This post is as late as it is because I’ve been recovering from an operation to remove a cyst from my left ovary. Fun! The operation itself went smoothly, but then I managed to catch a bug on top of it all, which naturally played havoc on a body whose immune system wasn’t at its peak (though it wasn’t Covid, thankfully). As such, my recovery took much longer than I would have liked.
Having made werewolves the theme of last October, I naturally went with vampires this time around – though I couldn’t delve too deeply into the genre as I was a little nervous that I’d fill my mind with disturbing imagery and then suffer nightmares while I was under anaesthesia.
I also read a couple of books that coincidentally ended up having a deep thematic connection with other media I consumed this month: Sarah Clegg’s Woman’s Lore explored the myth of the lamia and the seductress across human history, and lo and behold, she ended up linking it to the female characters of Dracula!
What’s more, at the beginning of November I watched The Sorcerer and the White Snake, and was astonished to realize it was essentially the story of Lamia, albeit a version set in China. Did modern-day filmmakers adapt it from the Greek legend? Nope, apparently it’s a Chinese myth that’s been around for thousands of years, though its similarities to Lamia’s story, right down to the Lycius and Apollonius equivalents, are uncanny.
I don’t necessarily believe in the monomyth, but it’s fascinating when certain patterns and connections emerge throughout our ancient storytelling.
As for the other thing... I’m giving myself permission not to think about it for a while. Books are full of admonishments about how one person can make a difference and that the smallest person can change the course of history – but it’s a load of bullshit. There’s actually not a damn thing I can do about what’s going on in another country on the other side of the world, so I’m treating myself to a media blackout until things start making sense. However long that might take.
(Though we gotta admit, maybe "somehow, Palpatine returned" wasn't such a stupid line after all.)
The Power of the Dark Crystal: Volumes 1 – 3 by Simon Spurrier, Kelly Matthews and Nicole Matthews
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We are now post-film in the Dark Crystal expanded universe, and have returned to graphic novels for a sequel set one hundred years after the events of the movie. Though the story is chronologically set at the far end of the timeline, these books comprised one of the earliest tie-ins for the franchise, and are based on a screenplay for a proposed Dark Crystal sequel that never got off the ground.
As befitting a long-running saga, a century has passed since Jen and Kira returned the missing shard to the Crystal and healed the planet of Thra. Now the Castle of the Crystal is a gleaming white edifice, a settlement has popped up around it, and the Gelfing race have repopulated the world (don’t think too hard about the genetics of this; given that there were only two Gelfing left alive at the conclusion of the film, a lot of in-breeding must have taken place).
The Gelflings are still paying tribute, overseen by strict rules and regulations, but now it’s to the Crystal instead of the Skeksis. Jen and Kira are still alive, but extremely old and living in a slumber-like state (something like the Odin-sleep? A prolonged dream-fast? For the purpose of extending their life-spans? Unclear). More concerningly, the light of the Crystal is fading, a phenomenon that’s seemingly connected to the encroaching blight in the surrounding countryside.
Into this scenario comes a character belonging to a brand-new species of life on Thra: a young girl called a Fireling, who looks a bit like a diminutive Gelfling, with perpetually-burning flame as her head of hair. She’s emerged from the core of the planet (kind of like Bism in Narnia’s The Silver Chair) in search of “a sliver of the great light,” in order to save her own world and its people.
But according to a prophecy of Aughra, only one of these two worlds can survive (“one world dies, another made right”), and although the Fireling Thurma manages to befriend the Gelfling Kensho, an acolyte at the Castle of the Crystal who tries to assist her, they end up being pursued by Gelfling guards when Thurma manages to nab the crystal shard. And with that gone, you can imagine who returns...
Actually, the appearance of the Skeksis and the Mystics doesn’t make a lot of sense, as their combined selves took off for the stars at the end of the film, but I suppose someone thought they were so intrinsic to the original movie that they had to be incorporated somehow.
It’s a reasonable sequel to The Dark Crystal, though not exactly mind-blowing. Mostly, it’s an excuse to return to the world of Thra and see what everyone’s been up to since the events of the film (even if this comprises only four characters, including Fizzgig). I’m reminded of my friend at work telling me he’d gone to see the latest Planet of the Apes movie, and would have been content to simply watch two hours of the gorillas training their hunting birds. That’s how I feel about The Dark Crystal. The story is secondary to just watching this world come to life, either on screen or in illustrations.
The books certainly don’t stint on that, with plenty of alien critters, fun details (I liked the antlered beetle armour of the Gelfling guards) and even some Sana Takeda art! Whoohoo! Unfortunately the layouts were not particularly friendly to the eye: it was sometimes difficult to know where to look and how the story flowed, and at one stage the speech bubbles were superimposed over the wrong page.
The story itself is filled with some interesting ideas, with an emphasis on religion and worship (the words “offering,” “acolytes,” “heretics,” and even “devilry” are repeated often) and the general theme of reconciling inner and outer worlds, symbolized in the collapse of good and evil into a singular being with dual impulses – not just the Skeksis and the Mystics, but the worlds of the Gelflings and the Firelings as well.
In some ways the underlying thesis of The Dark Crystal is more complex than that found in something like Star Wars, which manifests in this story as a sort of planet-wide trolley problem. What species has the right to exist? At what cost to the other? Despite the unconvincing Thuma/Kensho insta-love story, there was some interesting commentary on how far a person will go to save the ones they loved, and how this leads to a no-win life-or-death scenario.
(Though speaking of Star Wars, they do pull a very recent Star Warsian twist of having the Gelfling becoming somewhat corrupted in their golden age. Just as the Jedi are being more regularly portrayed as complacent and misguided, this sequel story now depicts the Gelfling commanding Garthim and upholding stringent laws).
As I’ve mentioned in the past, the puppet characters can be depicted as much more nimble in illustrations than they are in “real life,” and so the action featured here is much more rapid and kinetic, even if it’s just in pictures. Likewise, it was interesting to see Jen and Kira in their old age, having last seen them in the spring of youth (even Fizzgig is old and white now), and how they respond to a new threat against Thra and the Crystal.
Mostly, there’s so much joy to be had in the creation of this particular world and all its details, from how Thurma’s world is called Mithra (which feels etymologically sourced from the god Mithras) to the names of the clans and their attributes: the Vapran are a bit vapid, the swamp-dwelling Drenchen are “drenched,” the Grottans live in cave-networks (or “grottos”) and the Spritons are... spritely? Maybe I’m pushing it with that last one, but I’ll always love revisiting Thra, and finding new things to appreciate each time.
Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
Emily Carroll is one of my favourite... cartoonists? Graphic novelists? I’m not sure what the correct term is, but she’s always a must-read. This is an anthology of five dark little tales, plus a brief introduction and conclusion, all quite different in tone (one is a retold fairy tale, one a 1930s suspense thriller, one a dark folk story) but connected by her evocative artwork.
If there’s any sort of method behind how they’re ordered, I’d say the earliest ones are very ambiguous in nature, with no clear idea of what’s truly going on, while the later ones shed a bit more clarity on the events as they occur. As a result of this, the latter stories are much longer than their predecessors – in fact, the final one accounts for nearly half the book’s page count.
“Our Neighbour’s House” involves three young girls left alone while their father goes hunting, only for the eldest to claim that a man in a wide-brimmed hat visited them in the night. The following day, she’s gone too. “A Lady’s Hands are Cold” is a loose retelling of Bluebeard, in which a young bride hears mournful singing from the walls and floors of her husband’s house. On investigating, she finds a grisly secret.
“His Face All Red” is probably my favourite, and is available to watch on YouTube with an audio cast and soundtrack. A jealous younger brother is appalled when his brother returns from the forest after their attempt to hunt down a wolf – appalled because he killed his brother and left his body in a strange lilac-scented hole. This story hits the sweet spot between not explicitly telling you everything, but giving you enough clues to push you into trying to figure out what’s going on by yourself – a bit like Picnic at Hanging Rock.
“My Friend Janna” is perhaps the slightest of the five stories, about two friends that host fake séances, only for one of them to become truly haunted by a spirit, while “The Nesting Place” feels a bit like one of those 1930s sci-fi horror films about body snatchers, in which a sullen schoolgirl goes to stay with her older brother for the holidays, only to discover his beautiful wife is harbouring a terrible secret. (Her name is Rebecca, and I’ll leave you to figure out what that’s an allusion to).
Aside from the creepy stories, the main drawcard of the book is the illustrations. Despite being drawn in a fairly simple style, they force you to peer closely in search of clues and answers. Carroll is immensely creative with how dialogue is conveyed, such as a speech bubble containing the words “please, please, please,” formed out of the desperate tears of a grieving mother, or the mournful song of a murdered wife oozing out of floorboards and through keyholes in streaks of red blood.
There are all sorts of allusions to other stories as well, from the red hooded cloak of a little girl traversing a forest, to the rich green walls of a safe bedroom that evokes Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon.
The spooky season was a great excuse to revisit this book, and every time I read it, I discover something new.
Snowbound! by Anne M. Martin
Most Super Specials deal with the girls going on vacation, but this one takes its cue from The Babysitters’ Island Adventure and has them deal with a disaster instead. (Yes, the shipwreck is referenced here, and yes, it’s still hilarious).
Snowbound! is a rather plotless story – there’s not much to say about it beyond the fact the girls and their families are caught unawares by a sudden snowstorm across Stoneybrook (despite the weatherman cautioning them about it for weeks) and have to deal with being cut off from each other, often in drastic circumstances, whether it’s getting trapped at the airport or in a car, stranded at a babysitting job, or dealing with a visiting houseguest that now has to stay the night. Oh, and the power and phone lines go out too, which just adds to the isolation.
But guys, here’s the thing. I don’t know if this would constitute a “trope” or a “genre” in any way, but I LOVE stories about a. lots of people reacting to the same event over a wide geographical area (I referenced this in my latest Buffy episode review, where all the main characters experience the end-of-the-world earthquake, as well as the responses to the signs of Aang’s return in Avatar: The Last Airbender) and b. people sheltering from/trying to survive snowstorms.
I hate winter, and yet I’m always engrossed by the likes of The Dark is Rising and The Long Winter (the sixth Little House book). Honestly, I just want the White Walkers to invade Westeros to I can see people try to survive the snowstorm they’ll inevitably bring in their wake. I’m not kidding, an entire book comprised of that cast of characters trying to deal with inclement weather and a zombie invasion sounds like a dream come true. The show should have made a whole season out of it.
It's weird, and I can’t really explain it, but I have little interest in survival stories... unless snow is involved, in which case, I’m THERE.
As is always the case in these Super Specials, all the babysitters get a chance to tell their own stories, the framing device this time being Kristy sending in their handwritten experiences to a local newspaper who gave a rather dry rundown of the event instead of seeking out “human interest stories.”
As it happens, Kristy ended up having the easiest time of it: she is at home, invites Bart around, and is then horrified when it turns out he has to stay the night once the snow hits – mostly because she doesn’t want him seeing her first thing in the morning, but also because her stepsiblings are horribly embarrassing.
Claudia, Mary Anne and Mallory essentially get the same storyline: they’re all babysitting when the snowstorm begins, and none of the parents can get back that night. Claudia is at the Perkins place, which is lucky since it’s just across the road from her own home, and Myriah, Gabbie and Laura are pretty good at getting into bed during the blackout. The only minor issue is that they can’t find Chewie (he’s in the basement).
Mary Anne and Mallory are at the Pikes, and run into a little more trouble considering there’s a food shortage (the Pike parents were planning to do a big grocery shop once they got back from New York). In many ways this was the “hub” of the story, since Mary Anne has some contact with her father, who tells her he can’t get hold of Sharon or Dawn, and because they’re situated just behind Stacey’s house, they can see nobody is home there either.
It's Dawn and Stacey that get the most fraught storylines: Dawn and her mother are off to the airport to pick up Jeff, and then become stranded there after it gets too dangerous to drive. Stacy and her mother on the other hand, are on their way back from the mall when they get hit by the storm and eventually have to pull over due to low visibility. Both are conscious of Stacey’s diabetic requirements and how she needs to eat, and that there’s a good chance they could be in serious trouble if the car heater stops working.
They’re discovered by a man who drives them out to his farmhouse, and no, don’t worry, he’s not a serial killer – though Stacey certainly entertains the option. There’s little choice given they could have frozen to death if they stayed, and as Stacey says: “sometimes you just have to trust people.”
Anyway, this one catered to my very specific interests. Getting cut off in a blizzard and having to wait it out, pooling your resources, keeping children calm, banding together, snuggling up for warmth during the darkest part of the year... yeah, I love it. To read about at least. I’d hate it in real life.
The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright
In the mid-eighties there was a splurge of pre-teen books involving haunted dollhouses. Not to be confused with haunted dolls, which have always been a part of the genre, but specifically dollhouses. And I’m not kidding – along with this, The Dollhouse Murders, there was also Midnight in the Dollhouse by Marjorie Filley Stover, The Haunted Dollhouse by Susan Blake, Behind the Attic Wall by Sylvia Cassedy, The Doll in the Garden by Mary Downing Hahn, and Dollhouse of the Dead by Kathryn Reiss (okay, that last one came out in the nineties, but she was clearly inspired by those others).
What also interested me is that Betty Ren Wright and Mary Downing Hahn, the two most famous contributors to this specific genre, which I’m going to call the “preteen ghost story,” mastered a very specific formula between them. That is, a young girl is struggling with a family dilemma, which is in some way thematically connected to the ghostly occurrences that she finds herself drawn into, which usually start after a personal upheaval of some kind (a death, a fight, a move to a new house). The resolution of the ghost story naturally ends the issues plaguing the family unit – either because the ghosts are the direct cause of the discord, or because the preternatural experience teaches our young protagonist how to better deal with her unique family dynamics.
The similarities are so striking that if you removed the authors’ names from the covers, I probably couldn’t discern between a Wright and a Hahn book; the two just vibe too closely with each other. Between them, they dominated the preteen ghost story market back in the eighties/nineties, and many of their books are now getting the graphic novel treatment. (Wright has since passed on, but Hahn is eighty-six and still releasing books to this day).
I’ll say right up front that the haunted dollhouse aspect of the book only gets about four major scenes, which is a bit of a disappointment (and would have been even more so if I’d read it as a kid). Most of the story is to do with Amy Treloar’s relationship to her sister Louanne, who is special needs. For whatever reason, I was picturing Down Syndrome, though I listened to a podcast and they were of the opinion that Louanne was autistic. It’s never specified, which feels very of the time, though perhaps Wright was simply trying to allow for as wide a range of interpretation as possible.
Though she loves Louanne, Amy gets tired of having to constantly “sister-sit,” especially when she wants to hang out with her friends. Said friends usually don’t last long when Louanne is around, as she’s liable to cause trouble and dominate conversations. This time, Amy is particularly annoyed when Louanne ruins a trip to the mall with potential friend Ellen, especially since her mother is very good at guilt-tripping her over not taking better care of her sister.
As such, she leaps at the chance to stay with her Aunt Claire, her father’s much older sister. Claire has recently moved back into her childhood home, where she and her father lived for a while with their grandparents after the death of their parents (car accident, I think?) While there, Amy happens upon a dollhouse in the attic, which happens to be an exact replica of the house itself. Amy is delighted, but Claire much less enthusiastic.
Amy knows that her great-grandparents died in mysterious circumstances, though it takes a trip to the local library to uncover the entire story: they were murdered in the very house where Amy is now staying. Her great-grandfather was shot upstairs, but her great-grandmother managed to barricade herself in the downstairs parlour and hide Amy’s father (who was just a toddler at the time) in a cupboard, before she too was killed.
Claire was out at the time, but the main suspect was her boyfriend… who died that very same night in a motorcycle accident. All this is gruesome enough, but Amy is stunned to discover that the dolls in the house are seemingly moving when nobody is around, positioning themselves where their corresponding human counterparts died. Aunt Claire thinks she’s playing a nasty prank, but Amy is convinced the dollhouse is trying to tell her something.
As you can probably gather from this synopsis, the issues Amy has with her sister and the mystery of the dollhouse aren’t as thematically in-sync as you’d expect from most books in this sub-genre. Amy learns to better appreciate and deal with Louanne as a result of the dollhouse experience, but that’s about it. The character that benefits most from the resolution of the mystery is naturally Aunt Claire, who has carried guilt around with her for most of her adult life thanks to her belief that her boyfriend killed her grandparents.
SPOILERS
The big sticking point for me is that the book is a Clueless Mystery. It’s not a huge shock to any discerning reader that Claire’s boyfriend ends up being innocent, though the real culprit turns out to be a character we’ve never heard of before his name is discovered in the hidden note left by Claire’s grandmother (the dollhouse ghosts were trying to show Amy where it was hidden; in one of the downstairs bookcases).
And of course, by the time the truth is revealed, this individual has been dead for many years. So as nice as it is for Claire to get some closure (and alleviate her own guilt) the real killer managed to get away with murder. This reveal also means we have to accept that the double-homicide and the death of Claire’s boyfriend in a motorcycle accident on the same night was a total coincidence.
But it’s a fun, sensitively-written book, and along with Wait Til Helen Comes, one of the classics of the genre. And guys, it was made into a TV movie. In the eighties. AND IT’S ON YOUTUBE. STOP THE PRESSES!
The Ghost in the Dollhouse by Kathryn Reiss
This made for an interesting read right on the heels of The Dollhouse Murders since it too has a haunted dollhouse as its centrepiece, not to mention a preteen girl with family angst as a protagonist, but is otherwise very different in tone, veering more towards fantasy than ghost story at about the midway mark.
Zibby (short for Isabelle) is looking forward to spending her birthday money on a pair of new rollerblades, and so is more confused than anyone (including her mother, aunt and cousin) when she ends up purchasing an old dollhouse at the miniature exhibition she’s been dragged to. Even stranger, the elderly woman selling the dollhouse asks her to sign a contract that stipulates she’ll never try to return or exchange it.
This is all weird enough, but once Zibby takes the dollhouse home, strange things start happening. No matter where she puts it, it always ends up back in her room. The collection of dolls that came with it are never where she left them. And then, after she jokingly acts out her cousin being thrown into the bath, the scenario ends up happening in real life – only cousin Charlotte has to go to hospital with a concussion after she trips and hits her head on the rim of the bath.
It would seem that anything acted out in the dollhouse with the dolls ends up happening in real life – though in true Monkey’s Paw tradition, each “wish” comes with a HUGE caveat. As Zibby nervously tests out the powers of the dollhouse, we also get alternative chapters that take us back to the Victorian Era, in which the original owner of the dollhouse – Primrose Parson – plays increasingly elaborate practical jokes on her strict governess.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize what’s going on here, though I have to say that the ghost haunting this particular dollhouse is astoundingly powerful. I mean, usually ghosts just scare people by dint of their mere presence, but this one is causing break-ins, car accidents, and full-blown disasters in other countries. It’s for this reason that the book feels less ghostly and more fantastical in nature, as it’s never a question of laying the unquiet spirit to rest or figuring out how the murder victim was killed – this is a Be Careful What You Wish For scenario in which there are seemingly no limits on what the malevolent spirit is capable of (provided it’s acted out in the dollhouse first, which on refection, is kind of an odd condition).
As for the requisite family drama, Zibby isn’t having a great time of things lately: her father is remarrying after having abandoned Zibby and her mother, and her best friend has recently moved away. (Amusingly, this friend is called Amy, like the protagonist of The Dollhouse Murders, and if I squinted, I could almost pretend they were the same person).
The resolution to this whole subplot isn’t particularly rewarding: though Zibby makes friends with the new girls that have moved into Amy’s old house, she never really reconciles with her father or her snooty cousin, and the story just sort-of trails to an end. I can see that it’s been written as a trilogy, so presumably things are wrapped-up later on – but what are the odds of me finding books that have been out of print since 1997?
Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu
A vampire story that predates Dracula and is filled with Sapphic subtext? Hell yeah.
At least, that was what I anticipated going in, though Carmilla turned out to be a strange little book. First things first, it’s best classified as a novella. It’s extremely short, to the point where it could be easily read in one sitting. Framed as a testimony taken by a Doctor Hesselius researching the strange phenomena that comprises the book’s subject, the story itself is the first-person narrative of Laura, an English girl living in Austria, concerning her encounters with the titular Carmilla.
The book sets a lovely scene: Laura lives with her father and governesses in a remote castle located in a fairy tale forest. The author draws many scenes of woodland beauty, all described in picturesque detail, which read as all the more delicate and charming due to their placement in such a dark Gothic story.
On evening, the tranquil nature of the place is disturbed by a carriage crashing just outside the castle, resulting in a young girl being flung from its interior. The girl’s mother is travelling with her, who claims she cannot delay her journey – it's a matter of some urgency – and so Laura’s father graciously invites her daughter to stay with them until she has recovered, or until her mother completes her business.
Laura is delighted to have a new companion, and the girls initially get on well. Then of course, the weird shit begins. Laura is beset with vivid nightmares, Carmilla disappears from her (locked) room for hours at a time, and all around the countryside come reports of girls dying from a strange lethargic illness. And well, you already know that this is a vampire book.
The main drawcard for most, the Sapphic subtext and the vampiric content, might disappoint a lot of first-time readers. In the former case, there’s really no sense of the bond between these two characters, beyond the usual period-appropriate embraces and flowery declarations, and Laura stating that: “yeah, I loved Carmilla, but also feared her in equal measure.” Like, she just says it, without any real sense of it. Too much telling, not enough showing.
As for the latter, the resolution comes in the third act – a visiting Count who was also targeted by Carmilla and her mother comes to avenge his niece, and a vampire hunter is called upon in the very final pages to dispatch Carmilla while she’s resting in her ancestral tomb. And – that’s it.
An odd book all things considered, and certainly not what I had expected. I suppose I can see how it inspired Dracula – it’s not just the presence of a vampire, but the ambiance: a sense of dread, beauty, melancholy, horror... It also adds some bits of vampiric lore I’ve never seen anywhere else. For example:
“The vampire is subject to certain conditions. Millarca seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition of a single letter, those which compose it.”
Er, okay. If a vampire uses an alias, it apparently has to be an anagram of their real name. Up there with “sprinkle seeds and the vampire will feel a compulsion to count them all” bit of bizarre lore.
It also leaves a lot of unanswered questions: along with Carmilla inside the carriage when it crashes is a very old woman who never emerges and whose identity is never revealed. Likewise, we never get a clear picture of who Carmilla’s mother is and what she was up to (or even if it was her mother at all, which she probably wasn’t). We learn that Laura had a nightmare in her childhood about Carmilla, many years before they meet in person, but we never learn its meaning or how it came to occur.
Plus, it’s filled with strange little anecdotes, such as: “Mademoiselle related that her cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light on the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.”
It all adds to the eerie ambiance, but it’s a strange little book all told, and I can understand why it was eclipsed by Dracula as the vampire story. In a gif:
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Yes, I’ve finally read Dracula. This is one of those books everyone assumes they’ve read, like Peter Pan or the Sherlock Holmes stories, since it’s been adapted so many times that it’s become fully absorbed into the cultural think-tank.
But Dracula is a little different from those other examples in a couple of respects. First of all, if you’ve seen Nosferatu, you have and you haven’t seen Dracula. Because the filmmakers couldn’t get the rights to the book, it’s essentially the same story with different character names. Other adaptations starring the likes of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee are drastically different from Bram Stoker’s text.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula hits most of the major plot-points of the story, but inserts a completely fabricated love story between Dracula and Mina, which later adaptations have been unable to shed. These days, Dracula is more likely to be a smooth seducer in the vein of Angel or Edward Cullen instead of the bloodsucking fiend of the book.
In other words, most people are aware of the cultural significance of the novel more than the novel itself. And to be fair, most of the adaptations are smart enough to keep some of the book’s most iconic scenes: the seduction of the three brides, Lucy’s sleepwalking, the captain lashed to the wheel of the Demeter, the babblings of Renfield, even the line: “the children of the night; what music they make.” (In comparison, when Frankenstein comes to mind most people will think of neck-bolts and lightning storms and the hunchbacked Igor and shouts of: “it’s allliiiiive!” – none of which is in Mary Shelley’s original text).
Then there’s what Cleolinda long-ago termed the Dracula Problem, though I discovered that it didn’t really bother me while reading the story itself. Yes, it’s ludicrous that Jonathan Harker ignores all the warning signs telling him to turn back from his trip to Count Dracula’s abode (including a gloriously straight example of the Harbinger of Doom; an elderly landlady who beseeches him not to go and presses a crucifix into his hand – a tiny scene that is almost always dramatized in the filmic adaptations). But then, how is he to know that he’s in a horror novel called Dracula, starring a character who would go on to become one of the most famous literary creations of all time? He only comes across as idiotic because we’re so seeped in the clichés of this story.
I went it knowing it was an epistolary novel, comprised of letters and logbooks and journal entries and newspaper articles, which I’m not generally a fan of. And yet it moves at a steady clip, and Stoker manages to infuse everything with a sense of dread and rising suspense. Even the newspaper articles are chilling for what they don’t say, and what the reader can infer by reading between the lines.
Stoker makes the most of this epistolary technique, as many of the most chilling details are to be found in the dates and details of the letters and newspaper clippings – for example, the escaped wolf is found on the 18th September, discussed in a newspaper article which is placed in the book before the journal entries that describe what it was getting up to on the 17th. Likewise, many of Mina’s letters to Lucy while she’s attending to Jonathan in the convent are described in the text as “unopened,” setting us up for poor Lucy’s fate.
Likewise, the logbook of the Demeter takes up less than five pages of the book, but it’s a masterclass is rising tension, with the superstitious crew being picked off one-by-one. Ditto the newspaper articles that report how children are being found anaemic in the vicinity of a graveyard, who blame a “bloofer (beautiful) lady” for their strife, well before the main characters become aware of Lucy’s new form.
(That said, other times the tone of the book is difficult to grasp. Stoker isn’t particularly good at capturing the voice of Lucy, and many of her letters almost feel like a parody of what he thinks a young girl sounds like. Likewise, some of van Helsing’s statements are downright comical, though it’s unclear whether or not it’s intentional. After Lucy’s death he gravely states to Seward: “I want to cut off her head and take out her heart. Ah! You a surgeon, and so shocked!” Later he politely asks: “May I cut off the head of Miss Lucy?” Like, how on earth are we meant to suppose that dialogue is delivered? They went for black comedy in the Coppola version, and I can't say I blame them).
Most of the narrative is delivered by Jonathan, Mina and Doctor Seward, with a couple of notations by Lucy. Van Helsing only pens a couple of chapters towards the end, and he's not the grim vampire hunter of pop-culture, but a kindly old professor with a twinkle in his eye (initially called in due to his medical expertise, not his interest in the paranormal). There is no main character but an ensemble, and the character the book is named after is something of a cypher, with very little characterization. A lot of the page-count, much more than I expected, is taken up with Lucy’s strange malady and the menfolk’s attempts to protect her – as well as the aftermath of their failure, and Van Helsing’s need to gradually nudges his cohorts towards an acceptance of vampirism.
And of course, that’s perhaps the most interesting part of the whole book. You have to try and read it as a contemporary of Stoker, who may have only had minimal knowledge of vampirism, and no idea of where this story was going. We don’t have that luxury after so many years of it being the most famous vampire story of all time. We KNOW the castle is a trap, we KNOW that poor Lucy is doomed. How would this read without our cultural awareness of it? It pays to keep in mind that Stoker’s original audience would have been coming in fresh – I almost envy them that luxury.
Another fascinating thing about reading famous texts is confronting the number of preconceived ideas we have about certain characters. When we think of Lucy, we think of an overly sexualized young flirt who sits in contrast to the more staid, virtuous Mina. And yet in Stoker’s story, she’s a complete ingenue, who is deeply flustered and overwhelmed at the reality of having three suitors. Also belying her usual portrayal as more of a sophisticate than Mina, she writes that she finds “dresses a bore” and that she has “no interest in new fashions.”
Likewise, I was completely bewildered to discover that Renfield was just a random mental patient. I went in certain that he was Harker’s predecessor, the lawyer who was originally sent to Dracula’s castle to help him buy property in England, only to lose his mind on his return.
In the book, this connective tissue is completely absent, so I suspect it’s something that one of the film adaptations came up with to create a narrative thoroughfare. As it is, the book Renfield – despite becoming a bonafide character archetype – is a little pointless. Ultimately his purpose is to act as warning signal to Dracula’s presence (which the men realize far too late, even though he escapes his cell every other chapter) and to provide Dracula with the necessary invitation into the mental asylum so as to attack Mina.
On a much more minor note, the line is: “the children of the night; what music they make,” not “the children of the night, what beautiful [or “sweet” or “wonderful”] music they make,” when Dracula hears the howling of the wolves.
There are also some lingering mysteries: at one point Jonathan finds the blonde vampire-woman familiar, though no further explanation as to why is given. When van Helsing finds her crypt towards the end of the novel, he sees that it’s elevated and grander than the other two (“I find in a high great tomb as if made to one much beloved, that other fair sister”). Was she perhaps Dracula’s sister instead of his bride? Not that these vampires are ever referred to as “brides” at any point during the novel – in fact, we’re given no indication of who they truly are.
What was the blue fire in the Carpathian forests? Who drugged the servant girls the night Lucy and her mother were killed? What was the history between van Helsing and Seward? Furthermore, the powers that vampires possess are rather arbitrary. These days there are carefully drawn-up rules regarding what vampires can and can’t do, but this lot can disappear into dust particles, shapeshift into bats and dogs, seemingly control rats and wolves, command the weather, and goodness knows what else. Also, a LOT of time is taken up with those boxes of earth that Dracula has to sleep in, so much so that I suspect later vampire authors did away with them as an unconscious protest against how tedious they are in this novel.
And of course, there are plenty of little details that never seem to make it into any of the films, such as the mother of the baby that Dracula steals for his wives coming to the gates of the castle and being devoured by wolves, or Mina and Lucy befriending an old man called Mrs Swales, who adds some local flavour and insight into the cemetery they like to explore. A lot of it is just there to create ambiance for its own sake.
Indeed, this book is imbued in death, and not even at the hands of Dracula, who comparatively kills very few people. But Jonathan’s employer Mr Hawkins and Arthur’s father both die of natural causes during the course of the story, as does Lucy’s mother of heart failure when she’s startled by a wolf leaping through the window of her bedroom. Mr Swale is found on the graveyard bench one morning, a look of horror on his face, cause of death unknown.
There are also beautiful descriptions of the Transylvanian mountains and countryside, and so many allusions to various poets and artists of the day: Ellen Terry and Jack Sheppard, Burgers’ “Leonore,” Walter Scott’s “Marmion,” Felicia Hemans’ “Casabianca” – all of which had me constantly checking Google for context. Stoker is so good at capturing the feel of a place and time, vivid renderings of spatial awareness and atmosphere, and a sense of immediacy even though everything is being written in hindsight.
For instance, at one point Mina describes the scene from her bedroom window:
“It was brilliant moonlight, and the soft effect of the light over the sea and sky – merged together in one great, silent mystery – was beautiful beyond words. Between me and the moonlight flitted a great bat, coming and going in great, whirling circles.”
Beauty and horror are mingled together... and did I mention that Mina only goes to the window because she wakes up to find Lucy sitting up in bed, still fast asleep but pointing one hand at the window? Creepy!
Here's another one I liked:
“Today is a grey day, and the sun as I write is hidden in the thick clouds, high over Kettleness. Everything is grey – except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock, grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a brool over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom. Dark figures are on the beach here and there, sometimes half shrouded in the mist, and seem ‘men like trees walking’ [a Biblical quote]. The fishing-boats are racing for home, and rise and dip in the ground swell as they sweep into the harbour, bending to the scupper.”
*deep satisfied sigh* I can visualize that so clearly; its beauty as well as its inherent dread. Why hasn’t anyone put this image on film?
Likewise, there’s an amazing sequence that I’m stunned hasn’t been dramatized before (at least, not as far as I know) in which Mina goes out looking for Lucy at night after waking up to find her gone. Stoker has already taken pains to describe the layout of the house where the girls are staying and its spatial relationship with Carfax Abbey, which allows Mina to look out from a vantage point and see Lucy sitting on a bench in the churchyard, with something dark standing over her. That’s terrifying enough, but to reach her, Mina has to race down the steps to the pier, through the sleeping village, and then up again to the Abbey, catching glimpses all the while of what’s happening on the bench. Whew! Tell me that wouldn’t make a terrifying scene!
And then there are simple words and phrases that carry with them a fleet of connotations: the Carpathians, the Magyars, the Orient Express, the Danube, the Szekelys, the Romany... yes, I know there is some exoticism at work here, but certain words conjure certain images; they’re engrained in our subconscious, and I enjoyed the verisimilitude of it all.
In other words, the book can indulge in all the ambient details that the films have to whizz past – in fact, it makes several seemingly random scenes in 1992’s Dracula more coherent, like the blue fires in the forest and the escaped wolf from the zoo, which were clearly inserted out of fidelity to the novel, but robbed of their proper context.
Miscellaneous Observations:
Structure has become something of a lost art these days, though Dracula reminded me of Ivanhoe in that it’s divided into three distinct parts: Jonathan surviving Castle Dracula, the prolonged assault upon Lucy, and finally the banding together of our heroes to chase down the Count and end him once and for all.
Stoker knows exactly what he’s doing: the mounting dread and fear of Jonathan in the first act, the careful descriptions of the idyllic setting that we know Dracula is soon to invade in the second, and finally the painstaking trek across Transylvania, following leads and making plans to hunt down their quarry. Some readers have criticized the book for being a bit anticlimactic, in which Dracula doesn’t even fight the heroes one-on-one before he’s killed, though it’s clear to me that what Stoker is going for is a race against time. If the men don’t reach Dracula’s convoy before the sun sets, then they’re all goners.
There are plenty of other quirks of the time, like how everyone is so very English in response to everything: a stiff upper-lip in the face of all sorts of tragedy, and if anything weird happens, everyone dutifully ignores it. A newspaper article keeps referring to various children with the “it” pronoun (are children not afforded personhood before a certain age?) as well as this little gem from Seward: “Euthanasia is an excellent and comforting word! I am grateful to whoever invented it.”
Also, because blood transfusions were so recent at the time the book was published, we have to just accept that all four men who offer their blood to Lucy are a perfect match for her. Stoker didn't know any better!
Speaking of Lucy... well. Does her death, resurrection and death comprise a fridging? Yes, indubitably. An innocent young woman dies so that men can be sad about it. She dies like Gwen Stacey has to die, like Juliet has to die – it’s baked into the DNA of the book. And yet, not all fridgings are created equal. The worst kinds of fridgings involve women who are simple cardboard cutouts, without any interiority or agency, who are quickly forgotten and seldom mentioned after their passing, who exist only to provide that drive for the male character.
And Lucy is not that. She’s a reasonably developed character in her own right (albeit one written by a man who has very little idea of how young women think or behave) and her memory is held in sacrosanct well after her demise – not just for the men who loved her, but Mina as well.
I mean, it’s still as sexist as hell, but it’s not as egregious as I’d been led to believe. Relatively speaking.
As for Mina, I’ve already spoken about her at length in her Woman of the Month post, but she’s held up in contrast to Lucy as the feminine ideal, which can get a little tiresome. I feel that a lot of women love the idea of being put on a pedestal by men (you see it all the time in those adulating “he’s a wife-guy!” posts), but the truth is it’s an exhausting prospect. No one can be that perfect, and there’s no denying that Stoker has some serious issues when it came to the depiction of women and sexuality. To quote:
“She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth – which it made one shudder to see – the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.”
And there’s the man himself: Dracula. It’s almost amusing to see how much he’s been romanticized over the years, as the creature depicted here is almost purely evil: animalistic, demonic, and frightening to look at. I say “almost” only because a couple of passages do lend him a tiny bit of grace, a reminder that he was once an ordinary man. He dies as one as well, with a momentary expression of relief on his face. But as I said towards the start of this review, it’s almost amusing just how little he’s in this story – obviously the main mover-and-shaker of the plot, but mostly off-screen for much of the book’s page count.
Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes by Elizabeth Lesser
This is a fairly light, mildly interesting collection of feminist essays that are structured around ancient stories of mythological women, and how they relate to our modern-day times. For example, the author equates Cassandra (the princess who always told the truth but was never believed) to the victims of prolific sex offender Larry Nassar. She uses Galatea to talk about women who are put on pedestals, and Pandora to explore how women are blamed for society’s ills.
She offers up a new spin on the story of Eve, suggesting that she trusted her instincts (“she saw that [the tree] was good”) and reached for knowledge no matter the cost – very His Dark Materials! – and explores various themes and assumptions of patriarchal stories when it comes to the portrayal and treatment of women – obviously a massive undertaking, of which the surface can only be mildly scratched.
There’s... not much else to say. It had some interesting commentary, Lesser writes with a soothing sense of calm and common sense, and there were plenty of insights I’d never considered before about our collective veneration of warfare, and how its idioms have entered the vernacular to such an unrealized extent. Towards the end there’s some self-help chapters about meditation and positive thinking which I have to confess I didn’t have much interest in, though some of her personal anecdotes were amusing/interesting/poignant (I’d never heard of this author before, but she’s rubbed shoulders with the likes of Isabel Allende, Richard Branson and the Dalai Lama).
It's fine, though unsurprisingly, extremely Western-based.
Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi by Sarah Clegg
This, on the other hand, I found much more fascinating. It’s a look at the evolving depictions of female serpentine monsters throughout history, from Ancient Mesopotamia’s Lamashtu, to the Hebrew story of Lilith, to the Greek Lamia, and finally the French legend of Melusine, and how they and certain details of their stories bleed into each other across the course of time. To finish, the author briefly explores more modern-day depictions of monstrous women: vampires, succubi, femme fatale and the like.
The title comes from John Keats’s poem about how Lamia captivated Lycius with her “woman’s lore,” and Clegg’s hypothesis is that there’s a straight line between the terrible goddess Lamashtu, originally designed to help women cope with the fear of childbirth and grief of losing a child, to the more familiar archetype of the seductress/whore. She posits that the female-based narrative was hijacked over the course of hundreds of years by the patriarchy to instead represent their fear of sexuality and womenkind – or more pertinently, how it threatens their masculinity and power.
Genuinely compelling stuff, though it gets a little muddled toward the final chapters, in which the material Clegg is trying to tie into her thesis is so broad that you have to squint a little to see her point. She does a great job at creating a thoroughfare from Lamashtu to Lilith to Lamia to Melusine (pointing out very pertinent similar details that are prevalent in all the stories surrounding these figures) but has a bit more trouble when vampires and the femme fatale of noir films are brought into the mix.
For example, vampires may very well have been blended into the archetype of the seductress over the course of history, but their roots obviously started somewhere quite different than the Mesopotamian goddess of childbirth (like say, a primal fear of death and corpses). Still, it remains a persuasive read, and I have to confess to starting a little when she points out that our use of the term “vamps” and “sirens of the silver screen,” clearly have their origins in our ancient women-fearing mythologies. It’s so obvious once it’s pointed out!
(I was also reminded of how C.S. Lewis describes the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe as the progeny of Lilith, and how "we are born knowing the witch." Also in my fandom repertoire is the Merlin episode "Lamia," that show's most sexist, pointless and dire episodes. It's all connected...)
In fact, I’m going to have to quote extensively, since the argument Clegg makes is so compelling, and one that draws on the extensive poetry and artwork of the Victorians. Having explored the beliefs surrounding the figure of Lamashtu, who strangled infants and murdered pregnant women, and tracked her progress into the seductive nymphs and witches of the Victorian Era, depictions brought on by the threats to the empire and the rise of the New Woman movement, Clegg states:
“This is the complete usurpation of women’s lore – the demons that had originated as a way of consoling women through the very real dangers of childbirth had become, in the late Victorian era, about the fears of men over the imagined degeneration of masculinity... the dangers of seductive woman and of giving them power, elements of the sexual freedom demanded and taken by the New Woman, and the unproductivity of this sexuality.”
Much to my surprise (due to having coincidentally also read Dracula this month) Clegg looks deeply into the subtext of Bram Stoker’s famous novel as it pertains to this societal fear:
“Bram Stoker came close to making this connection explicit: the New Woman is referenced dismissively in Dracula, and while Lucy, the seductive monster who murders children, is brutally killed, Mina, the devoted wife and mother, saves the day...
But of course, it’s not the entire picture – the [vampirically] transformed women in these stories don’t go around demanding rights and riding bicycles. New Women were mostly depicted as sad, loveless spinsters. The decline of the empire was tied to what was seen an increasing permissiveness in British society, and the New Women were only a part of this perceived moral backsliding...
We see these fears – of foreign invasion, of slipping morality, of feminized men – all coming together in Dracula. The book is, fundamentally, an invasion narrative about a foreigner attempting to conquer England: Dracula is clear in his intention to take over the country and the empire. Aiding him are hideous inversions of women, who are irresistible to weak men. Standing against him is Van Helsing, the ideal man, who does not shirk from killing the transformed Lucy, who does not tremble after close encounters with vampires, and who shows Arthur how to behave when he is in danger of giving in to her. Here, Arthur’s lack of proper masculinity, his inability to resist or kill the beautiful monster, threatens the downfall of the empire and of social order. Van Helsing, the paragon of manhood, has to show him (and the reader) the right way to behave to avert these disasters. The hero who can resist the seductive woman appears frequently in relation to the [feminine archetype], often as a counterpart to more easily corrupted men (compare “Hylus and the Nymphs” to “Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses”).
This is not a painting about the power of women, but about the dangers of losing your masculinity, of giving in to degeneration and becoming a pig at a woman’s feet. At the same time, it shows the correct way to be a man, in the strong, un-seducible Ulysses. The message is clear: Kipling’s “fools,” the men who aren’t masculine enough to save themselves, their gender and their country, will die horribly. The Monster was not only about New Women and women’s rights, but about men terrified of themselves, terrified of losing control, terrified that they might become pigs or fools or just drowned victims if they couldn’t push back against the loss of virility, masculinity and empire.
Clegg goes onto further examples in the archetype of the femme fatale in later noir films, but I sadly had to skip over it since I’ve not yet seen the likes of The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, and I don’t want to spoil them – though it would seem that the male protagonists of these films also demonstrate their manhood by rejecting the would-be feminine seducer.
I’ve quoted so much because it’s fascinating and of course, because we’re seeing it all over again today, this drama about the loss of manhood and how it manifests as a profound fear and hatred of women. It’s such a painfully easy tactic to use: simply tell people that their manhood (or guns, or families, of which they are the protector) are in danger from [insert scapegoat here] and they’ll follow you blindly in complete terror of losing their power. It’s so easy, and so obvious, and people fall for it over and over again throughout history.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
I watched the miniseries adaptation of this a while back, and now having read the book, actually think the show did it better. Though slow-paced, it fleshes out some of the characters and plot-points, and is altogether a more immersive experience. You could really feel the heat and smell the sweat in the show, and even its biggest problem – that truncated ending – is an original sin of the book.
Camille Preaker is a reporter for a small newspaper who is sent by her boss to her hometown of Wind Gap, to cover the recent murders (or more accurately, one murder and one disappearance) of two teenage girls. Camille is hesitant to return, not wanting anything to do with her narcissist mother, indifferent stepfather and the teenage half-sister she’s never met, but compelled by the story offered to her.
In due course, she’s reunited with her mother Adora, and meets her younger sister Amma, each one as provoking and difficult as the other. Liaising with the local police force, she begins to show the recently-sent investigator from Chicago around some of the neighbourhood’s most relevant locales and hang-outs across Wind Gap, revisiting painful memories from her past in the process.
The story more-or-less divides itself into two distinct storylines: one being the investigation into the murders, and the other exploring Camille trying to come to terms with her fraught childhood/adolescence, which involved (among other things) a little sister who died of medical complications, and self-mutilation. Eventually the two strands intertwine, though any astute reader can probably see just from that brief summary where it’s all going.
Like I said, the miniseries tends to go a bit deeper into certain plot-points (such as the whereabouts of a bike belonging to one of the missing girls) and the ambiance of the setting (more scenes focusing on Adora and her relationships within the community) though the book is better at spelling out motivations and delving into the severely messed-up psychologies of its three main characters (even if the denouement is too rushed).
Much ink has been spilled on where Flynn stands on the whole “is this feminist?” angle – the antis insist that her female characters are terrible people, and therefore bad examples of womankind, whereas the fans argue that feminism means accepting women can be just as monstrous as men (albeit in a more feminine way). Honestly, I don’t have much of an opinion on the matter. I came for the fucked-up narrative; it delivered. Say what you will about her subject matter, but Flynn commits to the topic of severely damaged women and tears through her story like mad. I read this in about two days – even knowing where it was all going, I just flew through the pages.
The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
Not even a novella, this is a short story that was no doubt hastily published as a single volume after the colossal success of Gone Girl, though I suspect anyone looking for a decent Gillian Flynn fix will be disappointed with this. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s just so slight.
Another bad girl first-person narrator reveals how she works two jobs as a hokey psychic and a sex worker (hand jobs only) in the same establishment. One day she’s approached by a client who divulges fears about her weird stepson and the house they’ve just moved into, and our protagonist sees an opportunity to rake in some cash as a “domestic aura-cleanser” – which will basically just amount to cleaning the place with some sage and lavender oil.
Then she gets to the house, and is immediately perturbed by its dark atmosphere. Clearly something creepy is going on in this place, and interactions with the stepson and some rudimentary research into the house’s history only convince her further.
And then the twist comes. It’s... a difficult one to get your head around, mostly because Flynn is more interested in continuing past the twist and setting up a “what really happened?” scenario instead of just going with the straightforward “gotcha!” moment. And by stretching it out into further complexity, we’re not left with anything that feels remotely plausible. A part of me wonders if this could have been expanded into a longer book, but I suspect the premise couldn’t have held together under any more scrutiny.
It's a bit of a shame, since the first twist works perfectly well, relying on details that were seeded so early and effortlessly that you don’t even realize they were clues.
Seawitch by Skye McKenna
I very much enjoyed the two previous titles (Hedgewitch and Woodwitch) in what is apparently going to be a five-book series, mostly for their cozy atmosphere. Predominately set in a little English village on the borders of Faerie, there is a distinct Harry Potter vibe to the proceedings, but with more old-school charm. Think Enid Blyton mingled with Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or maybe Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. Teacups, broomsticks, standing stones, ruined chapels, the occasional “jolly good!” – you get the idea.
Having so much enjoyed the streets and cottages and forests of Hedgley, I was a tad apprehensive on discovering this book was leaving the village for the seaside town of Porthmorven in Cornwall. Though it has its charms (the point of comparison for any mysterious seaside village is always I Spy Treasure Hunt for me), I’ll be glad to return back to Hedgley in the next book. Still, this new setting makes for a solid expansion of this world, and introduces several new creatures such as knockers, selkies and mermaids.
The most interesting component of the story is the introduction of Robin, a boy witch who is discriminated against because of his gender. It’s... a thorny issue. On the one hand, it naturally makes a certain amount of sense that a deeply matriarchal society would carry prejudice against a male witch. On the other, I’m not a huge fan of “reverse-sexism” (or racism, or any other ism) stories, and the world of Hedgewitch is so insular that there’s no chance of exploring how this bias against Robin exists in the context of the larger world in which they live.
For instance, none of the female characters point out that Robin has an entire other society in which he might thrive, or that in the “real” world, women face considerably greater and more serious persecution. Instead, it reads as a simplistic morality tale about how the girls are silly for not trusting and accepting Robin immediately – which might well be true, but doesn’t really take into consideration why this might be so.
I just think the author may have bitten off a little more than she could chew with this one, without considering some of the wider implications. That said, this is a book for children, and was probably never going to get much deeper than “discrimination is bad.”
Main characters Cassie, Rue and Tabitha are perfectly pleasant girls, but also rather interchangeable, and the inclusion of the inevitable Alpha Bitch is getting tedious. The book’s strengths are its magical ambiance, which is very much based in the myths and legends of ancient Britain, and the slowly unravelling mystery surrounding the disappearance of Cassie’s mother. Now it’s going to be a long wait until the next book.
Dracula (1931)
The first of the three most famous Dracula movie adaptations I’ve watched this month. By this point in time Dracula is something of a cliché – he’s been a muppet and a cartoon duck and a cereal box mascot, obliterating any menace or thrill he might have once commanded. So it was interesting to step back in time and watch him “fresh.”
What struck me most is this: despite so many people complaining about how the 1992 version of Dracula attempted to sell itself as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” when it wasn’t a particularly faithful adaptation, it turns out that it certainly WAS in comparison with its predecessors.
This take on the material doesn’t have a dapper young Jonathan Harker journeying to Dracula’s castle in order to put his legal affairs in order, but a dapper young Renfield. Ah-hah! This explains my confusion as to why Renfield wasn’t portrayed as a lawyer in the book – this is an adaptational decision that’s been around so long that his original role as a simple lunatic has been largely forgotten about. (The 1992 film similarly posited him as Jonathan’s predecessor, who went mad after visiting Transylvania).
It's a creative choice that actually makes sense, as Bela Lugosi’s Dracula is here presented as the one who introduces Renfield to the whole “the blood is the life!” motif and his fascination with catching and devouring spiders. It is Renfield who is given the crucifix by the woman frightened for his safety, and Renfield who is ushered into Castle Dracula and feasted upon by the three brides. In many ways he feels like the protagonist of the story. He’s the first character we meet, you end up feeling drastically sorry for him, and he pops up regularly throughout the movie’s runtime.
The changes to the source material continue, from the significant (Mina is now Doctor Seward’s daughter, and the whole thing seems to be set in the 1920s as opposed to the Victorian Era) to the negligible (vampires are repelled by wolfbane instead of garlic, and the Demeter has been renamed the Vesta – why’d they change it from the Greek to the Roman goddess? Who knows).
Other notable features are that once the story hits London, most of the action takes place at Seward’s sanatorium, where he and Mina live (this seems like a bad idea, especially since Renfield keeps wandering into their private living quarters). Poor Lucy is dead after only two scenes, and the last we see of her, she’s wandering around a graveyard in her vampiric state – no one bothers trying to dispatch her. When Van Helsing turns up, he introduces the concept of vampirism in such a matter-of-fact way that it’s downright funny. To quote:
“It’s a pure myth.” “No, it’s not. It’s scientific reality.”
No further arguments.
Unfortunately, Harker gets the worst characterization, coming across as an absolute nincompoop. Is this film the reason Harker is always portrayed as such a wet dishrag? Because his portrayal here is absolutely awful. At one point Mina is reclining in a languor after she’s been bitten by Dracula, with the man himself in bat-form fluttering around the veranda. Harker spots the creature, and starts jumping on the furniture, flailing his jacket around, crying: “it’ll get in your hair!” Dude, really?
I’m not a villain apologist, but it’s easy to see why women would prefer Dracula in this case. Speaking of, Bela Lugosi is suitably foreboding and intimidating, but you could make a drinking game out of the amount of times there’s a close-up of him pulling this face at people:
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There are plenty of other notable shots, from the striking scenes of the three brides (whose identities remain a mystery) to some stunning compositions and vast sets. Check out this opening vista:
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Or this incredible staircase:
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There is little in the way of a score, instead the film is filled with long stretches of silence, which surprisingly works for rather than against the story. And of course, the infamous appearance of possums and armadillos in Castle Dracula... which I think are meant to represent rats?
In hindsight, I’m a little bemused by the whole thing. It’s clearly the most famous adaptation of Dracula (unless you count the original Nosferatu) for a reason, but I’d probably need to watch it a couple more times in order to really let it – and its creative decisions – sink in.
Horror of Dracula (1958)
This is the other really famous take on Dracula, and is somehow even more bewildering than the first when it comes to fidelity to the source material. This involves a Lucy Holmwood, engaged to Jonathan Harker and the daughter of Lord Arthur Holmwood, who is married to Mina. There is SO MUCH wrong with that sentence.
As per the book, it is Jonathan Harker and not Renfield who initially travels to Castle Dracula, which now seems to be situated somewhere in Germany, though it’s not in the capacity of a lawyer, but a librarian. Only he’s not – Harker is secretly a vampire hunter who has sought out Dracula with the intention of killing him. Except that the Count gets to him first, and Jonathan is turned into a vampire before the first act is finished.
Just...bwah? My head was spinning. Poor Jonathan – in the book he gets the honour of actually staking Dracula himself, but here he’s vamped and killed off before the first act is over.
More oddness ensues, such as the inclusion of a little girl called Tanya that I assumed was the daughter of Holmwood and Mina based on the way they interacted with her, only for her to later be revealed as the child of Gerde, the family housekeeper. Why is the daughter of a servant so well-dressed? Why is she being treated as one of the Holmwood family?
There’s only one bride of Dracula (they seriously couldn’t afford more than one actress?) and her role is also a little bewildering, not to mention a few comedic scenes involving an undertaker and a porter that are quite tonally jarring compared to the rest of the movie.
Still, it’s a chance to see Peter Cushing, Michael Gough and Christopher Lee in a film together – and this is the youngest I’ve ever seen Lee! It’s obviously an iconic performance, and one that very much brings a sense of allure and sensuality to the character, an addition that will become an intrinsic part of Dracula – and all vampires – henceforth. Even back in the fifties, it’s clear that Dracula’s female victims aren’t that unhappy about being bitten by him.
Viy (1967)
A Tumblr gif-set erroneously led me to believe that this was a vampire movie. Turns out it’s a witch-and-demon story, and quite a weird one at that. Based on an old Soviet folktale and filmed in Ukraine/Russia, it’s the story of a young priest who is unexpectedly caught by a witch, who he manages to overpower and kill.
On returning to his seminary, the priest is sent to a military man’s house in the countryside, whose daughter has recently died and who specifically requested that he perform the traditional vigil over her body. The priest duly arrives to perform his duty, only to discover that the girl is not quite at rest – and that she’s the witch he beat to death.
It’s a bizarre little film, and reminded me a bit of Donkeyskin in how it’s completely comfortable with its own weirdness. The story is very fairy tale-like in nature, focusing mostly on the three nights the priest must spend in the chapel with the unquiet corpse, and the ordeals he faces during that time. There are some striking visuals throughout, and an air of unsettling wrongness that only intensifies as the end draws near – in that sense, it reminded me of The Seventh Seal.
Apparently something of a cult classic, it also ended up fitting nicely with Sarah Clegg’s thesis in Woman’s Lore: that of a beautiful but wicked woman posing a physical and spiritual threat to a virtuous man, and by extension, society itself. Which of course meant that I was quietly rooting for her.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
There are so many questionable decisions made throughout Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Dracula, that at the time of its release people were raising eyebrows at how it was given the appellation Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Clearly, a better title would have been Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.
And yet as mentioned, this is much more faithful to Stoker’s text than the films of 1931 and 1958, even though there are two major elements introduced that are completely original to this movie. The first is an explicit link between the fictional Count Dracula and the historical Vlad Țepeș (also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Vlad Drăculea) who fought the Ottoman Turks in defence of his homeland, and was said to have displayed the bodies of those he killed on stakes (thus his moniker, “the Impaler”).
Although it is extremely tempting to say that this historical figure directly inspired Stoker’s Count Dracula, especially given the similarities in name and country of origin, the fact remains that Vlad is never mentioned in any of the author’s notes. That naturally doesn’t discount the possibility that he was an inspiration, but no one can be 100% sure, even with passages like this:
He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the “land beyond the forest.” That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The Draculas were... a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scolomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.
So much to unpack here – though Coppola’s film posits that Dracula became undead by renouncing God and making a pact with Satan, Stoker’s book presents his backstory as being that of a scientist who got in too deep with his experiments, and is moreover a little different from the rest of the undead due to the country in which he was raised:
With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have worked together in some wondrous way. The very place, where he have been alive, undead for all these centuries, is full of strangeness of the geological and chemical world. There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have been volcanoes, some of those opening still send out waters of strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify. Doubtless, there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way; an in himself were from the first some great qualities.
And yes, it turns out that the Scolomance is a real bit of folklore! I honestly had never heard of it before.
In any case, two very different backgrounds to the character.
The second new addition to the film is a love story between Dracula and Mina, who is here presented as a reincarnation of Dracula’s wife, who killed herself after she was led to believe her husband was slain in battle. It is her suicide (and apparent damnation) that causes Dracula’s turn to evil, and once the decrepit, centuries-old Dracula catches a glimpse of Mina’s portrait amongst Jonathan Harker’s things, he makes it his business to hunt her down in London.
It’s a framing device and a thoroughfare that has no basis whatsoever in Stoker’s novel, and yet the prologue is so compelling, and one that I watched at such a formative age, that the film just manages to get away with it, even though on some level I disapprove of the changes.
You’ll be unsurprised to know that, of course, it’s the “dark romance” between Dracula and Mina that bugs me, firstly because I think reincarnation love stories are lazy (we have no idea why these characters are in love with each other, it’s apparently just because they were married in another life) and secondly because it messes with the characterization of all three participants in this manufactured love triangle. Dracula is no longer the cruel villain, but a tortured anti-hero, and I suspect this depiction is part of the reason why this character type is so prevalent today.
They give Mina a sort-of “sexually repressed Victorian lady” theme, in which cold fish Harker clearly isn’t providing her with the type of excitement or passion she’s looking for in a romantic partner, and as for poor Harker... look, we all love Keanu Reeves, but he’s completely out of his league here (I get the feeling he was concentrating so much on his English accent that no other part of his performance managed to register).
For what it is, the love triangle does what it is meant to: romanticize Dracula, spice up the dynamics, and tap into the theme of Victorian sexual repression (in the book, the pure and virtuous women are turned into seductive monsters against their will; here, that capacity for sex and darkness is already inside them), but it also does Mina and Jonathan a horrible disservice.
As with a lot of female characters who are forced to love the dark and dangerous stranger in their midst, Mina ends up looking stupid at best, and downright amoral at worst (there’s actually a deleted scene in which Mina dances with Dracula in a candlelit room that’s intercut with scenes of Jonathan trying to escape the trio of vampiric brides, and yeah... I can see why they cut that one. Watching her cheat on her fiancé while he fights for his life is NOT a good look).
Essentially, we’re looking at a love story in which Dracula tells Mina: “I have crossed oceans of time to find you... but first I gotta rape and murder your best friend. Is that gonna be an issue?” And of course, it isn’t. Much like Marian, who had to shrug off Guy of Gisborne burning down her house, or Rey forgetting about how Kylo Ren killed Han Solo and beat her only friend into a coma, or Buffy barely registering that Spike sexually assaulted her, our heroines are constantly written as not giving a shit about ACTUAL RAPE AND MURDER.
It's the reason I hate these narratives – not because I’m opposed to forgiveness or redemption, but because the onus of such things are always on the wrong person. It’s the wronged party (usually a woman) who has to brush off truly heinous crimes, and most of the time what they’re being asked to forget about for the sake of the “love story” with a hot guy is downright ludicrous. What’s more, it also lessons my opinion of her. Which sucks.
It's telling that in this film, they have Mina quote from her book counterpart’s journal, in which she voices “pity for anyone so hunted as this creature.” But what they neglect to do, is give the whole context of Mina’s written statement:
“I suppose one ought to pity anything so hunted as is the Count. That is just it: this Thing is not human – not even beast. To read Doctor Seward’s account of poor Lucy’s death, and what followed, is enough to dry up the springs of pity in one’s heart.”
Due to this movie, the romance between Mina and Dracula has been picked up in several subsequent adaptations, to the point where I suspect some non-readers think it derives from the book itself. Yet here’s how Mina writes of Jonathan in her journal:
“I pray Him, with all the strength of my sad and humble soul, that He will watch over my beloved husband; that whatever may happen, Jonathan may know that I loved him and honoured him more than I can say, and that my latest and truest thought will be always for him.”
Meanwhile, here’s what Jonathan has to say about what he plans to do if Mina succumbs to Dracula’s curse:
“To one thing I have made up my mind; if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.”
Movie!Dracula may have crossed oceans of time for Mina, but Book!Jonathan, on being implored by his wife to euthanize her if she crosses into vampirism, instead decides to follow her into damnation. In my humble opinion, one is a far greater demonstration of love than the other.
Okay, I’ll start talking about the rest of the movie. Like I said, once you remove the connection to Vlad the Impaler and the whole reincarnated lovers angle, the film is surprisingly faithful to the text (certainly more so than the other two adaptations I watched this month). It follows the three acts of the book: Jonathan’s captivity in Castle Dracula, the prolonged attacks upon Lucy, and the return to Transylvania to destroy the Count once and for all, with Mina’s life hanging in the balance.
And it is truly a feast for the eyes: a cavalcade of weird and creepy imagery, a Gothic confectionary of intrigue, in which every frame is stuffed full of symbolism and detail and Eiko Ishioka’s jaw-dropping costumes. There’s a reliance on practical effects, which gives everything a tangible, stage-like quality, and little moments that serve no other purpose but to create a specific ambiance – at one point during his captivity Jonathan uncorks a small bottle and watches as the drops fall upwards to the ceiling. There’s no other reason for the scene but to be unsettling.
Other details, like the bird-head helmet of the coachman, the musculature-like armour of Vlad, the shadow puppets, the rings of blue fire, the moment in which two of the wives look like conjoined Siamese twins – the movie creates a visual language for itself that I honestly don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. At one point Dracula transforms Mina’s tears into diamonds. How? Why? Totally unclear, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
It’s also intriguing that Anthony Hopkins plays both Van Helsing and the priest in the prologue who declares that Elizabeta’s soul is damned, suggesting there’s another bout of reincarnation at work (he also does the voiceover for the captain of the Demeter). Later, he appears to engage in a bit of casual astral projection in the garden to convince the men that the supernatural is real – though I could have done without the scene in which he excitedly humps Quincey’s leg. What on earth was that about? Van Helsing is meant to be a kindly old professor, and though that characterization wouldn’t have fit the tone of this movie, they didn’t have to make him a dirty old man instead.
The movie also does the established filmic tradition of depicting Renfield as Jonathan’s predecessor in the law firm, having gone mad and been committed thanks to Dracula’s designs on him, and believe it or not, I’d totally forgotten that Cary Elwes and Richard E. Grant were in this as Lord Holmwood and Doctor Seward respectively (and naturally, they can’t resist making the latter addicted to morphine).
Finally, it’s rather amusing that I’ve been watching Gary Oldman in Slow Horses these past few months, as I don’t think you could get two such different characters as this romanticized take on Dracula and the slovenly, repulsive Jackson Lamb. His performance here is perhaps what carries the film – the likes of Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder feel a little overwhelmed by the whole thing, but Oldman sets the tone, sinks his teeth in (no pun intended) and delivers a compellingly over-the-top performance that somehow never tips over into Narm.
So with all that taken into account, I have to admit that despite its profound flaws, I absolutely love this batshit insane movie.
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)
The voyage of the Demeter, as it appears in Bram Stoker’s novel, is comprised of no more than five pages of the sea captain’s journal, detailing how crewmen start disappearing amidst rumours of a strange figure onboard. It culminates in the ship running aground on English soil, with the captain lashed to the steering wheel, a crucifix dangling from his hand.
It’s short, but a masterclass in rising suspense and dread. The idea to expand that voyage into a full-length movie was a pretty rock-solid premise, as all the beats of the story are already right there, captured in Stoker’s words, with plenty of wriggle-room for expansion.
As it happened, I decided to watch this in conjunction with the 1992 Dracula; specifically, that I’d watch that film up until the sea voyage, switch to The Last of Voyage of the Demeter, and then go back to the rest of Dracula. It was a fun idea, though didn’t really turn out that well – Dracula had a profoundly different tone and ambiance than this glossy slasher fic, and there are plenty of continuity errors between the two films as well.
Starting in Transylvania, we see the Count’s gypsies delivering the boxes of earth to the port, where the unsuspecting captain (played by reliable old Liam Cunningham) and his crew load them on board. Our Harbinger of Doom is an elderly crewman who takes one look at the dragon insignia on the crates and declares “fuck this shit, I’m out,” and his place is taken by Clemens, a young Black physician trying to get home to London. The ship sets sail, and the carnage begins.
There are a lot of problems with the film, and it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, there’s no real sense of escalating dread, at least not one that’s delivered in a compelling way. Crewmen start dying, their horribly mutilated bodies are found on deck, and everyone just sort of looks scared about it. Dracula is revealed way too early, and there’s a reliance on jump scares and gore as opposed to suspense and terror of the unknown.
Secondly, they add some of their own additions to the story, which is only to be expected – but in saying that, I’m pretty sure that stuff like the captain’s grandson and a stowaway (a young girl who was stashed in amongst the crates by the gypsies as a snack for the Count) would have made it into the captain’s logbook. Most baffling of all, the iconic scene in which the captain steers his ship to shore while lashed to the wheel is missing! Granted, there is a short scene in which we see him tied to the wheel, but here it’s the work of Dracula, not the heroic last act of the captain himself.
Finally, everyone comes across as unbearably stupid. And yeah, it might be a little unfair to say that since we the audience know full-well who and what they’re dealing with, but you’d think that after watching several of their turned crewmen burst into flames once they’re touched by daylight, they’d come up with the idea to – I dunno – bring all the boxes of earth up onto the deck and expose them to the sun??
The film is also way too long for its very simple presence, and the ending rather bewildering. Clemens turns out to be the only survivor, and in the final scene he declares his intent to find and kill Dracula. Um... we can only suppose he fails miserably, since this is the point that the rest of Stoker’s story picks up, and a guy called Clemens definitely wasn’t in it.
Dracula (2020)
Oof. Urgh. Other disgruntled noises. I knew going in that I probably wouldn’t enjoy this one, having been created by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatkiss on the heels of Sherlock, a show that had well and truly disappeared up its own arse by the final season, having become more intent on being oh-so-very-clever than actually making sense. This is more of that. Like, it’s so obvious it was written by the same people. Let me count the ways...
As with Sherlock, it’s divided into three ninety-minute episodes. There’s pedantic wordplay, playing around with chronology, and an attempt to turn everything into a puzzle-box, one based on imposing a framework of logical “rules” over the Dracula story (why is he repelled by the crucifix? Why does he say “blood is lives” rather than “blood is life”?) To try and give context and logic to vampire lore is just them all over.
There are female characters that somehow don’t remotely feel like real people. A vaguely disturbing comment on the nature of marriage that’s disguised as cutesy-poo talk (Mina tells Jonathan: “who you are will always be my decision.”) An attempt at profound feminist commentary – in this case, Dracula telling a young girl to “smile” – that falls flat when she obeys and he immediately kills her. Offhanded comments about interacting with famous people (Dracula apparently killed Mozart).
Dark, sardonic commentary that makes everything far more complicated than it needs to be. A namedrop (in this vase, Van Helsing) that’s presented as a climactic, jaw-dropping reveal. The sudden and violent death of a character who has just finished a rousing speech to boost morale. Stupidly provocative statements (Harker is randomly asked: “did you have sexual relations with Count Dracula?”) Someone even enters a mind-palace at one point.
And most of all, the fact that Dracula, here played by Claes Bang, is the exact same character as Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in Sherlock. The same grandiose monologuing, the same bombastic posturing, the same prolonged lead-ups to the big “game-changing” declarations, the same over-the-top confrontations that have no point and never seem to end... it’s actually almost funny. There is honestly no difference between this Dracula and their Moriarty.
Basically, a commitment to being clever over good. It’s just full of their tells. I suppose I should just be grateful there was no Dracula/Mina romance.
The whole thing is very loosely based on Stoker’s novel, and for the record, it’s not the changes I object to – in fact, a story like this has to be shaken up after so many decades – it’s that said changes don’t really add anything meaningful to the Dracula mythos. The first episode follows Jonathan Harker to Dracula’s castle (once again the character is portrayed as rather gormless – sorry John Heffernan, you just have one of those faces) and Dracula’s subsequent attack on St Mary’s Convent. The second is the prolonged voyage of the Demeter, which Dracula boards in order to reach England, resulting in a Ten Little Murder Victims scenario (and I wonder if it was the inspiration for the 2023 film, which works with the same premise).
The third episode takes place in the present day, Dracula having been trapped underwater after the sinking of the Demeter for hundreds of years, and finally resubmerging to discover the pros and cons of the modern world and all its technology. In all three episodes, his main nemesis is played by Dolly Wells, first a nun at St Mary’s Convent, and then as her own identical descendant, a member of the Harker Foundation that’s committed to protecting the world from the potential return of Dracula.
This final episode also deals with the seduction and undeath of Lucy Westernra, though once again a Moffat tell resurfaces. Remember the Doctor Who episode “Dark Water” that featured the recently-dead pleading: “don’t cremate me!” He obviously has a real bug in his bonnet about cremation, as the same thing happens here to poor Lucy.
(As an aside, Sarah Clegg mentions this miniseries in Woman’s Lore, though wrongly describes Lucy as “a vain prostitute who begs Dracula to turn her into a vampire so she can be young, beautiful and seductive forever.” That is wrong on at least three counts. Though the show is massively flawed, Lucy is definitely not a prostitute, she never begs Dracula to turn her into a vampire, and although vain, she certainly has no ambitions to be beautiful and seductive forever. Not sure where Clegg was coming from here).
It's packed full of familiar faces: Phil Dunster (Jaime in Ted Lasso), Sacha Dhawan (the Master in Doctor Who), Jonathan Aris (Anderson in Sherlock), Morfydd Clark (Galadriel in The Rings of Power) and even Mark Gatkiss himself as Renfield.
But their talent can’t elevate what’s on the page – I think my most face-palming moment was when a clue referring to “sunlight” leads Jonathan to the portrait of the former Count’s wife in Castle Dracula. Because of course, the face of the person you love most is “sunlight.” What.
Vampire Academy: Season 1 (2022)
Back in 2022, I did a little experiment in which I watched the first episodes of a number of genre shows, mostly from the biggest franchises around. The odd one out was Vampire Academy, not only in regards to its obscurity but its quality. When compared to the impeccable writing of things like Andor or Interview with the Vampire, or even the workmanlike nature of House of the Dragon and The Sandman, this was utter gibberish. I can’t even recall how I came across it in the first place, and soon enough it was cancelled, becoming yet another stillborn show.
But the theme of the month was vampires, I don’t like leaving things unfinished, and sometimes you can glean inspiration from the things that aren’t that good, finding ideas in their faults and cracks.
Vampire Academy is based on one of the many vampire-centric YA series that sprang up in the wake of Twilight, and was adapted into a film back in 2014 (I’m actually kind of curious about it now). But like a lot of YA, it’s so sodden with fictional rules and world-building minutia that any semblance of character or story gets rather lost.
I wasn’t kidding when I used the word “gibberish,” but as far as I could discern, this is about a secret world of vampires, who are divided into three types: the elite royals who rule, the bodyguards who protect them, and those that are just feral monsters living on the outskirts of their society. What do these vampires do all day? Well, the royals swan around in glitzy Hot Topic gowns at elaborate parties, and the bodyguards train incessantly in order to protect them from the feral ones (who are apparently growing bolder, though I’m not sure why).
Are they immortal? Do they burn in the sun? What’s their relationship to the human world? Unclear. The great irony of Vampire Academy is the fact that everyone’s vampirism is completely irrelevant to the story. They could be aliens or mutants or superheroes for all the difference it makes – vampires were just the big thing at the time of publication, with all of the perks and none of the drawbacks.
The story revolves around Lissa and Rose, the former a minor royal and the latter hoping to be appointed her official bodyguard. They’re best friends, though you wouldn’t know it given the lack of screentime they share. The old vampire queen is abdicating and Lissa unexpectedly becomes a candidate for the position, throwing her into a world of political intrigue, while Rose finds she has unexpected competition in the training arena with the arrival of Dimitri, a new commander with whom sparks fly.
Other stuff involving periphery characters goes on around them, though the only two I really warmed to were Sonya and Mikhail... then one of them dies and the other largely disappears from the story.
In another word: “haphazard.” We lurch from one character and plotline to the other, without being given a reason to care about any of it. At no point did I know what was at stake, or what any of the characters were actually trying to achieve – and I was paying attention! There were squabbles over the throne, obligatory romances, oppression of the lower classes, and none of it really mattered.
Julie Plec produced this one, keeping things in her vampire wheelhouse (having been behind the sprawling Vampire Diaries franchise), though in an attempt to be more grown-up than its predecessor (or so I assume) there are a few f-bombs and bare butts.
It was nice to see J. August Richards again, as I haven’t seen him in anything since he was Charles Gunn in Angel, and Sisi Stringer does a lot of heavy lifting as Rose – they were definitely the standouts amongst the cast. For their sakes I would have liked the show to continue, but I can’t say I’m surprised that it didn’t.
Abbott Elementary: Season 2 (2022 – 2023)
I never know what to say about sitcoms, as they’re usually so light and fluffy that they inspire no real discussion. Abbott Elementary ticks most of the boxes of the genre: workplace dynamics, slow-burn romance, awkward family dramas, mockumentary-style asides to the camera – you know how this works.
Major subplots of this season involve Janine dealing with her recent breakup, Melissa grappling with a new teacher aid, the threat of Abbott being turned into a charter school, and the ongoing attraction between Janine and Gregory that neither one knows how to act upon. There are lots of fun one-off scenarios like Ava having to sub in for Janine’s class, Barbara accidentally causing a fire with a scented candle, a stolen bag of Halloween candy giving hundreds of kids a sugar-high, and an overnight fieldtrip to the Franklin Institute.
We get to meet Melissa’s sister, with whom she’s been engaged in a years-long feud, as well as Janine’s mother and sister (who are pretty yikes). The show also manages to attract some impressive guest-stars, such as Leslie Odom Jr, Ayo Edebiri, Taraji P. Henson, and Gritty himself (that furry orange mascot guy).
It’s... nice. It’s all extremely nice. There are some cute running gags, like Barbara’s inability to get celebrity names right, and some reoccurring child actors, which is a smart idea for a show set at a school. And that’s all I got!
Interview with the Vampire: Season 2 (2024)
The first season of Interview with the Vampire was one of the television highlights of 2022, though because it only adapted the first half of the novel, I was a little hesitant to jump the gun and declare it a perfect show. Would it be able to deliver on all that it set up in its first half? Namely, its theme of the mutability of memory and the unreliability of biased narrators? The restructuring of the original novel which established the titular interview is the second time such a thing has taken place between Louis and Daniel Molloy? The decision to race-bend Louis and Claudia into Black characters and make the relationship between Lestat and Louis explicitly gay?
Yes, and then some. I think this post really brings home the complexity and depth with which the team of writers delve into the themes they’ve laid down for themselves, beautifully contextualizing it all within the reality of what a vampire’s existence must be like (if you live long enough, surely memories of your early years will start to fade) and cleverly playing around with the plot-points of Anne Rice’s novel (the Armand reveal in season one was a slam-dunk; now they use him to further explore the ennui of immortal relationships and the abuse that can arise when one half of a partnership can selectively erase the other’s memory).
Having disposed of Lestat at the end of the first season, Louis and Claudia leave America for the old world in search of other vampires and answers to the mystery of their existence. The show having moved the story forward in time, the pair are traversing the aftermath of WWII, discovering that their progenitors aren’t so easily found, not even when they come across a coven of vampires living in Paris, who introduce them to the hitherto unknown laws of their kind (which includes “don’t kill another vampire” – oops).
Claudia is delighted at the Théâtre des Vampires, where the participants disguise themselves as human actors, killing their victims onstage in front of an audience, but in such a way that spectators think it’s all part of the show. It’s one of Rice’s most compelling ideas (heck, I’d watch a whole other show about Theatre Vampires), and there’s some fun characterization in the ensemble: a father and son duo in which the son was turned much later than his father, therefore appearing much older than he does, and Ben Daniels as Santiago, who has the exact opposite problem as Claudia, in that he looks too old to play many of the theatre’s most famous roles.
Louis and Claudia settle in, but hanging over their heads is the shadow of Lestat, what they did to him, and the potential consequences should their new “family” find out.
All of this is being told in retrospect to Daniel Molloy, over seventy years later in Louis and Armand’s Dubai apartment, while Daniel grapples not only with the confused memories of his first meeting with Louis, but contact from the Talamasca, a secret organization that monitor vampiric and witchy activity (and which as far as I can recall, don’t appear in the original novel. I thought they were only part of The Mayfair Witches series, so clearly I have to start watching that show as well to see if there’s any crossover).
Sometimes the show does truly impressive things, like giving depth and personality to Madeleine, who was little more than a cypher in the book, here reimagined as a Parisian seamstress who is shunned by the community for having had an affair with a young Nazi officer. It’s beautifully done, and reminds me of Andor in that the show understands no part is too small for a talented character actor to help maintain the sense that a much bigger world is going on beyond the scope of our main characters. For example, Blake Ritson turns up for a minor role in a single episode, and he’s fantastic. Even the bit parts of the theatre-goers do a lot with their reactions to the show unfolding in front of them.
Another similarity with Andor: great dialogue, from Louis describing Paris as “Nazi scar tissue” to the aforementioned Ritson asking Louis: “are you a red?” Gah, that’s good. It’s also not afraid of complexity (several scenes involve a couple of dialogues going on concurrently, whether it’s verbal speaking and telepathy happening at once, or a casual conversation occurring while a participant is also reading a typed missive on a laptop) or dark humour (one discussion between Louis and Armond takes place outside a mansion that’s being attacked by the theatre troupe – as they talk, we can see chaos in the background as the vampires hunt the party guests).
And of course, the performances are incredible. Sam Reid gets most of the acclaim as Lestat (though as one of the writers pointed out, the most fascinating thing about him is that we’ve never seen the “real” Lestat – he’s always framed through someone else’s eyes) but Jacob Anderson is the soul of the show, managing to not be too pretentious, but just enough that the audience never forgets they’re watching Unreliable Narrator: The Show. That’s a critical part of any Louis performance, and one that Brad Pitt couldn’t even begin to portray back in the nineties.
My one gripe is that the actress for Claudia has changed, though they lean into the theatre ambiance by having a placard state “the part of Claudia will now be played by Delainey Hayles” at the start of the first episode. There’s certainly nothing wrong with Hayles’s performance – in fact, she’s probably better than Bailey Bass, if not simply because she has a stronger grasp on the accent – but it’s an annoying break in continuity, and in both cases the actress is too old for the part.
The writers don’t seem to realize that the point of Claudia, her tragedy and curse, is that she’s a literal child, not a young teenager. I know this would be tough to pull off with a child actor (even Kirsten Dunst back in the nineties was too old for the role) but it’s still hard not to grieve what might have been in what’s otherwise such an impeccable show.
Also, for some reason the fade-to-black at the start of each ad-break is really annoying. It’s far too abrupt, and sometimes cuts into the actors while they’re still speaking. Not sure who was responsible for that editing, but hopefully it’ll get fixed if this is ever released on DVD.
I'll also have you know that Lestat is currently being cancelled by Swifties over on Twitter, and it's exactly as amazing as it sounds.
The Dragon Prince: Season 6 (2024)
At this point, The Dragon Prince is like Disenchantment: I watch it diligently each time it drops, but have very little memory retention of what happens in each season. This time around everyone is split into several groups: Callum and Rayla are off on a quest for something or other. Ezran is caught up in the wedding of Amaya and Janai, while the latter’s brother leads a seditious army against her. Viren finally decides to embark on a redemption arc, even if it means abandoning his own daughter. Claudia seeks answers from Aavaros, helped by her boyfriend Terry.
Speaking of whom, the subtitle of this season is still The Mystery of Aavaros, though I’m beginning to wonder if the mystery is whether or not he’s ever going to actually appear in this story. Is the mystery that he’s in the title despite barely featuring in the show itself?
Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. He does turn up in a significant role for the final episode, in which we finally get an understanding of his backstory and motivations, but the show is really going to have to do something substantial with him soon.
This show was never stellar, but I don’t remember the first seasons being this sluggish. There’s no real urgency anymore, and even when big things happen (a character goes full-Targaryen on Katolis) it never feels like a game changer. Claudia and Soren don’t spend any time together – the only truly compelling relationship IMO – and the animation is still bleh.
I probably should rewatch this again from the start (I kept meaning to do that with Disenchantment as well) but I just don’t have time anymore.
Slow Horses: Season 4 (2024)
I’ve watched a season of Slow Horses per month for the last four months, and now the time has come in which I’m going to have to start waiting for more like everyone else – though at least I know there will be more, as the sixth season was announced a while ago, and the final episode has a trailer for the upcoming fifth.
The show has largely been an ensemble cast up until this point, though season four very much focuses on River Cartwright and his ailing grandfather (played by Jonathan Pryce, now explaining why he was cast in what has up till this point been such a small role). Even Jackson Lamb takes a backseat to the River-centric drama, as our young wannabe spy hero takes advantage of an assassination attempt on his grandfather to fake his own death and seek out answers in France.
Given the show’s tendency to kill off main characters, there’s a chance that people were taken in by the fake-out surrounding River’s death… maybe? Okay, I doubt that, but they go for a pretty elaborate bait-and-switch, involving a young man arriving at David Cartwright’s cottage, breezing past his grandfather to reach the bathroom, and promptly getting shot by the increasingly confused old man.
When the real River turns up, his grandfather is still addled and still holding his shotgun, and a quick search of the body demonstrates the intruder was probably intending to drown Cartwright Senior and make it look like an accident. Gathering clues, River takes advantage of everyone thinking he’s dead and heads to France to try and figure out what’s been going on.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Slow Horses are dealing with the aftermath of a mall bombing, which in scenes disclosed only to the audience reveal was the work (albeit unintentionally) of Frank Harkness, played by guest star Hugo Weaving. What he’s up to and the nature of his connection to River is the unravelling mystery of the season.
There are a couple of new faces on the team: Moira, who is Catherine Standish’s replacement (and a bit narratively pointless, to be honest) and Coe, a perpetually hooded weirdo who says and does so little that it becomes clear he’s just a Chekhov’s Gun waiting to go off in the final episode. Which he does, though I’m not entirely sure it was worth the wait. Over in MI-5 Headquarters, a gormless James Callis steps in as the new First Desk, much to the perpetual cringe/headache of Diana Taverner.
This season feels a little more ambitious in terms of its scope and complexity, though much of the revelations surrounding David Cartwright have been seeded carefully over the last few seasons (ever wonder why River’s parents appeared to be non-existent?) You get the feeling the events of this season have been brewing for a while. Likewise, its conclusion feels much more open than usual – clearly the show isn’t done with many of the characters and plot-points introduced in this season. But for now… we wait.
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