The Lake Vampire (2018)

Original title: El Vampiro del Lago

Venezuela. Ernesto Navarro (Sócrates Serrano) is earning his bread as a journalist, but because he’s written a pretty unpopular novel years ago (“It’s a cult novel”, he’ll tell everyone he meets, if they want to know or not), he’s calling himself a “writer”. He has a mild case of being a manipulative prick, too, which turns out to be a useful character trait when he becomes fascinated with a series of murders. The perpetrator only leaves behind the heads of his victims, but forensic evidence suggests he is somehow draining them of blood before the beheadings. On one occasion, the killer also leaves behind the burnt remains of a copy of Ernesto’s book, signed no less, so it’s really no wonder that our protagonist turns from interested in the case as a source for a new book to slightly obsessed with it.

Turns out Ernesto can’t be too bad a journalist, after all, for he manages to acquire rather a lot of interesting information about the case in a very short time once he starts on actual research. Apparently, he learns, this is not at all the only serial murder case in Venezuelas’s recent past with this rather specific modus operandi; these things have been going on for decades, if not longer. Ernesto makes contact with a now retired policeman who investigated some of these cases. After some dithering Jeremias Morales (Miguel Ángel Landa), as he is called, begins telling Ernesto some extensive flashback tales, also including a flashback inside the flashback to things about an investigation in a very similar case in the early 20th Century. The killer may very well be an immortal vampire, involved in a pact with Satan and assisted by some kind of occult conspiracy.

Carl Zitelmann’s Venezuelan horror film – with a healthy dose of the mystery genre – The Lake Vampire is an interesting little film. Its flaws are clear and obvious. It is a very talky film, and not all of that talk seems strictly necessary for plot, character, mood or theme, but rather based on the director’s enjoyment of simply showing his very game cast – Landa’s effortless grumpy old-man charm is particularly lovely – interacting with one another. I’m also not terribly sure the flashback structure needed to be quite this extensive, for while all of it is certainly useful to a degree to establish how far back the cases of vampirism the film is about reach into the past of Venezuela, and do quite a bit to ground the tale in the country as a specific place with its specific history, too, there’s a bit too much repeated detail for my taste.

On the other hand, this is definitely for once a talky film with interesting dialogue that shows a sardonic edge befitting a tale of vampires, serial killers and the devil, eschewing pop culture witticisms for a perfectly fitting, more old-fashioned kind of refinement. I also found myself rather taken with the construction of the occult business here, the cleverly underplayed insanity actually feeling coherent and true to the characters involved instead of built for a shocking/idiotic twist for once.


Visually, the film sometimes struggles a bit with the period sequences, clearly not having enough of a budget for full-on recreation, but Zitelmann nails all of the film’s central scenes of horror, and does handle all of the extensive talking very well, too. There’s also quite a bit of something still relatively seldom seen in – especially supernatural - horror movies: effective scenes of horror by daylight, carried by the director’s eye for creepy landscape shots. Nature can be as claustrophobic as a locked room, after all.