film, musings

Don’t Go Home Again: VAMPIR (2009) and STRIGOI (2021)

Taking their titles directly from Eastern European folklore, both 2009’s VAMPIR and 2021’s STRIGOI are, perhaps, the only two out of many thousands of vampire films that have tried as much as possible to ground their productions in the lands where these monsters “live.” As such, their settings are uniquely tied to the mythology of the vampire, and are crucial to understanding the people, politics, and palpable presence of supernatural beings in the small villages that gave rise to the legends.

STRIGOI, filmed in Romania, tells the story of Vlad Cozma (Cătălin Paraschiv), a med school dropout who had been living in Italy but  returns to the village where he was born. Soon after his arrival, the elderly local mayor / crime boss, Constantin Tirescu, turns up dead — murdered by villagers who, upon the fall of communism, sought to reclaim their land, only to find Tirescu controls it all. Another seemingly accidental death in the village motivates Vlad to try investigate the goings-on, only to find that Constantin and his wife have both turned into strigoi (a Romanian word for an insatiably hungry, flesh-eating revenant). By the end of the film, the villagers, in an act of vigilante justice, cut out Constantin’s heart and burn it. Vlad eventually comes around to the realization that these supernatural creatures are real (and really disgusting). The end of the film is Vlad, carrying a shovel, standing at a crossroads (where suspected vampires were buried in order to possibly confuse them), next to a cock, ready to crow in the early hours of morning. He is seemingly ready to carry on — not as the doctor he thought he would be — but an unconventional and somewhat reluctant vampire hunter, resigned to his new role in a community that has vastly changed since he had been away.

Strigoi Poster
“Real Vampires Don’t Just Drink Your Blood”

Written and directed by Faye Jackson, a British filmmaker married to a Romanian producer, STRIGOI is a UK / Romanian co-production. Mostly in English, it is not a traditional vampire film by any means. Its main theme of greed in the wake of communism uses vampirism mostly as metaphor (albeit a graphic metaphor… especially when Constantin’s wife gobbles up everything in a woman’s kitchen, including the woman!). More so, beyond greed, there is the suggestion that the West turned a blind eye to the real-world horrors of Nicolae Ceausescu.

Vampir Poster
The posters for VAMPIR made it clear that this was “A Serbian Vampire Film.”

While real-world horrors drive the plot of STRIGOI, the Serbian-British-German production that is VAMPIR is a more traditional — but unconventional — vampire film. Vampir is, in fact, a Serbian word, from which (no surprise) we get the word “vampire.” As such, a Serbian village is the perfect place to set this tale of a Arnaut, a Londoner of Serbian heritage who witnesses a crime and must return to the homeland of his family in order to lay low. Shot in the municipality of Trstenik, Serbia, VAMPIR delivers on an authentic Eastern European community that is both welcoming and secretive. A place where a man can definitely hide. And lose himself.

Branko-Tomovic
Branko Tomovic, here from a similarly disturbing movie called RED, wrote, directed, and starred in VAMPIR.

Hired as a cemetery caretaker, Arnaut — played by Branko Tomović, who also wrote and directed the film —soon has terrible nightmares. He is guided by the elderly Baba Draga to try to understand his dreams and the odd behavior of the townspeople. A priest tries to help, but it is inevitable. In the last reel, Arnaut becomes a blood-sucking vampire.

Even more so than Jackson’s STRIGOI, Tomović’s VAMPIR is an allegory for the modern West clashing with the mysterious East. In this regard, it is much like Bram Stoker’s DRACULA. Like Jonathan Harker before him, Arnaut is even left at the crossroads by his cabbie, a man who will not go into the village because of its reputation. At least that’s what Western viewers would assume. Mostly in English, STRIGOI uses the Serbian language — never translated on screen — sparingly but effectively. Thus, we don’t know what the cabbie says, and are further distanced by the film, which makes it clear that Arnaut isn’t in London anymore.

Unlike Harker’s expedition in DRACULA, however, Arnaut’s journey is one of self-revelation that he is becoming not only a man of Serbian blood, but one who drinks it as well.

The message in both films? You can go home again, but shouldn’t! One cannot escape where they come from, even if the reason is one of DNA. And in their dissimilar but similar tales, both STRIGOI and VAMPIR effectively take the trope of “the return of the hero” and invert it. Instead of receiving the rewards of a quest, these heroes have fled from the West with their only reward being one of renewed purpose in STRIGOI, and horrible transformation in VAMPIR. In this regard, they are very different films. The same goes for tone. Jackson infuses STRIGOI with plenty of humor, while VAMPIR is as serious as a heart attack.

A whole lot of arthouse meets a little bit of grindhouse in these films (with a healthy dose of folk horror). Slow, Deliberate in their pacing, they are slow-burns that deliver with wildly different finales. Both stand as fine examples of offbeat vampire films that should be sought out by fans that want immersion in the real “old” world — where folklore truly informs the experience. Viewers are left with a sense that these monsters are real, because the people are so real. Villagers both inviting and secretive, raised on the legends of things that suck blood in the night. Steeped in Eastern European folklore, they deserve their place among the best vampire films of the 21st-century.

culture, history

A Short History of Grave Robbing

The arrest of a Pennsylvania man on charges of grave robbing this week has led to hundreds of news outlets reporting the horrific details of his collection of hundred of bones and several skulls. Much like Ed Gein before him, Jonathan Christ Gerlach (yes, that’s his middle name) raided, at the very least, Mount Moriah Cemetery on the border of southwest Philadelphia — for purposes, at this time, unknown. Like Gein, was Gerlach a necrophiliac? Was he on his way to becoming a serial killer? Or was he, as some have suggested (based upon his being tagged in Facebook group about the sale of human remains) more interested in the money that can be had from “the bone trade” as it is sometimes called (oh, and he stole jewelry, too).

raiders-at-tomb-of-ameneminet
Are these grave robbers at the tomb of Ameneminet?

The history of grave robbing is fascinating, albeit gruesome, stretching back into antiquity. Ancient Egyptians were known to rob the tombs of the wealthy. In fact, most tombs in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings were robbed within one hundred years of their sealing. But theft was not the only motivation for those who disturbed graves. In China, for example,  in 506 BC, military general Wu Zixu dug up the corpse of King Ping of Chu to abuse and whip his corpse. Desecration, and the fear and revulsion that came with it, gave the abuser a sense of power over the living AND the dead.

The first known case of what is otherwise called “body snatching” was committed in 1319 by four medical students in Bologna, Italy. For centuries following — most notably the nineteenth century with the infamous duo of Burke and Hare active in the 1820s — grave robbers illegally sold human remains to medical schools primarily for purposes of teaching anatomy. Many doctors believed it to be a necessary evil. These body snatchers came to be known as “ressurectionists,” and many were paid handsomely for their ability to supply cadavers (with no questions asked as to how they were obtained). They would send spies to funerals  to scout out the freshest bodies that would later be easily removed from the loose, newly disturbed ground. Some, like Burke and Hare, would even kill to get bodies, making the job all that much easier.

Mortsafes
Mortsafes at a church yard in Logierait, south of Pitlochry, Perthshire, Scotland. Photo by Judy Wilson. Taken from Wikipedia.

Iron coffins, grave alarms, and mortsafes (the iron cage around a grave) became common as a way to combat body snatchers. In the UK, the problem was so prevalent that the government issued the Anatomy Act in 1832, making grave robbing a criminal offense. Of course, the practice didn’t stop. And to this day, there’s a black market for bones, skulls, scalps, skin, teeth — you name it. Not for medical schools, but for private collections… even sexual gratification. Morbid obsession. Anti-social urges.

At “oddities” flea markets, conventions and the like, one can actually find and buy a human skull. They are often accompanied by a certification of some kind stating that the skull was obtained by legal means (e.g., a museum auction for deaccessioned pieces). But these are relatively few and far between, whereas availability on the black market / dark web / and even — as was apparently the case with Gerlach — social media groups, is prevalent.

"Resurrectionists” stealing dead bodies from a graveyard.
“Resurrectionists” stealing dead bodies from a graveyard. 1887 illustration by British artist Hablot Knight Browne.

Psychologists say the motivations for grave robbing vary. But at the root is a need for power and control. Thieves feel empowerment when they take from the dead, justifying their crimes as having no real victim, or seeing the theft as revenge for perceived injustice (“eat the rich”). Sociopaths find an outlet for anti-social behavior, whether its extreme vandalism, an inability to relate to the living, or an obsession with the dead and all things related to death. And psychopaths? They satisfy unspeakable urges. Some, like Ed Gein, go on to murder.

What were Gerlach’s motivations? The truth will come out in time. The details will be horrific. We will be further shocked by this man’s behavior. Perhaps what is most disturbing is that the reasons behind crimes like Gerlach’s are impossible to fully understand. But it gave him an identity in a subculture that exists at the fringes of polite society.

And that this subculture even exists is perhaps the most disturbing revelation of them all.