Had Bram Stoker decided to make his vampire nobleman French instead of Eastern European, there lies within that land’s history a model as appropriate as Vlad the Impaler. Looking at the life of Gilles de Rais (1404–1440), one can hardly imagine a better man to deserve the title “Monster.” In fact, it remains curious how…
Tag: French
R.I.P. Jean Rollin
Jean Rollin died December 15, 2010. The event hardly made headlines, and in one sense that was logical as could be. How noticeable after all is the death of a seventy-two-year-old film director whose movies were invariably low-budget and barely distributed? Yet to vampire fans, Rollin had proved himself if not a giant, certainly a…
Moonlit Dance and Moonlit Death
Time for some more vampire folklore! Today’s post is on les Dames Blanches which is a combination of a few folkloric ideas. The name itself means “White Ladies” and it is usually used to describe a type of creature that looked half-ghost and half-fairy, but with very vampire-like traits. The name also suggests that there…