Creature design plays an integral role in the effectiveness of monster-based horror. Not only a monster’s appearance, but also the extent of time it should appear on-screen is a crucial consideration. French horror-drama The Vourdalak goes big in both respects with its monster, making the intriguing stylistic choice to eschew makeup and prosthetics or the use of CGI and instead bringing an undead creature to life through marionette puppetry, while also ensuring it spends a great deal of time on screen. In less competent hands — literally, since writer-director Adrien Beau handled the puppetry for the titular ghoul — the creature’s first appearance could’ve unwound the tension the film builds through atmosphere, mood and mystery throughout the first act. Thankfully, the uncanny appearance and movements of the marionette monster succeed in making The Vourdalak a singular experience.
The film opens full of portent. It’s a stormy night in 18th-century Eastern Europe, and the Marquis Jacques Saturnin d’Urfe (Kacey Mottet Klein), an envoy of the King of France, arrives on a doorstep seeking assistance after his traveling party was overtaken by bandits nearby. The man inside ominously warns that he opens the door for no one in the night, but he points d’Urfe toward a home that may supply him with a horse, but warns him to keep moving after that. Once there, d’Urfe finds a strange family without their patriarch, a man named Gorcha who, even in his old age, has gone off to fight the Turks. First, d’Urfe crosses paths with Piotr (Vassili Schneider), a young man with a penchant for wearing women’s clothes, and soon meets Piotr’s older sister Sdenka (Ariane Labed), who has disgraced her family some time prior by losing her virginity out of wedlock. Unfortunately, there are no horses here, but eldest brother Jegor (Grégoire Colin) soon arrives and vows to fetch him one, until Jegor discovers that his father is gone.
Gorcha has also left an ominous message for his children, promising to return from the battlefields within six days, but warning that they must drive a wooden stake through his heart if he arrives even a moment later than that, because in that case, he will no longer be their father but rather a dreaded “Vourdalak.” As the days pass, and d’Urfe’s horse takes lower priority, he tries to learn the meaning that strange word, especially by asking Sdenka, who he finds alluring even as she continually pushes him away. As the bell chimes six o’clock, marking exactly six days since Gorcha departed, dread creeps over the family for a moment, until they spot a clump of tattered clothes piled in the corner of the yard, and inside, the skeletal frame of Gorcha, withered and desiccated but evidently alive.
Unfortunately for the family, Jegor refuses to acknowledge the obvious: that this hideous creature ‒animated so uncannily through Beau’s puppeteering of this life-sized marionette ‒ is not their father anymore. Even more unfortunately, the blood-drinking Vourdalak differs from a more conventional vampire in that it prefers to prey on loved ones, and seems to have a particular eye on Vlad (Gabriel Pavie), the young son of Jegor and his wife, Anja (Claire Duburcq).
Shot on Super 16mm film, Beau’s film uses the interplay of light and shadow to great effect, the era in which the film is set also necessitates a great deal of moody candlelight. There’s pitch-black humor to be found here as well, and d’Urfe’s aristocratic garb, powdered white face and removable, cosmetic mole contrast well with the grime, gore and festering rot that begins unfurling around him. The performances are compelling across the board, helped by Beau and co-writer Hadrien Bouvier’s whip-smart script adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy. As a result, the film benefits from its source material predating by a half-century Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the myriad of vampire tropes it subsequently spawned. After all, the star of the show is Beau’s ghoulish marionette, its withered corpse-like body unsettling with its piercing eyes and robust voice (which Beau provided as well). As a result, The Vourdalak feels like a stylistic gamble that paid off, its unnerving mood and atmosphere only heightened by an innovative and macabre creature design too peculiar to easily forget.
Photo courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories
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