The Lake Vampire (2018)

Original title: El Vampiro del Lago

Venezuela. Ernesto Navarro (Sócrates Serrano) is earning his bread as a journalist, but because he’s written a pretty unpopular novel years ago (“It’s a cult novel”, he’ll tell everyone he meets, if they want to know or not), he’s calling himself a “writer”. He has a mild case of being a manipulative prick, too, which turns out to be a useful character trait when he becomes fascinated with a series of murders. The perpetrator only leaves behind the heads of his victims, but forensic evidence suggests he is somehow draining them of blood before the beheadings. On one occasion, the killer also leaves behind the burnt remains of a copy of Ernesto’s book, signed no less, so it’s really no wonder that our protagonist turns from interested in the case as a source for a new book to slightly obsessed with it.

Turns out Ernesto can’t be too bad a journalist, after all, for he manages to acquire rather a lot of interesting information about the case in a very short time once he starts on actual research. Apparently, he learns, this is not at all the only serial murder case in Venezuelas’s recent past with this rather specific modus operandi; these things have been going on for decades, if not longer. Ernesto makes contact with a now retired policeman who investigated some of these cases. After some dithering Jeremias Morales (Miguel Ángel Landa), as he is called, begins telling Ernesto some extensive flashback tales, also including a flashback inside the flashback to things about an investigation in a very similar case in the early 20th Century. The killer may very well be an immortal vampire, involved in a pact with Satan and assisted by some kind of occult conspiracy.

Carl Zitelmann’s Venezuelan horror film – with a healthy dose of the mystery genre – The Lake Vampire is an interesting little film. Its flaws are clear and obvious. It is a very talky film, and not all of that talk seems strictly necessary for plot, character, mood or theme, but rather based on the director’s enjoyment of simply showing his very game cast – Landa’s effortless grumpy old-man charm is particularly lovely – interacting with one another. I’m also not terribly sure the flashback structure needed to be quite this extensive, for while all of it is certainly useful to a degree to establish how far back the cases of vampirism the film is about reach into the past of Venezuela, and do quite a bit to ground the tale in the country as a specific place with its specific history, too, there’s a bit too much repeated detail for my taste.

On the other hand, this is definitely for once a talky film with interesting dialogue that shows a sardonic edge befitting a tale of vampires, serial killers and the devil, eschewing pop culture witticisms for a perfectly fitting, more old-fashioned kind of refinement. I also found myself rather taken with the construction of the occult business here, the cleverly underplayed insanity actually feeling coherent and true to the characters involved instead of built for a shocking/idiotic twist for once.


Visually, the film sometimes struggles a bit with the period sequences, clearly not having enough of a budget for full-on recreation, but Zitelmann nails all of the film’s central scenes of horror, and does handle all of the extensive talking very well, too. There’s also quite a bit of something still relatively seldom seen in – especially supernatural - horror movies: effective scenes of horror by daylight, carried by the director’s eye for creepy landscape shots. Nature can be as claustrophobic as a locked room, after all.

La casa del fin de los tiempos (2013)

aka The House at the End of Time

Warning: even though I’m keeping things as vague as I can here, deeply spoiler averse readers might want to avert their eyes, because while I’m as always loathe to disclose a film’s last act, I don’t think I can avoid it completely in this case.

Dulce (Ruddy Rodríguez) has spent thirty years in prison for the murder of her husband Juan José (Gonzalo Cubero) and the disappearance of one of her sons, Leopoldo (Rosmel Bustamante). The film’s first scene will certainly suggest to the audience there was actually something stranger and most probably supernatural going on in the creepy old house the family lived in that night Dulce supposedly did the deed.

Thirty years after the deed, a now elderly via unconvincing age make-up Dulce is transferred into a very old school form of house arrest in said creepy old house (which hasn’t gotten less creepy since). There are no electronic shenanigans here, but two cops sitting in front of the building house all day, which seems a rather ineffective use of police time to me. Be that as it may, in flashbacks, partially told to a priest (Guillermo García) who doesn’t completely believe the official version of what happened that night thirty years ago, Dulce and the film reveal what truly happened. It all started with the poisonous combination of a marriage gone bitter with time and poverty (the family only living where they did thanks to a government program selling empty living spaces to the poor), and the second-most traditional kind of ghostly manifestation I know – nightly, very loud rattling of door handles and knocking on doors. From there on out, things turned in turn complicated, tragic, and creepy, and it seems as if the house doesn’t deem Dulce’s tale to be quite finished yet.

Venezuelan director/writer/producer/editor Alejandro Hidalgo’s debut feature is quite the thing. It starts out as an effective traditional ghost story crossed with a just as effective kitchen sink drama, and eventually turns into something more complicated, perhaps less clear and certainly much more ambitious than that, and this in a deeply satisfying way.

Hidalgo’s trick here is that he has mastered the language of the genres he then diverts from quite wonderfully, portraying the life of his characters in a non-fussy, focused way on the kitchen sink side, and going to town quite effectively with the hauntings, the latter again proving you can use very old hats of the spooking business and still give a theoretically jaded viewer a bit of a fright if you only get the timing and the mood right, which Hidalgo does quite excellently. Of course, the specific old hats Hidalgo uses here are old and well-worn because they touch on something raw in a lot of us, the feeling of nakedness and helplessness we feel when imagining to be threatened alone in our beds, the dread of the place you live in turning strange and potentially dangerous on you, and so on.

What distinguishes the film further, though, is how well Hidalgo handles things once he deviates from the traditional and the pretty much universal, once all the things happen I would call twists if they weren’t organic parts of the film’s narrative structure and thematic interests. Because this, ladies and gentlemen, is very much a film about people haunting themselves, both in a literal as well as more metaphorical meaning of the phrase (and how potent is this as a metaphor for our connection to our own pasts?), surely driven by an outside supernatural influence but not controlled by it as they are by their feelings, in particular their love.

What begins as a ghost story eventually turns out to be a canticle for motherly love in a rather conservative view. You know, the love that is willing to give the whole of her life to her children, the sort of thing I’m willing to believe in for the duration of the film mostly because the film itself and its cast are working so hard to convince me. Still, the film’s sort-of happy end does carry more than just a bittersweet streak, because Dulce will really have given everything she can give to save her son, all the time of her life, and horribly, she will always have done it already, leaving free will on the wayside next to a Doctor Who episode.

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