Eight Evil Vampires

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Scene from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931)

Note that I didn’t say sexy vampire or funny vampire or really cool vampire. The vampire film has mutated over the years into all sorts of things that don’t interest me very much. That’s why the following list is so short and why there are only two films on it made since 1970. As with yesterday’s witch/warlock post, the entries below are in alphabetical order by title:

  1. Blood and Roses (1960). Lesbian vampires. French title: Et Mourir de Plaisir. Directed by Roger Vadim based on a great novelette by Sheridan LeFanu entitled Carmilla.
  2. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) with Gary Oldman. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
  3. Dracula (1931) with Béla Lugosi. Directed by Tod Browning.
  4. Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966) with Christopher Lee. My favorite of the Hammer Draculas, directed by Terence Fisher.
  5. Horror of Dracula (1958) with Christopher Lee. The original Hammer Dracula. Directed by Terence Fisher.
  6. Nosferatu (1922) with “Max Schreck” (real name unknown). Directed in Germany by F. W. Murnau. Truly terrifying.
  7. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979 with Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani. Almost a shot-by-shot remake of Murnau’s version. Directed in Germany by Werner Herzog.
  8. Vampyr (1932). Directed in Denmark by Carl Theodor Dreyer. A must-see classic.

Since this is Halloween, I thought I would send you to some earlier postings on the subject of horror literature and film:

  • Ten short horror stories that have impressed me. For some reason, I’ve found that short stories are particularly good at conveying a sense of terror.
  • Thirteen horror films that I love.
  • A special nod to my favorite horror filmmaker, Val Lewton.

Nine Witches and One Warlock

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Lisbeth Movin as the Witch’s Daughter in Day of Wrath

In honor of Halloween, I decided to list my favorite movies involving witches, plus one with a warlock. Bear in mind that, for the most part, I don’t care as much for recent films; so a number of recent titles which you might include are not represented here. The films are listed below in alphabetical order:

  1. Bell, Book and Candle (1958). Kim Novak as the witch. Directed by Richard Quine.
  2. Black Sunday (1960). Barbara Steele as the witch. Directed by Mario Bava. Gorgeous B/W photography.
  3. Curse of the Demon (1957). Released in England as Night of the Demon. Niall MacGinnis as the warlock. Directed by Jacques Tourneur. A truly terrifying film based on the short story “The Casting of the Runes.”
  4. Day of Wrath (1943). The lovely Lisbeth Movin as the witch’s daughter. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in Denmark. By far the best film on this list.
  5. The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), also known as All That Money Can Buy. The stunning Simone Simon as the witch. Directed by William Dieterle.
  6. Häxan (1922). Numerous witches. Directed by Benjamin Christensen in Denmark.
  7. I Married a Witch (1942). A comedy starring Veronica Lake as the witch. Directed by René Clair.
  8. Rosemary’s Baby (1968). I guess Ruth Gordon would be the witch. Directed by Roman Polanski.
  9. The Wicker Man (1973) with a whole island of witches and warlocks, led by Christopher Lee. Directed by Robin Hardy in England.
  10. The Wizard of Oz (1939). Margaret Hamilton and Billie Burke as the evil and good witch respectively. Directed by Victor Fleming and George Cukor.

I will try tomorrow to present my ten favorite vampire films.

Dicorus

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Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I Dicorus

The following humorous anecdote is from a speech that English Poet Robert Graves made at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1956. It is reprinted in his collection of essays entitled The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects.

This has started me thinking about the Epeirot recruit from Dyrrhachium who enlisted in the Byzantine Army in the middle of the fifth century A.D. He was a tough, shrewd, energetic peasant and distinguished from all the other tough, shrewd, energetic peasant recruits that year, because he had eyes of two different colours. His name was Anastasius, but they nicknamed him ‘Dicorus’, which is the Greek for that peculiarity. Well, you can guess how it was. The captain of his company didn’t know half his men by sight or name but always recognized Dicorus; and as Diocorus was always clean on parade and alert on sentry duty, and held the correct religious views, the Captain naturally promoted him to corporal, and then to sergeant. The Colonel, similarly, did not know half the sergeants by sight, but Dicorus was easily distinguished by his eyes; so because he had a crisp word of command and kept his section in good order, the Colonel made him sergeant-major. One day an inspecting General remarked: ‘A very fine body of men, Colonel. I suppose you owe a lot to that sergeant-major of yours—fascinating, his eyes, eh? Significant, even. My old grandmother used to say that two eyes of different colours are lucky. I’m going to take him on my staff in the “Silentiaries”’—meaning the Lifeguards.

Meanwhile, Diocorus had been studying Frontinus and Vegetius and Army Regulations. He made a good Staff Officer, and went up the tree quickly, because he was a distinguished man, and had significant eyes. Indeed, everyone thought, when the Emperor Zeno died, that Dicorus was obviously the man to fill the vacant throne and marry the Empress Ariadne. So he became the Emperor Athanasius, but they continued to call him ‘Dicorus’, because he was the only Emperor to have eyes of different colours; and all their grandmothers had always told them what a lucky sign this was. He made, by the way, a most unsuccessful Emperor, and all his successors for the next thousand years had both eyes of the same colour.

I cannot help but think that the same general principle of promotion applies to the corporate business environment.

Money and Politics

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I cast my ballot in the 2026 Midterm Election last week by dropping it in a Board of Elections lockbox situated at Stoner Park just under a mile from my apartment. Why did I vote early? Basically, I was so sick and tired of having my mailbox stuffed with multicolored ads claiming the support of the police and firefighters and full of outrageous lies and name calling. Now I could funnel all that stuff straight into the garbage where it belongs.

Democracy can be enervating in the extreme, especially when it is bloated with the cash of billionaires who are trying to push candidates and propositions that would favor their quest for power. I am sure that, human nature being what it is, the lies and name calling will always be a part of elections. The existence of so much money in campaigns, however, makes it ever so much more intense and vicious.

A month ago today, I posted about a candidate for California State Senate named Brian Goldsmith. He has been particularly energetic about stuffing my mailbox and TV screen with lies against his opponent, a fellow Democrat named John Erickson. His TV ads concentrate on attacking Erickson for daring to suggest cutting the staff of the LA sheriff’s department despite the crime rate going up 137%. Why, then, does the L.A. sheriff Robert Luna endorse Erickson? Does he want to see the L.A. sheriffs get gutted?

It seems that Goldsmith is a political consultant who is massively funded by several PACs with bland names. Although he is running as a Democrat, he was recently a Republican and changed parties. That’s a shrewd move in a state that at present is anti-Republican. But then why is he being endorsed by Republicans?

You have to be wide awake when voting. Things are never what they seem to be.

El Gobernador de California

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I am currently reading a book by Carlos Manuel Salomon entitled Pío Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California. Already I’ve made some interesting discoveries. Apparently, at the founding of Los Angeles, the majority of its residents were Mexicans of mixed race, predominantly black.

Also, I knew that, toward the end of his life, Pico was cheated by a Yanqui swindler of his ranch in Whittier, which Martine and I visited in 2019. But, as Salomon states in his Introduction:

Anglo-American avarice and greed was not the underlying factor in Pico’s demise. He and his Californio counterparts were often fiercely independent and dictated their own fates.

The Pío Pico State Historical Park is a charming bastion of early California history in otherwise charmless Whittier. There is another associated location in Mission Hills, which was where Pío’s brother Andrés lived: The Andrés Pico Adobe. Finally, the place where Pío Pico is buried is the Workman & Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry.

All of these are places Martine and I have visited because of our interest in Southern California’s Passport 2 History program, which is run out of the Leonis Adobe in Calabasas. They publish a booklet about interesting historical sites in Los Angeles, Kern, Orange, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties.

Now that the weather in L.A. has cooled down, I will try to visit (and write about) more of these sites.

Oscar Wilde on American Women

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Irish Writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Reading an 1893 play by Oscar Wilde entitled A Woman of No Importance, I ran across some of the author’s famous wit at the expense of American womanhood:

Lady Caroline. These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the Paradise of women.

Lord Illingworth. It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.

Lady Caroline. Who are Miss Worsley’s parents?

Lord Illingworth. American women are wonderfully clever in concealing their parents.

Lady Hunstanton. My dear Lord Illingworth, what do you mean? Miss Worsley, Caroline, is an orphan. Her father was a very wealthy millionaire, or philanthropist, or both, I believe, who entertained my son quite hospitably, when he visited Boston. I don’t know how he made his money originally.

Kelvil. I fancy in American dry goods.

Lady Hunstanton. What are American dry goods?

Lord Illingworth, American novels.

Lady Hunstanton. How very singular! . . . Well, from whatever source her large fortune came, I have a great esteem for Miss Worsley. She dresses exceedingly well. All Americans do dress well. They get their clothes in Paris.

Mrs Allonby. They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.

Lady Hunstanton. Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?

Lord Illingworth. Oh, they go to America.

“There Is No Path”

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This is a re-post from February 2, 2013.

Poetry can twist you around sometimes even if you just read a little sample of it. The following lines by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939) were in the introduction to a book on Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Wanderer, the road is your
footsteps, nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
you lay down a path in walking.

In walking, you lay down a path
and when turning around
you see the road you’ll
never step on again.
Wanderer, path there is none,
only tracks on the ocean foam.

Is this the entire poem? I don’t know. It could be a fragment, but if it is, it is remarkably self-contained.

In the meantime, I will continue along the path that is no path, that is being wiped out by the ocean foam even as I make tracks—toward what end? At least the water feels cool to my bare feet.

“Hope Is a Bad Thing”

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This is the second part of my Henry Miller post. It is a quote from “Peace! It’s Wonderful!”—the first essay in the author’s collection, The Cosmological Eye. It sounds very Buddhist or Taoist.

Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation so I have come to feel about my detachment from America. Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun has ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within. I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Before this inward change came about I used to think that we were living in extraordinarily different times. Like most men I thought that our time was the worst possible time. And no doubt it is—for those, I mean, who still say “our time.” As for myself, I’ve thrown away the calendar by which one reckons the lean and the fat years. For me it is all gravy, one continuous, marvellous stream of time without beginning or end. Yes, the times are bad, permanently bad—unless one becomes immune, becomes God.

A Mere Jonah

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American Writer Henry Miller (1891-1980)

George Orwell got it right when, in 1940, he wrote an essay entitled “Inside the Whale.” About the rising American writer Henry Miller, all of whose books except one (The Cosmological Eye, which I am reading now) were banned in the United States and England, Orwell wrote:

Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

Ever since I read his so-called “dirty” books in my youth—including Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn—I have loved Henry Miller’s work. He is a uniquely American writer, who could have appeared nowhere but in the United States, especially in Brooklyn, where he was born. He could be incredibly profound, as when he slams James Joyce in one of his early works:

Joyce is the lost soul of this soulless world; his interest is not in life, in men and deeds, not in history, not in God, but in the dead dust of books. He is the high priest of the lifeless literature of to-day. He writes a hieratic script which not even his admirers and disciples can decipher. He is burying himself under an obelisk for whose script there will be no key.

But then he could lapse into a goofiness all his own. Writing about film as art, he says, “It does not require millions to produce an artistic film; in fact, it is almost axiomatic that the more money a film costs the worse it is apt to be.” Then in a separate piece, a writes a film treatment with production costs that would exceed the gross Earth product (GEP?) in “Scenario.”

This is the first of two posts based on my reading of The Cosmological Eye (1939). The follow-up will appear tomorrow, God willing.

“Reading Books”

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Ancient Chinese Scroll

This is a delightful poem from Liu Tsung-yuan (AD 773-819) who was exiled by the Emperor to Yungchou in the 9th century for espousing unpopular opinions. Though it is more than 1,100 years old, it could have been written yesterday—especially in today’s political environment.

Reading Books

Living in obscurity I’ve given up current affairs
I bow my head in silence and reflect on the sage kings
the highs and lows of the ancient past
the ups and downs of countless paths
I laugh to myself when I’m pleased
when I’m sad I simply sigh
I take my books from their cases
I go through from front to back
despite the affliction of tropical diseases
I feel different than in the past
while reading I suddenly understand
when I’m done my mind is a blank
who can I talk with at night
if not these texts on bamboo and silk
I lie down when I get tired
after a good sleep I feel refreshed
I yawn and stretch my limbs
I read out loud to my heart’s content
I enjoy doing what suits me
not to please learned men
I shut up when I’ve said what I want
free of restraints I relax
the clever consider me stupid
the wise think I’m a fool
but reading as managed to make me happy
what good is working till you drop
cherish this body of yours
don’t use it to chase after fame

The translation is by Red Pine. The book is Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-Yuan, published by the Copper Canyon Press.