Not Remotely Yuletide in Theme - The Vampire's Ghost

This 1945 short feature is a very odd film indeed, combining the full-on vampire legend with the then fashionable jungle movie - all short in Hollywood, of course, on studio sets and with black actors dressed up as 'natives', broken English and all. Not surprisingly, the jungle genre does not seem ripe for revival.



It's a bizarre but oddly compelling idea - a vampire in Africa. It's based on a story by the remarkable Leigh Brackett, one of the few female stars of pulp science fiction and a respected Hollywood scriptwriter. Brackett also gets a script credit, and you can see her intelligence and playfulness in the way she handles this strange hybrid tale. But hark! The jungle drums are beating, and the natives turn out to be more clued-up about this vampire malarkey than the hapless white colonials.