Your Daily Dracula – Ghosts of Garip (Vlad’s Legacy) (2016)
Chilean director Patricio Valladares made this in Turkey, working from a script by Barry Keating (Mamula) and Italian film critic Loris Curci. It’s a rare horror film to revolve around Vlad Tepes – still a historical bogeyman in Turkey – and not follow Stoker by making him a vampire … or not quite a vampire. It’s also a found footage film which repeatedly stretches the format – featuring a subjective dream sequence, not to mention shots which can’t possibly be taken by the main characters. When the camera-toters are trapped in underground tunnels, there’s a shot of two baddies holding a door shut on them from the outside. This lackadaisiacal attitude carries over into the fairly random spookiness. Academic John Gillespie (Gianni Capaldi) and a small crew of student types are making a documentary about Vlad in Romania, when they are summoned to Turkey to investigate rumours of a Vlad sighting one year after his supposed death and legends that the impaler was kept in a subterranean dungeon in a town called Garip (which means ‘Strange’ in Turkish) and abducted children were sacrificed to him.
John once had a relationship with svelte historian Nina (Selma Ergec), when they were both at ‘Edinburg University’. Various characters get very het up about nothing much, squabbling intently in borrowed apartments. Sulky Bella (Natalie Burn) generates conflict by being insistent and unreasonable, and rushing off on her own into danger. Ali (Selim Bayraktar), a local academic, seems to be under some sort of spell and stalks the filmmakers. On one occasion, a sinister force breaks a vase in their Air BnB type apartment – which doesn’t rank up there with impaling thousands of peasants or nailing ambassadors’ turbans to their heads, but is about all the supernatural force here is capable of in the warm-up stretches. Of course, after back and forth, Gillespie’s gang get trapped in the tunnels and preyed on by vampire-ghoul-zombie creatures. Garip is played by a striking, abandoned-seeming location but the tunnels are just murky caves. I get a sense that this was thrown together on a holiday, and it takes a long time to get scary – though there are one or two chills in the familiat business of the arrogant foreigners getting got in a far-flung location.
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