{Movie Review} Love Itself is a Curse: The Vourdalak (2023)

“There are things it’s preferable not to mention.”

Aleksay Tolstoy’s novella “The Family of the Vourdalak” trades in an aspect of vampire lore that has largely been left out of many of our modern cinematic bloodsuckers – the idea that vampires prefer to feed upon those closest to them.

Written some half-a-century before Dracula, “The Family of the Vourdalak” has been adapted to film a handful of times before now. Famously as part of Mario Bava’s legendary anthology film Black Sabbath; somewhat less well known as the basis of Giorgio Ferroni’s wonderfully atmospheric The Night of the Devils from 1972.

Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak is undoubtedly the most faithful of these to the original text, while also being perhaps the most irreverent of them all, as well. That seems like a contradiction in terms, but these kinds of contradictions and textual tensions are also The Vourdalak in a nutshell – if such a bold, bizarre movie can, in fact, be confined to a nutshell at all.

Like the novella on which it is based, Beau’s feature debut opens with the Marquis Jacques Saturnin du Antoine (Kacey Mottet Klein), an envoy from the King of France, seeking shelter and aid after bandits have deprived him of his escort, his horse, and just about everything else in his possession. Unfortunately for him, he arrives on the doorstep of a local noble named Gorcha, an old man who has recently departed to fight the Turks who raided their village. He left very specific instructions with his oddball family – if he’s not back within six days, they shouldn’t let him in, because he will have become a vourdalak and will destroy them all.

Naturally, the Marquis arrives on the sixth day and, shortly thereafter, so does Gorcha – technically outside the window of time he allotted, but close enough that his slavishly loyal eldest son (Gregoire Colin) lets him in anyway. It doesn’t take long for this to prove to be the terrible mistake that we in the audience all know it will be.

I saw The Vourdalak at its Kansas City premier on the strength of one thing alone. The eponymous vampire in this French arthouse period horror comedy is played entirely (and convincingly) by a complex and expressive rod puppet, voiced by none other than the director himself. Think the reanimated corpse who hangs on Big Red’s back in Guillermo del Toro’s first Hellboy movie and you’re well on your way to picturing the titular vourdalak.

When I say “convincingly,” though, don’t mistake me for suggesting that you will ever forget that you’re looking at a puppet, or that the filmmakers even want you to. Indeed, the uncanniness that comes with the film’s primary antagonist being played by an obvious puppet – even while his family members struggle visibly to act as if nothing is the matter – is in large part the scaffolding on which the movie is constructed.

Even if another film were so bold as to make one of the major players in its drama a puppet, they would likely hold it back, keep it in the shadows. Not so with The Vourdalak. Here, the puppet is kept front and center. Characters have dinner with it, hold conversations with it, maybe even have sex with it.

The puppet is also at the center of the film’s unlikely tone. This is a surprisingly funny movie, but that humor never comes at the expense of the horror. Indeed, the two are often inextricably bound up with one another. Virtually every scene with the puppet is a little bit comedic and a little bit terrifying – strange bedfellows that work together to send a frisson down your spine even in moments when the movie isn’t invoking the vourdalak’s odd tendency to chew on blood-soaked bedclothes or funeral shrouds with some of the most unsettling sound design of the year.

Earlier, I mentioned Hellboy, and that was more than a passing consideration. While the aesthetic similarities between this corpse puppet and that one may have been what first called it to mind, there are numerous parallels between The Vourdalak and the actual comics of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.

At their best, Mignola’s comics have a surreal quality that combines genuine horror with surprising humor and unexpected pathos. It’s a tightrope of tone that few other creators can walk, but The Vourdalak manages it with aplomb, even while there are definitely beats here that Mignola would probably never have drawn.

As time wears on and more people see The Vourdalak than those who could cram themselves into the Stray Cat Film Center for its premier screening, a lot of ink will be spilled concerning the film’s thoughts on gender, on sexuality, on family, on civilization and barbarism. After all, Gorcha’s family had conflicts aplenty even before the vourdalak ever arrived. I’m not going to go into those aspects of the film much here, though, except to say that the movie sure does have them. Thoughts, that is.

Instead, I’m just going to tell you that if you’re here for an eerie, funny, offbeat, tragic arthouse movie with maybe my new favorite cinematic vampire, you’re in for a treat, and you should catch The Vourdalak at your earliest opportunity.