all is friendship, mutual aid and kindness

 cold grey morning outside. nice and toasty inside. 

valerie and her week of wonders.

it is of course an anti-clerical fairy story. the church and the bourgeoisie are rotten with vampires. your family are vampires. but sex is the driving force of the universe, the servant girls are at it, the farm labourers are at it. the birds and the bees are at it . the metonymic animals, the bees and the chickens, these represent the people, the bees fly in and out of a hive  in the wooden statues of a man and a woman through a slot where the generative organs are, the chickens are in the dovecote, chicken blood may be substituted for human blood, but the vampire is represented also as the polecat. 

our 13 year old heroine must fend off the inappropriate attentions of the vampires (even those in her own family)  if she is to recreate the family scene, if she is to enable the return of her mother and the recovery of her aunt and father (the bishop) from vampirism, if she is to escape the inquisition, if she is to grow and mature. and because this is a bright optimistic film, one filmed in the sunshine, she does it. 

it is the sexualisation of minors that is difficult for modern viewers not to worry about. like sweetback's badass song or jodie foster in taxi driver or whoever gets to play lolita or carrie  or christiane F.  people go to the cinema because they want to see (how much footage of a semi-naked 13 year old do we really need to see). 

if it were to be remade today it would probably be remade like the hunger games or twilight (or indeed buffy the vampire slayer). a fully clothed film of teenage daring-do. but it is not a night journey. most of it takes place in broad beneficent sunlight. valerie's motives are not sexual - with her  it is all friendship, mutual aid and kindness, this is what provides the cure against vampirism. her diet is not chicken and red wine, it is all honey and apples.

because this is a bright optimistic film, one filmed in the sunshine, she does it. everybody is at the picnic in the woods, her parents and aunt are returned to her (seemingly in pre-vampiric form), only the lustful priest is punished (imprisoned in a bird's cage sunken into the ground as if half-forgotten already). 

it made horsemouth feel nostalgic for the beauty of the czech republic (and poland also). for the old town squares when the sun shines and there is beer. 

horsemouth's friends would probably suggest that he should be watching more vera chytilova (sedmikrasky has a similar rabelaisian optimism, something different less so). there's a thing in milan kundera where sex becomes the thing that is possible instead of freedom (and therefore becomes tainted).  

horsemouth is not sure what he is up to today. 

it is the 180th anniversary of the birth of the reverend kilvert. he lived rural idyll in clyro near hay-on-wye. he liked them young and pretty and frequently confides this to his diary. how much notice you take of this depends on how you read it. there was a particular victorian habit of sentimentalising young girls (alice by kilvert's friend lewis carroll is a particular example of it).