A pasty-faced French nobleman, a darkened wood, a family in distress. If this doesn’t sound like the recipe for a modern horror classic, that’s only because you haven’t seen these elements in action yet. Shot sumptuously on Super 16, 2023’s The Vourdalak came out of nowhere and just as quickly disappeared into the ether after gaining significant awards buzz. But now is the perfect time to revisit the chilling tale of not-quite-vampires and the queer carnage they deliver.
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Adapted from an 1830s novella by Alexsey Tolstoy (Leo’s older cousin,) The Vourdalak tells the story of Jacques Saturnin du Antoine, a lost French Marquis trying to find his way back to Paris after being robbed somewhere in the forests of Eastern Europe. When he asks for help, he’s told to seek out a man named Gorcha, who can provide the Marquis with horses for the journey. But upon finding Gorcha’s home, the Marquis discovers a household in haunted disarray. Gorcha, the family patriarch, is nowhere to be seen, but his outcast daughter Sdenka and his gender-f*ck son Piotr are in evidence, and from our first enounter with them we know something’s up. According to Sdenka, their father went out to “fight the Turks” a week ago with strict instructions not to let him return to the family home if he should return after weeks’ end.
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There’s a very good reason for this, as the Marquis will come to find out. There’s something afoot in those old woods, something mysterious that transforms men into soul-sucking entities called Vourdalaks. They’re like vampires, in that they bite people in the neck and “turn” them, but there’s a particularly sinister twist. Unlike vampires, Vourdalaks are mostly interested in “turning” their own family members.
Everyone’s in agreement that Gorcha probably ended up being turned, and the siblings are already mourning the loss of their father. But when their older brother Jegor comes back from the wars, he’s intent on making the decisions for the household. And true to form, in the absence of another patriarch, Jegor leads with toxic masculinity. He shuns his siblings for not performing their genders correctly and, upon finding a body that looks like Gorcha’s outside their home, he insists on bringing the obvious vourdalak into the house, there to wreak total destruction on the family.
It’s an age-old tale, told slowly and quietly, in a way that honors its 19th-century roots. What makes the film modern is the way its director Adrien Beau uses the spectre of the vourdalak as a metaphor about intolerance and gender deviance within families. Everything is fine and dandy until Jegor shows up, and it’s because of his weird ideas about masculinity that everything falls apart in the end. Because yes, everything does fall apart, and quite quickly: but not before we get to enjoy some truly masterful, haunting cinematography and marionette work. At one point, our Marquis wakes up to find the vourdalak in bed with him. Later on, he looks down at Sdenka during a passionate interval only to find that he’s been making love to the vourdalak itself.
The idea of a flesh-eating zombified beast is scary enough: the added threat of a monster that destroys its own family from within makes for an instantly satisfying queer narrative. Not to mention the fact that our hero is a cute twink who looks great in silk knee breeches!
The slow-burning horror of The Vourdalak is not for everyone, but if you’re a horror fan who loves to wait for things to boil to a crisis point, you won’t be disappointed by this stately gem.
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