Tag Archives: Andrew Rakich

Interviews, Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EP. 191: ANDREW RAKICH & VERONIKA PAYTON, THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS

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Discussed in this episode:

The Vampires of New Orleans: Atun-Shei Films’ documentary/narrative hybrid delivers a story of vampires in modern New Orleans wrapped around interviews exploring the city’s horrific folklore.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987): Read Giles Edwards’ festival capsule. A tax collector encounters ghosts (and a rapping swordsman) in ancient China in this wild Hong Kong New Wave classic. Buy A Chinese Ghost Story.

“The Complete Kubrick”: Everything directed—including Canonically Weird entries 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange—in one glorious 4K UHD/Blu-ray box set from the . It goes without saying this ain’t cheap, but well worth it if you can swing it. Buy “The Complete Kubrick.”

“Fantastique: The Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema”: A box set of obscure fantastique French films spanning the 1930s to the 90s: Dans la nuit, La nuit fantastique, Le Diable souffle, The Golem, The Woman with Red Boots, and Three Lives and Only One Death. While the movies themselves may be unknown, familiar names like , , , , and ‘s son Jean Luis pop up throughout. (This is a pre-order for a November 10 release). Buy “Fantastique: The Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema.”

I Want Your Sex (2026): A sociopathic artist seduces her naive young assistant into an dangerously inappropriate sexual relationship. This unconventional (but not quite weird) B&D rom-com from appears on 4K UHD + Blu-ray with no extras. Buy I Want Your Sex.

Visitor Q (2001): Read the Canonically Weird review! Surprisingly (or maybe not, considering its straight-to-DVD origins) Takashi Miike‘s transgressive assault on the traditional family has never appeared on Blu-ray until now; Radiance to the rescue! Buy Visitor Q.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

No guest is scheduled on next week’s Halloween edition of Pod 366, but Greg, Giles and Pete will be there to discuss the week’s weird news and new releases. In written content, Michael Diamades gets weird for Halloween with the tale of Pere Portabella’s alternate cut of ‘s Count Dracula, Cuadecuc Vampire (1971); Enar Clarke investigates the new documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office; Shane Wilson finishes up his Halloween-themed reader-suggestion‘s by attending Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973), and Gregory J. Smalley looks at Ben Rivers’ experimental all-kid art film Mare’s Nest. Onward and weirdward!

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Courtnee Carter, , Andrew Rakich, , Monica R. Harris, Mekhai Lee, , Carl Sailor, ,

PLOT: When Brigitte Jackson’s sister is found dead under mysterious circumstances on the streets of New Orleans, she begins an investigation which leads her to a trinity of vampires; interspersed with this story is documentary footage exploring the city’s vampire heritage.

COMMENTS: “Y’all believe in vampires?”

It begins with the clap of a slate and an interview with “Sanguinarian Vampire” couple “Louis De Pointe Du Lac” and “Lestat De Lioncourt,” who found each other and moved to New Orleans’ French Quarter, in their words, “to live authentically regardless of society.” Then comes a series of interviews with various experts on “lifestyle vampires,” people self-identifying as vampires. This phenomenon appears to have started in the 1970s –80s in the NYC occult scene and grown in the1990s, with the Internet allowing more people to connect and converge on New Orleans to “live the Life.”

America has a love affair with vampires. They’re almost inescapable, everywhere you look.

Atun-Shei Film’s The Vampires Of New Orleans, a follow-up to their independent debut feature The Sudbury Devil, brings that same energy and cheek to a survey of tortured Americana that promises to be “the final word on the New Orleans Vampire as a pop culture figure.” It’s a big swing for an experimental docudrama. An epic one, in fact, clocking in at 159 minutes (including an Overture and Entr’acte, like a Hollywood roadshow picture). It will be interesting to see how audiences receive it.

The main narrative which hits the expected tropes of a vampire tale. Shania Jackson (Unique) is abducted by Nate Debney (Guiness), the human familiar for Jean-Louis D’Hemecourt (Rakich). D’Hemecourt has two sires: Josephine Macarti (Gregg) a Southern Belle turned vampire after her husband’s death in the Civil War, and the Axeman of New Orleans (Sailor), a (real) serial killer who preyed on Italian immigrants in 1918–19. This trio has been hunting and feeding in New Orleans for some time, with D’Hemecourt stressing that he “does not kill humans”—“humans” defined as “Whites.” Shania’s sister, Brigitte (Carter) crosses the path of the vamps while looking into the death, and with the assistance of her aunt Saffron (Harris) and street hustler/Voudon priest Dr. Tom (Lee) attempts to avenge her sister. It doesn’t play out as easily as they may hope.

It’s a straightforward narrative, but it’s all interspersed with those “expert” interviews—historians, tour guides, vampires (Sanguinarian and psychic)—who provide context and  commentary on vampire folklore, specifically that which involves New Orleans: the LaLaurie Mansion, the Casquette (casket) Girls, Jacques St. Germain, and the Axeman. They also provide a critique. While there proves to be rich and horrific historical lore in New Orleans, most, if not all, pertaining to vampires stems from a single source: Anne Rice’s “Interview With The Vampire,” published in the early to mid 70s, which fed the fantasies of self-identifying vamps and their acolytes and created a cottage industry of ghost tourism goosing up dry historical facts with the hook of the lurid supernatural. As one interviewee states, they’re “very grateful to Anne Rice for the tourism she brought.” “Interview” also helped sanitize the image of the vampire from the bloated, pestilent corpse depicted in European lore into a dark romantic figure, the aristocrat of Southern Gothic tales.

The real history became superseded by fictional legend: “a form of cultural amnesia, because Americans don’t like to face their real history; fictional stories drag us away from facing reality,” as one interviewee states. Vampires uses the fiction of D’Hemecourt to tell the actual stories it wants to impart about the metaphorical vampires of  New Orleans: corporate tourism replacing the soul of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; incarcerated labor as modern slavery, multi-generational poor communities turned into modern plantations. It may throw audiences expecting a more conventional vampire tale, but it’s rewarding for those willing to set expectations aside and go with the flow. The performances are good (most of the cast are veterans of Sudbury Devil). The length might be an issue for some, but the film doesn’t drag, helped immensely by Dillon Derosa’s score, which is as epic as the scope of the film.

The Vampires Of New Orleans is available to rent or buy via Atun-Shei Films’ website, and will drop on YouTube on 10/31: Halloween.

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE SUDBURY DEVIL (2023)

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The Sudbury Devil can be rented or purchased on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Andrew Rakich

FEATURING: , , , ,

PLOT: In 1678, 2 years after King Philip’s War, two Puritan witch hunters from Boston, John Fletcher (Guinness) and Josiah Cutting (Popa), are sent to a town in the Massachusetts sticks to investigate allegations of witchcraft and deviltry in the nearby woods by Isaac Goodenow (Van Guessel), where they encounter Patience Gavett (Gregg) and her companion Flora (Unique).

Still from "The Sudbury Devil" (2023)

COMMENTS: American folk horror is an established genre in literature, but it hasn’t quite made the jump to movies or television to the extent that its British cousins have. Outside of adaptations of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works (“The House of the Seven Gables”, “Young Goodman Brown” to name a couple), ‘s Eyes of Fire is probably the film people would point to, along with Ravenous and The Witch.1

The Sudbury Devil is a good addition to that slim lineup, and even more impressive for accomplishing what it does on its budget; of the films mentioned, it’s certainly the one that qualifies as microbudgeted, and it makes the most of its available resources.

If you mashed up A Field in England with Ravenous and The Witch,  you’d get The Sudbury Devil. It’s more than apparent that director/writer Rakich is a hardcore fan of the aforementioned films, and it’s to his and his cast and crew’s credit to have produced a film which goes further than its predecessors, as proper Hellspawn should.

Director/writer/actor Andrew Rakich is known for his Atun-Shei YouTube page, where he utilizes his knowledge and interest in history—he was a ‘living historian’ at Gettysburg National Military Park and a New Orleans tour guide—to produce work that amuses and informs. Starting from highlighting sites and events in New Orleans, he progressed to a Civil War series, “Checkmate, Lincolnites!”, which takes on the mythology of the South’s “Lost Cause” propaganda in entertaining fashion. Entertaining here means comedic, which makes sense; hard and unflattering truths tend to be accepted easier if there’s a laugh or joke involved, and once hooked, thinking can begin (ask filmmaker .) The same effect can be obtained by replacing laughs and jokes with dread and horror in Sudbury (although there is a touch of black humor in what the filmmakers describe as a “mischievous indictment of America’s foundational rot”).

As Sudbury lays it out, hypocrisy is at the heart of that rot. The justification of King Phillip’s War, which eradicated much of the indigenous population of New England, still weighs heavily on Fletcher in his nightmares. The “piety” of Cutting and Reverend Russell allows their disdain of women (specifically Patience). Russell supports  Mosley’s Company and the war, despite actively avoiding any involvement in it. Cutting dsiplays racism towards the original inhabitants of the land and towards Flora, despite his attraction.

While sex has always been a part of folk horror, it’s usually presented obliquely rather than directly. Sudbury puts it upfront: polyamory, homoeroticism, masturbation, gender-shifting, and even a climatic double penetration (although not in the way that you might expect.) Sex and sexual freedom is usually presented as aligned with devilry in folk horror, though Sudbury subverts that expectation.

In that sense, Sudbury is not only folk horror, but also a subset of what could be termed ‘Woke Horror’ (Get Out, Us, Harvest Lake, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster). This vein of film includes the works of , ‘s The People Under the Stairs (1991), and others; a long established tradition, so ‘Woke Horror’ isn’t such a new thing after all.

The Sudbury Devil will be available on VOD today, December 21—in time for Xmas!— on Rakich’s website, Atun-Shei Films. Other related work that may help in understanding the nuances of the film (King Phillip’ War, Sudbury area history, and specifics in the film) can be viewed there and on YouTube, as well as the webseries Checkmate, Lincolnites and The Witchfinder General, a lighter look at Puritanism. A physical media release may also happen sometime in 2024.

A note of interest for those literary horror aficionados who notice the name Tabitha King as an executive producer: yes, it is that Tabitha King (novelist and wife of an obscure writer named Stephen King). As Rakich explained in the Pod 366 interview, she is also a noted genealogist and had heard about the production and contributed to it.

Listen to our interview with Andrew Rakich and producer Veronika Payton about The Sudbury Devil.

  1. I’m certain there will be “That Guy” who pops in with some titles not named. That’s a protracted discussion for another time, after Vol. 2 of “All the Haunts Be Ours” is released… ↩︎
Interviews, Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EPISODE 48: THE SUDBURY DEVILS (ANDREW RAKICH AND VERONIKA PAYTON)

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366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Audio only link (Soundcloud download)

Quick links/Discussed in this episode:

The Sudbury Devil (2023): Interview begins. Two 17th century witch-hunters travel into the forest to investigate reports of devilish happenings; things eventually get weird. This low-budget historical folk horror is being self-distributed and will be released online on Dec. 21. In the meantime, check out these links:

Atun-Shei films – Check here for The Sudbury Devil and Andrew Rakich’s other feature films.

Atun-Shei YouTube channel – Rakish’s youtube channel hosts dozens of short historical documentaries (many of which add context to the movie), short films, and the film’s soundtrack.

Blacula (1972): Discussion begins. Read Giles Edwards’ review. Blacula arrives on Blu-ray for the first time, though unfortunately in a bare-bones release. (There’s also an accompanying DVD re-release). Buy Blacula.

The Boy and the Heron (2023): Discussion begins. ‘s surprise final film involves a boy traveling to a world between the living and the dead, meeting strange animals with character designs said to rival Spirited Away. It’s finally in wide release, a major event in the year’s cinematic calendar (for weirdos and normies alike). The Boy and the Heron U.S. distributor site.

Poor Things (2023): Discussion begins. highly anticipated adaptation of  Alasdair Gray’s novel about a woman who is revived from the dead, but with a fetus brain. Another major, major release this week. Poor Things official site.

Werner Herzog – Radical Dreamer (2022): Discussion begins. A talking heads documentary retrospective of the eminent director’s varied (and very often weird) career. In some theaters, but mainly available on VOD. Werner Herzog – Radical Dreamer official site.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

Next week’s scheduled guests on Pod 366 are the guys behind the found-footage sensation channel “Everything is Terrible!” (Not coincidentally, they’re also the team behind Canonically Weird The Holy Mountain-remade-with-dog-footage oddity Doggiewoggiez, Poochiewoochiez.) In written reviews, Shane Wilson reviews “La Cabina,” a Spanish short that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue; Giles Edwards advises you whether Japan’s 2021 remake puts a new twist on Cube; and Gregory J. Smalley hopes to make it to report on ‘s Dream Scenario before it disappears from theaters. Onward and weirdward!