Before we bite down hard, a neat piece of trivia related to our post on Blacula earlier in the week. Old greydog‘s talented writing partner, author and award-winning artist Alan M Clark, also noticed the review, and informs us that:
“I went to high school at Symbas Experimental High School in a warehouse commune in San Francisco. My ‘film’ teacher was the Joan Torres who wrote Blacula and Scream Blacula Scream.”
Rather cool. You can find the article on Scream Blacula Scream here:
Anyway, vampire fiction is again the mood of the day, as three more word-whisperers tell us a bit about their stories in the forthcoming SLAY anthology. This time we’re pleased to have Valjeane Jeffers, Marcia Colette writing as V G Harrison, and Miranda Riley, who provide three very different takes on the Vampire Noire…
‘Beautiful Monsters’ by Valjeanne Jeffers
Sanyu, the heroine of my story, ‘Beautiful Monsters’, is both a vampire and a freedom fighter. Thus, she is something of an anti-heroine, if you will. Sanyu is powerful and bloodthirsty. But she is definitely focused on her end game, which is slaying oppression. Her journey takes place in the town of Passion, in an alternative steamfunk universe.
I’ve been in love with vampires—werewolves too (really all creatures of the night)—since I was child watching Dracula and Barnabas from Dark Shadows, But when I saw the call for submissions to SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire, I realized that I’d never written a story about a traditional vampire, although I wrote about “time vampires” in the third novel of my Immortal series, Immortal III: Stealer of Souls.
So, I decided to challenge myself. I drew from the myths of traditional vampires, their birth, their fatal allergy to sunlight and, of course, their bloodlust. I decided to use a steamfunk setting because I love world building. I also included a tribute to my late sister Sidonie, who has a small but quintessential role in ‘Beautiful Monsters’.
I’m so very thrilled. and honored that ‘Beautiful Monsters’ has been published in SLAY, surely a groundbreaking anthology, the first of its kind, and to add my voice to the chorus of wonderful authors writing stories of vampires from the African Diaspora.
Valjeanne Jeffers is a speculative fiction writer, a Spelman College graduate, and a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Carolina African America Writers’ Collective. She is the author of nine books, including her Immortal and her Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective series.
Valjeanne has been published in numerous anthologies including: Steamfunk!; The Ringing Ear; Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler; Fitting In: Historical Accounts of Paranormal Subcultures; Sycorax’s Daughters; Black Magic Women, The Bright Empire, and, most recently, All the Songs We Sing, and Bledrotica Volume I. Visit Valjeanne at: www.vjeffersandqveal.com
‘Message in a Vessel’ by V.G. Harrison
Featuring Dr. Adelynn Jakande, ‘Message in a Vessel’ takes place on the moon in the distant future where a virus has turned most of the world into vampires. The few humans who are left can no longer feed the rest of the world. Vampire and bioinformatics specialist Dr. Jakande is faced with the task of helping her people look to the stars for new sources of food. There are no threats to the mission, so it’s a go… until Dr. Jakande double-checks what little humanity she has left.
I’d say that my vampire is unlike any vampire written before because she is not originally human. When Nicole posted the call for SLAY submissions and I read the description of “unique, never before seen vampires”, I knew I could knock this out. I thought, “what if…we took the giant, most gentle being on the planet and turned it sour?” And so Talik, the vampire elephant, was created.
I lived with my family in Mozambique for a period of time and fell in love with a small village named Machanga. That is where I base my story, except in my world, Machanga was attacked by a league of vampires and killed Aziza’s family. Aziza trained to become a warrior who could protect her village and serve as a guardian.
But what is all that training good for if no one comes to attack?
Kruger National Park is losing elephants fast due to Talik’s rage and bloodlust. The Order of vampire slayers calls in Aziza, a warrior in the area and of interest to the Order, to help slay the beast and find the one responsible for transforming Talik into a monster.
This is Miranda J. Riley’s first published work! She has another short story in the works for publication through Prospective Press and she thanks Mocha Memoirs Press for the chance to share her talents. You can follow her on Twitter @TheSpunkyDragon and friend her on Facebook. You can also check out her beta website at https://mjrileyonline.co. Miranda is originally from Brazil and has lived on three different continents in her short lifetime. She gathers inspiration from the people, places, and events that have impacted her life.
SLAY, full of some fantastic authors, is due out on 13th October, and available to pre-order now:
Vampires ahoy! Today we’re looking back at one specific film, that fascinating piece of horror/blaxploitation known as Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973). And why? Well, mostly because this sequel to Blacula (1972) is pure seventies Black fun and horror, apart from a few white cops shoved in to increase the victim count. Count, get it? Never mind. And it’s also a film that, whilst enjoyable as it is, should have been great, far greater…
First of all, we say ‘blaxploitation’, but hold your horsepower a moment. Blaxploitation or blacksploitation has been described as:
“An ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The films, while popular, suffered backlash for disproportionate numbers of stereotypical film characters showing bad or questionable motives, including most roles as criminals resisting arrest…
“Blaxploitation films set in the Northeast or West Coast mainly take place in poor urban neighborhoods. Pejorative terms for white characters, such as “cracker” and “honky,” are commonly used. Blaxploitation films set in the South often deal with slavery and miscegenation. The genre’s films are often bold in their statements and utilize violence, sex, drug trade, and other shocking qualities to provoke the audience. The films usually portray black protagonists overcoming “The Man” or emblems of the white majority that oppresses the Black community.”
Yet Scream, Blacula, Scream isn’t really that way out, and we could question it being placed under the blaxploitation umbrella (although the period and commercial intent make that fairly inevitable). For our money, it has the makings of a decent mainstream horror film. One with Black characters, of course, for perfectly good reasons.
The non-vampire hero is an ex-cop and collector of valuable African artefacts – he’s not there to clean up mean streets or deprived neighbourhoods – and he is friends with at least one African professor. He has good relationships with the local police; the heroine is a sophisticated woman who happens to practice voodoo as part of a local sect/group. Their social scene is not faux ‘ghetto’ and alleyways, but urbane living room parties.
And the titular Blacula is not a criminal or raving madman, but a cursed African prince who is not exactly delighted by his own vampiric condition. In addition, there’s hardly any other criminal activity in the film – unless you count making and staking vampires – and only a throwaway Black pimp scene for a bit of background excitement. Although described as being set in Los Angles, it was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia.
william marshall and pam grier
The film critic Roger Ebert had this to say in 1973:
“Scream, Blacula, Scream” is an adequate vampire movie, which is to say that a satisfactory number of vampires spring out of hiding and sink their teeth into helpless victims, and there are abundant shots of vampires with blood drooling down their chins. But beyond those two prerequisites, the movie isn’t exactly the best thing in its line since Taste the Blood of Dracula.
“(William Marshall and Pam Grier) both have a lot of style; so much, indeed, that it stands out in this routine movie. Marshall has the kind of pseudo-Shakespearean dialog and delivery that Vincent Price and others have been polishing at Hammer. And Miss Grier, a real beauty, has a spirit and enthusiasm that’s refreshing. Also, she can scream well, and that is always important in these enterprises.”
There’s no doubt that William Marshall, as Blacula/Prince Mamuwalde, is well-suited to the role. In fact, he has moments of being magnificent and genuinely threatening. With presence, stature and a deep, powerful voice, he can certainly stand alongside other ‘Draculas’ of the period. As for Ebert’s ‘pseudo-Shakespearean’:
“(Marshall) played Shakespeare many times on the stage in the U.S. and Europe, including the title role in at least eight different productions of “Othello”. His Othello (which was later captured in a video production in 1981), was called by the London Sunday Times “the best Othello of our time”
IMDB
TRIVIA: We were delighted to find that Marshall had been in the first-season episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. entitled ‘The Vulcan Affair’ – because 1968 he also appeared as Dr. Richard Daystrom in the Star Trek episode ‘The Ultimate Computer’. A great performance, in which his scientific efforts were initially supported by Mr Spock – a Vulcan.
marshall as daystrom
It’s sad that Ebert’s 1973 review ended with the sentence “Scream, Blacula, Scream is just an interim exploitation effort, and a warm-up for the better vampires in Marshall’s future.” There should have been more, and the film allows for a sequel, but alas, that was never to be – no further Blacula films were made. If the world were fair, Marshall would have ended up with the same status in vampire filmology as someone like Christopher Lee.
SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM? SO, IS IT ANY GOOD?
Yeah, but listen…
The score is wobbly. Dark tones occasionally, but too much seventies plinky Quincey ME stuff, and a song at the end which doesn’t help a lot. The direction is erratic – scenes start suddenly without explanation, jumping to ‘and then this’. Women scream for ages and then suddenly stop; men charge around without any obvious clear plan. We can live with that, but it could have been tighter – the pacing isn’t always in keeping with the story.
There’s nothing terribly wrong with the effects, but more money might have helped – the voodoo parts are quite eerie and powerful; the vampire parts vary, and aren’t helped by the use of ‘werewolf’ eyebrows to show that a character is being vampiric.
for the love of god, shave my eyebrows!
The humour is light to variable. The character who raises Blacula, Willis (Richard Lawson), starts the film with promise, as if he is going to be a main player, determined to take his place at the head of the voodoo cult, but then gets bitten, and drivels away into a weak comedy figure who serves no real purpose, complaining about not being able to admire his own threads in the mirror. Whilst this puts the focus on Blacula as the ‘baddie’, it’s a wasted opportunity, with the mammaloi/pappaloi issue almost completely abandoned.
pam grier and don mitchell, centre
The female lead, Lisa (the now legendary Pam Grier), is stylish and capable, but misused (or underused). A touch more agency and determination would have helped. Instead, the focal point for the ‘goodies’ throughout most of the film is the ex-cop we mentioned earlier, Justin (Don Mitchell, also known as Officer Mark Sanger in Ironside). Who is fine, and is given the routine role of being the one who first suspects vampires, gets the authorities to listen, and so on. One of the nice parts is when he persuades a gang of mostly white cops to take up wooden stakes when they raid the vampire lair, and although clearly dubious, they go along with it (not that it helps them that much, as they wander around inside fairly incompetently and get done in a lot).
The only notable white character is the senior police officer Harvey Dunlop (Michael Conrad). Nor is there any reason, to be frank, why he couldn’t have been Black as well.
Where the film works best is at the start and towards the end. When Mamuwalde says that “you have a power unlike my own” to the voodoo priestess, and seeks her help in removing his curse, you have some good stuff. The presence of a voodoo fetish doll during the film’s introductory scene and again when Blacula is being ‘exorcised’ is another nice touch. Which shows you what Scream, Blacula, Scream could have been – an innovative take on the demonic spirit of the vampire, and the power of other ancient beliefs (rather than just throwing a cross and a priest into the mix, as was done with many traditional vampire films). The more ‘African’ moments are the best ones, and given that Blacula himself started as African nobility, this would had fitted nicely.
“Scream Blacula Scream is actually better than the first film because it makes the story a bit more complex and interesting. Bringing the voodoo aspect into the plot, (something that is also the basis of the classic 1974 Blaxploitation-Horror film Sugar Hill), gives us more depth to bite into.”
The Grindhouse Cinema Database
In Conclusion
Yes, Scream, Blacula, Scream is enjoyable and well worth a look, as long as you don’t expect too much; the Hammer-type Dracula franchise that never got a fair chance, and absolute proof that the Black vampire film can work.
Ready for more tales of the Black vampire? You’re in luck, because SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire, full of some fantastic authors, is due out 13th October. And it’s available to pre-order NOW:
It’s a week of vampire stuff, so we’re meeting a few of the authors from the forthcoming SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire anthology, coming soon from Mocha Memoirs Press. Today we’re delighted to have Vonnie Winslow Crist and Penelope Flynn with us…
Today’s bold assertion – there never was an African vampire. Africa is hardly short of powerful and worrying myths, or tales of blood-drinking, psychic draining and the like, but… vampires? We shall argue not. And if there are such creatures there today, then they are the matter of the new urban myth, the product of colonial-era fears, or adaptations of folklore for modern fantasy and horror stories (see later below).
To put it another way, Africa never held that figure beloved of many horror readers and romanticists – the cursed or afflicted human being who dies, rises from the grave as one of the undead, and goes for the jugular, drinking blood for sustenance. No vampire in the Gothic or Stoker tradition, nor in the mould of Balkan fears; no Varney or Nosferatu or Dracula equivalent.
“(In Africa) there are any number of folkloric or legendary creatures that subsist on the blood of the living, but these are not truly the undead.”
John L. Vellutini, Editor of the Journal of Vampirology, Interview 2016
Those who like to interconnect beliefs from different cultures are often tempted to include the ‘African vampire’, as it makes a nice extra chapter – or serves as a way to tempt people into examining folklore which for once isn’t European-centred. We’re all for that last part, and for respecting African lore, but putting something under a heading doesn’t make it a vampire.
NOTE: This piece is mostly about folklore, not fiction, so we’re not covering the obvious link in Anne Rice’s novel The Queen of the Damned, where the mother of all vampires, Akasha, begins as a queen in Kemet (proto-Egypt), many thousands of years ago. According to Rice, an evil spirit captures the soul of the dying queen and pulls it back into her body, turning her into a vampire. As far as we know, there are no genuine Egyptian vampire myths.
Maybe we’ll talk about the rich and complex history of related Caribbean/Americas legends another time, but for today, let’s round up some of those African tales. These are of folk-beings which have come to be described as ‘vampire-like’ or ‘vampiric in nature’, by later, usually Western, authors already infected with the vampire concept. In addition, many accounts are second and third hand, drawn from long and varied oral traditions, and then percolated through modern sensibilities, but we’ll work with what we have…
The Asasabonsam
Almost twenty years after the publication of Stoker’s Dracula, R. Sutherland Rattray published his Ashanti Proverbs – The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. These were apparently selected from a collection of Tshi proverbs published by the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society in 1879.
Setting aside any colonial spin and prejudice about Ashanti culture – that title gives quite a lot away (!) – Rattray describes the Asasabonsam, which belongs to the folklore of the Akan of southern Ghana, as well as Côte d’Ivoire and Togo, as:
“a monster of human shape, which living far in the depths of the forest, is only occasionally met by hunters. It sits on tree tops, and its legs dangle down to the ground and have hooks for feet which pick up any one who comes within reach. It has iron teeth. There are female, male, and little sasabonsam.”
artist unknown
Similarly, according to A Dictionary of World Mythology, “the hairy Sasabonsam has large blood-shot eyes, long legs, and feet pointing both ways. Its favourite trick is to sit on the high branches of a tree and dangle its legs so as to entangle the unwary hunter.”
The Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology adds the following:
“During the photography of a sasabonsam sculpture in Ghana, J. B. Danquah was told by an Ashanti youth present in the crowd that a sasabonsam had once been killed by a man named Agya Wuo and brought to his town, where it had been observed by a number of people. According to the youth, Agya Wuo had come across the sasabonsam sleeping in a tree hollow in a dense forest, and fatally injured it after it “emitted a cry like that of a bat but deeper”. He took the body back to his village, where it died after making “ho, ho” noises, then on to the bungalow of District Commissioner L. W. Wood, who supposedly photographed it on 22 February 1928.
“When questioned about the incident by Danquah, Wood “seemed uncertain whether he had indeed photographed such a creature,” and cautiously said that “he may have taken the snap and the film, when developed, may have shown nothing!”. He had not been in Ashanti in February 1928, but he had been there in February 1918, making it possible that the youth had misremembered the date of the incident.”
Whatever the truth, you will note that the monster in question is neither human in origin nor undead. It is not an African vampire.
The Obayifo
The obayifo is sometimes described as a creature in its own right, and yet more properly the word refers to a broader body of beliefs and practices, often called witchcraft.
Rattray writes of the obayifo:
“(This is) a kind of human vampire whose chief delight is to suck the blood of children, whereby the latter pine and die. Men and women possessed of this power and credited with volitant powers, being able to quit their bodies and travel great distances in the night. Besides sucking the blood of their victims, they are supposed to be able to extract the sap and juices of crops. Cases of coco blight are ascribed to the work of the obayifo.
“These witches are supposed to be very common, and a man never knows but that his friend or even his wife may be one. When prowling at night they are supposed to emit a phosphorescent light. An obayifo in every day life is supposed to be known by having sharp, shifty eyes, that are never at rest, also by showing an undue interest in food, and always talking about it, especially meat, and hanging about when cooking is going on, all of which habits are therefore purposely avoided.”
Ashanti Proverbs (1916)
On the other hand, Modjaben Dowuona, a West African representative at the First International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1934 spoke more broadly on the subject of obayifo, and made it clear that obayifo represented a range of activities by certain people, not a folk monster as such:
“There are in the main two forms in which witchcraft is practised. The first takes the form of a power to do harm to other people, especially children, without any physical contact or concrete act of poisoning. Death due to poisoning is considered separate from that believed to be due to witchcraft, though in practice it is not always distinguished from it. The tendency is to ascribe to witchcraft any death which cannot be accounted for on other grounds. It seems that this non-physical way of killing was first directed against children, as is evidenced from the Twi word for witchcraft, ‘Bayi’ meaning literally ‘taking away or removing children.’ It is interesting to find that a corrupt form of the word, namely ‘obeah’ appears in the West Indies, though there it is associated with the worship of various cults.”
Quoted in Psychic Phenomena Of Jamaica by Joseph J. Williams, S.J. (1934)
So this is ‘witch lore’ – the obayifo is a willing, living human being – and not vampire lore as Europeans would know it.
The Adze
The adze is said to be a vampiric being from the folklore of the Ewe people, who are concentrated in the coastal areas of West Africa, especially Togo and Ghana.
Illustration copyright, from the site of a Black, formerly Zimbabwean, artist now living in London, who has some great art on show.
Wikipedia’s entry pretty much summarises what most sources have to say about the being:
“In the wild, the adze takes the form of a firefly, though it will transform into human shape upon capture. When in human form, the adze has the power to possess humans. People, male or female, possessed by an adze are viewed as witches (“abasom” in the Ewe language). The adze’s influence would negatively affect the people who lived around their host. A person is suspected of being possessed in a variety of situations, including: women with brothers (especially if their brother’s children fared better than their own), old people (if the young suddenly started dying and the old stayed alive) and the poor (if they envied the rich). The adze’s effects are generally felt by the possessed victim’s family or those of whom the victim is jealous.
“In firefly form, the adze would pass through closed doors at night and suck blood from people as they slept. The victim would fall sick and die. Tales of the creature and its effects were probably an attempt to describe the potentially deadly effects of mosquitoes and malaria. There is no defence against an adze.”
Unfortunately for the African vampire hunter, there is no suggestion that the adze is undead or risen from the grave.
The Ramanga
The Ramanga is not that well recorded, but it is mentioned occasionally as a ‘vampire-like’ being. This belongs to the Betsileo people of Madagascar, who – whilst officially mostly Protestant or Catholic – still draw on indigenous religious beliefs, including belief in the presence of witches and diviners.
Quite what a Ramanga is remains unclear – we’ve so far found no period source material for it. Some say that it represents a person who takes on ritual roles for important tribal figures, such as drinking blood and eating nail clippings; others that it is a creature which does the same thing but for its own appetites. The jury is out, although none of the above require it to be undead – so it has no clear claim to be a African vampire, we fear.
Colonialism and Mythology
Where vampire lore in Africa does turn up again, on the other hand, is in stark reality. At the start of this post, we mentioned new urban myths and colonial-era fears. Following contemporary rumours of vampires in Malawi and nearby countries, you may come across a rather different narrative from ancient folk monsters.
“According to Tim Allen, an expert at the London School of Economics who has written on violence related to vampire stories in Uganda, large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa share broad and ancient—if shifting—beliefs in witchcraft and blood’s esoteric powers. Vampire tales proper seem to be a recent permutation on these beliefs. While Witches are traditionally described as insiders manipulating their neighbors’ lives, vampires are seen as outsiders who would steal from a community.
“Unsurprisingly, these themes gained currency in Africa about a century ago, at the height of European colonialism. Their specifics vary greatly, but such stories reflect lingering anxiety ‘about extraction and harm and uncertainty that is sometimes extremely powerful and sometimes not even mentioned,’ according to Luise White, a University of Florida historian.
“ ‘In colonial Zambia in the 1930, Africans claimed their blood was taken and their bodies left for dead to make cough drops for Europeans,’ she told me. ‘Can you think of a better description of the exploitation for luxuries for white people?’ ”
In her own book, Speaking with Vampires – Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (2000), White says:
“I call this transnational genre of African stories vampire stories, not because I want to insert a lively African oral genre into a European one, but because I want to use a widespread term that adequately conveys the mobility, the internationalism, and the economics of these colonial bloodsuckers. No other term depicts the ease with which bloodsucking beings cross boundaries, violate space, capture vulnerable men and women, and extract a precious bodily fluid from them… Europe’s literary vampires were a separate race, which fed, slept, and reproduced differently from humans.
“Yet I worry, as historians of Africa are prone to do, that an African specificity will be lost when I invoke a dominant European term, worry that all the regional and local history in this book will be submerged into a vision of African vampires congruent with that of European lore.”
The politics of colonial and post-colonial Africa are far darker than any myth or encyclopedia of legends.
In Conclusion
So, we stick to our statement that there never was an African vampire in folklore terms (if you can prove us wrong, we’d be delighted to hear from you!). This is not in itself a problem for writers and readers – much vampire literature is fairly divorced from its Balkans folkloric origins anyway. Moldavian and Transylvanian villagers might have recognised aspects of African witch lore as related to their own striga, but would have been puzzled by dark, romantic figures flitting around siring dynasties, or conning young American women into baring those long necks…
So as far as the African vampire in contemporaryfiction is concerned, anything goes. There’s even no particular reason why there can’t be a predatory upper caste Kenyan who is secretly a dracula, wears a cape, and goes out to seduce and exsanguinate the young women of Mombasa – or a Cape Town vampire queen, etc. Nomadic herders and hyenas could even do their bidding, as gypsies and wolves are in short supply down there. Quite whether or not this would read well is beyond us.
Or writers can abandon the term ‘vampire’ altogether when writing African-set stories, and focus on the nature of sickness, psychic draining and post-mortem survival in new ways – perhaps echoing aspects of obayifo and other practices. Remember that Luise White phrase: “(I) worry that all the regional and local history in this book will be submerged into a vision of African vampires congruent with that of European lore.”
Finally, note that the argument against indigenous African vampires has nothing to do with the issue of Black vampires in fiction. If vampirism is contagious, or transmissible by bite, or whatever, then vampires can be of any colour, creed or nation. Maybe science has produced them, through some insane haematological experiment; maybe Balkan legends developed from a nest of Black vampires driven across the seas.
Or maybe a century or more ago, a Black trader, scholar or seaman felt the icy breath of a dracula upon his neck…
NOTE: In that ‘vein’, we’ll be covering both Blacula and Blade the Vampire Killer later this week)
And if you want to pursue the Black vampire, 13th October 2020 sees the exciting launch of SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire, from Mocha Memoirs Press:
“SLAY aims to be the first anthology of its kind. Few creatures in contemporary horror are as compelling as the vampire, who manages to captivate us in a simultaneous state of fear and desire. Drawing from a variety of cultural and mythological backgrounds, SLAY dares to imagine a world of horror and wonder where Black protagonists take center stage — as vampires, as hunters, as heroes. From immortal African deities to resistance fighters; matriarchal vampire broods to monster hunting fathers; coming of age stories to end of life stories, SLAY is a groundbreaking Afrocentric vampire anthology celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the African Diaspora.”
SLAY, full of some fantastic authors, is available to pre-order now:
