Le Vourdalak

Based on Tolstoy's La Famille du Vourdalak, where a vampire from Slavic folklore returns to feed off his own family, Adrien Beau's feature film debut Le Vourdalak follows the Marquis d'Urfé, an emissary of the King of France, finding haven in the house of a peculiar family where he expects to receive a horse to continue his journey.

Visually, it evokes the feeling of being in a fairytale due to its aesthetics resembling those of the past. There's charm and a sense of magic in them. The house and the woods add a haunting yet beautiful aura to the story that enhances its fantasy qualities. Due to the choices it makes when it comes to VFX, opting for practical effects with props instead of CGI, it achieves a slapstick humor that can also be scary at times (puppets, for instance).

It's not everyday that a film succeeds in combining genres so different as horror and comedy, but Le Vourdalak does it from beginning to end, making it worth watching.

LE VOURDALAK (The Vourdalak) poses as the debut full lenght feature film of newcommer French director Adrien Beau. I was lucky enough to catch this film on the 64th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. From its very first shot LE VOURDALAK feels like a film made between the late 60s and early 70s somewhere between Central and Eastern Europe. It combines the atmosphere of those regions and times perfectly, managing to transcend the viewer in a wondrous place in the woods, constantly evoking the idea that something evil lurks there.

LE VOURDALAK explores the idea/legend of the vampire with a much more traditional, unique approach in comparison with the many vampire movies that we've been used to in the past years. Drawing his essence from Tolstoy's classic gothic novella, "The Family of the Vourdalak", Adrien Beau crafts a unique take on the vampire legend with samples of practical effects, performative acting, experimental montage and ordinary horror musical elements.

In its core, the film offers a daring, enchanting, tragic horror tale that, at times, is caught between the realisation of its classic background tale and the exaggeration of its daring fresh approach. Meaning that, yes, the story is based on a classic legend, in which Beau paints with his own gothic imagination, that strays from its horrific nature and leans more on the dramatic aspect of a tragic story.

After making a couple of shorts, French artist Adrien Beau made his first feature film in 2023, inspired by the gothic novel «The Vurdalak Family. Unpublished Fragment of the Memoirs of a Stranger», written in French by Russian author Aleksey Tolstoy in 1839, which has been adapted to film on numerous occasions as a horror drama. Beau does not elude the horror angle, but by making the decision to dispense with computer visual effects to represent the vurdalak (vampire) and opting for a puppet that he designed, executed and voiced, his film takes different directions, including comedy, without express intention, so that the story evokes fascination, smile (or laughter) and terror in turns.

There is nothing comic about the story. In the middle of a forest (Serbian, in the original), a young marquis and ambassador of the King of France (excellent Kacey Mottet Klein) is assaulted and robbed by Turks. The courtier seeks help at the house of a peasant named Gorcha, to continue his journey. But the peasant family and the French diplomat, are all besieged by old Gorcha, who has become a bloodthirsty vurdalak. For his "mise en screen", Beau shot the film in 16 millimeters, which gives a richer and realistic visual quality to the image, in these days when we are accustomed to the pulchritudinous digital image; and in several scenes he resorts to the terror that arises from "the unseen", from what happens in the dark, instead of the explicit images in which the vurdalak subjugates all.

The decision to use a puppet may have been completely intentional, considering that all the characters are indifferent to his cadaverous appearance. Avoiding that "terror a la antique", with figures generated by the most macabre and sinister sector of an author's brain, and reluctant to make it visible with "grace a la CGI", Beau gives another dimension to the macabre, gives it some humor, with a cardboard entity without the fluidity of the computerized image, but which is capable of draining life and startle us, as the shot in which the vurdalak appears behind his little grandson and voraciously bites his neck and consumes his blood.

«The Vourdalak» premiered at the Venice Film Festival, within the framework of Critics' Week, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Female Performance for Ariane Labed (wife of Yorgos Lanthimos and awarded at that same festival for her performance in the drama «Attenberg» by Athina Rachel Tsangari). Currently it must be available on Amazon Prime (which co-produced it). Don't miss it and have your good glass of wine or bag of popcorn ready.

If the title sounds familiar, it's probably because you recognize "wurdulak" as the word for the vampire in Mario Bava's Black Sabbath. This is another version of that story by A. K. Tolstoy, and it's a peculiar mix of folk horror and vampire myth. It's slow - Bava told the story in 1/3 the time - but very enjoyable, with a charming performance by. Kacey Mottet Klein as Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfe, prancing around the Russian forest in his powdered face, beauty spot, wig and stockings. Imagine Barry Lyndon in The Company of Wolves. If you like your vampires on the European weirdness side, give this a watch!

This movie deserves a much higher rating than the 5.8 it currently has on IMDB. It's a black-comedy vampire yarn based on same Tolstoy story Mario Bava adapted in the movie Black Sabbath, where the Vourdalak was played by a green-faced Boris Karloff. (The Vourdalak is based on a type of vampire from Slavic legend who returns from the dead to haunt and feed of of his own family.) The acting in this adaptation is superb and it is dripping with deadpan comic sensibility, placing it in the same general class as The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein, Evil Dead, Drag Me to Hell and other movies whose greatness derives from the fact that they play as well as comedies as they do as horror films. The actors are all well directed and have great chemistry, with the elegant, dark electrifying pathos of Ariane Labed's performance dominating the screen. Costumes and makeup are top-notch, the sets are great, the lighting and camerawork is well-done and the editing is tight, efficient and deftly paced. As far as the monster itself - well, I won't spoil that surprise for you.

It's just a rilly rilly entertaining hidden gem that will delight veteran horror enthusiasts.