Bite Me, Daddy: Le Vourdalak (Adrien Beau, 2023)

Dead Teenagers #2 is coming your way April 15. So is the re-issued Dead Teenagers #1, which sold out its first print run. In the meantime, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is still available, in both book and smell form. You can also pre-order the collected edition of Be Not Afraid, which will be out in July.

Sometimes, in the course of writing about the Cinema, you are privileged to see a truly Big Swing — a movie that would otherwise be good contains one element so bizarre, so daring, so potentially divisive, that it becomes either great or horrible depending on your reaction to it. Le Vourdalak is a movie with a Big Swing, and I love it, and because it would otherwise be distracting, I’m going to tell you about it right now. 

Okay. So: You know how, in the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, there is a scene where the character Titus is having dinner with his boyfriend’s family, and the boyfriend’s grandmother is so old that she’s become a Muppet? Do you remember that scene? Here it is: 

What I need you to accept — now, before we go any further — is that Le Vourdalak is a feature-length version of this scene. It’s about a family attending an aging, toxic, extremely elderly patriarch who may or may not be a vampire, but who is definitely a puppet, and a very Muppety one at that. Like the Kimmy Schmidt gag, it’s supposed to be funny — this is a surprisingly funny movie — but it is also supposed to be horrifying. You are going to need to be scared of the puppet, more than once. 

Is that okay? Are we good now? Do you feel prepared to engage with this material? Because here’s the thing: I found Le Vourdalak just delightful. Deep down, beneath all the puppetry, Le Vourdalak is what I will very pretentiously call a queer feminist reading of the vampire myth: Patriarchy is the ancient monster sitting at the heart of the family, draining the life from its non-conforming children, and it must die if the world is to survive. 

So, the plot: It’s the 18^th century, and a French diplomat stumbles through the Eastern European forest in full face paint, wig and heels, having just been mugged. He’s our first sign that the movie is going to be going deep on Gender — he’s performing what is, to him, the only properly masculine performance, which is, to us (and to the Eastern European peasants he’s dealing with) the height of feminine artifice. He’s also excessively dorky and awkward and polite in ways that endear him to us; like Speak No Evil, this is a horror movie about how good European manners will get you trapped in situations you cannot escape. 

Due to the mugging, the diplomat is forced to seek shelter in the house of a peasant family. He could not have picked a more miserable family to abide with: Goth witch Sdenka, the eldest daughter, is expected to live in permanent shame and self-abasement because she was caught having sex before marriage. Youngest child Piotr, a “sissy” who wears women’s clothing, is similarly despised and beaten down for being queer. The oldest son, Jegor, is a married normie who holds the line for their terrible father; his wife, Anja, is at the end of her rope or perhaps beyond it, as it’s become clear that being Daddy’s Perfect Special Most Best Boy Ever is more important to Jegor than his own child. 

As for the father, Gorcha, well: He’s away fighting the war. He's already warned the children that, if he does not come back by a certain day, this means he is dead, and what arrives at their house in his shape will be a vourdalak – a vampire that can only feed on the blood of people it loves. They are, under no circumstances, to let it in. 

What happens next? Well: If you guessed “the deadline passes and Dad comes back as a Muppet,” full marks. Jegor, being Jegor, immediately lets his obviously dead and en-Muppeted dad into the house, while proclaiming that everyone else is crazy for seeing a problem here — and Dad, the moment he arrives, begins humiliating and torturing his children with such terrible efficiency that he hardly even needs to drink their blood. He starts doing that too, though, as soon as the sun goes down. 

As for our embattled French diplomat: Not being a member of the family, he’s supposedly safe, and free to leave at any time. The Vourdalak can only prey on him if it loves him. But some combination of a crush on Sdenka and terrible, self-immolating politeness immobilizes him, and by the time Dad starts demanding to see him display his shapely calves in a dance, he’s in far over his head. 

So: Dad is a tyrant who drains the life from those below him in the hierarchy; the son, aspiring to be like his father, is too weak to see anything he does as a problem; the queer and/or femme and/or female children, at the bottom of the hierarchy, lack the power to resist the father’s rule or even to escape him. It’s all terribly familiar, both as allegory and as a diagram of how some families work. 

On its own, this might be terribly preachy and consciousness-raising — but then, there are the Muppet vampires to contend with, and the French aristocrats stranded in the middle of world-historically awkward family dinners, and altogether enough blood and wit and beautiful cinematography that the movie just zooms by and leaves you (leaves me, anyway) utterly thrilled. I love movies that aren’t afraid to be movies, to ditch verisimilitude, to use magnificent, obvious artifice and give us visions the real world could never offer, and this one delivers. 

It’s tough to do anything new with a vampire story, but Le Vourdalak finds it, and it panders to the all-important “gay feminists who hate their Dads” demographic. That’s enough for me. Is it enough for you? Depends on how willing you are to be terrified by patriarchal Muppets — and I can’t think of a single reasonable person who would turn down that offer, which bodes pretty well. 

Le Vourdalak is streaming on Tubi.