Six Damn Fine Degrees #210: The Little Vampire (1985)

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I wonder whether director Jim Jarmusch was aware of TV’s The Little Vampire, which I watched ferociously growing up in the mid-’80s. Weren’t the slim-hipped goth vampires in his Only Lovers Left Alive (whom Julie described so well in last week’s piece) potentially inspired by this definitely goth-rock take on vampirism in the present-day world? It would be too interesting to ask and find out!

To me at least, this first German and Canadian TV adaptation of Angela Sommer-Bodenburg’s successful young adult novel certainly was by then, aged five or six, the most exciting thing I had seen. The story of boy vampire Rüdiger (Joel Dacks), who inhabits the local crypt of an anonymous metropolis with his ecclectic family members (Familie von Schlotterstein in German), immediately struck a cord. Alongside sister Anna (Marsha Moreau), Aunt Hildegard (Lynn Seymour) and Uncle Ludwig (horror legend Michael Gough, no less!), he had to hide away during daytime just to come out and seek nightly victims after dusk.

The fifth and certainly most noticeable family member was cousin Lumpi (Jim Gray), who looked straight out of a Sex Pistol biopic or the latest Duran Duran music video. Coincidenally, Gray contributed the series’ title song “They Can See in the Dark”, which he performed with his punk band Dark Room. This, of course, was one of the first songs I taped directly off the TV speakers and the very first Napster download I ever made.

Of course, the plot goes well beyond the crypt and the adjoining cemetary, even if the oddball character of this quirky vampire family made up for much of the series’ charm. The book’s actual protagonist, a boy by the name of Anton Basker (Anton Bohnensack in German), comes into focus when he strikes a friendship with his unlikely nightly visitor Rüdiger, who soon teaches him to fly across the nightly city in his cape covered with a sprinkle of “flying powder”. You can imagine how often I had childhood dreams of doing just that while following Rüdiger to the crypt!

However, The Little Vampire was also truly scary to me, not at all because of the vampires themselves, whose bloodlust is considerably tamed down here and their characteristics rather come across as charming satire of all the known vampire clichés. What was really frightening, instead, was their foe, the man who roamed the cemetery at night, chewing garlic, singing threatening songs and trying to find and stake out each vampire: Detective Gerrmeyer (or Johann Geiermeier in German), played by none other than German star Gert Fröbe!

Years before I turned into an ardent Bond fan and would see Fröbe face Sean Connery as legendary gangster Goldfinger, I already feared him here. His Gerrmeyer is imposing and loud, conniving and odd, and he makes you dread the prospect of any member of the vampire family eventually getting caught. The series built on this asset of having such a powerful performance by employing Fröbe in many of the suspense scenes. Often, Anton, Rüdiger and the von Schlotterstein family would escape Gerrmeyer’s greedy paws just in the nick of time!

Fröbe had already practiced such roles as creepy child murderer (It Happened in Broad Daylight, which landed him the Bond villain role) and as countless villains, inspectors, doctors, generals and aristocrats in international productions throughout the ’60s and ’70s (the Mabuse films, Bergman’s Serpent’s Egg, These Magnificent Men in their Flying Machine, just to name a few), and he had recently made an impression as Robber Hotzenplotz, which might have sealed the deal for The Little Vampire. Sadly, it was also to be one of Fröbe’s final performances, as the actor died just two years after the series’ release in 1988.

According to media reports at the time, the Gerrmayer role gave Fröbe a chance to brush up on his English for the production, which was entirely filmed in Edmonton, Alberta. Fröbe had famously been dubbed in the Bond role, even after investing heavily in mastering English for the shoot. The Little Vampire also gave Fröbe a final chance to show off his singing skills, with Gerrmayer boasting about his vampire-hunting skills in a second signature tune for the series. In no surprise to anyone who has seen any of his films, Fröbe could be kookily endearing and downright threatening at the same time, and this role was a great showcase for both. I’m sure that on set in Canada, he would have been everybody’s darling and a treat to work with, and photos and articles of the time certainly seem to confirm this.

The Little Vampire was probably my favourite TV series growing up, and its semi-satirical tone and the presence of Michael Gough and Gert Fröbe certainly played a big role in this. In a way, it was also an early encounter with the world of vampires and the world of international film and TV at large. Later adaptations of the same novel consequently were of little interest to me, as they were missing the key ingredient of being something during one’s childhood that just happens in the right way and at the exact right time. I can’t wait to watch it again one of these days!