Carmilla

Best Bloodies

Carmilla
UK 2019 Directed by Emily Harris
Bird Flight Films

Warning: Slight spoilers if you don’t know the original
story or any of its subsequent screen adaptations.

Carmilla is yet another screen version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 serialised novella of the same name and, by this point, one wonders how many times this tale of sapphic vampirism by way of passive and undetected home invasion can be committed to celluloid. That being said, Jean Rollin forged a career out of making surreal and truly astonishing, beautiful lesbian vampire movies (none of which were particularly inspired by Carmilla, I believe) so, maybe the answer is... plenty.

Well, when you have a film as good as Emily Harris’ new iteration of the source, you know there’s at least room for one more... although it would be fair to say I had a few small problems with it. Instead of going straight for the jugular, so to speak, here she instead opts to step right back from the vampiric qualities of the original, toning it down to such an extent that at one point I wondered if this really was a version of Le Fanu’s classic after all. As it happens, the vampirism is indeed included in this story but mostly through the deeds and implication of the characters at the periphery of the main focus of the main protaginist Lara (changed from Laura in the book) and the girl she, in this version of the story, names Carmilla (in the original text, as I’m sure many a Hammer Horror fan can tell you, it was itself an anagram of the first name of Mircalla Karnstein but, in this version, the famous ‘K’ word never comes up).

So yeah, I was a bit taken aback that both the vampirism and, honestly, the lesbianism of the subject was handled almost from a distance, at least in terms of overtly showing the harder edges (or should that be softer curves) of the latter element. In spite of all this though, the film has an amazing amount of positives and I’ll focus on those for a moment.

One is the acting. The main female trio of Lara, Carmilla and Lara’s governess Miss Fontaine are played by three very capable actresses who really make the film work on the performance level. Miss Fontaine is played by Jessica Raine (who readers may best remember for her turn as Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert in An Adventure In Space And Time, which I reviewed here... as well as in one of the better episodes of the modern version of the show, reviewed here) and she does her usual, wonderful job. Lara, played by Hannah Rae, does an absolutely brilliant turn here and, since the film is almost solely viewed through her character’s eyes, she almost carries the movie on her own. Carmilla herself is played by Devrim Lingnau, who does a remarkable job of breaking through the veneer of suppression which characterises Lara’s home and is exactly the brash and earthy creature (curious, perhaps, for an unearthly character) that you’d expect in a good version of Carmilla Karnstein. Although, she almost seems a little too young for the role at times.

So, yeah, fair enough, we have some great performances here. However, the real star of the show is the beautiful cinematography and shot designs that the director infuses the story with. Contrasting many shots of the beauty of nature with various insects and bugs in close up, to remind the viewer of the nature of the vampiric creature now residing in Lara’s home. Indeed, from early on in the film we hear Lara being reminded of why flowers look and smell so pretty, in order to attract the bees to pollinate them... so already the director is pushing a vampiric metaphor of an organism which uses something else for propagation, so to speak. So, great and beautifully shot wide open spaces might well be tempered with the close up sights and sound of ants crawling on a tree or worms turning in the earth. And it looks quite wonderful and certainly acts as a salve, in my case, to distract from the extraction of the details of the original story.

The director loves making nice, clean shots and there are some strong symmetrical designs throughout. A shot of Miss Fontaine and Lara’s father addressing Lara from either side of the foreground of the frame as she is standing in front of a fireplace in the centre background of a shot comes to mind. Also, there’s a beautiful moment when a triangle on one third of the screen is joined by a diagonal separator with all the plains being out of focus. 

 This director is not afraid to use the extreme edges of the wide screen shot either... where two characters are talking for instance... and just leave space in the centre of the screen. There’s a real feel of meticulous and well thought out design to the film and, while some viewers might find the artifice of the photography distracting, I personally love this kind of cinema and admire it above all others (it’s why I love the cinema of the Italian giallo so much).

One thing which did bother me, though, was the use of lens flares. Despite using it myself just recently in my role as a graphic designer, I find the use of lens flares to call attention to the camera a real irritant and am not a fan. They’re all over this film... even in darkened interior shots and, frankly, after a while I just wanted to duck every time a flare of light sprang up on the screen. So, yeah, could have done with less of that.

My other little problem was that the writer/director has distanced the specifics of the action so much that, I suspect the film may be a little hard to follow for people who are unfamiliar with either the source or one of the more faithful, previous adaptations of it (actually, Hammer’s first Karnstein movie, The Vampire Lovers, which I reviewed here, is a surprisingly faithful primer if you’ve never read the original). Luckily, I knew the original but because the vampirism of the story is masked and fairly thinly alluded to, I think some viewers might not have any idea as to that element of the story, especially when various tropes of the genre are more or less done away with here. 

When Carmilla is, finally, staked there is no pre-warning and you don’t actually see it, just hear some thumping and moaning and, at this point, I was wondering what a certain section of the audience who had no idea this was in some way a vampire movie were supposed to think. I suppose the idea here is not to show that Carmilla is a vampire but, it’s more about the perceptions other people have of a person and the extremes they go to in order to make good on their assumptions. Thankfully, there is one brief shot of the aftermath to clue the more unsuspecting audiences in on what’s just been done to Carmilla... and it’s a shame it’s so brief because it’s a nicely brutal shot which really drives the message home, if you don’t blink and miss it. Again, though, I get the feeling that this is not the director saying... yes, she was a vampire. More saying, yes, this girl was suspected of being a vampire and this was the consequence of that suspicion (though, to be fair, Carmilla is all up for sucking Lara’s blood at one point).

One other thing I’ll briefly mention is the unusual score by Phil Selway. It uses a very small number of players (it seemed to me) and does some interesting things like, in some scenes, using high pitched and persistently reoccurring strings in a way which alerts the audience that something is going on, even when visually it’s maybe not too obvious that anything is amiss. That being said, it’s not overtly ‘stinger’ led or anything like that and it really hovers in the background, giving the film a coating of musical texture in the best way. It’s a shame that there’s no soundtrack CD available at time of writing this review because I’d really like to experience this as a stand alone listen. It’s certainly not a ‘horror’ score by any stretch and perfectly fits the restraint practiced and demonstrated by Emily Harris’ writing and direction.

And that’s me done with this latest version of Carmilla. It’s certainly not the least faithful ‘inspired by’ film but it’s also not something viewers might even realise was an ‘adaptation’ unless clued in by the name of the central vampire. Indeed, the coach crash which brings Carmilla to Lara’s door, so to speak, doesn’t even occur until almost half an hour into the movie. I don’t remember seeing Le Fanu mentioned in the credits at all (and I was watching out for it... maybe I missed it at the start, somehow), so I’m wondering how many of the potential audience for this quite strikingly shot and beautiful movie have missed this one. Certainly something I’d be happy to recommend with the caveat that it’s not anywhere near to being either a horror or straight vampire movie as you might expect from a film with this title. One to watch out for.

Byzantium

Byzantium Endures

Byzantium
UK/USA/Ireland 2012 (released 2013)
Directed by Neil Jordan
Playing at cinemas now.

I don’t know much about director Neil Jordan, truth be told. I think I saw The Company Of Wolves once, many years/decades ago, but that was it. But I have seen a fair amount of vampire movies and I remember that last year I saw a really good one from Germany called We Are The Night (reviewed here). Since vampire films have become so clichéd again at this particular point in cinema history, I thought the odds of finding a really decent new one like that were pretty astronomical if I’m being honest with you. To discover two such films in such close proximity would, in all fairness, be fairly unlikely.

But, I’m happy to report that Byzantium is just such a film. A truly great vampire movie that people who are interested in this genre will want to see. We also have the invention of a new term for vampires which is pretty cool if you don’t want to just come out with "the V word" and keep a certain distance to a little of the previous genre baggage. In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s “inspired by” movie “adaptation” of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott coined the term replicant to give what became his artificial humans an air of gravitas that the term android just didn’t carry anymore. Similarly, the screenplay to this film by Moira Buffini, based on her own play, comes up with the term “sucreant”... which I really like the sound of, to be honest. It sounds quite filthy, to be sure, and almost instantly conjures up the dark sexuality implicit in the kiss of a vampire.

The film seems to me to concern itself with three main themes, one of which is very typical of a vampire movie.

The first of these is, of course, the question of survival. Vampires survive, and make themselves villains in the eyes of the living, by drinking the blood of the living. Byzantium’s two main female protagonists are vampires sharing a certain relationship (I won’t spoil it by telling you right from the ‘bat’ what that relationship actually is) and managing to survive over the millennia by being ruthless and moving on from place to place when the going gets tough. These two central characters have been running for a long time... but I won’t tell you why, because it will become apparent as you watch.

The second of the themes this movie concerns itself with, it seems to me, is temporal displacement. The movie works on revelations through flashback and sometimes, often in fact, those flashbacks are cross cut with the “present” of the character’s timelines, mixed up in a ghostly fashion through both editing and shots where characters share screen time with other versions of themselves. It sounds clumsy, I know, but actually this director does this with a very nimble touch and the results are pure visual and audio poetry in the mode of some of the great European directors over the years, as opposed to what might have been less confidently handled scenes in the hands of another director.

On the first time I thought I was watching a flashback, for example, which was cross cut with one of the two protagonists talking about the past life of the other... it turned out I wasn’t watching a flashback at all but two separate incidents from the same story happening simultaneously. So the director not only dislocates the characters in time due to the way the narrative leads us in to expecting the possibility of flashback, he also dislocates the very audience who are watching the film. So when the film does go into flashback territory, very soon after, he has already set up the feeling that time is not something which vampires worry about or neccessarily perceive in the same way that we do, despite Gemma Arterton’s alpha female Clara constantly telling her companion not to “look back”. This is a brilliant approach to the telling of the story and it carries all the way through the movie until we get to a certain point near the films beautiful climax.

The third theme this movie is about is... the telling of a story. Now a lot of directors (more than I care for) hold dear the idea that their function as filmmakers is to tell a story. It’s always a statement which causes me to groan loudly because it denies the possibility of cinema to exist without narrative structure... which it clearly can. However, unlike many films, this one isn’t just about the telling of the main protagonist’s story... it’s also about the telling of that story and the consequences of its revelation. And that’s a very interesting thing and, because we have this kind of narrative displacement already in the way that this tale is approached... what could have been a very simple storyline is revealed in tiny pieces and it’s only right near the end that we get the whole truth of the history of the two characters. And it’s even much before then that the discovery and telling of that history becomes a prominent point in the story in and of itself.

And again, because of the juxtaposition of two linear timelines, with one going from A - Z but with the back story scrambled and scattered into a different order and then pitched against it, our sense of temporal structure is shifted in exactly the way that the younger of the two female vampires, Eleanor, played by Saoirse Ronan (perhaps best known for her superb portrayal of the title character in Hanna) experiences it. Time is turned somewhat topsy turvy in a sucreant’s world and this is implicit in the creation process of the species as shown in the place of each vampire’s creation. The very act of becoming a vampire is portrayed as a kind of temporal trick... so this temporal misalignment also becomes part of the narrative thrust which surrounds the world of our main characters. And, of course, because of the way the back story develops as one displaced fragment at a time, it’s sort of like watching a film directed by Nicholas Roeg in some ways, but slowed down to a more relaxed pace which lets itself unfold like the slow opening of a piece of paper with an important word of revelation on it.

The performances are incredible.

I would expect no less of Gemma Arterton now, to be honest. She’s proven herself to be one of the powerhouse actresses of her generation and I look forward to being completely immersed in her character whenever I see her plying her trade on screen. Absolutely amazing.

Brilliant, too, is Saoirse Ronan as the younger of the two vampires. She was brilliant in Hanna and proves here that the performance was no flash in the pan, playing a vulnerable but courageous soul who’s voice-over narrative helps imbibe the already beautiful visual imagery with a deeply poetic feel... and this film is truly a study in the cinema of poetry made flesh. Not quite in the same way as Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman might have achieved that kind of feel but certainly Jordan’s treatment of the text and his faith in his cast and crew delivers a beautiful piece of art that could have easily turned into true exploitation cinema if he and his dark practitioners in the art of collaborative cinema had proven to have a less deft touch. Add in cast members like the always watchable Daniel Mays and the ever changing chameleon actor Caleb Landry Jones and you have a movie which is, in fact, a true masterpiece.

It also, having said all that, doesn’t steer away from the graphic violence or the action set pieces either. A lot of the film is shot with beautifully slow moving camera which slowly reveals the way the actors are related to the space around them and changes your perceptions of that sometimes over the duration of the shot. But when an action piece is called for, Jordan has no problem adjusting the tempo and the editing style to hook us into the hard edged action mode and, similarly, when a piece of vampiric violence is called for, made novelty with a nice little substitute for fangs (which, again, I won’t spoil here) then he really delivers. There’s a decapitation scene at one point which really goes for it and treads the fine line between the poetry of violence and all out unpleasantness which really works well.

The film is not that predictable either, possibly due to the narrative structure, and that’s really something rare these days too. It will have you guessing right up until the end which heads are going to roll, so to speak, and you’ll definitely be rooting for people who may have been portrayed as less sympathetic in anyone else’s retelling of the story.

There’s some nice little shout out’s for vampire fans too, such as Clara going under the assumed name of Carmilla, in reference to Sheridan La Fanu’s short story of the Karnsteins (much filmed in many variations by various directors over the years) and the scene where Eleanour is watching Hammer’s Dracula Prince of Darkness in the hotel she is staying in. Alas, the hotel Byzantium in no way, it seems to me, parallels the hotel in Daughters Of Darkness... but one wonders if that was in the writer’s mind.

It’s also interesting in that, like a lot of modern vampire movies, it plays hard and fast with the “established” rules of the game and picks and chooses just which parts of the myth it wants to retain for the sake of convenience. So, for instance, the vampires in this story are fine hanging around in the sunlight (although they “prefer” the night) but they still need an invitation into somebody’s house to be able to gain entry. It’s always interesting to see which parts modern filmmakers will retain and which they will leave by the wayside... the choices made in this one are all pretty intelligent ones and don’t really hinder the story and it’s telling in any way. Nor set it apart from the established mythology too much either. It invents, adds and enriches without alienating itself too much from its cinematic and literary legacy.

What more can I say? Byzantium is just absolutely bloody brilliant... and I do mean bloody, at times. It’s an absolute must for all true lovers of the vampire genre (and is probably not for Twilight fans, I would guess) and even if you are not a follower of that particular vein of cinema, it’s certainly an intelligently crafted piece of celluloidal delight (as much as that can mean in the digital age) and would still be worth taking a look at whether you’re a fan of these kinds of films or not. An absolute full on recommendation from me. Miss it at your peril.

Crypt of the Vampire

Postcrypt

Crypt of the Vampire (aka La cripta e l'incubo aka Terror In The Crypt) Italy/Spain 1964

Directed by Camillo Mastrocinque

Retromedia

Region 0

So once again I find myself watching another Karnstein movie... that is to say, another movie which is an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s short story Carmilla. Though you wouldn’t recognise it to begin with.

Christopher Lee stars as the head of the Karnstein family who has a vampirish fiend in his household (or maybe that should be castlehold) preying on his family and friends in a movie that pre-dates Lee’s regular studio Hammer’s first attempt at a Karnstein movie, The Vampire Lovers (reviewed here) by a good six years.

The film is nicely shot in black and white but this is going to be a pretty short review methinks because, really, it’s only the consummate acting talents of Christopher Lee (which really shine when he’s surrounded by people who just can’t deliver lines very well) and the sometimes wonderfully designed shot movements and transitions/juxtapositions that can be recommended. It’s not a great version of the original source material that’s for sure, not nearly as good as the first Hammer outing with Le Fanu’s characters, and it starts off very similarly to a lot of those early 1960s Edgar Allan Poe “adaptations” shot by Roger Corman. If it wasn’t for the black and white photography and the less than stellar looping/dubbing on the soundtrack, it could easily pass for one of those films... especially in the acting stakes. Although, to be fair to the “Corman does Poe” films which I love, those particular movies do have a lot to be recommended when viewed at their correct aspect ratios.

For most of the film the finger points suspiciously at the one person who readers of the original will know is definitely not the vampire... right up until the film’s final reveal when the bleak atmosphere of the denouement is tempered with a “happily ever after” postscript scene tagged on at the end to help liven up the audience. In fact, the double ending where the culprit is done away in two places at once cross-cut (don’t ask and I won’t spoil) is the only part of the movie where some of the action actually takes place in the crypt mentioned in the title. I was wondering about that bloody crypt all the way through this movie.

This isn’t to say the movie is complete rubbish (although that might have been a more fun watch). It’s certainly effective with some moody atmospheres maintained throughout and a certain similarity in style to a much more famous movie by maestro Mario Bava, his horror masterpiece Black Sunday (Mask of Satan etc or whatever title you happen to know that film by). Similarly, Crypt of the Vampire is a movie filled with beautiful women and lots of walking down corridors with wind and lightning... although it has to be said that some of the sequences in this one belong more to something Dennis Wheatley might have written as opposed to Sheridan Le Fanu.

It’s hard to be too critical because even at its clunkiest, the film tries hard to make up with sheer enthusiasm what might be lacking in the technical ability of a lot of the cast. Christopher Lee certainly lights up the screen with his smoldering presence and there is one genuine scare at a funeral service taking place within the castle which goes own like this: Various people are in attendance watching over the coffin with a recently stabbed-to-death lady in it. Thunder and lightning starts up and visibility in the castle flickers between pitch black to light as the storm continues to rage... making it just as impossible for the audience watching the movie to see certain parts of the screen as it does the characters in the film. At one point, after a brief second or two of pitch black, the coffin is lit up briefly and the woman inside is sat up and pointing an accusing finger at her apparent murderer... she’s back down again when she’s lit up again but the effect on the viewer (at least this one) is genuinely unsettling in this little sequence.

So while I can’t quite recommend Crypt Of The Vampire wholeheartedly to many readers of this post, I will say that for fans of gothic horror, old AIP flicks, Karnstein movies or Christopher Lee fans in general... you might like to try out a little time in the Crypt Of The Vampire... just don’t make your expectations too high on this one.