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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.

“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.

Gothick

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An Engraving of a Scene from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

Not too many years ago, I would have laughed to scorn the works of Mrs Ann Radcliffe and indeed the whole 18th century gothic novel. Since then, I have undergone a change of heart: I no longer eschew melodrama. Instead, I recognize that there are degrees of quality in the works ascribed to it and that it is a legitimate genre. To date, I have read four of Mrs Radcliffe’s five novels, having only The Sicilian Romance (1790) and a number of shorter works to read. I have just finished her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and found myself loving it.

Originally, I thought of the 18th century gothic novel as a failed attempt to create a horror novel. But then, in the closing paragraphs of Athlin and Dunbayne, its author explains what she is trying to do:

Virtue may for a time be pursued by misfortune,—and justice be obscured by the transient triumphs of vice,—but the power whose peculiar attributes they are, clears away the clouds of error, and even in this world reveals his THRONE OF JUSTICE.

In other words, unless there are numerous dank abbeys and castles in her work, there is no hint of the supernatural. She comes close to it in her most famous work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), but is too devout an Anglican to fall prey to such dubious flimflammery. (That didn’t stop Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764) from going whole hog, but then he was undoubtedly less devout, being a wicked Whig politician, and earl, and man about town.

The edition of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne which I read was published by Oxford University Press and contained a superb introduction by Alison Milbank on the subject of Mrs Radcliffe and the gothic novel. That didn’t prevent OUP from butchering her last name (by making it Millbank). Sic transit gloria mundi.

Ultimately Unknowable

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Ukrainian/Brazilian/Jewish Author Clarice Lispector

As much as I like her work, I think that Clarice Lispector is ultimately unknowable. Then why do I like her? Is it that I like living in her somewhat troubled (but ultimately sane) mind for several hundred pages? Her main character in <b>The Chandelier</b>, Virginia, is undistinguished. But she draws me in and makes me care for her. Her strange family, especially her brother Daniel and sister Esmeralda, her on-again off-again boyfriend Vincente—don’t really exist as persons outside Virginia’s field of vision, but Virginia, on the other hand, exists in spades.

At one point near the end of the novel, Lispector writes:

She’d always observed in old people something that couldn’t be summed up, that wasn’t exactly lack of desire, or satisfaction, or experience, ah, never experience—something that only the imponderable living of all the incomprehensible instants of sleep and wakefulness seemed to grant. So strange and imperceptible were the power and fecundity of the rhythm. Nothing would seem to escape the the continuous sequence, the intimate spherical movement, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. Anyway everything was the way it was, she thought almost brightly, almost cheerful—and that was meaning her deepest sensation f existence as if things were made of the impossibility of not being what they were.

As I read the book, I felt mesmerized, inhabiting for a short while the brain of a likeable woman, of no particular intellectual attainment, but of an honesty that never fails.

Smoke and Mist

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I am three quarters of the way through James Lee Burke’s Rain Gods (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). It is one of the author’s Hackberry Holland novels set in Southwest Texas. I am also beginning to think that its author has exceeded the limits of the genre and approached the level of literature. The following quote is what goes through the mind of a strange mass murderer who calls himself the Preacher as he sits cradling a Thompson submachine gun on his lap.

He did not know the hour and never wore jewelry or a watch when he worked. He did not measure the passage of time in terms of minutes or hours but in terms of events. There were no vehicles on the county road. There was no sign of activity inside the house he was about to invade. There were no insomniacs or early risers turning on lights in the neighborhood. There was a fire burning in the grass, and horses were nickering in the darkness, the smoke providing a plausible explanation for their sense of alarm. The sky was booming with thunderous explosions; not those of dry lightning but the kind that promised serious rain, perhaps even the type of monsoon that gave back life to a desert. In spite of the acrid tinge of smoke inside the mist, the night was as lovely and normal as one could expect during the late summer in Southwest Texas.

Preacher stuffed his trousers inside the tops of his boots and up-ended his Thompson in one hand, the other gripping his cane, then began walking through a thicket toward the ranch house in the distance, his face as impervious as molded plastic to both the brambles and the rain.

“The Mystery of All Mysteries”

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Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991)

He wrote in Yiddish, yet he was one of the greatest storytellers who have ever lived. I have just finished reading his collection Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories and, for the first time in my life, I found all of the stories within to be great, with no falling off in quality from beginning to end as is usual. The following excerpt is from his story “The Unseen”:

On his last night, Nathan dreamed that Roise Temerl [his beloved first wife] and Shifra Zirel [his abusive second wife] were one woman with two faces. He was overjoyed at her appearance. “Why have I not noticed this before?” he wondered. “Why did I have to go through this trouble and anxiety?” He kissed the two-faced female, and she returned his kisses with her doubled lips, pressing against him her two pairs of breasts. He spoke words of love to her, and she responded in two voices. In her four arms and two bosoms, all his questions were answered. There was no longer life and death, here nor there, beginning nor end. “The truth is two-fold,” Nathan exclaimed, “This is the mystery of all mysteries.”

An Evening Prayer

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Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

He was one of the greatest writers of prose in the English language. Religio Medici and essay “Hydriotaphia, or Urn Buriall” are my favorites among his works. The following comes from Religio Medici:”:

We term sleep a death; and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. ’Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death; for every man truely lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself. Themistocles, therefore, that slew his Soldier in his sleep, was a merciful Executioner: ’tis a kind of punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented: I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may be literally said to dye daily; a death which Adam dyed before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death: in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers, and an half adieu unto the World, and take my farewell in a Colloquy with GOD.

And here is a devout prayer he wrote:

An Evening Prayer

THOU whose nature cannot sleep,
On my temples sentry keep;
Guard me ’gainst those watchful foes,
Whose eyes are open whilst mine close;
Let no dreams my head infest,
But such as Jacob’s temples blest.
While I do rest, my soul advance;
Make me to sleep a holy trance,
That I may, my rest being wrought,
Awake into some holy thought;
And with as active vigour run
My course, as doth the nimble sun.
Sleep is a death. Oh, make me try
By sleeping, what is it to die!
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe’er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee!
And thus assured, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep

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Bangkok at Night

During this hottest summer of my life, I have entertained myself by reading all the Sonchai Jitpleecheep novels by John Burdett. Sonchai is a member of the Royal Thai Police, while at the same time serving as a pimp in the Soi Cowboy brothel run by his mother and his boss, Colonel Vikorn. In all, there are six novels in the series:

  • Bangkok 8 (2003), named for the Bangkok police district controlled by Colonel Vikorn
  • Bangkok Tattoo (2005)
  • Bangkok Haunts (2007), with the word “haunts” to be taken literally
  • The Godfather of Kathmandu (2009)
  • Vulture Peak (2011)
  • Bangkok Asset (2015)

I assume that, since no new titles have appeared in the last eleven years, that the series is complete.

Reading the novels, you get a great picture, not only of Bangkok, but of several other Asian countries as well, including Laos, Cambodia, Kathmandu, and Dubai. The picture that emerges of Bangkok is a crowded one, like the above photo, but one tempered by the Buddhism of Jitpleecheep in an atmosphere of outrageous criminality.

Burdett has also written several other books, which I will eventually evaluate—though I feel that the Bangkok novels are going to be tough to beat.

I have always loved reading mystery fiction set in other countries, such as the Inspector Ghote novels set in India by H.R.F. Keating; the Napoleon Bonaparte novels set in Australia by Arthur Upfield; the Mario Conde novels set in Castro’s Cuba by Leonardo Padura; the Inspector Espinosa novels set in Brazil by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Rosa; and the Judge Dee novels set in Tang Dynasty China by Robert van Gulik. And that’s just to name a few.