Tales to Keep You Awake: The Nightmare – review

Director: Narciso Ibáñez Serrador

First aired: 1967

Contains spoilers

Tales to Keep You Awake (Historias para no dormir) was a thriller/horror anthology (with a touch of sci-fi) series in Spain that has rightly been called the Spanish Twilight Zone. It made episodes both from original ideas and based on classic tales (largely Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe) and cast a wide net on its ideas. Some episodes were geared towards the macabre – there is an excellent first season version of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar – but others had a touching sentimentality – The Rocket (El cohete) being a prime and fantastically executed example.

bite marks

This episode was from season 2 and pulls on its full gothic sensibilities. It begins with three older women discussing the dresses and stockings that Rosa should wear. As they start it seems almost frivolous and the viewer thinks that, perhaps, Rosa is to go to a dance – until we realise that they are dressing her corpse. The main woman curses the village doctor, calling him stupid for saying she had succumbed to a peculiar weakness. She brushes Rosa’s hair and the movement reveals the punctures on her neck.

Fernando Guillén as Yolakin

We are in the village Kisilova in the Carpathians in 1880 and the innkeeper strings garlic outside his window. Inside he sends Maria to get more bottles of Sloe Gin – it is to be a busy night. Once retrieved he sends her to bed but the girl hides and watches. The men of the village are there and they know that the vampire is the strange and reclusive stranger Yolakin (Fernando Guillén). His nocturnal habits betray him but, they muse, the doctor doesn’t believe it and if they deal with the vampire they’ll hang, despite 6 girls having died. They’ve invited the doctor to talk. He arrives but is not swayed by their arguments so they say if one more girl is harmed Yolakin will die whatever the subsequent outcome. During all this the word wurdulak is used.

meeting

Catalina (Gemma Cuervo) is being fussed by the housekeeper, who is making her wear a garland of crushed garlic and silver cross. Maria has come to visit and, once the housekeeper is called away, confides in Catalina what she eavesdropped the night before. She suggests that Catalina should warn Yolakin and it is clear that Catalina has feelings for the stranger – and she does agree to visit him. She gets to his house and is intercepted by Luis, Yolakin’s servant who is going to send her away when Yolakin appears and takes her to the library.

Gemma Cuervo as Catalina

It transpires that the doctor and Catalina would, on occasion, dine with Yolakin and she has perceived the looks he bestowed upon her as an indication of his feelings. This is despite her frequently, over 6-months, writing to him and he not replying. She tells him that he should leave the area and take her with him – indeed she demands he go to her that very night. If he fails to do so then… she has taken a keepsake from each of the dead girls and she’ll say she found them buried near his home…

victim

Has she convinced him or simply irritated a vampire? Is he a vampire at all, or the scapegoat for superstitious villagers, as the doctor believes? Will the villagers kill him regardless? The episode does a nice line in playing with the outcome and it is a nicely gothic and competent story (there is, perhaps, some shorthand in the telling due to the episode length but it doesn’t suffer for it). Perhaps it was the vampire-centric story that made this one of my preferred episodes but I think its worth catching. 6.5 out of 10.

The episode's imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK

V-Wars: Season 1 – review

Director: Various

First Aired: 2019

Contains spoilers

This is a hard one to review. Overall I enjoyed watching it, and did so as a fan of the novels, but the movement away from some of the premises built in the book proved a weakness for the series overall – I get that often the filmed media has to take liberties with the source material but it was a difficulty on several grounds.

The first difference was slight, that the infection reactivating junk DNA was a prion rather than a virus. Once infected then someone with a certain ‘predator gene’ would start to transform into a vampire. The show concentrates on the initial outbreak, rather than pitching through different moments in time as the books do – this was a change that I understood.

arctic suicide

The series begins with a suicide in an arctic research centre. Doctor Luther Swann (Ian Somerhalder, the Vampire Diaries) is sent to find out why contact has been lost and takes his best friend Michael Fayne (Adrian Holmes). They both become ill but Fayne has the predator gene, Swann does not. This was an unfortunate series of changes – Fayne is patient zero in the books but is an actor who becomes infected on a shoot in Alaska. Swann is a folklorist and this makes him valuable to the Government in understanding the threat they face – making him a whizz scientist made the occasions he went out with the troops seem implausible.

Wurdulak bites

The issue (and the biggest change book to screen) with not having him a folklorist is that the vampires are for the most part rather generic; they have improved senses – seeing the blood rush under the skin, for instance – and a maw of fangs. There is an absolute lack of variance, however. We do meet a pair of wurdulaks – Danika (Kimberly-Sue Murray) was a casual lover of Fayne and gets infected that way. She infects her sister Mila (Laura Vandervoort, Dresden Files: Bad Blood, Mom’s Gat a date with a Vampire & Rabid). The wurdulak’s are shown having more traditional fangs and described as injecting a narcotic venom in their victims to keep them alive and pliant (rather than murdering their prey).

Laura Vandervoort as Mila

Whilst it was nice to have a general difference they are described in show (and in the books) as only preying on loved ones – having to forge an emotional bond with their victim before they can feed. We get that and yet Mila is able to eschew feeding for drinking blood bank acquired blood. Admittedly she looks like she is not enjoying it but a wurdulak should starve is they have no loved one to feed from and that was not covered at all. We get a sense that Mila is going out killing other bloods (as the vampires call themselves) but that thread was not taken far enough – but her hatred for her sister was a series highlight.

Adrian Holmes as Fayne

Other than that – as mentioned, the bloods are generic and that was the biggest miss – the programme makers could have had a different vampire per episode and that would have made this much more interesting. Instead we get a conspiracy by the DNS, rapidly constructed internment camps (that did nothing to quarantine people, indeed where was the CDC quarantine) and a villain in the form of Calix Niklos (Peter Outerbridge, Forever Knight) who is less sinister than he might have been. Indeed, the full Government conspiracy seemed somewhat contrived.

Ian Somerhalder as Swann

Not as contrived as the constant Deus ex Machina that leads to Swann miraculously escaping danger very often. Swann has been forced to kill his second wife (Jessica Harmon) and so his son, Des (Kyle Breitkopf, Being Human), is his primary focus – it is a shame therefore that Des is played through as a story cipher often, unfair on the actors who might have built a lot more of their relationship if the script had allowed for it. The last scene we see Swann in is, unfortunately, blooming ridiculous looking.

a vampire

However, if you put all the issues listed above aside, I found myself enjoying this little slice of nonsense. The disappointing part is that it could have been so much more. I hope, if they get a second season, they start exploring the vampire types in much more depth. I also hope that they forget where they took Swann in that coda because it isn’t conducive to an interesting, flawed but rounded character. Because I enjoyed it, 6 out of 10 reflects enjoyment versus the issues listed – not a bad score but given how highly I rate the books, a pity.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable mention: Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

This was a 2017 release by Kim Newman and is a collection of multi-world stories, mostly taking the Anno Dracula premise of adapting a film or book into an alternate world, but only the last story being part of the Anno Dracula series. That was the last tale Yokai Town: Anno Dracula 1899, which in itself is a teaser of a new Anno Dracula novel due later in 2017.

It was actually fun to step out of that world and into other worlds created in Kim Newman’s fertile (and genre geek heavy) imagination. Some of the stories also touched on vampire themes occasionally.

The first story is Famous Monsters and follows the fortune of a Martian (ethnicity, it was birthed in the USA) actor in Hollywood. When I say Martian I mean, of course, those of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), which itself is a book concerned with alien vampires as our blood is their sustenance. In this cow’s blood is consumed.

The story Amerikanski Dead at the Moscow Morgue was probably my favourite in the volume. An unusual zombie apocalypse story that name checks wurdalaks and vrykolakas. The Chill Clutch of the Unseen sees the last monster hunter and the last monster (the invisible man) meet – with a memory of a vampiric attack touched on. Red Jacks Wild follows Jack the Ripper whose life is extended with ritualistic sacrifices to Hecate. In Übermensch Newman imagines what would have happened if Superman had crashed in Germany and fell under the sway of National Socialism – one of his enemies (in a name-check) was Graf Orlock. Completist Heaven sees a genre fanatic find a TV channel that shows the films you could imagine – obviously vampires feature in some of these.

Finally the Anno Dracula story sees a boat pull into Tokyo harbour, the passengers – all vampires fleeing Dracula – seek sanctuary and are allowed to move to Yokai Town – a place that officially doesn’t exist and houses the Yokai (in this reimagined as types of vampires).

A worthy volume though the Anno Dracula connection is more a selling point than the underpinning of the volume.

V-Wars: Night Terrors – review

Editor: Jonathan Maberry

First published: 2016

Contains spoilers

The Blurb:

• The war is tearing our world apart. Instead of big armies with tanks in the field, the Vampire War is fought in the streets, neighbor against neighbor, family against family. Anyone can turn at any time. The blood hunger can suddenly appear in the middle of a kiss. The person who sleeps next to you every night could wake up in the dead of night...hungry. So hungry...



• V-Wars: Night Terrors collects all-new stories from the reporters embedded with the beats (humans) and the bloods (vampires). Each tale explores the nature of terror and peels back another layer of our comfort. Each tale bares our throat to the bite.



• New York Times Bestseller Jonathan Maberry and his team of front-line storytellers bring you all-new tales of horror and heroism, of pain and delight, of deadly despair and soaring courage. The war between beats and bloods is blazing. Pick a side.

The review: Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of V-Wars as a concept and a series and you can find my reviews of the first two volumes here and here. Whilst arguably the first V-War never really ended, this volume is set during the second V-War and one of the great things about the volumes is how the various authors pull your loyalties one way and another. One moment you may root for a human and the next a vampire. There are multiple shades of grey drawn and, even with a hint that there is a corruption within human Government encouraging the ethnic cleansing of the V-War, we are given the warning that even the most benign seeming V organisations – the court of the Crimson Queen – may not be the ideal it makes itself out to be.

This is underlined when, through the eyes of a truly innocent hybrid, we see the grassroots organisation Unity, which espouses mutual living and yet thinks nothing of holding humans prisoner as food for their interpretation of greater good.

Again it is a joy playing spot the vampire type. We are told there are 300 vampire species and 5800 known hybrids (plus hydra, a never before classified species and a one off. Hydra being a teenage girl whose regenerative powers are so strong she may be truly immortal). Lycanthropes generally are vampire types but there is a known (through DNA) true lycanthrope who has human and dire wolf DNA – this may be the person known only as Rancid and certainly Rancid is something else.

One interesting idea was allowing us to meet a male White Lady of Fau. Normally female this ethnically French type of vampire is a seducer and the male one we meet is gay. We meet a vampire (wurdulak) turned vampire hunter as she tries to stop the monsters she perceives herself and her kind to be. There are characters we have met before and new characters too.

V-Wars is begging for a TV series. It’s clever and sassy and there is a wild variety of vampire types that could be played with in that format. In the meantime we have the books and this one holds its own against the others in the series, the use of multiple writers with Maberry’s overall control allowing the series to remain fresh and yet follow its path without irrelevant meandering. 9 out of 10.