Vampire Graves found in Poland

Construction work in the south of Poland has uncovered what archaeologists think is a vampire burial ground. The heads of the skeletons on this site were ritually severed and placed on the legs to ensure that the dead remained dead. This was one of the many rituals used throughout parts of Europe to stop outbreaks of 'vampire' activity.

Last year, Italian researchers found the skeleton of a 16th century female 'vampire' on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice Lagoon. A brick had been 'staked' through the 'vampire's' jaw to stop her from feeding on plague victims.

Remains of female 'vampire' found in Venice in 2012

For more information, go to these sites:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2153307/Vampires-Venice-Bricks-bones-scared-Medieval-world-undead.html

http://www.livescience.com/38148-vampire-grave-uncovered-vampire-burial.html

http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Vampire+burial+ground+found+Poland/8648878/story.html

Only Lovers Left Alive - Jim Jarmusch's crypto-vampire love story

From Thor's troublesome brother to vampire. Tom Hiddleston is set to hit the screen again alongside  Tilda Swinton in Jim Jarmusch's undead romance Only Lovers Left Alive.

Tilda Swinton as Eve &
Tom Hiddleston as Adam

Adam (Hiddleston) is an (appropriately) underground rock musician depressed by the seemingly endless cruelty and suffering of humanity. He reunites with his enigmatic vampire lover, Eve (Swinton), but their idyll is not to last as Eve's crazy little sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), pops up to create havoc (as little sisters are wont to do).

Hopefully, this film will wipe out some of the sparkle and the moaning left over from Twilight and restore vampires to their former glory in popular imagination.

INTERESTING FACTS
1 - This film also features John Hurt (aka the voice of the dragon in Merlin) and Anton Yelchin.

2 - Rock music has a special attraction for vampires - Anne Rice's Lestat was a rock star for a while in The Vampire Lestat and so was Timmy Valentine in S. P. Somtow's Vampire Junction

The Vampire Lestat (Vampire Chronicles)
Vampire Junction

 3 - Tilda Swinton is the White Witch from Narnia. No, she does not appear in Lord of the Rings. But she does feature in some of my favorite films, including Burn After Reading and Michael Clayton with George Clooney, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio with Sean Bean, Orlando (based on the Virginia Woolf novel) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe (Widescreen Edition)
Burn After Reading
Michael Clayton (Full Screen Edition)
Caravaggio (Special Edition)
Orlando
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Criterion Collection)

A Vampire in Venice: Evan Rachel Wood at the Venice Film Festival

Evan Rachel Wood, who plays vampire queen Sophie-Anne Leclerq in True Blood, was at the opening of the 68th Venice Film Festival last week with the cast of George Clooney's latest directorial enterprise, The Ides of March.

The film opened the Festival on August 31 and Wood walked up the red carpet with co-stars George Clooney, Marisa Tomei, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, as well as supermodel Cindy Crawford who formed part of Clooney's retinue with her husband Randy Gerber.

Evan Rachel Wood as the vampire Sophie-Anne Leclerq in True Blood

Wood looked amazing in a Dolce & Gabbana outfit during the press conference in the morning, and, later that evening, in a white shirt dress by Alessandro Rich (above).

Other celebrities who were spotted on the red carpet included Diane Kruger (Troy), Violante Placido (The American) and Vittoria Puccini.

Erzsebet Bathory - The Blood Countess of Hungary

Erzsebet Bathory

Any vampire fan is familiar with the name of the Hungarian Blood Countess Erzsebet Bathory.

Countess Bathory lived in 16th century Hungary, appropriately close (given the vampire associations) to the border with the Romanian region of Transylvania.

Bathory residence in Hungary
Photo by Charmaine Tanti

Elizabeth Bathory came from a family of Voivods of Transylvania, and her uncle Stephen was also King of Poland.

In 1610, she was accused of murdering over six hundred women and girls to bathe in their blood, believed to keep her skin youthful and translucent.

Bathory bathing in virgin blood - wax figures at Nyirbator
Photo by Charmaine Tanti

However, this accusation was most likely the fruit of a conspiracy against the Countess who refused to yield any of the estates that she had inherited from her deceased husband.

Bathory was tried and found guilty. She was walled up in a room where she died 4 years later, in 1614.

Bathory on trial - wax figures at Nyirbator
Photo by Charmaine Tanti

Bathory's legend grew and she is now considered the female version of Dracula. The Blood Countess and the Impaler share the same fate in popular culture as most people are more familiar with their legendary/fictional personas than with the real historical facts.

Bathory's legend inspired many stories in the 18th and 19th centuries, and still does so today. In 1729, her story was published by the Jesuit scholar Laszlo Turoczi in Tragica Historia. 

The witness accounts were published in 1817, and first gave rise to suspicions that the bloodbaths were pure fiction. However, the vampire craze that raged during the nineteenth century firmly rooted her within the ranks of the sadistic and bloodthirsty undead.

Bathory's legend has inspired anything from literature to music, plays and films. Kim Newman mentions her in his superb Anno Dracula, and she is one of the villains in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer Vol 1.

She also features in Riyoko Ikeda's Berusaiyu No Bara Gaiden where she meets Oscar Francois de Jarjayes.

Hammer Horror made one of the first feature films about Elisabeth Bathory in 1970: Countess Dracula starring Ingrid Pitt.

The most recent movies about the Blood Countess include Juraj Jakubisko's Bathory (2008) starring Anna Friel; The Countess (2009) directed by and starring Julie Delpy; and Ulrike Ottinger's Die Blutgraefin (2011), starring Tilda Swinton.

For more information about the Countess' palace in Nyirbator, go to my blog Mad About Travel

Useful Links and references:

http://thevelvetrocket.com/2011/07/21/the-blood-countess-elizabeth-bathory-erzsebet-bathori/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory

The Countess

Die Blutgraefin

Bathory

Let the Right One In

In a world where human beings have stopped caring about each other, you could find true friendship in a vampire ...


John Ajvide Lindqvist's book Let the Right One In is a beautifully horrific story about the friendship between a lonely, bullied boy and a vampire child.


Oskar is a 12-year-old Swedish boy who lives with his mother in a Stockholm suburb in the 1980s. Bullies at school make his life a misery, but then Oskar befriends Eli, the new 'girl' next door.


Let the Right One In embraces the modern vampire tradition that recognizes the monstrosity in human beings while creating sympathy for the vampire by pointing out the victimization that led to its creation in the first place and the true love that the vampire is capable of. 


The story's main focus is the intimate relationship that develops between Oskar and Eli, two 'beings' that belong to different species, and who have both experienced suffering at the hands of human beings. Adults are ineffectual when it comes to protecting their loved ones - Oskar's mother tries hard, but never finds out what is happening to her son, and Oskar's father is a drunk. Eli's 'father' is actually a pedophile who tries to provide blood for the vampire child to keep it with him.


At the core of the novel, as the title inspired by the Morrissey song suggests, is the  need to let the right person into one's life. Lindqvist's novel goes that extra step further by showing that it is not only the human boy who needs to let someone in. The vampire, too, needs someone it can trust ...

Related Articles
For an insightful appreciation of the film version, go to: http://noeltanti.com/2010/11/03/knock-knock-let-the-right-one-in-2008/ (SPOILERS ALERT) 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Right_One_In (SPOILERS ALERT here, too)




Check out the Morrissey song that inspired the title in this fan video that includes images from the film:

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon

Source: http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/sturgeon.html

Some of Your Blood is a short horror novella whose protagonist, George Smith, is a sociopath. George is sent to the army psychiatrist after he attacks an officer. His mild manners contrast so much with the officer's report that Dr Philip Outerbridge decides he wants to delve deeper into this man's psyche to see what had triggered off such an apparently uncharacteristic reaction. He asks George to write his autobiography. George happily complies, but his narrative is as deeply false as it is true. The doctors realise that to find out George's secret, they have to read between the lines to discover what it is that their patient is hiding so carefully....

So, where is the vampire connection?
1. George's parents are Hungarian-American
2. His real name is Bela
3. George's 'problems' are deeply connected to his mother
4. Find out George's secret to learn more ...

La Morte Amoureuse

Theophile Gautier

Theophile Gautier's "La Morte Amoureuse" is a short vampire story about a young priest, Romuald, who is first haunted and then seduced by the beautiful vampire Clarimonde. First published in La Chronique de Paris in 1836, the story is one of the first and most influential vampire stories written in the nineteenth century.

Characters
Clarimonde - the femme fatale and loving vampire who falls in love with Romuald.
Romuald - the young priest whose moral dilemmas and erroneous choices prove tragic to himself and to Clarimonde.
Serapion - Romuald's spiritual guide and the antithesis to Clarimonde.


Synopsis
Romuald is a young man who has always lived a cloistered life studying to be a priest. On the day of his ordination, he espies a beautiful woman in the Cathedral and he falls in love with her. In spite of this, he takes his vows anyway and is assigned to a small parish.
One night a messenger arrives summoning him to the house of the beautiful courtesan Clarimonde who is dying. When he arrives there, Romuald is overwhelmed by the 'dead' woman's beauty and kisses her. Clarimonde wakes up and from that night onwards they become lovers. Romuald starts leading a double life: by day he is the timid, humble priest and by night he is his own arrogant and wealthy alter-ego, Clarimonde's lover.
Romuald the priest, however, is consumed by guilt and he confides in Serapion, an older priest who urges him to betray the vampire's whereabouts ...

"La Morte Amoureuse" was made into a TV film in 1997/8 in the series The Hunger. The title of the episode is Clarimonde and stars Audrey Benoit as Clarimonde, David la Haye as Romuald and James Bradford as Abbe Seraphon.


Read it or listen to it Online


The text in English:
http://www04.us.archive.org/stream/greatshortstori01brangoog#page/n11/mode/1up

The text in French:
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/gautier_theophile/morte_amoureuse/morte_amoureuse_print.pdf

French audio version of the story:
http://www.litteratureaudio.com/livre-audio-gratuit-mp3/gautier-theophile-la-morte-amoureuse.html

The Film
http://welcome-to-monster-land.blogspot.com/2009/08/hungry-for-clarimonde.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0608305/

Or buy new from Amazon