Blog The Vourdalak The Vourdalak Proves There’s Still Blood in the Vampire Story By Leah Schnelbach | Published on July 3, 2024 Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories Over the last two weeks I’ve seen Handling the Undead, a slow, sad film about motherhood and grief, with zombies in it, and The Devil’s Bath, a slow, sad movie about motherhood and depression, with some folk horror trappings in it. In both films children and animals die gruesome deaths. Now we come to The Vourdalak, a faster-paced story about fear of immigration, fear of contamination, and the fear of queerness, with vourdalaks in it. An animal and a child die gruesome deaths. But wait, perhaps you’re asking yourself what a vourdalak is? It’s a revenant—vampire-like, though its name seems to come from a Slavic word that was used for a creature more like a werewolf than our modern idea of a vampire. In 1839 Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy’s second cousin!) wrote a novella called The Family of the Vourdalak seemingly drawing on Slavic myths, and that novella is the basis for The Vourdalak, directed by Adrien Beau, who co-wrote the screenplay with Hadrien Bouvier. In Tolstoy’s version (published 20 years after John Polidori’s The Vampyre, and almost 60 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula) the vourdalak thirsts for blood, but specifically the blood of its loved ones, and they’re pretty impossible to (re)kill; the movie adds the beautiful detail that they wander around sucking on their burial shrouds like babies with blankets, which means they’re preceded by an ominous slurping sound. If you don’t think a “slurping sound” can be “ominous”, The Vourdalak will be only too happy to demonstrate why you’re wrong. So that’s what this new movie has in common with the prior two, but the big glaring difference is that while those two movies were both very good, and I’m glad I watched them, The Vourdalak is fun. At least, it’s fun for a while, if you have a fairly sick sense of humor and you love weird, startling vampire movies. The film opens abruptly, with a pounding at a door in the dark. The Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé, an emissary of the French Court, has been beset by bandits who murdered his guide and took his horse and supplies. The guard on the other side of the door is more concerned with whether or not they were “Turks” than with the plight of M. d’Urfé, and he sends him on his way down the road. There’s a gentleman named Gorcha, he can give the Marquis a horse if the horrors of the forest don’t kill him first. Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories The Marquis somehow survives the night, and on the way to Gorcha’s house runs into a mysterious dancing lady (Ariane Labed) and, a little further down the path, a second mysterious dancing lady who turns out to be a young man in drag. He (the movie only uses “he” pronouns for this character, but things get complicated) turns out to be the younger son of Gorcha, Piotr (Vassili Schneider). The other lady was Gorcha’s daughter, Sdenka. Once they reach the estate, d’Urfé meets Anja (Claire Duburcq), Gorcha’s daughter-in-law, and his grandson Vlad (Gabriel Pavie). Finally, his elder son, Jegor (Grégoire Colin), returns from hunting down the band of Turks that attacked the village. But where, then, is Gorcha? Apparently, he went off to fight the Turks too, even though he’s very, very old. And he warned Piotr and Sdenka that if he’s away longer than 6 days that means he’s a vourdalak and they have to kill him. And guess what else? Today is DAY SIX. For the next hour or so, the film is a delightful horror-farce, where one half of an Eastern European family knows they have a bloodsucking monster in their midst, the other half absolutely denies that despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, and meanwhile an elegant French courtier stands in the corner trying to figure out how to survive all this. (Usually his defense is to throw witticisms and court tales around to amuse people who are absolutely not going to be amused by him.) The more I’ve thought about it, the best way I can describe it is if you dropped an aristocratic French version of Tony Hale’s Buster Bluth into a Hammer Horror. And Kacey Mottet Klein is hilarious in the role—until he isn’t. Because at a certain point a monster movie has to unleash its monster, and The Vourdalak becomes a creepy, bloody, often upsetting horror movie—one that’s also about the fear of outsiders and queerness, as I said above. Because like all good horror, The Vourdalak is about something, not just mindless entertainment. The original story is similar to a Universal Horror Picture: stranger comes to a rural town, is warned about monsters, scoffs at backward superstition, encounters said monsters who are totally real, and lives to tell the tale, years later, to other “civilized” folk. The film makes a lot of small tweaks to the source material—in the story the Marquis d’Urfé doesn’t spend as much time with the family, and the elder brother is the one who believes in vourdalaks. (Most fun is that the film changes the elder brother’s name to Jegor, and names his son Vlad.) If you have a well-developed sense of gallows humor, it’s, uhhh, amusing to watch as the people in power ignore an obvious threat in their midst, leaving it to the most vulnerable members of the family to try to fight back and save everyone. But what I find really rewarding about the film, as I think about it, is that it turns a simple horror tale into a complex story about Otherness, and especially queerness. Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories The Marquis d’Urfé is an Other, and seems like kind of a fop. But he’s not a wimp, and he has a compassionate nature underneath all his finery. He puts his pale makeup and false mole on each morning, dresses in his bright blue waistcoat, and treats Old Gorcha’s family like individuals worthy of respect, even when their beliefs are strange to him. After a few moments of caddishness, he accepts Sdenka and Piotr as they are. He keeps a respectful demeanor while they practice their various religious rituals, both the ones that to my eyes read as Eastern Catholicism and the ones that seem a bit more occult, even though, in the original story, the Marquis is a faithful devotee of the Enlightenment and practices no religion. And going in the other direction, Jegor treats the Marquis as an honored guest even though their cultures are different… for a while. At a certain point, of course, it’s easier to blame the stranger for all the misfortune falling on his family, and Jegor unwittingly becomes as much of a threat to everyone as the vourdalak himself. This element, along with Piotr’s implied queerness, and Sdenka’s yearning for independence and adventure, are all inventions of the movie, and they really take the story to a more interesting level. I wasn’t sure I could be really surprised by a vampire story at this point, but by going back further than Dracula, and mining a different source material, Beau is able to create a movie where you can never be sure of the rules. The vourdalak has certain powers, but he also has a musket. He’s vile and destructive, but he loves his family and wants to keep them together. Perhaps best of all, the portrayal of the vourdalak is somehow hilarious and terrifying at once, but, again, to say much more will spoil the very surprises I’m talking about, so I’ll dig into the film a bit more in a couple of full-spoiler paragraphs below. First, let me send anyone who hasn’t seen it yet with a recommendation that you seek it out and try to see it in a theater if it’s safe. This is a unique, inventive movie with some legitimately scary moments and an actual heart under all of its frockcoats and fur cloaks. People love to throw the word “weird” around, but this movie is actually weird. And now, spoilers! Grab your burial shroud and get outta here if you want to go into the movie cold as death. Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories I find it fascinating that in the last few months, I’ve seen two vastly different movies with avenging queer people who seem to gain almost supernatural power from their queerness. One was in Monkey Man (which, if you haven’t seen Monkey Man, GET ON THAT. Right after you see The Vourdalak.) and the other was in the indie sci-fi comedy Mars, a movie I got to see at Tribeca Film Festival (review coming soon!). These two unlikely compatriots are joined, to an extent, by The Vourdalak. When we first meet Piotr, he’s dressed very much like his sister. d’Urfé addresses him as “madame” before he gets a closer look at his face and amends to “sir”. We soon learn that Piotr is only free to dress in a confirming way because his father and elder brother are gone. Each time he tries to stand against them they throw some variation of a slur at him, and he backs down again, clearly terrified of what they’ll do to him—I assume because they’ve done terrible things before. But when he does finally strike out against his old man/revenant, he does so in full glorious makeup and gorgeous flower crown. That the attempt fails doesn’t really matter. This is a dark, dark movie, and part of the point of it is that any attempt to fight the evil is bound to fail. But Piotr goes down swinging, he goes down as his true self. Later, the film’s relationship to queerness is further complicated by the vourdalak himself. In the story, d’Urfé returns to Gorcha’s home months after the initial encounter. He finds Sdenka still there, and seemingly fine, and she entices him to stay in her room with her. At a certain point he realizes he’s been enchanted, sees that he’s making out with a rotting vourdalak, and sees Old Gorcha and his eldest son waiting outside to pounce on him. In the film, the scene begins the same way, until it’s revealed that Old Gorcha himself has enchanted and seduced him. But then, another turn: the vourdalak explicitly says that he’s fallen in love with d’Urfé, and if he’d met him sooner, his entire life might have gone differently. Adrien Beau has taken a standard vampire story, and, in addition to musing on “the other” as an idea, he’s created a dark exploration of generations of repression and fear, and how that repression destroys everything it touches. Along the same lines, the film takes d’Urfé, who could have just been a silly fop caricature, and allows him to be a real person. When he sees little Vlad stumbling off into the woods in search of his grandfather, he does his best to protect the boy. When Piotr is in anguish over having to kill his dog on Old Gorcha’s orders, it’s d’Urfe, not Sdenka, who finds him to comfort him. Faced with his own imminent death, d’Urfé gives his map and horse to Sdenka so she can be free and make her own life. As in Piotr’s case, this act of hope turns out to be in vain, but who cares? Better to die with hope in your heart, if you’re going to die anyway.[end-mark] The post <i>The Vourdalak</i> Proves There’s Still Blood in the Vampire Story appeared first on Reactor.

Top Democrat officials and pundits are demanding that President Joe Biden surrender his driver’s license after he totaled the campaign bus during his June 27 debate with President Donald J. Trump. “I am hopeful that he [Biden] will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw,” Congressman Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, stated Tuesday. “I respectfully call on him to do so.” “We all saw what we saw,” said Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, D-Wash. “Biden is going to lose to Trump.” The Chicago Tribune editorialized that Biden “should announce he will be a single-term president who now has seen the light when it comes to his own capabilities.” Biden’s continued candidacy “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment,” warned New Yorker editor David Remnick. Mark Liebovich’s concurring opinion in The Atlantic is headlined: “Time to go, Joe.” These same Democrats shriek, “DEMOCRACY!” more often than parrots screech about crackers. Now, they tell Democrat primary voters: “Drop dead.” Those pushing Biden to scupper his re-election bid have no respect for the Americans who awarded him the Democrat nomination. “The bedwetting brigade is calling for Joe Biden to ‘drop out,’” deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty complained in a post-debate communiqué. “Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee, period. End of story,” Flaherty added. “Voters voted. He won overwhelmingly.” Biden secured his party’s nomination in epic fashion: He scored 14,324,396 primary votes, or 87% of those cast. In second place, “Uncommitted” took 703,897 votes, as 4.3% of primary participants expressed their displeasure with his policies on Gaza. And Congressman Dean Phillips, D-Minn., won 525,408 votes, 3.2% of total. Biden controls 3,894 delegates; 98.9% of those who will convene in Chicago in August are pledged to Biden. Thirty-six are “Uncommitted,” and Phillips wields four delegates. Perhaps he will take them to dinner. Biden dominated 56 of 57 primaries, caucuses, and other contests. True, Jason Palmer gained 20,926 votes and all three of American Samoa’s delegates, but Biden pocketed every other state and territory. Fully 14.3 million primary voters picked Biden for four more years, yet Democrats are plotting and planning in broad daylight to catapult him into the Chesapeake. As they perpetrate this treachery, they claim that Trump threatens “our democracy.” Psychological projection rarely gets worse. Biden spent 48 years climbing from the Senate to the vice-presidency and then the Oval Office. If he wants to fight for this job, no one can stop him. If the “party elders” drive to the White House and tell him to stand down, he has every right to give them five seconds to scram before he directs the Secret Service to speed them back to Pennsylvania Avenue. If Biden did step aside, Vice President Kamala Harris occupies the on-deck circle for the nomination. Her epic fail as Border Czarina, ceaseless giggles, and side hustle as White House word-salad chef all would endure immediate Trump/GOP bombardment. Harris’s poll numbers have tended to lag Biden’s. So, making her standard bearer would buy Democrats little to nothing. ? Trump Campaign Releases New Ad — "Who Is Laughing Now" pic.twitter.com/eDnSJVUH6S— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) June 27, 2024 But what if top Democrats tried to hand the nomination, like an orb and scepter, to a wealthy, white, male heterosexual, such as Governor Gavin Newsom of California? Newsom would uncheck every box that the equity crowd worships. Black women, the cornerstone of the Democrat base, would not be amused. “You’ve got to build consensus, and there is not consensus right now,” California delegate Areva Martin, a black woman, said on Stephen A. Smith’s iHeart podcast. “You pick a white man over Kamala Harris — black women, I can tell you this: We’re gonna walk away. We’re gonna blow the party up.” Delegate declares Black women will "blow up" Democrat Party if Biden is replaced with a White man instead of Kamala Harris.READ: https://t.co/uMPBuzslxE#Democrats #JoeBiden #stephenasmith #KamalaHarris #DNC #politics #viral #whitehouse #explorepage #viral #trending pic.twitter.com/dZOkTOi0eF— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) July 2, 2024 Whatever Biden and his colleagues decide to do, there is no escaping an unnamed Democrat operative’s conclusion, as the Committee to Unleash Prosperity reported Tuesday: “These have been the worst four days for the Democratic Party since Lee surrendered at Appomattox.” We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post ‘Pro-Democracy’ Democrats Tell 14.3 Million Dem Voters: Drop Dead appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On this Independence Day, let’s acknowledge the exceptional existence of these United States of America. I came to America in 1975. Attending first grade that autumn in New Jersey, I quickly had to learn what my new country was all about. Helpfully for me, they spoke the same language, but apart from that, things were very different. Each morning, we put our right hands over our hearts, faced the blackboard, and pledged allegiance to the flag. This was not something done in my previous schools in France and England. My new hometown played an important role in the birth of the United States. Princeton was the site of a Revolutionary War battle, and it was later briefly the U.S. capital. In 1976—for the Bicentennial celebration—we held historical reenactments commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence in nearby Philadelphia 200 years before. Like most kids in public and private schools, I studied American history in eighth grade and again in 11th grade and learned what makes this country unique and special among nations. Unlike challengers and rivals China, Iran, or Russia, our country is incredibly young. President Joe Biden was born closer to Abraham Lincoln’s (second) inauguration than his own. My father just turned 85, and if a baby born at the start of the American Revolution had lived that long and handed a baton to a successor born that year, and so on, we’d still only be on the third man in this historical relay. Yet the progress we’ve made in those three lifetimes is staggering. In 1776, just like in 64 B.C., it was acceptable for one human being to own another. It took a week to get from New York to Richmond. “The science” may have lost some credibility after COVID-19, but in 1799, medicine was so primitive that as George Washington lay gasping for life on his bed at Mount Vernon, having caught a bad cold from riding his horse in the rain, his doctors kept cutting him to drain his blood into a bowl—somehow thinking that would help. But some things our forefathers knew and did then have stood the test of time. One is the Constitution, the greatest document ever to govern a free people. Drawn up by a body of highly educated, widely experienced, and exceptional men, our Constitution—including the subsequent first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights—has been an enduring guide in changing times. It was designed for a moral and religious people, yes, but also for humans, flawed and vain and avaricious and fickle. It has withstood many challenges so far. A critical part of the Founders’ design was the separation of powers, by which all three branches of government are kept in balance and in check. The Supreme Court has recently issued a slate of judgments, pleasing or angering partisans on both sides. I agree with many of the decisions, albeit not all, but I respect them all. That’s a key difference. Thus, it saddens me to hear Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speak of a “disgraceful decision by the MAGA Supreme Court,” which goes beyond disagreeing with a decision and impugns the integrity of the justices themselves. That’s a dark path to take. The United States is more free, prosperous, and safe than most of the rest of the world. That’s not only because we work hard, but because we have rules. Defending those rules is the paramount duty of all citizens, not just the courts. Of course, the first necessity for that duty is that citizens know our history. Thus, the fact that barely 15% of U.S. high schoolers are proficient in American history is more than a scandal; it is an existential threat. The second necessity is that we respect the verdicts of the courts, even if we rail against them using our God-given right to free speech, protected by the First Amendment. Vilifying individual justices or packing the court will be mistakes for either party. What’s sauce for the goose will be sauce for the gander, and we’ve seen this story play out all over the world. We’re divided today on important policies, including whether to have borders and defend them or let anyone in who shows up. Under the Constitution, “The Congress shall have the power … to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” That means Congress—not the president or courts—decides who gets to come here, and who gets to stay, and under what conditions. John Winthrop said, as Ronald Reagan echoed three centuries later, that America “shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” That metaphor implies that there are other cities, and places, less desirable all around. Cities throughout human history were often built on high ground, or had walls, for a reason. Outside lay deserts, jungles, barbarians, and/or chaos. When you stop guarding the city gates, separating those with the right to be inside from those who aspire to enter, your civilization will fall—as did Carthage, and Rome, and Constantinople, and Persia, and every other power before or since. Globalists who believe in a human right to migrate anywhere and no enforcement of borders don’t seem to understand that. I trust that we can overcome our current differences in time—maybe the span of one more 85-year-old—and that the United States has greatness yet to come. On this July 4th, I choose to believe that, to trust in young people to revive our traditions and to hope for a bright future. The post Yes, America Is Exceptional. Happy 4th of July!: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society. Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”  In 1972, Congress—recognizing certain inadequacies in the law for women that didn’t fully live up to that Jeffersonian vision free from harassment and discrimination—passed Title IX of the Education Amendments. For 52 years, Title IX has protected women’s pursuit of their dreams, expanding their athletic, academic, and economic opportunities.  Now the Biden administration and its Education Department, in thrall to radical gender ideology, would erase that progress. In deciding to reinterpret the statute by replacing “sex” with “gender identity,” the Biden administration would transform a statute meant to protect women into one that would punish them. From kindergarten to college, girls would be unable to raise their voices to protect the very rights Title IX affirmed for them for more than five decades.  The ramifications are deeply unsettling. Last year in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, parents sounded the alarm when a fully intact male coach, who goes by the name Sasha Yates and identifies as a woman, regularly changed in the girls’ locker room, exposing his male genitalia in front of 15- and 16-year-old girls. In West Virginia, a group of girls was banned from a track meet after refusing to compete against a male in a shot-put competition. Under the Biden administration’s proposed rule change, those girls could be cited for sexual harassment for expressing extremely natural and justified concerns about their mental and physical well-being.  These rules operate in conjunction with academic curricula and counseling programs that are meant to drive a wedge between children and parents. They are also deliberately designed to undermine our children’s ability to use logic and reason to understand the world, which was, until recently, the real purpose of education.  Once again, compelled speech and censorship come into play. Elementary school students who plainly see their teacher as a man in a dress are told to defy their senses and pretend that adult is a woman. Students who might feel uncomfortable accommodating someone else’s ever-changing personal pronouns or sharing a restroom with someone of the opposite sex are pushed to seek mental health counseling. Then these students are emotionally manipulated into believing that if they speak the truth, they are driving trans students toward self-harm. Teachers who reject this newspeak are cowed into submission, facing disciplinary action should they stand up for the truth. We once had a school system where children developed the tools to make up their own minds and navigate the world. We now have one where children are trained to submit to the gender ideology du jour. Such a model is incompatible with the maintenance of a free society. But, of course, that’s the point.  This is a war on our families, our children, and the First Amendment. And make no mistake, the Biden administration is taking steps such as this because it is losing. Across the country, organizations such as Moms for Liberty, Leadership Institute, and Moms for America are mobilizing concerned parents to run for school boards and push back on this madness.  Louisiana recently became the 11th state to pass universal school choice, giving parents more authority over where their children attend school. At the behest of groups such as the American Principles Project, states are passing laws to protect girls’ sports and ban the social and physical gender transition of our children. And here at Southeastern Legal Foundation, we are working tirelessly both in and out of the courtroom to challenge these Biden administration measures and protect the rights of our students to speak the truth.  Everywhere you turn, engaged parents and grandparents are bridging the partisan divide to restore and preserve an educational system that gives our kids the skills they need to be upstanding citizens in a free republic. They are bravely guarding the ability of our children to reason, to dream, and to speak the truth without fear of retribution from some Orwellian Ministry of Truth. Now, more than ever, we must come together to support and learn from each other, to share our stories and to show the Washington bureaucrats that we will not sit idly by while they rob our kids of their birthright. That’s why I’ll join the March for Kids on Aug. 31 on the National Mall, demonstrating peacefully with thousands of families to remind the government that we won’t let the bureaucrats steal our children’s right to speak freely. Parents and grandparents who care about the education of their children should join us. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Don’t Let the Department of Education Silence Our Kids appeared first on The Daily Signal.

New Betting Odds Have Harris Ahead of Biden to Be Dem Nominee

Biden Blames Horrible Debate Performance on Travel to Europe

In 1955, one of the most controversial UFO books of the fifties was released: The Case for the UFO. Written by Morris Ketchum Jessup, the book delved into the theoretical power sources for UFOs, posing questions about what enabled these objects to perform extraordinary aerial feats, such as hovering at incredible heights and coming to a complete stop mid-air. Jessup’s work suggested that anti-gravity could be the answer. His theories quickly attracted attention, notably from a “special weapons” division within the U.S. Navy. This interest hinted that Jessup’s ideas had struck a chord with military officials. In 1959, Jessup disappeared… This premium content is for PLUS+ members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read. The post Mysterious Death of Morris K. Jessup: UFO Theorist and the Philadelphia Experiment appeared first on Anomalien.com.

Pita, a charming blonde golden doodle, has a unique habit that has captured the hearts of her neighbors, Nicole and Thai. Unlike typical dogs who might bark or whine for attention, Pita has developed a clever method to visit her friends – she knocks on their door. This unexpected behavior took Nicole and Thai by... The post Goldendoodle runs over to neighbor’s house and ‘knocks’ on their door for sweetest reason appeared first on Animal Channel.

When Lucy, a 9-year-old girl, found a helpless magpie on the ground, she couldn’t have imagined the bond that would form between them. The bird, named Pie, was just six weeks old and in desperate need of care. Lucy’s compassionate heart led her to feed Pie mealworms soaked in water, forming an immediate connection. Those... The post Nine-year-old girl melts hearts becoming ‘best friends’ with wild magpie appeared first on Animal Channel.

Hiking in the mountains offers countless unexpected encounters, but one hiker experienced something truly unique when a marmot approached him. This surprise encounter turned into an unforgettable moment as the small creature displayed an unusual level of curiosity and friendliness. What followed was a heartwarming interaction between human and wildlife, one that left a lasting... The post Hiker sees marmot approaching him and freezes until he’s ‘attacked’ appeared first on Animal Channel.