The Curse of the Highgate Vampire
If I had known about Highgate Cemetery (just north of London) when I traveled to England last year to visit a friend, I absolutely would have visited. She says her favorite grave is that of Malcohm McLaren, but that’s because of her fashion and music background. Plus, she says, Karl Marx has two graves in the cemetery (the original and the one he was moved to in 1954).
Though I’m not a big fan of paranormal investigations, I landed on this “documentary” for the Halloween season. It’s a few years old, but I’m lazy and this is my contribution. Based on actual events, it loosely tells the tales of David Farrant and Sean Manchester, who became notorious in the early 1970s for their “work” with the paranormal activities of what has been described as “one of the most haunted cemeteries in the world”.
My problem with paranormal investigators is that they tend to be bad actors. As in, their acting is sub par and I don’t believe them. This short documentary is a sort of urban Blair Witch film, where a spooky, biologically amazing historical woodlands is not far from this spooky, historically amazing cemetery that is old and overgrown and has been fixed in the public zeitgeist as a gloriously spooky place. It’s full of ancient and fantastical headstones, sometimes shrouded in vegetation, with dark and narrow paths leading throughout. One night in 1969 a man named David Farrant claims to have seen a large apparition on the other side of the heavy, imposing iron gate of the cemetery.
You young’uns out there will be fascinated to discover that he made this claim in a “Letter to the Editor”. Back then, news was printed on paper and delivered to your door. One of the pages was the editorial, where opinion writers went on about whatever thing they were interested in, generally political in nature. A smaller part was letters that regular people would send in through the post office on actual paper about their own thing. A cat up a tree that was rescued, griping about the local council, or if you’re Farrant, about a large spectral being he saw through the Highgate gate. Once it was sent, you had to wait to see if it was printed, then wait even longer to see if anyone else would go to the effort of writing on paper and posting a reply to the newspaper. This was the antithesis of facebook or tiktok in its timing.
Farrant’s little letter lit a fuse and suddenly Highgate Cemetery became the Next Big Thing. Another paranormal investigator, Sean Manchester, latched onto the hubbub and claimed the being Farrant had seen was a vampire. Farrant denied until he died that he had seen an actual blood sucker. That didn’t stop a group of people mobbing the cemetery in October 1970 in what is called the “Highgate Riot”. It led, of course, to mayhem and damage and even a body being dragged out onto the road.
Both men banked on the cemetery’s story the rest of their lives. Farrant seems more like an actual believer, and the documentary portrays Manchester as essentially an internet troll.
Like other video about paranormal research, the original investigative camera work is jumpy like a Blair Witch handheld, and black and white and shot in the dark so peoples’ irises are blown and look weird. They always “feel” something that makes them run in fear after trying to interact with whatever is there. The documentarians continually refer back to a lengthy interview of Farrant interspersed between shots of gates, graves, roads at night, cool old buildings.
There’s a certain look of the film that will be familiar to people who enjoy that sort of thing.
Here’s the thing. I have actually seen a ghost, so I believe in that sort of thing. These shows bug me because I don’t feel like they are sincere. If you enjoy this kind of “spooky” videography, then I think you will very much enjoy this documentary. It kept my interest for fifty minutes, but I really felt like bad actors were trying to put one over on me. Of course, I am officially a curmudgeon.
Triggers: attempts at spooky stuff on film
Available on: Hulu, HBO Max, Prime Video
LINKS:
TRAILER: Couldn’t find a suitable trailer to share.
CFR: In Addition
Oooo. I may watch this. I do not remember hearing about this and I would find this fascinating. I LOVE that Crankhy talks about the subpar acting. LOLOLOLOL! Well that happens.
Now what I found interesting about writing this up is that there are lots of references to the Highgate Vampire and that means lots of movies and TV shows. So if I go to watch this, I bet I would find a lot of fun things to watch.
Here’s to the weekend.
