French Director Adrien Beau’s Venice-Bound ‘Vourdalak’ Promises Offbeat Tale of the ‘Original Vampire’

Elsa Keslassy
·4 min read
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An edgy new voice within the world of French genre, Adrien Beau worked as a designer and scenographer for the likes of Dior, John Galliano and Agnes B before making his feature debut with the offbeat vampire movie “Vourdalak.”

Produced by Judith-Lou Levy at Les Films du Bal, “Vourdalak” will world premiere at Venice Critics’ Week and will likely be one of its boldest entries. At a time when horror has become a mainstream genre overloaded with special effects, “Vourdalak” couldn’t be more radical. Lensed in Super 16, the film’s central character is a vampire patriarch named Gorcha, played by a marionette that Beau operates and lends his voice to.

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In an interview with Variety ahead of the festival, Beau says he got the idea for the film after he and Levy came across “La Famille du Vourdalak,” a strange vampire novella penned by Alexeï Konstantinovitch Tolstoï, published in 1884.

“‘La Famille du Vourdalak’ was written 40 years before ‘Dracula,’ which manufactured this image of an aristocratic vampire in his castle. But as this novella shows it, the original vampire was a lower class countryman,” says Beau, who penned the film with Hadrien Bouvier. “In literature, vampires and zombies are the same, but it’s cinema that has given them a different social rank: zombies are commoners, bums, while vampires are aristocrats. In our film we turn the tables, we follow an aristocrat who finds himself among peasants who happen to be vampires.”

He also infused “Vourdalak” with his artistic skills, on display through his previous two short films: “La Petite Sirene,” a black-and-white fantasy film shot in Super 8, and “Les condiments irreguliers,” shot in Super 16 and loosely inspired by the life of the 17th century arisocrat Marquise de Brinvilliers.

Even if it’s inspired by a published material, “Vourdalak” is in many ways a personal film for Beau, as it brings together his “passion for 19th century dark romanticism and puppetry.”

“I started out in plastic arts and have always been interested in drawings, sculpture and puppetry, because it’s at the crossroads between plastic arts and live spectacle,” says Beau, who sports a wealth of interesting tattoos, including a little fly on his upper left cheek and skeleton fingers on his hands.

Beau said he made “Vourdalak” with a marionette because he’s a fan of horror films like “Alien” or “The Fly” where “creature puppets give such dramatic force to the story.” “Once we decided to go that route, we had to shoot it in Super 16 to create something unique, yet harmonious in terms of style and narration,” he says.

Shooting the film this way came with constraints because they “couldn’t have as many horror scenes as in a classic horror film,” he says. “You can’t have as many special effects because they’re real effects, but this limitation forces you to be more inventive and create characters differently so that we care about them. As my editor told me, with special effects it looks real but it feels fake, and with what we created, it looks fake but hopefully it feels real.”

“Vourdalak” boasts committed performances by Kacey Mottet Klein (“Happening”), Ariane Labed (“Attenberg”), Gregoire Colin (“Both Sides of the Blade”) and Vassili Schneider (“Les amandiers”). Featuring lush cinematography, the film was shot entirely in natural settings. “We aimed to create something bizarre and different from all the fantasy films that we’re used to. It almost looks like a film unearthed from the Soviet Union in the 1960s,” says Beau.

The original score contributes to giving the film its retro vibe, which Beau said was inspired by “Fellini’s Casanova.” “Vourdalak” is paced with instrumental themes inspired by traditional Russian or Slavic music, yet modernized. The costumes are also highly elaborate, courtesy of Beau. “After working in fashion for more than 10 years, I could never make a film with actors wearing jeans and T-shirts,” he quips.

Les Films du Bal, founded by Levy and Eve Robin, is known for delivering bold movies mixing genre and politics. The Paris-based company has notably produced Mati Diop’s Cannes-prizewinning “Atlantics” and Nadav Lapid’s “Ahed’s Knee,” which won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

“Vourdalak” was co-produced by Lola and Marco Pacchioni at Master Movies. The movie lured high-profile partners and was pre-bought by pay TV group OCS, Amazon Prime Video and The Jokers, while WTFilms handles international sales.

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