The Vourdalak
The tableau above looks kind of familiar, right? Max Schreck, by way of Klaus Kinski, via Gary Oldman, yes?? And he/it--NOSFERATU, in other words--is on the way AGAIN, courtesy of Bill Skarsgård???
Well, you can't keep a good Vampire down, apparently--people's preferences/appetite for the physiognomic Rodent Man specimen currently taking over the world (I get most of my Style info from the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/style/who-is-a-rodent-man.html ).
Pish tush. You could do worse while you're waiting ('til Christmas!) for Skarsgård fils's turn as Count Orlok by checking out the curious French shocker THE VOURDALAK (d. Adrien Beau, see the still above)--now probably not playing anywhere near you (I am lucky indeed to be in walking vicinity of 4 of NYC's best arthouse cinemas: Film Forum, IFC Center, the Quad Cinema, and Cinema Village ). But sure to be streaming on MUBI or a similar cable channel any day now.
Based on Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1839 Gothic novella The Family of the Vourdalak--previously filmed under the title The Wurdulak as an episode of Mario Bava's 1963 horror anthology Black Sabbath starring Boris Karloff-- the gee-whiz factor herein is the use of a life-size VAMPIRE MARIONETTE standing in for the eponymous...well, protagonist... not exactly the word I'm looking for here, but it will have to do.
A puppet monster per se is not all that new (check out the RatBatSpider in Ib Melchior's 1962 The Angry Red Planet-- plus all those delightful Toho Studio kaiju creations)--but as a life-size vampire surrogate it's a novel twist indeed--'cept you can almost but not quite see the invisible hand working the strings propelling The Vourdalak around above ground on his gruesome business. Not that far afield come to think of it from Vincent Price's manipulation/reeling in of the Skeleton in the Acid Bath at the conclusion of William Castle's 1959 House on Haunted Hill (auteur Castle, whose films I've adored since I was a lad, is sadly to me conspicuously left out of Quentin Tarantino's otherwise crucial Cinema Speculation book, though QT does give him a name-check in passing in one of his many online interviews).
This opus has the feel of a particularly offbeat, lush Eastman color Hammer vampire film from another era--1963's Kiss of the Vampire and 1972's Vampire Circus come to mind--down to the primal manor house situated deep in a dark forest, which resembles nothing so much as Pinewood Studios's Black Park in Buckinghamshire, a favorite location of so many Hammer Horror exterior sequences.
Good sound design also: The Vourdalak (the animated decaying corpse known as Gorcha, on the attack below) slurps blood as noisily as Kinski in Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu and speaks impeccable French as well (voiced by the director).
I don't want to spoil all the fine plot points which you can read all about elsewhere, except to say I was more or less riveted for the duration. (Up close the hideous mask of The Vourdalak also gives off an "Onibaba" vibe. Which is to say, there is a lot to chew over--hehe--for all you cine maniacs out there).
In conclusion, definitely a bloody cut or two or three above the quotidian horror fare. Well worth your attention.