Once in a while, a different sort of vampire film comes along—something like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, say; a movie that plays with and turns the vampire mythos that we’ve grown accustomed to until it looks like something else.
The Vourdalak might be one of those films. Based on a novella that—as the description points out—”predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by over half a century,” the feature film debut from French director Adrien Beau simply looks strange. And delightfully so. The synopsis says:
When the Marquis d’Urfé, a noble emissary of the King of France, is attacked and abandoned in the remote countryside, he finds refuge at an eerie, isolated manor. The resident family, reluctant to take him in, exhibits strange behavior as they await the imminent return of their father, Gorcha. But what begins simply as strange quickly devolves into a full fledged nightmare when Gorcha returns, seemingly no longer himself…
The trailer features everything from goofy dancing to dead children and stubby detached fingers (and a lot of weirdness in between). The blood-sucking monster here is no indiscriminating snacker; no, this guy “delights most in the blood of close relations and those dearest to its heart.” One might wonder why the young man who delivers this line is so up on all things vourdalak, but presumably one will have to watch the film in order to find out.
Director Beau co-wrote the film with Hadrien Bouvier; it stars Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Grégoire Colin and Vassili Schneider. Meet The Vourdalak for yourself in theaters on June 28th.
