When we think about vampires, our expectations have inevitably been shaped by popular literature, which has in turn – for the last century – also found expression in cinema. In the nineteenth century, popular reading habits created a set of cultural expectations about vampires. The birth of horror fiction, which stemmed in turn from the Gothic novels of the preceding century, came to reflect a taste for a certain, new kind of monster. The likes of Varney the Vampire (~1847), Carmilla (1872) and of course, Dracula (1897) were very popular. These stories often present vampires as effete aristocrats, occupying the highest ranks of society, and using their means and status to literally, maybe eternally, get away with murder. These archetypes also started to appear in film at the turn of the twentieth century, where they have bounced along ever since, often – if not always – displaying similar, recognisable traits.
Given that there is a wholly different branch of tale telling and folklore in Europe which relates to vampirism, the association of ‘vampire’ with ‘nobility’ is quite a rehabilitation. It says a lot, particularly about Western readers in the 1800s, that they were so happy to affiliate class, wealth and power with literal blood-draining, as the titled antagonists of these popular penny dreadfuls and railway novels survive death only to perpetuate the exploitation of the living from beyond the grave. However, this is only a partial picture of the bloodsucker. Other authors working from Eastern European, Greek or Slavic traditions were telling very different stories about what we would class as vampires, although these tales, too, had a nineteenth century print heyday – albeit taking influence from a far older set of oral traditions.
It was A. K. Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin, two popular Russian authors, who first helped to popularise the idea of the ‘Vourdalak’. Pushkin printed a collection of poetry titled Songs of the Western Slavs in 1835: it contained a poem about a vourdalak. Tolstoy’s novella, The Family of the Vourdalak, was published shortly afterwards in 1839. The folklore behind these was however much older, with folk beliefs about these particular kinds of revenants – often blended together with other ideas of witchcraft and lycanthropy – stemming back centuries.
Vourdalak myths have little in common with our newer notions of suave, moneyed vampires. Instead, vourdalaks are complex symbols of death anxieties, as often felt by the poorest and most powerless. Beliefs about vourdalaks have also been shaped by a host of religious and social ideas, often representing some fearful kind of breakdown in social order. It is in times of struggle that these kinds of myths manifest themselves the most keenly, particularly where disease, famine and war disrupt an ordered response to death, prompting panic and grief. Mass burials, unexpected numbers of deaths and burials on unconsecrated ground all link to ideas about a ‘good death’ and a ‘bad death’, and what could happen when a good death is impossible. To die unconfessed, in Christian tradition, is historically seen as a risk to one’s mortal soul; to be tipped into the ground, any old ground, beyond the good graces of God is a calamity normally reserved only for outlaws and outcasts. What happens to someone if this fate befalls them? This fear has given rise to tales and traditions of vampires and ghouls, condemned to wander, coming back to afflict the living.
Vourdalak myths also reflect a fascinated misunderstanding of the natural decomposition process, which often equates the appearance of things like ‘growing’ nails and teeth, the secretion of bodily fluids from the mouth and the ruddy appearance caused by bloating and lividity as evidence of a recent blood – or flesh – meal. In short, naturally occurring phenomena are recast as supernatural, then given as evidence that the dead are leaving their graves, menacing the living. Extreme circumstances demand extreme solutions: the only efficient way, historically, to deal with a suspected vourdalak is through corpse defilement. Archaeology has been turning up decapitated, pinioned, mutilated bodies for as many centuries as the deeds have been done.
These measures are, to most modern sensibilities, horrific: however, for those people, often from the lowest ranks of society, dealing with shock, bereavement and fear in extraordinary circumstances, it constitutes both a response to the breakdown of order and a reasonably structured means of resetting that order. The repellent idea of a loved one returning from a bad death to spread more harm was enough to drive these practices even into the twentieth century, such as in Greece during the Great Famine of the 1940s – when families took age-old, grisly steps to prevent their unfortunate loved ones from ever returning as vourdalaks, or in Greek, vorvolakas (1).
This brings us to The Vourdalak (2023), a horror film based on the Tolstoy story mentioned above. However, the screenplay – co-written by Hadrien Bouvier and director Adrien Beau – expands on the source text, both reinforcing its singular horrors and granting them a broader, more pessimistic remit. In the film, based during the eighteenth century, an emissary of the French court, Marquis d’Urfé, finds himself stranded deep in Eastern Europe after being robbed, losing his horse. He is taken in by the family of a local man called Gorcha, but the patriarch himself is absent – gone to pursue the pillaging Turks who recently raided the village. Gorcha has however left his family strict instructions: should he return after six days, not to receive him back over the threshold. If he reappears after that time, then it will be as a vourdalak. But when the family finds the old man collapsed close to the house, weak and ailing, they can’t help themselves, although six days have – just – passed by. These dutiful relatives bring him home and try to care for him. As a result, this revenant begins to drink the blood of his family members, spreading vampirism amongst them – all whilst d’Urfé, who has fallen in love with the daughter of the family, Sdenka, tries to find them an escape.
They say that love is blind and it certainly is here. The Vourdalak has many strengths, and amongst these is the strange pleasure of seeing vampirism represented on screen in such a genuinely hideous way. Mario Bava filmed the same story as part of his 1963 film Black Sabbath, though stops short of presenting Boris Karloff in quite the same way as in the 2023 version. The Vourdalak reinvigorates the notion of the vampire as an unnatural parasite, a repellent creature which slithers out of its grave or rises after its death to inflict misery and harm. Gorcha is represented through puppetry in the film, too, which helps to entrench the uncanny impact his scenes have: gaunt, ghastly and fearsome, chewing noisily on his shroud, he’s quite the poster boy for disruption and disease. Little wonder that, alongside war, times of epidemic and plague have often prompted renewed beliefs in vampirism: they share the same ideas of symptoms and transmission. Although Gorcha more closely resembles Count Orlok from Nosferatu (1922) than he does other on-screen bloodsuckers, there’s no pan-European travel, no lording it in high castles and certainly no property acquisition. Gorcha returns to his own village, his own lowly house, and his own family: they are his chosen victims, and it is to them that he passes his infection. Even when they begin to understand that he is a vourdalak, they are afraid or unwilling to disfigure him with a stake through the heart.
Similarly, because his family is so poor, insular and isolated, they are very vulnerable. This allows the revolting creature to get close to each family member, though he starts with the weakest of them all – Vlad, his little grandson, whose ensuing symptoms are immediately described – of course – as an illness. Gorcha is a spiritual, physical, moral and most of all a domestic threat. But what of d’Urfé, an outsider, come from the genteel and modern French court – where he still hopes to return?
D’Urfé is in his own way a victim of his own cultural beliefs and practices. His chivalric impulse to court Sdenka – a young, unmarried, if ‘fallen’ woman – almost condemns him to death in the earliest part of the film, when the woman first tricks him into approaching a cliff edge as he tries to woo her. However, his romantic attraction towards her is at least partly why he remains. The trickster Gorcha certainly understands the visitor’s love for Sdenka, using it ultimately to try to bring d’Urfé into the fold by taking part in the horror cinema tradition of presenting us with a young, beautiful woman – who is in fact anything but. From the very beginning, d’Urfé must go through the uncomfortable process of unlearning some of his cultural attitudes – his rational ideals, his education, his belief in law and order – to fully understand what is happening to the family. This begins very early: when he first encounters the undead Gorcha, he must swallow his revulsion, following the lead of his hosts. Later, when he begins to realise what must be done, he has to grapple with the anger of the family. He is constantly reminded of his outsider status, right up until it is too late, and he cannot resume his old life.
But The Vourdalak does its best work in how it extends the remit of this strange story, moving it beyond the confines of one remote homestead in Eastern Europe. In effect, the usual vampire story arc goes into reverse: the film leaves us with the knowledge that here, it is the peasantry which exploits the gentry. Using what she learns from d’Urfé, Sdenka is able to travel to France, ingratiating herself with a duchess who takes pity on her, writing of her great interest in this vulnerable foreigner. To go back to the run of popular vampire stories which were being written and read in the nineteenth century, this is an interesting idea for how vampirism could first infiltrate a higher social class: rich, leisured, sheltered people would have plenty of opportunity to pass this condition on amongst themselves, once it arrived amongst them. As such, the film provides an intriguing bridging point, as well as offering us an especially gloomy, unredemptive ending. It’s also a link between the folklore and tale-telling of the East and West; to come back to Nosferatu (1922), this film was reportedly based on the experiences of producer Albin Grau, who served in Serbia during the Great War, and once met a local farmer who told him his own father had returned from the dead…
This makes The Vourdalak an engaging update of a long-established, queasy, uneasy death folklore, where revenants emerge from unhallowed ground or hastily-dug trenches to terrorize those once closest to them. It also brings us a strange clash between Western empiricism and Eastern folklore, but one where Eastern folklore breaks out and finally infiltrates an unsuspecting West. And, most of all, it is remarkable in its depiction of a blood-drinking, shroud-slurping, pallid and ungodly living corpse, a cipher for all the plagues and wars which have beset mankind through the centuries, as well as a grim reminder of the hideous aftermath as Gorcha, the vourdalak, spreads his undeath to both family and strangers.
1: Mazower, Mark (1995). Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44. Yale University Press. p. 41