The Awakened

Arabus Drake acts as narrator, beginning with an explosion of dirt covering his grave. He goes back into his past in 1503 Greece to observe what happened to his former mortal self that caused this to happen, with the hopes he can change this frightening consequence of mortal cowardice that led him into undeath.

Mikos is a cowardly boy, afraid of the stories of Vlad the Impaler, and of bats and death. At age 10 he is taken from his family and forced to become an Ottoman Turk Soldier, as was the Muslim custom of taking the second son of every Christian family in Greece to serve as a Janizary soldier. Mikos befriends another young boy, Dimitri, who tells him that his family would have been killed if they had tried to stop the Turks from taking him. He vows to be Dimitri’s friend forever, a vow he would come to regret.

The scenes with the mortal Mikos move rapidly to his inevitable murder at age 30. His fate is sealed when he meets the love of his life, Althea. As they attempt to escape the Janizary life, they are betrayed by Dimitri and killed. But while Althea’s spirit rises freely to the afterlife realm, Mikos is filled with anger. This anger allows the demons of the underworld to grab his essence and re-animate his corpse. Althea sees his fate and becomes trapped in the earthly plane as a ghost, to try and help him learn to control the demons.

Mikos is undead, a Vrykolakas, a Greek vampire, much to his horror, and at first cannot understand why this ghostly apparition is following him around, haunting him with images he doesn’t understand. He goes on a venge-filled killing spree, allowing the demons control.

Once all of those are dead responsible for killing him, he starts to hear her voice, but the thirst is overwhelming and innocent people begin to fall. One young girl gives him the name Arabus and we see with her for the first time Arabus’s efforts to control his thirst.

But the movie is filled with more blood as the pain of what he has become is often too much for him to bear, and he allows the demons control. Arabus must come to the realization that Althea’s love was real, that he had been too cowardly to let her go in life, and that love does not die with death. When Althea inhabits the body of another gypsy, Arabus kills her family and they have the ultimate showdown. Arabus sees that she is also Althea and makes her undead, too, but Althea’s spirit leaves the corpse, forcing him to deal only with Kindra’s hate.

After destroying Kindra, in a symbolic twist, he overcomes his recurring fear of bats by swatting one to the ground at the end of this story, symbolizing his growing control over the demons.