Vurdalak

The name’s origins

«Vurdalak» has a surprisingly bookish history. Its spread is due to Pushkin◇ATTR◇ Critical attributionA reasoned connection proposed by scholars or critics, but not confirmed by the creators.Source: Pushkin 1835, who uses it in Songs of the Western Slavs, itself partly drawn from La Guzla, Prosper Mérimée’s celebrated literary hoax. The term is probably a reworking of Slavic words for a werewolf≈CONTR≈ Disputed traditionA belief or etymology on which sources disagree.: a clue to how, in Eastern Europe, vampires and werewolves were less distinct categories than cinema might suggest.

Traditional and literary characteristics

In A. K. Tolstoy’s story, the Vurdalak has three characteristics retained in Bava’s film:

1. it chooses its victims from among those it loves most◆PRIM◆ Primary sourceAn original document consulted directly: a text, record, script or film print.Source: Tolstoy;
2. each victim in turn becomes a Vurdalak, and an entire family can be consumed;
3. it is recognised by its return after the appointed time and by a change in its gaze and behaviour.

Differences between tradition and popular culture

Eighteenth-century accounts of Serbian cases describe exhumed corpses, fresh blood and grown nails: signs that we now know can be explained by the ordinary processes of decomposition, as Paul Barber has shown. The literary Vurdalak, by contrast, adds a psychology: it is not a corpse that fails to decompose, but an attachment that refuses to let go¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation..

Film adaptations

• I tre volti della paura (1963): the patriarch Gorca, played by Boris Karloff.
• La notte dei diavoli (1972): a contemporary adaptation of the same story.
• Sem’ja vurdalakov (1990): a Soviet adaptation.