Cursed Castle on the Mountain: The Black Queen of Zagreb

This week, folklore YouTuber The Jolly Reiver heads:

... to Medvedgrad Castle north of the Croatian capital of Zagreb to look at the story of the Black Queen that was said to have terrorised locals until her fatal confrontation with the devil.

Horror Awaits You In The Pages of New Ravenloft Comic

Ravenloft rises from the grave once more to terrify comic book readers this August with a new eponymously titled four-part miniseries from Dark Horse.

Ravenloft is falling apart, and nobody knows why. Fortunately, monster hunter Ez D’Avenir is on the case! She’s searching the frozen wasteland of Lamordia for an undead creature that may hold the key to Ravenloft’s fate. But when Darklord Viktra Mordenheim catches wind of her quest, Ez is suddenly the one being hunted!

Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft, a new four-issue genre-bending comic series will unite Rudolph van Richten’s protégés from across the horrifying domains of Ravenloft.

The miniseries is written by Bram Stoker Award–winning author Amy Chu (Carmilla: The First Vampire, Red Sonja), with line art by Ariela Kristantina (The Girl Who Draws on Whales, Adora and the Distance), colours by Arif Prianto (Poison Ivy, Green Lantern Corps), and letters by Haley Rose-Lyon (BUMP: A Horror Anthology, Jill and the Killers).

Issue #1 will feature cover art by Guillem March, Riley Rossmo, Francesco Francavilla, Todor Hristov, and Angela Wu.

The series is also being touted as the perfect companion piece to the forthcoming Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, the new TTRPG supplement book for Dungeons & Dragons 5.5 that is due out in June.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: My Life and Humanoid Ducks In Roleplaying Games

Part of the reason for my passionate support for Darcy Perry's wonderful DuckQuest roleplaying game - and why I backed several of his anthropomorphic duck-related miniatures Kickstarters - stretches right back to my earliest days of gaming.

In the late '70s and early '80s the bulk of my long-form (rather than random one-shot) gaming was with Gublin, a friend who lived five doors down the road from me.

Although created for a specific Dungeons & Dragons adventure at our local gaming club, my enduring character from those days was a female half-elf fighter/cleric/magic-user called Staghind, who enjoyed a storied adventuring career, before becoming a queen of her own nation and retiring.

At some stage in her life she adopted an anthropomorphic duck called Quincy as one of her many children and he taught her Quack Fu. Or she was taught Quack-Fu by a master and then she adopted Quincy. My memory from those days is like Swiss Cheese!

My ideas about humanoid ducks were entirely shaped by reading Steve Gerber's bonkers Howard The Duck comics, rather than RuneQuest (which officially introduced ducks into the roleplaying consciousness).

This is also why I have a copy of this issue framed and hanging on the wall in our lounge with other key comics from my years of collecting and reading. 

Not just because of the incredible impact it had on me as a nascent comic book reader, exposing me to the gonzo possibilities of the medium, but also for the influence it had on me as a fledgling gamer.

Whilst my anthropomorphic duck gaming ended rather abruptly with Staghind's retirement, the concept endured with the help of one of my mum's delightfully random fandoms.

Once I was of working age (and writing nonsense for the local paper), my mum somehow became a massive fan of the late '80s kids cartoon Count Duckula, so I used my salary to ensure she had an extensive collection of VHS tapes and annuals (as that was the only merch available at the time).

These days duck characters can be found roleplayng games such as Dragonbane (from Free League Publishing), where they are called "mallards", and Twilight Sword (yes, this was a deciding factor in me backing this game).

In the latter game the duck kin are also known as "mallards" and were available, in print form (as a set of cards), as an early bird sweetener to entice backers to get the ball rolling on the crowdfunding campaign.

I hesitated and missed out on this bonus "kin", but understand it will still be available to all backers as a PDF. I can't NOT have ducks as a playable race in my version of Twilight Sword!

Why Aren't These Movies Cult Classics?

WhatCulture Horror presents a selection of classy genre movies, which are all too often mistakenly overlooked. These 10 films should be classed as cult classics, the 13-minute featurette argues, but aren't.

It's an interesting selection, although I firmly believe that the number one film, Near Dark, is a cult classic. I certainly regard it as such.

A Tale of Two Tales of An Ancient Empire

TALE ONE: It took director Albert Pyun almost 30 years to bring us a sequel to the much-loved, pulpy magnificence of The Sword And The Sorcerer - but sadly 2010's Tales Of An Ancient Empire wasn't worth the wait.

I'll confess that I feel slightly guilty about this upcoming savaging of a movie I should have loved.

However, the first thing you should know about Tales Of An Ancient Empire is that it isn't even a complete movie - it only lasts about 65 minutes then there's a trailer for the sequel Red Moon (which, sadly, never saw the light of day as far as I am aware).

Rather bizarrely scenes from this trailer have been used in the artwork on the back of the DVD case... even though technically they don't occur in this movie!

The basic premise isn't actually too bad. Tanis (Melissa Ordway), the daughter of Talon (Lee Horsley), hero of The Sword And The Sorcerer, is charged by her half-sister princess to track down her father and liberate the kingdom from the grip of newly-risen vampire queen Xia (Whitney Able, hilariously incomprehensible due to her over-sized fake fangs).

Along the way Tanis teams up with a string of other rogues who all happen to be children of Talon - including an oddly camp Kevin Sorbo.

Horsley only truly appears on screen for a single scene - but he steals the show in that one performance - while the cloaked figure we see later, wielding the famous three-bladed sword, may - or not - actually be Horsley as we never see his face.

Right from the off, Tales Of An Ancient Empire is victim to a series of strange and misjudged decisions: background information is imparted through on-screen text that disappears too quickly, the story is broken up into pointless, titled chapters (one lasts the length of time it takes two characters to walk down a hall, while another lasts for the entire third act) and there is much mumbled delivery, often in thick accents, by large portions of the cast.

On top of that there are just too many characters, several of whom look very similar, to keep track of and Pyun's heavy reliance on montage and flashback just confuses things further.

Improvements in special effects technology over the last three decades seem to have passed this production by. While the monsters (all vampires) are good and the smaller atmospheric effects work fine, the exterior of the main palace at night and a sailing ship that Tanis heads off on both looked like unfinished previsualization tests and a lot of the basic green-screening is very obvious.

Most of the film's production faults could have been overlooked if there had been a satisfying conclusion to the story (or any sort of conclusion, really) but to just stop when it did and then taunt us with a tease of better looking scenes was just cruel.

I so wanted to love this film, as I do the original, and I really like the idea of a party of adventures composed of half-brothers and half-sisters, but annoyingly this was a half-movie.

TALE TWO: Following my disappointment with Tales Of An Ancient Empire (expressed, pretty much as above, on a different, earlier blog) I was contacted by director Albert Pyun (yeah, I know! The power of the Internet, eh?) who explained that the version I had seen was a "rough early cut" that was released "without [his] okay".

And then, proving what a cool director he was, Albert (emailing from the set of Red Moon, the sequel to/continuation of Tales Of An Ancient Empire) allowed me a sneak peak at the first 18 minutes of the official, final cut and mix of the movie.

The first thing that strikes you is that the expositional text and chapter headings have gone, replaced by an on-screen, talking head narrator - Hekate (Cazzy Golomb).

If nothing else, this adds a degree of "Know, O Prince," Conan-style gravitas to proceedings and, unlike the chapter headings from my DVD, Hekate only pops up a couple of times during this first 18-minutes.

With less exposition, the story is allowed to unfold at its own pace, which cuts out a lot of the narrative repetition of the previous version, diving straight into the first meeting between Princess Tanis (Melissa Ordway) and her roguish half-brother Aedan (Kevin Sorbo) after the initial introduction of the arch villainess, the vampire queen Xia (Whitney Able).

The stunning Victoria Maurette as Kara

Melissa Ordway as Princess Tanis and Lee Horsley as Talon

The attack on the palace is then told in flashback and this helps to make it clear what is going on.

I was even, this time around, able to pick up on the fact that Tanis is the (adopted) daughter of the king that Talon (Lee Horsley) is riding off to save at the end of The Sword And The Sorcerer.

As well as the CGI shortcomings of the original, reviewed, version of Tales Of An Ancient Empire now being fixed, it's subtle differences that make all the difference in the director's cut (well, the 18 minutes I saw anyway). 

These give me hope that the finished product would have more likely been on a par with The Sword and The Sorcerer.

Ready for Another Dracula?

When a 15th Century prince’s wife is brutally murdered, he renounces God and damns heaven itself.

Cursed with eternal life, he is reborn as Dracula – an immortal warlord who defies fate in a blood-soaked crusade to wrench his lost love back from death.

Directed by Luc Besson, with release date of February 6, this iteration of the undying Dracula saga appears to take as much inspiration from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula as from Bram Stoker's original 1897 novel.

Do we need another take on this tale? Let's wait and see, rather than jumping to conclusions.

Given that it's directed by the legendary Luc Besson, if nothing else, this Dracula should be a visual feast.

The Last Voyage of The Demeter (2023)

If you know Bram Stoker's Dracula, then you know The Last Voyage of The Demeter.

Inspired by the book's single chapter that details the captain's log of the doomed voyage from Bulgaria to England, Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz's script, directed by Trollhunter's André Øvredal, extrapolates those few pages into a near-perfect 119-minute 'spam in a cabin' horror flick.

It's July 1897 and the merchant ship Demeter is carrying cargo bound for London, including - unknowingly - a number of boxes of Transylvanian soil and one holding the sleeping body of the vampire lord, Count Dracula (Javier Botet).

Once the ship is at sea, with the crew eager to get to England quickly to earn some bonus pay, the deaths begin.

First the livestock, which was to be the crew's food for their journey, is mysteriously butchered.

Then the crew start being killed off.

The Last Voyage of The Demeter is Alien on a nautical vessel rather than a space vessel, the ship's small crew trapped at sea, being hunted by a supernatural killing machine that dines on them as they bring him closer to his desired destination: the fresh feeding grounds of Victorian England.

Kong: Skull Island's Corey Hawkins is the new ships doctor, Clemens, a man of science to counter the superstitious crew, headed by the ever-excellent Liam Cunningham (aka Game of Thrones' Davos Seaworth, another sailor of note) as Captain Eliot: an almost unrecognisable David Dastmalchian as Wojchek, the quartermaster; and Jon Jon Briones (the genie from Sinbad; The Fifth Voyage) as Joseph, the highly religious ship's cook.

A young Romani stowaway, Anna (Aisling Franciosi) is found when one of the boxes of soil is accidentally opened by rough seas, and we later realise that she was Dracula's packed lunch for the voyage.

Captain "this is my last voyage, I'm going to retire" Eliot even has his eight-year-old grandson, Toby (Woody Norman), along with him and if you think "oh, they wouldn't hurt a child" you clearly haven't been paying attention.

The fate of the Demeter and its crew is inevitable, a foregone conclusion set down in the text of Stoker's game-changing vampire opus.

But that doesn't stop The Last Voyage of The Demeter being nail-bitingly tense and claustrophobic, with several good jump scares, oozing atmosphere from every frame, and featuring a genuinely monstrous depiction of Dracula.

The vampire is no suave British character actor, instead starting a gaunt, grey ghoul and evolving through the film into a giant, Nosferatuesque bat-creature, unsentimental in its brutal slayings.

What adds to the terror is the realisation - to a modern audience - that these people have no idea what a vampire is or how to kill it, they don't know its powers and weaknesses and there is no spoonfeeding of exposition to give them a clue.

All Clemens learns from Anna is that the beast is Dracula, it drinks blood and has kept her people in servitude through fear of its wrath.

Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of The Demeter falls down in its denouement, at the very last moments when it suddenly decides to try and give the tale a pointless "feel good/Hollywood" ending, when the source material's nihilistic resolution would have had a more lasting impact.

Birthday Bonus Trailer for The Timeless Doctors

There are fan films, then there are fan films, and then there is The Timeless Doctors.

Of this forthcoming epic, due for release next year, creator Stuart "BabelColour" Humphryes says:

"It cleverly weaves archive film with newly created special effects, modelwork and voice acting to produce a spectacular new adventure in time and space. Augmented with a bespoke musical score and specially filmed inserts, with cutting edge CGI and the appearance of very special guest artists, this is a fan venture like no other!"

Celebrating Doctor Who's 62nd anniversary with the release of a new, bonus, trailer Stuart adds:

"To celebrate Doctor Who Day today (23rd November), I share a bonus trailer for the 'Timeless Doctors' fan-film. This trailer takes us back to Old Gallifrey, to the days of the Doctor's childhood and much, much further - through the millennia to the Dark Time and the Age of Rassilon, when Omega detonated stars, the Great Vampires stalked the universe and the fledgling Time Lords invented living metals to protect their world. "

This is next-level fandom, supported by many with direct connections to the production of Doctor Who - both Classic and Modern - and a phenomenal pool of talent.

Check out an earlier trailer below and make sure you subscribe to BabelColour's Doctor Who YouTube Channel and/or The Timeless Doctors Bluesky feed for further developments.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Amusement Park (1973)

George A Romero's "lost" movie, 1973's The Amusement Park is a bit of an odd fish.

It was the only work-for-hire movie the father of modern zombie cinema made, commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania "as an educational film about elder abuse", but shelved soon after completion.

A print was discovered of this believed-to-be-lost film in 2017, restored, and was made available to view on Shudder.

Directed and edited by George A Romero, from a script by Wally Cook, The Amusement Park primarily features volunteer actors, or people who were actually involved in elderly care at the time.

In an interview, Romero's wife Suzanne Desrocher-Romero is quoted as saying:

"They [did] use it initially, but I suspect that they thought it was a little edgier than they would have liked."

Clocking in at just under an hour, the main story is bookended by stage actor Lincoln Maazel (who portrays the main character in the film) addressing the audience on how poorly the elderly generation are treated and how we should all change our attitudes to be more accommodating.

The story commences with a jovial Maazel entering an anonymous white room with a single door out.

There's another old man in there, looking the worse for wear, and groaning.

Maazel tries to engage him in conversation, but the battered man simply tells him there's nothing out there and not to go through the door.

Opening the door, Maazel - who also plays the key role of Tateh Cuda in Romero's 1978 vampire film Martin - sees a busy fun fair and steps through.

What follows is a metaphorical bombardment of this old man, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, as he stumbles - increasingly deliriously - through a cavalcade of on-the-nose - but often still rather clever - allegories about old age. 

For instance, pensioners are seen queueing up to hawk their valuables in exchange for tickets to the fun fair rides; there's an eye test before you're allowed to drive one of the dodgems (bumper cars) and if you hit someone police and insurance company reps show up; when Maazel tries to be kind to some children he gets heckled as a "degenerate"; a young couple visit a fortune teller and see a terrifying vision of their future in a rundown flat, penniless, and unable to get the medicine they require etc

When Maazel tries to help fellow elderly punters at the fair, the younger - more numerous - visitors don't pay him any attention.

At one point he is hustled into an attraction ominously called Boot Hill, which turns out to be a grim physiotherapy centre.

A "freak show" just features old people, and when Maazel goes to leave, the crowd proclaim that "one is escaping" and chase after him.

There's a moment when Maazel is set upon by a trio of bikers.

Another scene has him being pickpocketed by a sleazy con-artist.

Even when it seems like he might have found some solace reading The Three Little Pigs to a picnicking girl her mother soon packs up and takes the girl away, leaving Maazel almost in tears.

Finally, the ground down and broken Maazel stumbles back into the white room, now the battered version of himself as his earlier self enters the room again, fresh and full of optimism.

Stylistically, I feel The Amusement Park owes a lot to 1962's Carnival of Souls, with elements of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 A Clockwork Orange,.

You can also see echoes of The Amusement Park in LQ Jones's 1975 adaptation of Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog.

It's obvious from the get-go why the film's commissioners decided not to go with this peculiar oddity as their Public Service Announcement of choice.

It falls into the same broad category as the notoriously disquieting British public information films of the same era, but is considerably longer - and more surreal - than those tended to be. 

While The Amusement Park does get across its point about the systemic mistreatment and general abandonment of the elderly, it does it in a way that is more likely to turn off a general audience rather than inspire them to take positive action. 

Not because of its more shocking and dark content, but because of its art house approach of disjointed sounds and imagery.

As an amateur cinéaste, I found The Amusement Park an interesting watch (primarily because of who directed it), but I can't say it educated or inspired me about elderly care in any manner.

Additional research c/o Wikipedia.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Countess Dracula (1971)

In 17th Century Hungary, the elderly and recently widowed Countess Elisabeth Nádasdy (Ingrid Pitt) discovers she can temporarily restore her youth and libido by bathing in the blood of young virginal women.

Initially, her secret is only known to her castellan Captain Dobi (Nigel Green, a familiar face from such classics as Zulu and Jason & The Argonauts), who has loved the countess from afar for two decades and sees the death of her husband as making way for him, and her brainwashed nurse, Julie (Patience Collier).

At the reading of her husband's will, the Countess finds herself attracted to a new arrival, Lt. Imre Toth (Sandor Elès, who has an air of Jonathan Rhys Meyers about him), the son of her husband's wartime colleague and heir to the Count's stables and collection of valuable horses.

Unfortunately, the will divides the late Count's estate between the Countess and their daughter, Ilona (Lesley-Anne Down, of North and South, and Dallas), who has yet to arrive back from a stay of many years in Vienna.

Thus, the Countess instructs Dobi to kidnap Ilona on her return to the area, and she is bundled off as a prisoner of mute woodsman Janco (Peter May), who's not the sharpest tool in the box but still manages to thwart her multiple escape attempts.

In the absence of the real Ilona, the de-aged Countess assumes the role of her daughter and seduces cavalry officer Toth.

However, because her dark magic never lasts longer than about 48 hours, the Countess finds herself switching between the 'characters' she plays in the castle, while also charging Dobi with finding her fresh victims.

The wise old librarian Grand Master Fabio (Maurice Denham) quickly becomes suspicious and starts to investigate the goings-on in the castle, but this comes at a cost.  

However, his downfall opens the eyes of Toth, just as the castle is forced into "lockdown" by the Chief Bailiff, Captain Balogh (Peter Jeffrey), who concludes that the person responsible for the recent spate of murders could be among the Countess's staff.

Blackmailed into staying, Toth is forced to go through with the planned wedding to the fake Ilona, but the Countess needs another bath of blood to maintain her looks and energy for the honeymoon.

With no visitors coming to the castle, the jealous Dobi has to retrieve a virgin for exsanguination so his unrequited love can find some kind of happiness with a younger man.

Guess who he brings back?

A solid, if ultimately unremarkable, slice of Hammer Horror fare, with music from Harry Robertson of Hawk The Slayer fame, this is a creative compression of the legend of the real Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a real 16th Century serial killer said to have bathed in the blood of her victims.

Of course, the Countess isn't a classic cinematic vampire - there are no fangs on display, and she doesn't drink the blood, but rather uses it as skin cream - so the title Countess Dracula (shoehorned into the dialogue right at the last moment) is a slight misnomer. 

Mainly enjoyable for the charms of Ingrid Pitt, the film certainly improves the closer it gets to its climax, but to modern eyes one can't help thinking that with some judicious trimming of the fat this could have made a really good hour-long shocker.

I went into Countess Dracula pretty certain I'd seen it before, but as the tale unfolded, the more convinced I became that it was actually 'new' to me and I'd simply conflated it with the many other 'boobs and blood' vampire films I've sought out over the years.

The Return of Dracula (1958)

Evading the European police, Count Dracula (Francis Lederer) kills Czech artist Bellac Gordal who is on his way to America to stay with his extended family.

Dracula assumes the artist's identity and turns up in the small, whitebread community of Carleton, California, to be met by Bellac's widowed cousin Cora Mayberry (Greta Granstedt), and her children, aspiring dress designer Rachel (Norma Eberhardt) and young Mickey (Jimmy Baird).

Their neighbour Rachel's boyfriend, the ill-mannered Tim (Ray Stricklyn), is also at the station to greet Bellac, and takes an instant to dislike to the charming European visitor.

You know with a manly heroic name like that, Tim's going to be Rachel's knight in shining armour, right?

Tim and Rachel... need I say more?

After he is moved into their spare room, the Mayberry's quickly learn that their European cousin is quite eccentric, keeping to himself, sleeping in, slipping out of the house unnoticed etc

When Mickey discovers his "beloved" kitten Nugget mutilated in an abandoned mineshaft in the hills, it becomes clear that Dracula is here to feed!

However, I'm not exactly sure how we're supposed to feel about the tearful Mickey at this point because he'd seen earlier that Nugget had fallen into a spike-filled pit trap in the mine... and just left him there, promising to come back the next day.

He did try to go back that evening, but was told it was getting too dark to be playing in an abandoned mineshaft. He never mentioned to anyone that that's where he'd seen Nugget!

So, I reckon Mickey is just as guilty as Dracula for the fate of his cat.

Bellac learns of a sickly blind girl, Jennie Blake (Virginia Vincent), that Rachel has been reading to at the parish house, where she helps out.

So Dracula pays Jennie a midnight call and gives her his trademark love bite.

The next day, Jennie is at death's door, and asking for Rachel.

Jennie just manages to rasp out a vague warning before dying.

Around the time of Jennie's funeral, the European police show up, initially in the form of private detective Mack Bryant (Charles Tannen), posing as an agent of the Department of Immigration.

He "wants to check Bellac's immigration paperwork" and manages to snap a sneaky picture of the Undercover Count with a spy-camera in his cigarette lighter.

Outside, he hands-off the film to professional Dracula hunter John Merriman (John Wengraf).

But Bryant's days are numbered. Heading to the train station, to wait for a train out of this kooky place, Bryant spots the supposedly dead Jennie on the other side of the railway tracks.

Lured over there, he is killed by a white German Shepherd dog (was this Dracula... or even Jennie, transformed into a killer dog?).

Undercover Dracula aka Cousin Bellac

Rachel is getting worried about Bellac, after having a nightmare in which he tried to hypnotise her into removing her crucifix (which she got from Jennie).

Then, while trying to find her cousin to convince him to come to a Halloween party at the parish house, she discovers a painting in his room, depicting her lying in a coffin. Why? Who knows, really?

Rachel telephones Tim, but is surprised by Bellac ... because he casts no reflection in the hall mirror and she didn't see him sneaking up behind her.

Tim turns up and whisks a slightly befuddled Rachel away to the Halloween party.

Meanwhile, in the graveyard, Merriman, a couple of random police officers, and local vicar Rev Dr Whitfield (Gage Clarke), discover that Jennie's coffin is empty, so wait for her return (I'm trying to resist using the term "stakeout", for reasons...).

She returns, they paralyse her in her coffin by placing a cross on her chest, there's a bit of a debate over whether she was actually buried alive, then Merriman drives an enormous stake through her heart.

Meanwhile, Rachel slips away from the Halloween party - before the winner of the costume contest is announced - and Tim follows her out to the abandoned mineshaft, where Dracula has set up camp.

Dracula tries to hypnotise Rachel into becoming his bride, but the staking of Jennie makes him weak at the knees and so Tim heroically (well, with a bit of effort) uses Rachel's crucifix to drive Dracula back into the spikey pit (see, foreshadowing!)

With a running time of 77-minutes, The Return of Dracula aka The Fantastic Disappearing Man is the very definition of a B-movie.

Clearly an unofficial sequel to both Bram Stoker's original book and Universal's Dracula franchise, it's not great (but also it's not that bad either), but it vanished from the public consciousness once Hammer's Horror of Dracula aka Dracula was released later the same year, and the iconic Christopher Lee became synonymous with The Count.

It's kind of a shame really because, despite the complete absence of any special effects, beyond the odd cloud of mist when a vampire manifests, Francis Lederer is quite a charismatic Dracula.

While fangless, he compensates with his Teddy Boy quiff.

As this was made in the 1950s, during The Cold War, there's a strong "beware outsiders" vibe to this piece, with All-American, rough-and-ready, Tim's instant distrust of the suave "foreigner" being proven right in the end.

The script, by Pat Fielder and directed by Paul Landres, is paper-thin, but still manages to wander all over the place, with the two - almost simultaneous - climatic showdowns happening with no established correlation, beyond Dracula's reaction to Jennie being staked miles away.

There was an odd moment in this black and white film, when Jennie was staked, a short, colour, shot of bright red blood bubbling up from an impaled corpse had been spliced into the action.

Checking IMDB, this was a deliberate tactic for the theatrical release of the movie, and was restored for cable TV when it was shown on Turner Classic Movies.

While there, I also learned while Lederer hated this making this film, he reprised the role of Count Dracula in a 1971 episode of Night Gallery, A Question of Fear/The Devil Is Not Mocked.

Had Christopher Lee not swept onto the scene, with his big swooshing cape, there's a possibility (albeit remote) that The Return of Dracula might have had a bigger impact on vampire culture, as - for all its shortcomings - there's a certain simple charm about it.

Hellraiser (2022)

In this remake/sequel to Clive Barker's definitive, original Hellraiser from 1987, a penniless, former junkie, Riley (Odessa A’zion) and her loser boyfriend, Trevor (Drew Starkey). decide to rob a warehouse, so she can make enough money to pay her brother, Matt (Brandon Flynn), the rent she owes.

Unfortunately, what they end up stealing is a dread magical puzzle box that opens a portal to Hell, summoning demonic Cenobites who demand a blood sacrifice.

After her brother is seemingly taken by the Cenobites, Riley and Trevor's investigation into what they have stolen leads them to the home of its former owner, the - presumed dead - billionaire hedonist, Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić of ER and Timeless).

There Riley must reach an agreement with the leader of the Cenobites, The Hell Priest (formerly known as Pinhead and played exquisitely by Jamie Clayton), if Riley is going to get her brother back.

Part of my problem with this Hellraiser is that Riley isn't a particularly engaging protagonist. Clearly inspired by Jane Levy's Mia from the 2013 remix of Evil Dead, it is, however, almost impossible to have any relatable sympathy for Riley until pretty much the final scenes of this current flick.

The lack of character depth is accentuated in the set-up to the final act - at Voight's elaborately constructed mansion in the middle of nowhere - that plays out like a generic "teens get in trouble and get slaughtered" slasher flick.

And that's my biggest issue with this take on Clive Barker's mythology: the Cenobites are largely portrayed as simply monsters to be fought, actors in rubber costumes that could be interchangeable with vampires, werewolves or any number of other supernatural creatures. 

For me, the sadistic Cenobites work best when shown to be forces of nature, with almost Lovecraftian levels of inscrutability and power, totally beyond our comprehension and ability to combat with fists and physical weapons.

It is only when the 'angels of pain' are more static and still, as the film builds to its glorious climax, and we get to appreciate the porcelain nature of The Hell Priest's flesh and the power of her words (yes, she does get to recite some Pinhead classics from the original) that Hellraiser becomes more than just another monster movie.

For all that, although this film is around two hours long, director David Bruckner, coming off of The Night House, paces Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski's screenplay really well, so the action carries you along and the movie never drags.

Bruckner permeates the film throughout with a building sense of dread, and that most certainly pays off in the end, with a denouement worthy of the original film as we get to witness the horrific creation of a new Cenobite.

While this Hellraiser wasn't on a par with the 1987 one, it was certainly better than the awful avalanche of sequels that followed that, and, actually, I'd be interested to see an inventive sequel to this Hellraiser, as long as the same team were behind the camera and they continued to build on what they established here.

Real Life Monster Hunters Are More Hardcore Than Fiction (Monstrum)

How did Van Helsing go from academic in Dracula to action hero icon? This episode explores his evolution from Victorian scholar to monster-hunting legend, unpacking his role in the novel, pop culture legacy, and why he remains the ultimate supernatural slayer.

Jakob's Wife (2021)

Jakob's Wife was a pet project of the iconic Barbara Crampton, who had apparently spent years trying to bring the script by Kathy Charles, Mark Steensland, and director Travis Stevens to life.

She is quoted on IMDB as saying:

"I read it and I was immediately captivated. I hooked up with Bob Portal at Alliance Media Partners and it took many years for us to develop the project and put it together."

In the film, Crampton plays Anne Fedder, the dutiful but downtrodden wife of a boorish, small town minister, Pastor Jakob Fedder (Larry Fessenden).

The film wastes no time in getting to the meat of its storyline when an attractive girl, Amelia Humphries (Nyisha Bell), disappears on her way home from an evening church service.

Then Anne has the chance to meet up with an old flame, Tom Low (Robert Rusler), who is back in town to help with the restoration of a historic gin mill.

The couple rendezvous at the rundown, out-of-town, property but just as it looks like their old romance is about to be rekindled, they are attacked by supernatural forces.

Tom is killed off swiftly, but Anne returns home later... a changed woman.

Bonnie Aarons as The Master

She has fallen under the spell of an enigmatic, asexual, vampire lord - of the old school, Nosferatu-style - known only as The Master (Bonnie Aarons, who also played the titular role in The Nun).

Once Jakob realises what's going on in his town, he is at first naturally horrified, but then his desire to exterminate the vampire threat (which he readily accepts as real) is tempered by a determination to save his wife, somehow.

The story pivots and lurches thematically and tonally, but it is Barbara Crampton's powerful central performance around which everything revolves and that holds this strange 98-minute affair together.

I think it's supposed to be a dark comedy, but this really isn't clear from the get-go.

There's a definite Fright Night vibe - and even a touch of Buffy The Vampire Slayer - to Jakob's Wife, but it has an odd habit of allowing characters to flip from 'good guys' to 'bad guys' at a moment's notice.

Jakob, for instance, isn't a particularly likeable person to begin with, and yet there are times when he's suddenly - slightly uncomfortably - thrust into the role of 'hero'.

In all honesty, the majority of the audience isn't ever going to care for him... even if, at the eleventh hour, he realises what a great catch his wife is.

And I wasn't totally sold by his transition from "thoughts and prayers solve everything" to "killing in the name of love".

Conversely, Anne switches from murderous monster to "hero" and back again several times in the tale.

Director Travis Stevens was certainly very lucky to have an actor as brilliant as Barbara Crampton as the power engine behind his movie, because it could have possibly spun totally out of control without her presence.

Jakob's Wife is a buffet, a potential melange of different tastes that may, or may not, appeal depending on your personal preferences and tolerances.

Zoltan, Hound of Dracula (1977)

Pretty certain Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula was the first vampire film I ever saw as a kid, as it was a running joke in our cat-centric house when I was growing up that all "vicious" dogs were called "Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula".

A cheesy B-movie, with a novel central concept, a modicum of gore, and almost zero scares, no one will ever mistake Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula (aka Dracula's Dog) for high art, as ultimately the "idea" is better than the execution.

A unit of Cold War era Soviet soldiers unearth a "Dracula tomb" in Romania, accidentally releasing Zoltan, The Hound Of Dracula, and his handler, Veidt Smit (Reggie Nalder).

Police inspector - and vampire expert - Inspector Branco (José Ferrer) correctly deduces that Smit is heading to America to pledge his allegiance to Dracula's last living relative, psychiatrist Michael Drake (Michael Pataki).

Smit (or 'Smith') and Zoltan arrive in California ahead of Branco, but Drake, his family, and their dogs (two full-grown German Shepherds and three puppies) have already left for a two-week camping vacation at Clear (not Crystal!) Lake.

To be honest, I was horrified that this family took their new-born puppies on a wilderness camping trip. Horror compounded by the fact that one gets lost almost immediately, and eventually falls prey to Zoltan's fangs.

The Hound Of Dracula, and his handler, have followed the Drake family to the wilderness, and begin a campaign of harassment, with the eventual idea (I think) of letting Zoltan bite Michael and turn him into a vampire.

It's all a bit vague really, and I don't truly understand why they don't just storm in there on the first night and turn Michael lickety-split.

By drawing things out, they only allow time for Branco to roll up, from "The Old Country", fill Michael in on what's going on and formulate a defence strategy.

Drake is clearly au fait with his historical heritage as he takes everything that Branco tells him at face value and has no problems accepting the existence of vampires.

Of course, if everyone had listened to Drake's young daughter, Linda (Libby Chase), earlier - after she bumped into Smit and his rather on-the-nose hearse - matters might have been resolved quicker and more easily.

I did like the fact that neither Michael nor Branco actually actually knew about Zoltan until the climax of the final act.

Conversely, I didn't quite grasp Smit's obsession with Michael as the last blood relative of Dracula, when Drake had two kids: Linda and Steve (John Levin). Surely, THEY were Dracula's last descendants? And probably better targets for vampiric transformation?

There's an exciting siege in a wooden hut, when Michael and Branco are attacked by Zoltan and a couple of dogs he's converted to his cause, but otherwise this movie pretty much fails to live up to its potential.

Although everyone gets bloodied and bruised in the final fight, ultimately the good guys win way too easily.

However, the denouement is worthy of a wry chuckle.

Inescapable comparisons with Cujo exist, as this is another "people attacked by blood-hungry canines" yarn, but Zoltan - unsurprisingly - pales in comparison.

An ill thought-out story, riddled with plot holes, pretty much sinks Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula, leaving us, simply, with the brilliant idea of the immortal count's pet having a cinematic un-life of its own.

Abraham's Boys: A Dracula Story With A Difference

Max and Rudy Van Helsing have spent their lives under the strict and overprotective rule of their father, Abraham.

Unaware of his dark past, they struggle to understand his paranoia and increasingly erratic behavior. But when they begin to uncover the violent truths behind their father’s history with Dracula, their world unravels, forcing them to confront the terrifying legacy they were never meant to inherit.

Based on the short story by Joe Hill.

MONSTER MAYHEM: The Vourdalak (2023)

Having been attacked by Turkish bandits while travelling through an Eastern European forest, French nobleman the Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), an emissary of the King of France, seeks assistance at the isolated home of an elderly man called Gorcha.

The man of the house is absent though and the Marquis instead meets his children: the eldest son, surly Jegor (Grégoire Colin), crossdresser Piotr (Vassili Schneider) and ethereal "fallen woman" Sdenka (Ariane Labed). Also present are Jegor's wife, Anja (Claire Duburcq) and their young son, Vlad (Gabriel Pavie).

The Marquis d'Urfé discovers that the elderly Gorcha left the house six days earlier to go fight the invading Turks, warning that if he returned after six days he would be a "vourdalak" and his family were not to let him in.

The Marquis (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Sdenka (Ariane Labed)

That evening, while the residents of the manor are dining outdoors, Jegor discovers what appears to be the corpse of his father, lying at the edge of the property.

However the old man (voiced by the film's writer and director Adrien Beau) is alive. Kind of.

This is where things start to get really weird. Despite Jegor's refusal to believe in folk stories, his father, Gorcha, is, indeed a vourdalak, an undead corpse-like being that's part vampire, part ghoul, that thrives by feeding on its loved ones (rather than random strangers).

However, that's not the weirdest part of this darkly, atmospheric Gothic French movie. It's the fact that Gorcha is portrayed by a life-sized skeletal puppet (also operated by Adrien Beau), with a limited range of movement.

Luckily, I had been forewarned about this fact, as it comes as quite a surprise when it pops up in this grounded, period piece, set in the 18th Century.

Yet oddly, once you've adjusted your brain to the idea that the antagonist of this claustrophobic horror tale isn't an actor in a rubber suit or a CGI creation, it is a rather effective depiction of a creature that's alien to our reality and yet was once human.

This isn't Muppet Christmas Carol territory, but something much creepier and more unnerving (more so even than the spooky Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come).

Coming in at under 90-minutes duration, The Vourdalak is a fascinating French-language work of oppressive horror, where the tension ratchets up methodically to a gory climax.

What could have come across as a "silly experiment" on paper, is, in actuality, an eerie and atmospheric movie about a largely unseen supernatural predator preying on his own family, trapped on their own estate by both familial loyalty and fear of the Turkish invaders.

While our POV character, the foppish Marquis starts the tale as "powdered courtier" and a bit of an ass, his story arc sees him grow a backbone - partly motivated by his attraction to Sdenka - to just about become the tale's hero.

Based up the 19th Century novel The Family of the Vourdalak, by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin of  the more famous Leo Tolstoy), the film is an interesting twist on the ubiquitous vampire mythology and is worth watching for that alone.

The Shed (2019)

Having been attacked in the woods by a Nosferatu-like vampire (Damian Norfleet), hunter Joe Bane (Frank Whaley) crawls away to a nearby shed to recuperate... and complete his transformation into a bloodsucker.

The shed stands in the garden of Bane's neighbour, 17-year-old orphan Stan (Jay Jay Warren), who lives with his alcoholic and abusive grandfather, Ellis (Timothy Bottoms).

After the vampire kills Ellis and his dog, Stan realises he can't go to the authorities as his grandfather was the only thing standing between him and another spell in a juvenile detention centre.

Thus, he confides instead in his best friend, Dommer (Cody Kostro).

Unfortunately, Dommer immediately sees the "pet monster" as a weapon to strike back at the school bullies, Marble (Chris Petrovski) and his cronies, Pitt (Francisco Burgos) and Ozzy (Uly Schlesinger).

Naturally, things don't really go well for anyone, eventually culminating in Stan and his cute ex-girlfriend Roxy (Sofia Happonen) besieged in his house by a small horde of vampires.

Slightly reminiscent of several classic urban vampire flicks, from the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie and Fright Night to Near Dark and Salem's Lot, The Shed is an innovative, tight, well-made, well-acted, low-budget, low-key monster movie that, ultimately, doesn't quite live up to its potential.

Jay Jay Warren has a certain Anton Yelchin-like quality about him and together with Sofia Happonen they make for charming, easy-going leads, while Cody Kostro's Dommer, especially when he finally gets one over on Marble and cracks, is superb.

Spanning a three or four day period, the 98-minute movie is well-paced and a believable slice of small town American life in a community where everybody knows everybody.

However, a couple of things stand in the way of The Shed being a truly great horror flick.

The first is that, for a film that isn't a Nightmare on Elm Street, it spends far too long in Stan's dreamscape, unless this is somehow connected to a previously unknown power of the vampire. Sadly, this is never explained.

Secondly, the abrupt ending feels like writer/director Frank Sabatella just suddenly ran out of ideas (or money?) and called a halt.

Too many questions, many of them practical and grounded in the real world, are left unanswered.

And there's the obvious Chekhov's Gun of Deputy Haiser (Mu-Shaka Benson), introduced early on and clearly having a grudge against Stan, who then never appears again, even after his boss, Sheriff Dorney (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) fails to return from a routine call-out.

It feels as though The Shed could have done with, at least, five or 10 more minutes of run time to wrap up its many dangling plot threats.

Shadow Of The Vampire (2000)

The darkly humourous Shadow Of The Vampire is the perfect companion piece for Nosferatu. Its canny conceit is that the dangerously eccentric and driven director Frederich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) has made a devilish pact with a real vampire (an almost unrecognisable Willem Dafoe) to play the role of Count Orlok in his film, Nosferatu.

His payment? The chance to feed on the lead actress, Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack) during the climax of the movie.

Unfortunately for Murnau, things don't run smoothly as 'Max Schreck' aka Count Orlok starts killing off his crew.

Having been told that the actor 'Max Shreck' is a deep method actor, who always stays in character as the vampire, the cast and crew of Nosfesatu quickly find their location shoot in Czechoslovakia is anything but routine.

Suspicions arise, and producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes) conspire to unmask 'Shreck' and end his reign of terror.

Shadow Of The Vampire's (totally bogus) 'secret history' of the making of Nosferatu borders on slapstick with much of its camp delivery.

However, it then manages to slickly change gears for powerful moments such as Orlok's discussion of the inherent sadness of Bram Stoker's portrayal of Dracula (in the novel that Murnau couldn't get permission to officially adapt).

Watching the two films back-to-back allowed me to mentally place the scenes being created for Shadow's movie-within-the-movie in the real movie, but also - especially during the multiple murders in the final scene - to realise where it deviated dramatically from the actual Nosferatu.

As well as an amusing vampire film in its own right, Steven Katz's script - under the guidance of director E. Elias Merhige - gives us a fascinating insight into not only the silent movie making processes of the 1920s but also the lengths an 'inspired' director will go to to craft his masterpiece.

Ultimately Murnau is driven insane by the process and is willing to allow people to literally die, on camera, for his art (even as he is creating the first snuff movie).

Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror (1922)

The first, albeit unofficial, cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu takes the novel's core elements, gives the characters new names, and delivers a chilling and iconic vampire tale.

Told in five delineated acts, the striking images we know so well come, primarily, from the climax of the movie when Count Orlok (Max Schreck) arrives, by boat, in the German city of Wisborg and stalks the maiden Ellen (Greta Schröder).

She's the wife of real-estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), who traveled to Transylvania, at the behest of his increasingly insane boss, Knock (Alexander Granach), to negotiate the purchase of a property in the city for the enigmatic Count Orlok... who happens to be a vampire.

Orlok spies a picture of Ellen in a locket of Hutter's and immediately knows where he's dining once he arrives to take up residence in Wisborg.

As a film that's almost a hundred years old, Nosferatu has a very different narrative structure to that which we are used to today. For instance, Hutter - the protagonist - has no involvement in Orlok's eventual demise, this is all down to Ellen, who takes it upon herself to act as bait for the vampire.

Nosferatu is a silent foreign-language film, meaning the intertitles (the cards that appear onscreen, between live-action shots, with dialogue or narrative) are written in German, with English sub-titles.

However, the result of this is that sometimes, when the intertitles contain a lot of text, the sub-titles clash with the text underneath, which is somewhat annoying.

I know the restoration of this movie for the Blu-Ray was striving for authenticity, but perhaps an option to view the film with English intertitles might have been an idea.

The print is tinted, alternating between, mainly, yellow and grey, but as far as I could tell there was no pattern, or meaning, to the changes of colour, it just helped make the film's imagery pop a bit more.

Of course, the main draw of Nosferatu is Max Shreck's incredible portrayal of the vampire count. With a single performance he encapsulated, and created, an entirely new vampire sub-species, with its own mannerisms and abilities that are, at once, similar but markedly different to the traditional (Hammer/Universal era) vampires we generally think of today.

Shreck's Orlok is not charming, suave, or romanticised, but an otherworldly beast that happens to have taken a human form. He is the living embodiment of plague - a theme echoed in The Strain television series (and books and comics), whose vampires bear more than a passing resemblance to Orlok.

Graf Orlok - portrayed by Max Schrek