just as compelling counter-argument of a woman framed to take her land and power. This, however, is a documentary and should have at least given the possibility that there was another side to the story. The further idea that this was the source of the noble as vampire that Stoker picked up. No… Firstly I have no evidence before me that Stoker researched Báthory (I stand to be corrected), more than this, however, the source of the vampire as nobleman is likely to have been Byron, upon whom Polidori based Ruthven. Also, remember, many of the vampire plays/operas through the 19th century (that Stoker will have been aware of) were loosely based on Polidori’s the Vampyre.

We then move on to a re-hash of the ‘porphyria explains vampires’ rubbish and the documentary actually suggests that, in the age of enlightenment, it was used as an explanation. As has been well documented the entire bunkum was created by Dr David Dolphin in 1985 (on very poor research) and the assertion in this by Michelle Belanger (who is actually a spokesperson for vampyre lifestyling and self proclaimed psychic vampire, thus not necessarily an expert on medical matters) that porphyria sufferers sometimes crave blood was another giant boob – porphyria sufferers do not crave blood and it would not, ingested, help their symptoms. Mark Benecke did offer another side when he went through the forensics of decomposition – though it was nothing new as anyone who has read Vampires, Burial and Death will know.

Was the Gaspard Robilette story invention?

Then we get the assertion that to mention the word vampire in the 1400s would have inspired fear – the word first appears, in English, in around 1734; so whilst the myths (or variants thereof) were around in the 1400s, the word probably wasn’t. There were other irksome bits before the documentary span into the sensationalism of the Rod Ferrell (Jack Sale) case, via the disappearance of Susan Walsh (Lyndsey Nelson) to take a large amount of time to look at Vampyre lifestylers – surely a separate documentary. The one irksome bit I’d like to mention was the story from 1613 of Gaspard Robilette (Adrian Balbontin) as I’d not heard of the (barely even vampiric) story before and, to be honest, google the name and you only get things regarding the documentary – surely it wasn’t made up?

Less a documentary and more a dip into tabloid journalism, all sensationalism, sleaze and little substance; as a result this wasn’t very good. 2.5 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Monsterquest: Vampires in America

details on a gravestone

This was a lot better (despite the introduction relegating Kali from Goddess to a four armed woman). Whilst still quite tabloid – trying to search for evidence of vampires – it was primarily a very interesting look at the New England vampire epidemic. The conclusion, it would seem, is that consumption (TB) was the killer but what was fascinating was the cases they looked at. Mercy Brown is a famous case. Less well known, however, is the case of “JB” whose unmarked grave was found with the bones rearranged into a skull and crossbones motif – possibly done 5 years after initial burial and the Johnsons in Wilmington, where a letter to a newspaper complains of the foreign quack doctor who had Johnson exhume his children to provide a cure. It was also interesting to see the grave of a consumption victim that suggested he had succumbed to the vampire’s grasp.

coming to get you

Less convincing was the look towards Europe – albeit briefly – where again Báthory was mentioned (though this time we have the admission that there was no evidence of blood drinking) and a claim the Vlad Tepes was the inspiration for Dracula. Interestingly, however, there was the claim that Stoker had a newspaper clipping about the Mercy Brown affair (which occurred during the writing process of Dracula) amongst his notes. I’ve not heard that before. EDIT: since reviewing this Stoker's notes have been published and the article he had is now established fact

computer graphics

Sadly, we ended up with a brief look at the Ferrell case as well as the Matthew Hardman case. Porphyria was again traipsed out as a possible reason for vampirism. This was during the test on a sanguine vampyre, Joy Poulos, to see if her blood carried unusual traits (leading to her belief that she needs to drink blood). Her blood was perfectly normal. Michelle Belanger appeared again, this time to have her psychic vampirism tested. There was a minor result but nothing conclusive and it would have been nice to have that result analysed by an actual scientist.

However, all in all this was a much more interesting documentary. 5 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Biography: Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker

This third disc doesn’t actually inspire much comment. It is a biography of Stoker but does make some mistakes. The fact that he had a wife and child isn’t really explored until the end of the biography and thus it almost sounds like he moved to London on his own. Despite some heavyweight commentators, Elizabeth Miller and David Skal for instance, we also get someone suggesting – in respect of the vampire rules Stoker invented – that Dracula can’t be out during the day and the documentary lets this titbit of inaccuracy pass. You are better off watching Dracula’s Bram Stoker. Lightweight generally, 4 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Ancient Mysteries: Origin of the Vampire

naturally mummified

This was a much older documentary, dating back to 1994 and directed by J Charles Sterin and, for the most part, it was a fascinating look into the folklore and myth mainly from the European vampire epidemic of the 1700s but also looking at some of the New England cases.

Then, in the 5th Act things went awry as we get the idea that Dracula was based on Vlad Tepes, that the contents of the novel was based entirely on authentic Transylvanian myth (when Stoker, as well as researching myths, invented much himself) and that Báthory was the model for the female vampire and not only drank blood but indulged in cannibalism. Much of this was espoused in documentary by Raymond McNally and I guess 1994 was earlier than the development of the arguements against his theorems. A further error occurred when the narrator suggests that Dracula meant devil or dragon rather than son thereof. Still, ignoring Act 5, this was the best of the documentaries in the set thus far. 6 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Cities of the Underworld: Dracula’s Underground

bust of Vlad

This 2007 documentary might have been fascinating if it was not for three things. Firstly it was the connecting of Vlad Tepes with vampirism and Dracula… again. The first location visited is a bat cave, not because of its own intrinsic geological and biological value but because of vampirism (despite that the connection between vampires and bats, whilst occasioned earlier, was cemented and pretty much created by Stoker). Secondly because of the sensationalism that it indulged in. You cannot mention Tepes without looking at torture and impalement, of course, but you can balance a documentary by mentioning that most of the evidence of atrocity came from enemies, that the sheer numbers listed were probably impossible (the act of impalement will have taken a while and a lot of effort per impalement) and that – let us be fair about this – torture and grievously sadistic capital punishments were about par for the course with just about every ruler in mankind’s less than salubrious past (and our present as well). This documentary doesn’t even mention that Vlad is seen as a National hero even to this day.

The third reason I disliked this was due to host Don Wildman, who came across as a grinning annoying buffoon. Sorry if you happen to be a Wildman fan. Perhaps it’s just me, perhaps I wanted him to stop going gee whizz in full on tourist mode and actually act like the archaeologist he clearly isn’t. If you turn the sound off, this shows some fascinating archaeological and geological sites. With the sound up, 3 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

The Final Documentary – In Search of History: The Real Dracula – was actually the documentary that also came in the Box of Blood Set and I have previously reviewed it here.

Conclusions:

You may be thinking 'ouch' at this point; however there is a damn fine reason for having this set. For your collection. It is a nice big box (though only released as single discs in the US, I’m afraid) and it cost me just £7.49 on pre-order. Just don’t expect world shattering documentaries.