the one rule of 1990s Urban Vampire Films

A newsletter from the shed of

Now then, 

How you doing? I am writing to you in a time of great mourning here in the UK - Homes Under the Hammer has been inexplicably shunted from daytime schedules in favour of back-to-back monarchy coverage. A sad state of affairs.

In other news, we are deep in Birthday Season. It was my birthday on Friday, it was my eldest daughter Kitty's yesterday, and it is my youngest daughter Edith's birthday tomorrow. Three birthdays in four days in one household is mental. I have to remember every year not to get totally smashed on my birthday night as I can't cope with Kitty's birthday if I'm vomming out my nose all over the bathroom floor (and yet, and yet, and yet.....).

Other than that, I got that evil tv drama book in! It is SUBMITTED hurrah.

I've sent it to my editor in New York and now I will keep my fingers crossed she wants it. If she does, it'll then go out to external reviewers, which I will probably hear from in about six months, then I'll have to make revisions, then if it is accepted it will get published which will then take about a year to come to fruition. So - if I am very lucky and all gatekeepers say yes (unlikely) - it'll be out in just under two years hurrah!

The speed of academic publishg eh? 

I also got my project with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas done as well. Once I have more updates on publication, you guys will be the first to know. There is some really cool stuff in it, you are going to love it, trust me.

Earlier this week, I also reviewed an essay for Sonia Lupher (creator of Cut Throat Women, an inclusive database of women working in horror film production around the world), who is editing a special issue of Monstrum journal on short-form horror films. I reviewed an excellent essay on the history of women horror filmmakers working in short form filmmaking and I can't wait to see the final essay - and whole special issue - published and out into the world. Monstrum is open-access, so you'll all be able to read it online for free. When it comes out, I'll tell you.

Next, I did an endorsement (a nice back-cover blurb) for Janice Loreck's forthcoming book for Edinburgh University Press, Provocation in Women’s Filmmaking: Authorship and Art Cinema (due for release March 2023). Janice is one of the contributors for my book Women Make Horror, and wrote a beautiful essay on Lucile Hadžihalilović. In her book, she studies provocative, transgressive films in post-2000 arthouse cinema and makes a case for women's film authorship in an attempt to redress "a discourse of provocative auteurism that is still hypermasculine". She studies Hadžihalilović, plus Anna Biller, Claire Denis, Jennifer Kent (amongst others). If these filmmakers are your thing, keep an eye out for the release (and then get it ordered at your local library).

And a quick reminder -  Three Ways to Dine Well is playing at the lovely City Screen Picture House in York on Sunday 25th September as part of the Dead Northern film festival. I'm now not going to be able to attend, as I am being called away to Glasgow, but if you do go please take pics and send them to me!

Finally, in news - book giveaway time. To celebrate the two-year anniversary of Women Make Horror's publication (on Kitty's birthday, actually), I'm giving away a free copy to a member of the Losers' Club. I've randomly picked out an email this morning, before sending this (including not just recent sign ups, but all of you, I am very into loyalty of course) and I have picked anisa_begum1996@XXXX (whole address taken out for privacy). 

If this is you - congratulations! Please email me back (you can just reply to this email) with your name and postal address and I'll get the book sent out to you forthwith.

***

What have you been watching? I've finished Murders in the Building season two and now I am bereft. Thankfully UK Drag Race starts up soon, hurrah. We started the new series of The Great British Bake-Off on Tuesday and my heart is full. I also started comfort re-watching the American version of The Office AGAIN while finishing my book (Paul and I watched when it was on, then watched all of it in lockdown, and we are back to it again) and we're already up to season four.

(Paul says I am Jan which I don't think is very nice of him, do you?). 

Film-wise, Kitty and I watched Sleepy Hollow (1999, Sky). I was obsessed with this when it came out at the cinema, and the obsession continued long enough that in 2002, I wrote my entire, 20,000 word MA dissertation on the flashback sequences (which total about 4 minutes, that was some IN DEPTH ANALYSIS). But I was less impressed on revisiting. Not bad - by any means - but didn't blow me away (I'd also secretly hoped that because it was set in Olden Days there would be some knitting that I could add into my knitting and horror essay film but it was not meant to be).

Christopher Walken though, remains, as ever, excellent.

Paul and I watched I Came By (2022, Netflix) - our combined verdict was 'shit, but not shit enough to turn off', and The Card Counter (2021, Sky) - too self-serious but yes to card game methods and always yes to Oscar Isaac - and yes I do actually have a few horror films to talk about as well.

This week has been Inadvertent Serial Killer Week round our way.

I'm always asking you lot for recommendations for things to watch, and lovely Ariel, Losers' Club member, recommended the serial killer giallo The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971, Tubi), so I thought I'd give it a go.

I have to admit though, I have a terrible track record with Italian horror cinema. With the exception of Suspiria, the few Italian horrors I have seen are old ones that are not my cup of tea at all. 

(My mate Russ, who has published the first book-length study of Italian horror cinema will be reading this and shaking his head sadly at this point). 

The women in the few 1970s ones I've seen were more or less objects, tits and fear, and I wasn't into it. A few years ago I was at a Ljublijana film festival with Russ, and we attended a Q&A and screening of I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale / Torso (1973), in honour of Sergio Marino (who also directed The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh). But after the Q&A, as Torso was about to start, I became convinced it wasn't going to be for me. I turned to Russ and asked if I was going to like this film. He knows me very well. He exhaled, paused, and shook his head. I walked home alone and climbed into my hotel bed to read Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) instead. 

So I settled in on this film, knowing my existing prejudices (and limited viewing experience), but definitely intrigued by the premise: an ambassador's wife discovers that one of the men in her life - either her husband, an ex-lover or her current lover - may be a vicious serial killer.

However, quite early on, Julie Wardh, the ambassador's wife has a memory which is pulled out of the car after arguing with her lover, and he's pulling her down on the floor and ripping her clothes off and she's crying and fighting back but then suddenly she's into it and I'm like hmmm. All of her memories of past sexual experiences are along these lines which was a real no-go for me. I can see why Ariel suggested the film - it is led by a fascinating female protagonist, shot well, and it has some gorgeous location shooting - but it is shot with a hardcore male gaze, where women are objects to be stared at and hurt, and that line between sex and violence and sexual violence is very very blurred. 

So my next viewing choice was consciously a contemporary, woman's take on serial killers - Watcher (2022, Shudder USA), co-written and directed by Chloe Okuno (pictured at top of newsletter). In Watcher, a young American woman (played by Maika Monroe, AKA Jay in It Follows) moves with her husband to Bucharest, and begins to suspect that a stranger who watches her from the apartment building across the street may be a local serial killer decapitating women.

This wife - not Julie Wardh, now Julia - is similarly adrift and alone in a European city. Her husband is out at work all day and she doesn't know anyone at all. However, she deals with it in a different way. She becomes obsessed with a guy in the window of a flat opposite her, who she thinks is staring at her. And note the difference here - she becomes the bearer of the look and the man becomes the object of her gaze - and so the Watcher of the title is ambiguous (for most of the film, at least): who is watching? who is watched? what power is there in watching - and making someone know they are watched? And then, it escalates: who gets to follow people? How far will you go in following someone in order to stare at them? What are the repercussions? 

The obvious reference points are Rear Window, but Julia's dislocation, her sense of isolation and imprisonment comes from a lack of language and inability to communicate to both read and communicate in the world around her: she is fundamentally alone. This is what the film is interested in, really. If you cannot read and you cannot speak, how do you communicate? how do you learn? As befits an audiovisual medium, Julia overcomes this by looking (by watching): staring at images in newspapers, searching the internets for videos about the serial killer, interacting with people by reading body language, decording gesture, sound, affect and tone.

And there's all sorts of other, subtle notes that speak to the history of horror cinema. Early in the film, Julia and her husband go out in Bucharest (there's a lot of gorgeous location shooting of Bucharest actually) and they come across an ambulance and some kind of accident, they become part of a crowd, and totally give me Daughters of Darkness vibes, a beautiful young couple adrift in a foreign, European town. She also goes to a local, beautiful cinema to watch a Cary Grant film which totally made me think of making a video essay around this actor going to the cinema in both Watcher and It Follows, and then spiral out into looking, women and cinemas, in horror films.

Finally, I got to watch The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998, Box of Broadcasts). I'd mentioned this a few weeks ago, in our newsletter, when I read about Lost Vampires UK doing a video screening of it in London (and you can still get tickets! It is happening on Tuesday in Camden). I'd asked you lot where on earth I could watch this, and I got a slew of responses - thank you everyone - including german vhs releases on ebay. However, a special thanks need to go to Losers' Club member Mick, who told me it was on Film Four about fifteen years ago. As an academic, I have access to Box of Broadcasts, which gives me on demand access to the programming of most UK freeview channels from the past fifteen years or more. And sure enough - I found it! So thanks Mick.

The synopsis is promising (if containing unncessary adverbs and adjectives): After years of murdering single women for their blood, debonair vampire Steven Griscz (Jude Law) can no longer quench his thirst at the pallid necks of the lonely and miserable. To continue to sustain himself, he desperately needs the vibrant, energizing blood of a victim who loves him. As Griscz struggles to seduce gorgeous scientist Anne Levela (Elina Lowensohn), policeman Healey (Timothy Spall) follows a trail of clues leading directly to his door.

Another serial killer film! But this time from the perspective of a vampire serial killer! Played by Jude Law in the 1990s!

I was already in, even before Jude Law's opening voiceove finished, just because of the aspect ratio which is the boxiest thing I have ever seen. I also enjoyed the location shooting - everything looked like my memories of Britain in the early 1990s, all concrete and grimness, and much like an episode of Auf Weidersehen Pet, which is amusing given that Timothy Spall also stars here. 

I also enjoyed a couple of totally random things: when Spall is attached on the Underground, one of the attackers is on roller skates (for no reason), and there is a nonsensical emergency tracheotomy in the middle of an industrial site which is very The Haunting of Julia (1977).

It is a very curious film though. I can't tell what genre it is supposed to be. We know there's a vampire in it so we know that it's horror, to some degree, and a serial killer, so there's lots of killing. But it's also not remotely scary: it isn't shot or scored like a horror film - more of a grim realism. There's no interest in vampire lore either, no real interest beyond the need to bite necks. The Wisdom of Crocodiles does follow the one key rule of Urban Vampire Films in the 1990s though: vampires live in spartan, upper floor flats, preferably in converted industrial units (see also, Pale Blood, and Tale of the Vampire). During this decade, vampires would never be seen dead in a terraced house with a comfy sofa and a TV in the corner of the room.

But what this film is really obsessed with, is paper.

So much time is spent on paper. 

This film is fascinated with depicting the texture of high-quality paper that you sketch on lingering lingering shots of ridges and gnarly holes within the paper (yes I am telling the truth). So much time on sketching. So much time on crumpling up paper. So much time on Jude Law making paper aeroplanes.

While paper is the star of this film, the emotional heft is provided by Law's character. It is driven by his feelings, his emotions, his conflict at murdering but his desire to live at all costs. There is definitely a kind of proto Twilight tortured young brooding handsome young male vampire going on here, a progenitor of Robert Pattinson, but done in this really weird way. There is no real narrative thrust at all. 1 hour 15 in, and I had no idea where it was going or what it is trying to do. Because the story has no momentum or narrative structure, it would be pretty unwatchable, if it wasn't for the generally pretty decent performances. Thank goodness for Law and Spall.
 

***

I have been mostly reading other people's academic essays for various projects I am working on, but I still have a few recommendations for you. Leila Latif has written an excellent essay, 'Nope and the Daredevils Risking it All for One Perfect Shot' for Curzon, and Katherine Connell has published a new-to-me essay on 'Uncanny Cats' in horror films for MUBI. Ella Kemp's review of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies for Empire may well lure me back to the cinema, while Arden Fitzroy reflects on The Thing at 40 for Girls On Tops. I also really, really enjoyed Jaha Nailah Avery's 25-year retrospective of Eve's Bayou for Vanity Fair (we always need more Kasi Lemmons talk).

In fiction, I am currently reading Seicho Matsumoto's detective story Tokyo Express (1958, published by Penguin in 2022) and I am enjoying it very much. I absolutely love Japanese cosy crime, and can recommend the Japanese crime backlist of publisher Pushkin Vertigo - The Decagon House Murders is a favourite of mine, too.

Right that's it from me. Back into the birthday fray - Edith's birthday party starts in an hour argh. As ever, if you want to say hi, just reply to this email and let me know a bit about yourself. I really do love hearing from everyone, and I do always write back, albeit very belatedly. 

Take care and speak soon, my lovely horror family,
 
Alison


take care, and keep in touch,

Alison

The Losers' Club is a newsletter by Alison Peirse, associate professor of film and 
author / editor of Women Make Horror; After Dracula and Korean Horror Cinema.