Ageing and death are perhaps the foundation of all horror, but this droll French chamber piece, adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy, puts a devious spin on that. The titular “vourdalak” – a kind of Mitteleuropean vampire – is Gorcha, wizened patriarch of a family of forest-dwelling peasants, who is driven to feed on the blood of those he loves the most. With the film incarnating this beastie in the form of a toothy puppet resembling Norman Tebbit (voiced by director Adrian Beau), it’s a cruel but funny metaphor for parental authority and late-life dependency. Obviously they didn’t have assisted living in early modern Bohemia.
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Beau could have adapted this as straight gothic. Instead, he opts for an enjoyable high-strung comedy that, with him often shooting through Hammer-style soft gauze, skims pastiche. D’Urfé’s court manners are ridiculously superfluous in the rustic setting, exposed as hypocritical when he roughly pursues Sdenka, and then redundant in the face of the ghoulish paterfamilias scoffing at him down the dinner table.