From the Desk
Correcting the Record on Three Centuries of Vampires
A hundred and thirty-seven filings from the cinema, the shelf, the stage and the schedules, sorted by when the events claim to have happened rather than by when somebody got round to printing them — an arrangement in which you can watch the rules get invented, which is the only genuinely gripping thing about my own paperwork.
By Casimir Vane The Registers · Filed Under Protest 2026-09-02
The paper compiled the alien contact record, got the obvious follow-up question, and gave it to the one member of staff who keeps the hours. Newspapers call their clippings archive the morgue. Mine is the only one with a resident. The alien file is about arrival; mine is about being let in, and I have opinions.
In three centuries of filings the door is rarely forced, and neither, I would point out, is the throat. The thing is admitted. It buys the house, takes the room, knocks, or waits politely at the window, and I should like the record to show that this is manners rather than weakness. Two filings break the rule, and in one of them the occupants drive out and fetch the problem home themselves, which I am obliged to print and would dearly love not to be.
Everything else the record calls a defence turns out to be something this paper already reviews. The threshold is access control. The garlic is inventory. The boarded glass is window treatment. Three hundred years of terror, and the countermeasures file under home improvement. I did not go looking for that, I resent the tidiness of it, and I notice nobody has ever thanked me for wiping my feet.
The famous rules do not survive the file in equal measure, and I take no pleasure in reporting which of them are drained. The invitation holds across three centuries and has failed twice. The stake works, sometimes, though nobody has standardised the method in three hundred years, which for a procedure of that importance is frankly a scandal — there is a great deal at stake and no agreed length of one. Garlic is carried everywhere and was justified exactly once, in 1954. Running water is cited by everybody in the folklore and barely used by anyone in practice, so somebody has been taking us for a ride.
And sunlight, the most obeyed law of the lot, is not in Stoker. It was invented in 1922 by a print the courts ordered burned, the copies got out anyway, and every filing since has repeated it without checking. I have arranged three hundred afternoons around a clerical error. You will understand if I take this personally.
The register
Sorted by when the events claim to have happened, with the option above to re-sort by publication date instead. Both are worth having: one tells you when a story is set, the other lets you watch a rule get invented. Plates are typeset rather than illustrated, for the reason set out in the house rules.
The Undead Register
Scroll sideways. Arranged by period — when the events claim to have happened — with release order available above. One work to a card: no packets, no bundling, no adaptation folded into its source. Publication years are cited fact; periods and file references are ours.
Vampire chronology, 1725 to 2024
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UR-1988-QOD / Founding subject located
Plate XLVII
The Queen of the Damned
1988
Anne Rice
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Register Is Told Where It All Began, By Someone Who Was There
Period c. 4000 BC onward · the origin account The register's earliest claimed event, and its least verifiable.
- Jurisdiction
- Historical, extending the file back several thousand years.
- Mechanism
- A single origin, a surviving first party, and a council convened to stop her.
- Confidence
- Unverifiable, and the register's only claim to a first cause at all.
Every other filing in this register describes a condition already in progress. This one supplies an origin and a living witness to it, which the desk accepts as testimony rather than history for the usual reason: the witness is the interested party. What the filing does establish, and what the register keeps finding elsewhere, is that the response to an existential threat among these subjects is to convene a body, hear the argument, and vote.
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UR-2002-QOD / Origin account, filmed
Plate LXX
Queen of the Damned
2002
Michael Rymer
film
Plate held; sources bundled at source The Origin Account, Condensed
Period antiquity and the present, merged Two filings compressed; the period is the earlier one.
- Jurisdiction
- Historical, as UR-1988-QOD, with the intervening volume folded in.
- Mechanism
- Two filings compressed into one adaptation before it reached us.
- Disposition
- Retained with objection. See below.
The desk files this one through gritted teeth. Two separate volumes were merged into a single adaptation before the register ever saw them, which is precisely the bundling this whole clock exists to refuse — and unlike our own packet cards, we cannot unpick it, because the merge happened upstream in the production rather than downstream in the filing. It gets one card because it was released as one work. We note the loss and move on.
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UR-1983-LON / Longevity asymmetry
Plate XXXIX
The Hunger
1983
Tony Scott
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Arrangement With the Unequal Term
Period contemporary, with an origin in antiquity Sorted on the earliest event described, not the frame.
- Jurisdiction
- Private contract between two parties, one of whom drafted it.
- Mechanism
- Eternal life granted; eternal youth quietly not included.
- Disposition
- Filed under Provisions as a failure to read the term sheet.
The register's only genuine contract dispute. One party is promised forever and receives it exactly as written, with the ageing left in — a distinction that was always available to check and never checked. The desk has no supernatural comment to offer and one practical one, which is that this is the same failure mode as every extended warranty we have ever examined: the offer is true, the omission is where it lives, and nobody reads to the end while being courted.
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UR-2006-UW2 / Records integrity failure
Plate LXXXIII
Underworld: Evolution
2006
Len Wiseman
film
Plate held; finding restated The Archive Was Falsified by Its Own Keeper
Period 1202 and the present; the audit spans both
- Jurisdiction
- Internal. The coven investigating its own official record.
- Mechanism
- The custodian of the history had been editing it for six hundred years.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2003-UW1, whose orderly archive this filing invalidates.
This is the single most alarming document in the register and the desk files it as a correction rather than a sequel. An institution's written history — the thing that made UR-2003-UW1 credible — turns out to have been maintained for centuries by the one participant with a motive to falsify it. Every reader who trusted the archive was reasoning correctly from a poisoned source. We print this one at full length because it is the failure mode of everything this paper does.
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UR-2009-UW3 / Suppressed origin recovered
Plate XCVII
Rise of the Lycans
2009
Patrick Tatopoulos
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Events the Falsified Archive Covered Up
Period the thirteenth century
- Jurisdiction
- Historical. The origin of the war, as it happened rather than as recorded.
- Mechanism
- Bondage, a forbidden attachment, and a revolt the official history reassigned.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2006-UW2, the audit that made this filing necessary.
Having established at UR-2006-UW2 that the coven's history was written by an interested party, the register receives the events that history was concealing. The desk regards the sequence as exemplary archival practice conducted by accident: a record is trusted, the record is audited, the audit finds the custodian at fault, and the suppressed material is then published in full. Three filings, in that order, is how a correction is supposed to work.
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UR-1992-COP / Restored attribution
Plate LIV
Bram Stoker's Dracula
1992
Francis Ford Coppola
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Refiling That Gives the Title Its Author Back
Period 1462 prologue; 1897 main file The 1462 prologue is the film's addition to the dossier, and it stages the Vlad III identification the rulings grade unsourced.
- Jurisdiction
- Licensed adaptation returning to the primary source.
- Mechanism
- The novel's own machinery: journals, cylinders, shipping, and soil.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, whose documents this filing finally puts on screen.
A century after the original dossier and seventy years after the print that was ordered burned, the register gets an adaptation that puts the author's name back in the title and the paperwork back in the plot — the diaries, the recordings, the manifest. The desk is aware this is a marketing decision as much as an editorial one. We approve regardless, on the narrow ground that it is the only filing here that treats the source document as the interesting part.
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UR-2014-DUN / Origin, restaged
Plate CXV
Dracula Untold
2014
Gary Shore
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Count Gets a Sympathetic Backfile
Period 1462 · Wallachia The film's own setting. The identification it rests on, the Count as Vlad III, is graded unsourced in the rulings.
- Jurisdiction
- Sovereign. A prince, a tribute demand, and a decision taken for the state.
- Mechanism
- A voluntary bargain, entered knowingly, with the terms disclosed in advance.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1992-COP, which reaches for the same 1462 backfile more briefly.
The film gives the archive's most-cited antagonist a motive, a deadline and a defensible reason, which the desk records with the wariness such filings deserve. What it does show, and usefully, is the condition being taken up deliberately, in full knowledge of the terms, by somebody who read them first.
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UR-2005-HST / Archival research filing
Plate LXXXI
The Historian
2005
Elizabeth Kostova
novel
Plate held; no cut on file Three Generations of People Reading in Libraries
Period 1476 onward; the search runs 1930–1972
- Jurisdiction
- Academic. Reading rooms, marginalia, and interlibrary correspondence.
- Mechanism
- A book left for scholars who get too close, functioning as a summons.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI. Both files are assembled from documents rather than events.
The desk's professional favourite in the entire register: a vampire novel in which almost everything that happens is somebody finding a document, checking it against another document, and travelling to a third archive. The antagonist's ambition, when finally stated, is to have his collection properly catalogued. We have met that man at conferences.
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UR-2017-CVA / Dynastic, animated
Plate CXX
Castlevania
2017
Warren Ellis · Netflix · from the Konami games
animated series
Plate held; no cut on file A Widower With a Standing Army
Period 1476 · Wallachia
- Jurisdiction
- Sovereign and punitive. A campaign declared against a country, with a year's notice.
- Mechanism
- A wife burned by the church; a husband with resources and a grievance.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2014-DUN. Both files set the grievance in fifteenth-century Wallachia.
The register's only declared war with a published deadline: he tells them what he intends, gives them a year to leave, and then does exactly what he said. The desk observes that the institution he is punishing had already burned somebody on evidence it did not have, so the filing is less a monster story than a document about two authorities, both certain, one better organised.
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UR-1993-CRN / Device filing
Plate LV
Cronos
1993
Guillermo del Toro
film
Plate held; no cut on file The One Where the Mechanism Is a Machine
Period device made 1536; the file opens in 1997
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. A shop, a family, and an object that should not have been kept.
- Mechanism
- A wind-up device with a living component. No bite anywhere in the file.
- Confidence
- High. The mechanism is manufactured, dated, and can be taken apart.
The only filing in the register whose vector is a serviceable object with an inspection plate. An alchemist built it in 1536, it has been passed along ever since, and it does exactly what it was designed to do to whoever winds it. The desk has covered enough appliances to recognise the shape: this is not a curse, it is a device still under warranty and nobody read the manual.
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UR-1725-SRB / Exhumation report stratum
Plate I
Visum et Repertum
1732
Johann Flückinger, regimental field surgeon
official report
Document filing; no plate struck The Only Vampires With Real Paperwork
Period 1725–1732 · Serbian frontier villages
- Jurisdiction
- Imperial military administration, Serbian frontier villages.
- Mechanism
- Reported deaths, formal exhumation, official finding, official remedy.
- Confidence
- Total on the paperwork; nil on the conclusion. Both facts matter.
These are the only entries in the register produced by a government rather than a publisher. Army surgeons were dispatched, bodies were opened, findings were written up, signed, and forwarded through a chain of command. The reports circulated in the Western press and carried the word vampire into English with them. The desk files this first and without irony: the folklore is unproven, the filing is real, and a properly signed document about a thing that did not happen is still the best-documented item on this clock.
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UR-1845-PEN / Serial accumulation era
Plate III
Varney the Vampire
1845
James Malcolm Rymer / Thomas Peckett Prest
serial
Plate held; no cut on file Two Hundred and Twenty Installments, One Card
Period c. 1730s, and later the present day Disputed. The serial does not agree with itself.
- Jurisdiction
- Weekly serial publication; London.
- Mechanism
- Fangs, puncture wounds, and a vampire who hates being one.
- Disposition
- Retained whole. Not bundled. See filing note.
Six hundred thousand words across two years and 220 weekly parts, and it gets exactly one entry, because this register does not bag filings together to save room on the spine. The alien record puts twelve Star Wars films behind a single dot and calls it a packet; the desk has since decided that is a shelving decision pretending to be a chronology. Varney also supplies two fixtures the register never gives back: the puncture pair, and the vampire who would rather not.
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UR-2012-DSF / Adaptation, broadcast estate
Plate CVI
Dark Shadows
2012
Tim Burton
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1966-DSH Twelve Hundred Episodes, Condensed to Ninety Minutes
Period 1752 prologue; 1972 main file
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and commercial. The family firm, and a competitor.
- Mechanism
- A curse, a coffin, and a fishing business in decline.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-1966-DSH, at roughly one per cent of the original length.
The desk records the compression ratio without further comment: a serial of over twelve hundred instalments, filed as a single feature. It is the most extreme bundling event in the register, it happened upstream where we cannot unpick it, and it is the reason this clock keeps the 1966 serial on its own card at the far end of the period arrangement.
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UR-1972-BLC / Jurisdiction reopened
Plate XXVI
Blacula
1972
William Crain · William Marshall
film
Plate held; no cut on file A Diplomat Detained by the Count in 1780
Period 1780 Transylvania; 1972 Los Angeles
- Jurisdiction
- Diplomatic, then domestic. An embassy in 1780 and a shipment in 1972.
- Mechanism
- Turned and interred by the Count after a failed appeal to abolish the slave trade.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI. The same house, a century earlier, and a worse host.
The register's most pointed filing: a prince arrives to petition against the slave trade, is refused, is turned as a punishment, and is sealed in a box that reaches Los Angeles as an estate lot two centuries later. The desk observes that this is the only entry in which the vampire's condition is imposed as a sentence, and that the sentence is passed by the register's most cited subject.
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UR-1985-LES / Subject files a rebuttal
Plate XLI
The Vampire Lestat
1985
Anne Rice
novel
Plate held; rebuttal on file The Interviewee's Account Is Disputed by the Other Party
Period 1780 onward · Auvergne and Paris
- Jurisdiction
- Editorial. A second source contradicting the first, at length.
- Mechanism
- Autobiography, published deliberately and for a mass audience.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1976-INT, whose single unverified source this filing exists to answer.
The desk's complaint about the 1976 interview — one source, self-serving, unverified — is answered here by the only means that ever answers it: the other party publishes his own version and contradicts the first on the facts. This is how the record is supposed to self-correct, and the register notes that it took the archive two hundred and sixty years to produce a single instance of it. That the rebuttal is at least as self-serving as the original does not diminish the achievement.
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UR-1976-INT / On-record interview
Plate XXXII
Interview with the Vampire
1976
Anne Rice
novel
Plate held; subject declines portraiture The First Subject to Sit Down With a Reporter
Period 1791 onward · New Orleans Interview conducted in the present; the account runs back to 1791.
- Jurisdiction
- Editorial. A room, a reporter, and a running tape.
- Mechanism
- Testimony. The subject supplies the entire file voluntarily.
- Confidence
- Unresolved. It is a single unverified source describing himself at length.
Two centuries into the register a subject finally agrees to an interview, and the desk has to admit the result is professionally uncomfortable. The account is vivid, self-serving, unverifiable, and obtained from exactly one person with an obvious interest in how he comes out of it. Our own standards would require a second source and get none. We file it as testimony rather than fact, and note that the interviewer's real error is not believing too much but never once leaving the room.
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UR-1994-IWV / Interview, filmed
Plate LVI
Interview with the Vampire
1994
Neil Jordan
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1976-INT The Tape From 1976, Played Back
Period 1791 onward · New Orleans
- Jurisdiction
- Editorial. Same room, same reporter, same running tape.
- Mechanism
- Testimony, now with the interviewer visibly failing to challenge any of it.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-1976-INT. Own card by rule.
The adaptation makes the desk's original objection impossible to miss, because you can now watch the interviewer take it all down. He asks nothing hostile, seeks no second source, and ends the session wanting to join the subject he came to document. We have sent reporters to sit with people far less interesting and lost them the same way. It is filed here as a lesson in method rather than a horror.
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UR-1966-DSH / Serialised gothic
Plate XVIII
Dark Shadows
1966
Dan Curtis · ABC
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing Twelve Hundred Episodes of Family Business
Period 1795 and 1967 · Collinsport, Maine A daily serial that revisits its own past for years at a time.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and hereditary. A great house, and the family that cannot leave it.
- Mechanism
- A chained coffin opened by a servant looking for jewellery.
- Confidence
- High on volume. Over twelve hundred instalments, broadcast live to tape.
The register's longest continuous document by a wide margin, produced daily, with the visible mistakes of live television left in. The desk approves without reservation: an archive assembled under deadline, uncorrected, is a more honest artefact than a tidy one. It is also where the sympathetic vampire stops being a literary experiment and becomes an afternoon habit.
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UR-1974-KRN / Taxonomy filing
Plate XXX
Captain Kronos
1974
Brian Clemens · Hammer
film
Plate held; no cut on file A Hunter Who Knew There Were Species
Period early 19th century · rural England
- Jurisdiction
- Itinerant, on referral. The pair are sent for, like surveyors.
- Mechanism
- Different species take different prey and answer to different methods.
- Confidence
- Highest methodological rating the desk has awarded in the register.
The register's only practitioner who begins from the position that there is more than one kind of thing here and that the correct countermeasure must be determined by test rather than assumed. He establishes which method works by trying several and recording the results. The desk has read a hundred and thirty files in which somebody sharpened a stake on faith. This is the one that ran the experiment.
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UR-2012-BYZ / Succession refused
Plate CV
Byzantium
2012
Neil Jordan
film
Plate held; no cut on file Two Hundred Years of a Mother and Daughter
Period 1804 onward · England
- Jurisdiction
- A closed order that does not admit women, enforcing its own membership rules.
- Mechanism
- Two centuries of concealment maintained by moving and starting again.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1976-INT. Another subject who writes it all down and is not believed.
The daughter keeps writing the true account and throwing it away, because nobody will read it as anything but fiction — which is the register's own problem stated from the inside. The desk notes the institutional detail too: the order pursuing them is not objecting to what they did but to their having joined it without permission.
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UR-1819-DIO / Byline dispute interval
Plate II
The Vampyre
1819
John William Polidori
novella
Plate held; attribution contested The Aristocrat Enters the Record
Period c. 1810s · London and the Grand Tour Contemporary to writing; the text fixes no year.
- Jurisdiction
- Foreign travel; Lord Ruthven working across the continent.
- Mechanism
- Charm, invitation, and social access. No coffin logistics on file.
- Cross-reference
- Same wet summer and same wager that produced Frankenstein.
The vampire stops being a swollen peasant corpse and becomes a gentleman with an itinerary. This is the single most consequential edit in the register: everything downstream inherits the manners. The desk notes the launch was also the record's first byline dispute — the piece went out over Byron's name, sold well on it, and had to be publicly reassigned to the doctor who actually wrote it. We have run that correction ourselves and sympathise.
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UR-1922-WIS / Suppressed print epoch
Plate VI
Nosferatu
1922
F. W. Murnau
film
Plate ordered destroyed; plate survives The Copyright Ruling That Failed as Archive Policy
Period 1838 · Wisborg
- Jurisdiction
- Copyright; Florence Stoker prevailing.
- Mechanism
- Serial numbers filed off an existing filing. Names changed, plot retained.
- Disposition
- Court ordered every print burned. Prints had already left the country.
The estate won completely and the record lost nothing, because copies were already abroad by the time the order came down. The desk cites this at every opportunity as the register's clearest lesson in retention: a deletion policy that runs slower than distribution is not a deletion policy. It also introduces the rule that sunlight is fatal, which Stoker never wrote — an invention by an unauthorised adaptation that the entire subsequent record adopted as law.
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UR-2024-REF / Centenary refiling
Plate CXXXIV
Nosferatu
2024
Robert Eggers
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Suppressed Print, Refiled at a Hundred
Period 1838 · Wisborg
- Jurisdiction
- Licensed refiling of an unlicensed original.
- Mechanism
- The 1922 file, restaged with its rat-borne contagion made explicit.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1922-WIS, ordered destroyed; UR-1954-EPI, which made it a health file.
The register closes on the entry the courts tried to remove from it, refiled a hundred years later with full legal standing and its plague logic restored to the surface. The desk offers this as the last word on retention policy: the print they burned is the print that got remade, and the reason it could be remade is that somebody, somewhere, kept a copy they were not supposed to have. Archives do not survive because they are protected. They survive because they were copied.
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UR-1872-STY / Priority dispute stratum
Plate IV
Carmilla
1872
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
novella
Plate held; no cut on file Twenty-Five Years Before the Famous One
Period early 19th century · Styria Inferred. The narrator dates the case only by her own age.
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic; a remote schloss and its household.
- Mechanism
- Residence as a guest. Access granted by the family, in writing, at the door.
- Confidence
- High. The household admits her itself and cannot later explain why.
Filed a quarter-century ahead of the entry everyone cites, and the desk keeps it at the front of that dispute on principle. The mechanism here is the one this paper considers load-bearing for the whole register: the threat is invited, housed, fed, and given a room. Every later invitation rule is a restatement of a problem Carmilla had already written down — that the perimeter is not the wall, it is the decision made at it.
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UR-1970-VLV / Carmilla, adapted
Plate XXII
The Vampire Lovers
1970
Roy Ward Baker · Hammer
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1872-STY The 1872 File, Filmed Nearly a Century Late
Period early 19th century · Styria
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The household admits her, exactly as the novella has it.
- Mechanism
- Residence as a guest, arranged through a staged carriage accident.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-1872-STY, ninety-eight years after filing.
The register's oldest novella waits ninety-eight years for a faithful adaptation while the 1897 file gets one every decade, which the desk records as a fact about publishing rather than about vampires. The mechanism survives intact: an accident is staged outside the gates, a daughter is left in the family's care, and the household completes the breach itself.
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UR-1967-FVK / Countermeasure failure, comic
Plate XX
The Fearless Vampire Killers
1967
Roman Polanski
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Crucifix Did Not Work on That One
Period mid 19th century · Transylvania, deep winter
- Jurisdiction
- Itinerant academic. A visiting scholar, unequipped and unsupervised.
- Mechanism
- Conventional, except where the countermeasure meets a subject it does not cover.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, whose holy-symbol assumption this filing tests and breaks.
The register's funniest countermeasure failure and one of its most pointed: a victim raises a crucifix at a vampire it has no purchase on whatsoever, and the joke is entirely at the expense of everyone who assumed the folklore was universal. The desk files it beside the holy-symbol ruling. A countermeasure that only works on the people it was designed around is not a countermeasure, it is an assumption.
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UR-1979-HRZ / Refiling, licensed
Plate XXXIV
Nosferatu the Vampyre
1979
Werner Herzog · Klaus Kinski
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1922-WIS The Suppressed Print, Remade Once the Rights Ran Out
Period c. 1850 · Wismar
- Jurisdiction
- Licensed at last — by expiry rather than by permission.
- Mechanism
- Plague ship, rats, and a town that holds a banquet in the street.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1922-WIS, whose names this filing is finally free to restore.
The 1922 film could not use Stoker's names; this one can, because the copyright that ordered the prints burned had simply run out. The desk files it as the register's tidiest lesson in duration: the estate won, the term expired, and the work came back under its own title. Nothing was forgiven. The clock just ran.
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UR-1991-GLD / Two centuries, one life
Plate XLIX
The Gilda Stories
1991
Jewelle Gomez
novel
Plate held; no cut on file Two Hundred Years, Beginning in Flight
Period 1850 to 2050 · Louisiana, and everywhere after
- Jurisdiction
- Itinerant and chosen. A found family rather than a coven or a court.
- Mechanism
- The condition offered, explained, and accepted — with an exchange required.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2005-FLD. The register's two filings on consent as a stated condition.
The register's longest single life told forward rather than in flashback: two centuries beginning with a girl escaping a plantation in 1850 and ending past the present. The desk marks the mechanism as the significant departure — the condition is explained in advance, must be accepted, and carries an obligation to leave something behind for what is taken. Almost nothing else in this archive asks first.
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UR-1982-FVR / River commerce filing
Plate XXXVIII
Fevre Dream
1982
George R. R. Martin
novel
Plate held; no cut on file A Partnership Agreement on the Mississippi
Period 1857 · the lower Mississippi
- Jurisdiction
- Commercial. A shipping partnership, properly capitalised and documented.
- Mechanism
- A chemical substitute for the habit, and a faction that does not want one.
- Confidence
- High. The register's most convincing business plan by a distance.
A riverboat captain takes an investor who will not travel by day, and the register acquires its only genuine commercial venture. What makes the filing valuable to this desk is the substitute: somebody in the archive finally tries to solve the condition as a supply problem rather than a moral one, and is opposed by his own kind for exactly the reason you would expect.
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UR-1958-HAM / Colour blood era
Plate XV
Dracula
1958
Terence Fisher · Christopher Lee
film
Plate held; no cut on file The First One in Colour
Period 1885 · by Harker's diary
- Jurisdiction
- Licensed adaptation; British production.
- Mechanism
- Physical rather than hypnotic. This one runs at you.
- Disposition
- Establishes the house style for the following two decades.
Colour arrives and the register acquires evidence it had previously only inferred. The desk notes the practical consequence rather than the aesthetic one: once the injuries are visible, every later filing is obliged to account for them, and vagueness about mechanism stops being an available option. Christopher Lee's contribution is to play the subject as physically present in the room, which is exactly the detail an archive of hearsay had been missing.
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UR-1960-BRD / Sequel without its subject
Plate XVI
The Brides of Dracula
1960
Terence Fisher · Hammer
film
Plate held; subject not present A Sequel to a File It Does Not Contain
Period late 19th century · Transylvania
- Jurisdiction
- Educational and domestic. A girls' academy, and a mother keeping her son chained.
- Mechanism
- Containment by a parent, undone by a guest who thinks she is helping.
- Disposition
- Filed as its own case. The title names a subject who does not appear.
A sequel whose title promises the register's most cited subject and delivers a different one entirely, which the desk records without complaint because the case underneath is better than the branding. A mother has been confining her son for years and feeding him quietly; a well-meaning visitor releases him. Every catastrophe in the file follows from somebody undoing a restraint they did not ask about.
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UR-1987-MSQ / Access, warded
Plate XLV
The Monster Squad
1987
Fred Dekker
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Count Occupies the House and Cannot Reach the Contents
Period a century before an undated present The prelude is one hundred years before the main action. The desk anchors that undated present to the 1987 release and derives 1887 for sorting; neither year is a stated story date.
- Jurisdiction
- A children's club confronts a coalition led by Dracula, including the Mummy, the Gill-man and the Wolf Man.
- Protected storage
- An amulet lies beneath the house the monsters occupy. Wards prevent them from taking it.
- Access
- Locked cathedral doors leave the children reading the required incantation on the stoop.
Sean receives Van Helsing's diary and needs it translated from German before the club can use it. The procedure calls for an amulet, an incantation and the approaching midnight balance of good and evil. The register takes the access arrangements seriously: occupying the house does not confer access to the object below it, and reaching the cathedral does not get the defenders indoors. The Count and the children have both found that possession falls short of a complete set of keys.
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UR-1992-ANN / Alternate record
Plate LII
Anno Dracula
1992
Kim Newman
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The File in Which He Won, and Married the Queen
Period 1888 · London, under a vampire prince consort
- Jurisdiction
- National. The condition is legal, fashionable, and represented at court.
- Mechanism
- Victory at UR-1897-EPI, followed by marriage into the constitution.
- Cross-reference
- Every earlier filing, most of which appear in it by name.
The register's counterfactual: the 1897 party fails, the Count marries Victoria, and turning becomes a career move. The desk rates this the most useful document in the archive for a reader who has just finished the rest of it, because it is the only one that asks what the paperwork would look like if the condition had simply been legalised — and the answer is that it would look like ordinary Victorian class politics.
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UR-2004-VHL / Institutional hunter
Plate LXXVIII
Van Helsing
2004
Stephen Sommers
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Vatican Keeps a Department for This
Period 1888 · Transylvania, on assignment
- Jurisdiction
- Institutional. A funded order with a workshop, a quartermaster and orders.
- Mechanism
- Assignment, equipment issue, and a written brief. Almost no improvisation.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, where the same name works alone and pays for his own kit.
The register's hunter finally acquires an employer, a supply chain and a requisitions process, which the desk has been waiting for since 1897. The filing is thinner than the ones around it and we keep it for one administrative reason: it is the clearest picture in the archive of what the opposition looks like once it has a budget line.
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UR-1970-TST / Respectability filing
Plate XXI
Taste the Blood of Dracula
1970
Peter Sasdy · Hammer
film
Plate held; no cut on file Three Pillars of the Community Went Looking for It
Period late Victorian · London and the home counties
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and hypocritical. Three households of unimpeachable standing.
- Mechanism
- Bored respectable men purchase a ritual as an entertainment and complete it.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, where the threat arrives; here it is commissioned.
The register's sharpest class document. Three Victorian gentlemen who chair committees on Sunday buy a relic and perform a ritual for amusement, and every subsequent death in the file traces to men who were looking for something to do. The desk notes that nobody is invited in here at all. The threat is procured, paid for, and brought home by the buyers.
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UR-1897-EPI / Primary source apex
Plate V
Dracula
1897
Bram Stoker
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The File That Files Itself
Period 1893 · by the file's own dated entries
- Jurisdiction
- Cross-border: Transylvania of origin, Whitby of landing, London of residence.
- Mechanism
- Property purchase, imported soil, and a shipping manifest nobody audited.
- Confidence
- Highest in the register. It is nothing but sources.
The desk's favourite document in any register we maintain, because it is not a story about an investigation, it is the investigation's own dossier — dated entries, a ship's log that stops, phonograph cylinders, and newspaper cuttings, collated into one chronological file. Someone typed it, ordered it, and made the copies. That someone is Mina Harker, who does sub-editing under field conditions while the men hold meetings, and who would have been hired here on sight.
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UR-1966-PRN / Ritual reinstatement
Plate XIX
Prince of Darkness
1966
Terence Fisher · Christopher Lee
film
Plate held; no cut on file Reinstated by Ritual, and Not Permitted to Speak
Period late 19th century · the castle, reopened
- Jurisdiction
- Hospitality. A castle kept ready for guests by a servant with an agenda.
- Mechanism
- A caretaker maintaining the premises specifically to restore the occupant.
- Confidence
- High. The servant's preparations are shown in full and are meticulous.
The interesting party here is the butler, who has kept the castle warm, the table laid and the ritual ready for a decade against the return of an employer who is currently dust. The desk finds the succession planning more remarkable than the resurrection: this is an estate maintained in trust by an employee, unpaid and unsupervised, purely on the expectation of reinstatement.
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UR-2020-DRB / Adaptation, broadcast
Plate CXXV
Dracula
2020
Mark Gatiss · Steven Moffat · BBC
television series
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1897-EPI The 1897 Dossier, Cross-Examined
Period 1897, and then the present
- Jurisdiction
- Investigative. The file is reconstructed by interviewing a survivor.
- Mechanism
- As the novel, with the rules restated as findings and tested aloud.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-1897-EPI. Own card by rule.
An adaptation that opens with somebody being asked to account for their statement, which is the correct way to treat the register's founding document and almost nobody's instinct. The desk is less taken with where it goes than with how it starts: for one episode the archive gets what it has always needed, which is a hostile reader with the transcript in front of them.
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UR-2023-DEM / Ship's log expanded
Plate CXXXI
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
2023
André Øvredal
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1897-EPI The Chapter Nobody Survived to File
Period 1897 · Varna to Whitby, by sea
- Jurisdiction
- Maritime. A cargo manifest, a crew list, and a captain's log kept to the end.
- Mechanism
- Fifty boxes of soil, loaded without inspection, and a four-week passage.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, where this passage survives only as a recovered log.
The register's finest piece of archival expansion: one chapter of the 1897 dossier — a log found aboard a ship that arrives with nobody alive on it — given the whole voyage it implies. The desk approves entirely. This is what a document *is*: the small surviving fragment of something that happened at length to people whose names were on a manifest.
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UR-2022-IWV / Interview reopened, serialised
Plate CXXIX
Interview with the Vampire
2022
Rolin Jones · AMC
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Interview Is Conducted Again, With Follow-Up Questions
Period 1910 onward · New Orleans Interview reopened in the present; the account runs back to 1910.
- Jurisdiction
- Editorial, and at last adversarial. A second interview with the same subject.
- Mechanism
- The original transcript produced, checked against the subject, and disputed on the record.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1976-INT and UR-1994-IWV, both of which this filing audits.
The register's vindication, and the desk will be insufferable about it. A reporter reopens the 1976 sitting, arrives with the original transcript, and does the thing neither previous filing ever did: he checks the account against itself, catches the subject revising, and says so to his face. Memory is shown to be an interested party. This is the only document in a whole record that treats a vampire's testimony the way this paper treats a press release, and it is the best filing in the register on method alone.
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UR-2000-SHD / Production filing
Plate LXVII
Shadow of the Vampire
2000
E. Elias Merhige
film
Plate held; concerns another plate A Film About the Making of Plate VI
Period 1921 · the Nosferatu shoot
- Jurisdiction
- Occupational. A film set, a cast list, and a crew going missing.
- Mechanism
- A director who has cast an actual vampire and considers it a production saving.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1922-WIS, the filing this one claims to document the making of.
The register's only filing about another filing: the 1922 shoot, restaged on the premise that Max Schreck was not acting. The desk finds the conceit unexpectedly rigorous — it takes the archive's founding forgery and asks what a document costs to produce, which is the question we ask about everything else and rarely about ourselves.
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UR-1924-STG / Stage filing, load-bearing
Plate VII
Dracula
1924
Hamilton Deane · revised by John L. Balderston
stage play
Plate held; playbill only The Cape Was a Stage Direction
Period contemporary to staging · a drawing room and a library
- Jurisdiction
- Theatrical. Three acts, one set, and a cast a touring company can afford.
- Mechanism
- The novel reduced to a drawing room, because ships and asylums do not fit on a stage.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1931-LIC, which adapts this play rather than the novel it came from.
The most consequential filing in the register that almost nobody reads. The 1931 film is an adaptation of this play, not of the 1897 dossier — and the evening dress and high collar everyone pictures were staging solutions, the collar existing so the actor could turn upstage and vanish through a trap without the audience seeing his face. The archive's defining image is a piece of blocking.
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UR-1931-LIC / Licensed filing
Plate VIII
Dracula
1931
Tod Browning · Bela Lugosi
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Authorised Version, Filed at Last
Period contemporary · 1930s
- Jurisdiction
- Licensed adaptation, by way of the stage play rather than the novel.
- Mechanism
- The accent, the cape, the stare. Established here, permanent thereafter.
- Cross-reference
- Duplicate production ran overnight on the standing sets; see disposition.
The licensed filing arrives nine years after the unlicensed one, which the desk records without comment beyond noting that this is normal for our own correspondence too. The genuinely useful item is administrative: a second crew filmed a Spanish-language version at night on the same sets, from the same script, and the register therefore holds two simultaneous primary documents of one event — a condition our chronology is otherwise never lucky enough to get.
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UR-1931-NOC / Concurrent night production
Plate IX
Drácula
1931
George Melford · Carlos Villarías · Lupita Tovar
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Same Sets, After Dark, By a Different Crew
Period contemporary · 1930s
- Jurisdiction
- Same studio, same script, same standing sets, different company.
- Mechanism
- Identical to UR-1931-LIC. The document differs; the case does not.
- Confidence
- Total. Two independent records of one production exist and can be compared.
The register's only controlled experiment. A second crew took the same sets every night after the English-language unit went home, shot the same script, and produced a longer and by many accounts better film that almost nobody saw for fifty years. The desk gives it a card of its own because folding it into the Browning entry as a footnote is precisely the bundling this register was built to stop — and because two accounts of one event, made under identical conditions, is a thing our archive otherwise never gets.
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UR-1932-ATM / Atmospheric filing
Plate X
Vampyr
1932
Carl Theodor Dreyer
film
Plate held; image indistinct The Entry That Is Mostly Weather
Period contemporary, and deliberately unfixed The filing declines to place itself. So do we.
- Jurisdiction
- Uncertain by design; the file does not fix its own location.
- Mechanism
- Not established. The document declines to say.
- Confidence
- Low on facts; high on dread; unusable in court.
A filing composed almost entirely of conditions — fog, shadow, a room seen through gauze — and almost not at all of events. The desk retains it because a register that admits only legible documents will slowly convince itself the world is legible. This one is the control sample: the file you cannot summarise, kept on the clock to keep the rest of the clock honest.
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UR-2025-SIN / Establishment filing, Delta
Plate CXXXVI
Sinners
2025
Ryan Coogler
film
Plate held; no cut on file One Night, One Juke Joint, One Door Held Open
Period 1932 · the Mississippi Delta
- Jurisdiction
- Commercial premises, on the first night of trading.
- Mechanism
- The invitation rule, enforced at a door that a business needs to keep open.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1872-STY and UR-1996-DUS. The register's two threshold traditions, met.
The register's threshold rule placed where it costs the most: a business whose entire proposition is that people may come in, on the one night it cannot afford to refuse anybody. The desk has argued across this whole register that the perimeter is the decision made at it. This filing is the version where the decision is also the livelihood, which is the hardest form of it in the archive.
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UR-1936-DGT / Treatment sought
Plate XI
Dracula's Daughter
1936
Lambert Hillyer
film
Plate held; no cut on file The First Subject Who Wanted to Be Cured
Period contemporary · London
- Jurisdiction
- Clinical. A private practice, a patient, and a presenting complaint.
- Mechanism
- The condition treated as compulsion, addressed by therapy rather than a stake.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1973-GNH and UR-1995-ADD, which take the same view sixty years later.
Five years after the licensed filing, the register acquires a subject who considers the condition a problem to be treated and goes to a doctor about it. The desk marks this as the archive's first therapeutic entry and notes how long it took anyone to return to the idea: the next filing to treat the condition as a compulsion with a clinic attached is nearly forty years away.
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UR-1943-SON / Filing under an alias
Plate XII
Son of Dracula
1943
Robert Siodmak · Lon Chaney Jr.
film
Plate held; no cut on file He Registered Under an Anagram
Period contemporary · a Louisiana plantation
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and testamentary. An estate, an inheritance, and a marriage.
- Mechanism
- Invitation obtained by courtship; the property acquired by will.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1975-RE. Again the mechanism is a deed rather than a bite.
The subject arrives in Louisiana travelling under the name Alucard, which is his own name reversed, and is admitted to the house because nobody at any point writes it down backwards. The desk offers this as the register's purest indexing failure: the alias was defeatable by a filing clerk with a mirror, and no filing clerk was consulted.
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UR-1948-CMY / First comic filing
Plate XIII
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
1948
Charles Barton · Bela Lugosi
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Archive Is Old Enough to Be Laughed At
Period contemporary · a wax museum and a freight depot
- Jurisdiction
- Commercial. Two baggage clerks and a consignment that should not have been signed for.
- Mechanism
- Crated exhibits, delivered to the wrong address, opened anyway.
- Disposition
- The register's first comedy. Retained on the same terms as the rest.
Seventeen years after the licensed filing, the same actor plays the same subject for laughs, and the desk treats the date as a milestone rather than a joke: an archive becomes canonical at the moment it can be parodied without explanation. It is also, once again, a freight and receiving failure. Two clerks accept a delivery they have not inspected. We have written that column.
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UR-2000-BLD / Animated, contract work
Plate LXV
Blood: The Last Vampire
2000
Hiroyuki Kitakubo · Production I.G
animated film
Plate held; no cut on file One Night, One Base, One Contractor
Period 1966 · a US airbase in Japan, on the eve of Halloween
- Jurisdiction
- Military and extraterritorial. A foreign base, on the eve of a war.
- Mechanism
- An asset placed by an agency, given a cover identity and almost no briefing.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1997-HEL. The state employs the subject rather than filing it.
Forty-five minutes, one night, and no exposition whatsoever: an agency inserts an operative into a base school and the reader is left to work out the arrangement from what people do. The desk admires the restraint and notes the recurring institutional shape — the dangerous party is on a payroll, under a cover story, with a handler who tells her less than she needs.
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UR-1964-LME / Adaptation, first of three
Plate XVII
The Last Man on Earth
1964
Ubaldo Ragona · Sidney Salkow · Vincent Price
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1954-EPI The 1954 File, Filmed for the First Time
Period 1968 · Rome, standing in for anywhere
- Jurisdiction
- Population-scale outbreak; one fortified dwelling remaining.
- Mechanism
- As the novel. The routine, the generator, the boarded glass, the rounds.
- Disposition
- First of three adaptations of UR-1954-EPI. Each gets a card.
The closest of the three to its source, and the only one that keeps the ending in which the survivor learns what he looks like to the people who replaced him. The desk files all three separately because the differences between them are the whole story: one novel, three decades, and a steadily increasing reluctance to let the last man be the monster.
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UR-1970-YRG / Suburban relocation
Plate XXIII
Count Yorga
1970
Bob Kelljan
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Count Moved to Los Angeles and Held a Seance
Period contemporary · Los Angeles
- Jurisdiction
- Social. A grief circle, and a professional who offers to contact the dead.
- Mechanism
- Access through bereavement services. The invitation is a booking.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1972-ADX, the same relocation attempted two years later in London.
Two years before Hammer tried the same move, an American filing puts the Count in a hillside house and has him meet his victims through a seance he is paid to conduct. The desk notes the professionalisation: the access is not charm and not a shipwreck, it is a service booked by grieving people who invited him because that is what you do with someone you have hired.
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UR-1972-ADX / Relocation attempt
Plate XXV
Dracula A.D. 1972
1972
Alan Gibson · Hammer
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Count, Moved to a Modern Postcode
Period contemporary · Chelsea, and a deconsecrated church
- Jurisdiction
- Urban. A deconsecrated church and the property left standing around it.
- Mechanism
- A descendant, a ritual, and consecrated ground sold off.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1958-HAM, whose century-old business this filing resumes.
The register's first attempt to move its oldest subject into the present day, and the desk is interested less in whether it works than in what makes it possible: the site is available because a church was deconsecrated and the land released. The threat returns through a planning decision. This paper has said that about a great many things.
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UR-1972-NGT / Press suppression
Plate XXVII
The Night Stalker
1972
John Llewellyn Moxey · Richard Matheson · Dan Curtis
film
Plate held; story spiked A Reporter Filed It and the Paper Was Made to Kill the Story
Period contemporary · Las Vegas
- Jurisdiction
- Editorial and municipal. A newsroom, a police department, and a city hall.
- Mechanism
- A correct investigation, suppressed by officials with a tourism problem.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1985-FRT. Accurate reports, correctly filed, refused by the recipient.
The filing this desk would frame if it framed things. A reporter investigates a series of killings, reaches the correct conclusion, verifies it, writes it up — and is run out of town by officials who understand exactly what he has and cannot afford to have it printed. It is the only entry in the register where the vampire is not the antagonist. The antagonist is the spike.
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UR-1973-GNH / Addiction filing
Plate XXVIII
Ganja & Hess
1973
Bill Gunn
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Filing That Calls It an Addiction
Period contemporary · New York
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and private. A house, a marriage, and a habit kept secret in it.
- Mechanism
- A wound from an artefact. No bite, no coffin, no invitation.
- Confidence
- High on condition; the filing declines every convention that would place it.
A vampire film with almost none of the apparatus, which is why the desk keeps it: the condition is presented as a dependency with theft, shame and relapse attached, and the register's usual furniture would only get in the way of that. It is the strongest argument in the archive that the folklore was always describing something ordinary in a costume.
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UR-1973-SRD / Corporate filing
Plate XXIX
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
1973
Alan Gibson · Hammer
film
Plate held; no cut on file He Incorporated, and the Company Had a Research Wing
Period contemporary · London, from a company office
- Jurisdiction
- Corporate and governmental. A board, a laboratory, and members of the establishment on it.
- Mechanism
- A weaponised bacillus, developed under contract, by a company he owns.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2010-PSG and UR-2012-UW4. The outbreak as a procurement decision.
The archive's most cited aristocrat buys a business, hires researchers, and commissions a plague, and the desk regards this as the single most prophetic filing in the register. Everything the later entries assert — that the danger arrives through institutions, contracts and research budgets rather than through castles — is here in 1973, with a boardroom and a minuted meeting.
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UR-1975-RE / Real property incursion
Plate XXXI
'Salem's Lot
1975
Stephen King
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Vampire Buys the House
Period contemporary · Jerusalem's Lot, Maine
- Jurisdiction
- Home & Hardware. Real property, cleanly transferred.
- Mechanism
- Purchase, occupancy, and then the town, one household at a time.
- Confidence
- High. Every step of it is a matter of public record at the town office.
The register's most administratively plausible entry: nothing is broken into, because everything is bought. A property changes hands, a business opens, a neighbour is invited in, and the town is lost through an entirely legal sequence of ordinary transactions. This desk maintains a Home & Hardware section precisely because dwellings are where consequences land, and we submit this filing as the strongest argument in the register that the vampire problem was always a housing problem.
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UR-1979-SLM / Adaptation, broadcast
Plate XXXVII
'Salem's Lot
1979
Tobe Hooper
television series
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1975-RE The Marsten House, Televised
Period contemporary · Jerusalem's Lot, Maine
- Jurisdiction
- Home & Hardware, as the novel. Property, then the town.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged. Purchase, occupancy, and an invitation at a bedroom window.
- Disposition
- First adaptation of UR-1975-RE. See also UR-2024-SLM.
The adaptation drops the novel's talkative antagonist for something closer to the 1922 filing, which the desk regards as the correct call: a vampire who negotiates is a character, and a vampire who simply arrives at the glass is a housing problem. The window scene is the register's most efficient statement of the invitation rule, and it is four minutes long.
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UR-2004-SLT / Adaptation, second filing
Plate LXXVII
'Salem's Lot
2004
Mikael Salomon
television series
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1975-RE The Marsten House, Filmed a Second Time
Period contemporary to the novel · Jerusalem's Lot, Maine
- Jurisdiction
- Home & Hardware, unchanged.
- Mechanism
- Purchase and occupancy, with the town's own rot given more of the running time.
- Disposition
- Second of four filings. See UR-1979-SLM and UR-2024-SLM.
One novel, now four cards across forty-nine years, and the desk keeps every one because the count is itself the finding. This filing's contribution is to spend longer on the town before anything arrives — the affairs, the debts, the quiet cruelties — which makes the purchase read less like an invasion and more like a buyer identifying an undervalued property.
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UR-2024-SLM / Adaptation, third filing
Plate CXXXV
'Salem's Lot
2024
Gary Dauberman
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1975-RE The Marsten House, Filmed a Third Time
Period contemporary to the novel · Jerusalem's Lot, Maine
- Jurisdiction
- Home & Hardware, unchanged across forty-nine years and three filings.
- Mechanism
- Purchase, occupancy, and a town lost through legal transactions.
- Disposition
- Third filing of UR-1975-RE. See also UR-1979-SLM.
One novel, a miniseries, and two features across half a century, each on its own card. The desk keeps counting these because the count is the finding: the works this register returns to repeatedly are not the ones with the best monsters, they are the ones with the clearest mechanism. A house changes hands, and everything follows from the deed.
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UR-1954-EPI / Epidemiological turn
Plate XIV
I Am Legend
1954
Richard Matheson
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Register Becomes a Public Health File
Period 1976–1979 · written as the near future
- Jurisdiction
- Population-scale outbreak; a single fortified dwelling remaining.
- Mechanism
- A transmissible agent, not a curse. Garlic and crosses get a stated reason.
- Cross-reference
- Opens the file that the desk's forthcoming zombie register inherits whole.
The hinge of the entire register. Vampirism stops being a moral condition and becomes an epidemiological one, with a mechanism, a vector, and a survivor keeping a household running alone — generator, boarded windows, inventory, routine. It is also the point where this file forks: the outbreak logic here is the direct parent of the walking-dead record, which the desk will open separately rather than let it contaminate this clock. The final finding, that the holdout is the monster to the population that replaced him, is the coldest sentence in the archive.
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UR-1971-OMG / Adaptation, second of three
Plate XXIV
The Omega Man
1971
Boris Sagal · Charlton Heston
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1954-EPI The Same File, With the Ending Removed
Period 1977 · Los Angeles
- Jurisdiction
- Post-war outbreak; one fortified townhouse, generously provisioned.
- Mechanism
- Biological warfare rather than bacteriology. The Family, robed and organised.
- Disposition
- Second adaptation of UR-1954-EPI. The finding is quietly reversed.
The novel's point — that the survivor is the legend and the monster — is replaced by one in which he is straightforwardly the hero. The desk notes this as the register's clearest instance of an adaptation resolving a document's central discomfort by deleting it, and files it beside the original so the two can be read against each other, which is the only defence an archive has.
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UR-1977-MAR / Undetermined filing
Plate XXXIII
Martin
1977
George A. Romero
film
Plate held; classification unresolved The Only Entry That Refuses to Say Whether It Belongs Here
Period contemporary · Braddock, Pennsylvania
- Jurisdiction
- Unresolved. A family insists on one reading; the subject half agrees.
- Mechanism
- A razor and a sedative. Every supernatural element is asserted, never shown.
- Disposition
- Retained undetermined. The register declines to settle what the film will not.
An elderly relative is certain the boy is an eighty-four-year-old vampire; the boy uses a razor and a syringe and says the magic part is not real. Nothing in the document settles it. The desk retains the filing precisely because it cannot classify it, and notes that an archive which only admits the cases it can label is not an archive, it is a shortlist.
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UR-1979-KV / Domestic-scale filing
Plate XXXV
Der kleine Vampir
1979
Angela Sommer-Bodenburg
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Vampire Next Door, First Filing
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. A child's bedroom window, and the family behind it.
- Mechanism
- Friendship. No conquest, no outbreak, no property acquisition.
- Disposition
- Original filing. Refiled twice; see UR-2000-LV1 and UR-2017-LV2.
The register's scale collapses from a continent to a bedroom, and the desk considers this a promotion rather than a demotion. The vampire here is a child with a family, obligations, and somewhere he has to be by morning — which makes this the only entry on the clock where the logistics of the condition are treated as an ordinary household inconvenience rather than a curse. It is also the origin filing for two later adaptations, both of which appear on this clock in their own right.
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UR-1979-LFB / Eviction filing
Plate XXXVI
Love at First Bite
1979
Stan Dragoti · George Hamilton
film
Plate held; no cut on file The State Repossessed His Castle
Period contemporary · Transylvania, then Manhattan
- Jurisdiction
- Housing. A state repossession, and a subsequent search for a rental.
- Mechanism
- Eviction. The castle is requisitioned as a training facility for gymnasts.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1975-RE. Both filings turn on property; only this one loses it.
The archive's most cited aristocrat is served notice by his own government, loses the castle to a sports programme, and arrives in Manhattan to discover that the hard part of relocation is accommodation. The desk has filed a great deal about vampires acquiring property. This is the only entry in a hundred and thirty-seven about one being evicted, and it is the correct comic answer to every deed in the register.
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UR-2004-INV / Threshold enforcement
Plate LXXV
Låt den rätte komma in
2004
John Ajvide Lindqvist
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Invitation Rule, Enforced Literally
Period 1981–1982 · Blackeberg
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. A block of flats, a courtyard, and two children.
- Mechanism
- Entry requires permission. The novel states the rule; the film enforces it.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1872-STY, where the household grants the permission and cannot say why.
Two children on a Stockholm estate in winter, and the register's coldest reading of what the invitation rule actually costs the person extending it. The novel is the statement of the rule; the 2008 adaptation at UR-2008-INV is the enforcement, and gets its own card accordingly. What this filing does is return the register to where Carmilla left it — the threat is not at the door, it is standing in the hall because somebody decided it could be.
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UR-2008-INV / Threshold enforcement, filmed
Plate LXXXIX
Låt den rätte komma in
2008
Tomas Alfredson
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-2004-INV The Rule, Tested Once, On Camera
Period 1981–1982 · Blackeberg
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. The same estate, the same courtyard, the same two children.
- Mechanism
- Entry without permission, demonstrated in one unbroken shot.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-2004-INV. Own card; the scene is why.
Every earlier filing in the register states the invitation rule. This one makes somebody test it, holds the shot, and does not cut away from the result. The desk separates it from the novel because that is the entire distinction worth recording: the book asserts the boundary, and the film is the only document in a whole record that shows the enforcement. It is the register's definitive statement of access control — the cost of crossing improperly, paid immediately and in full.
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UR-2010-LMI / Adaptation, relocated
Plate XCVIII
Let Me In
2010
Matt Reeves
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-2004-INV The Threshold Scene, Remade in New Mexico
Period 1983 · Los Alamos, New Mexico
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. A courtyard apartment block, relocated across an ocean.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged. The invitation, tested once, with the result left on screen.
- Disposition
- Third filing of one case. See UR-2004-INV and UR-2008-INV.
One novel, two films, three cards, and the desk keeps all three because the differences are instructive: the same scene works in Swedish winter and in a New Mexico snow, and the rule survives translation intact. A threshold does not care what language the invitation is in. That is the closest thing to a law this register has.
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UR-1985-LFC / Cross-register incident
Plate XLII
Lifeforce
1985
Tobe Hooper
film
Plate held; jurisdiction contested The Filing the Alien Record Also Claims
Period contemporary · London, and the tail of a comet
- Jurisdiction
- Contested between this register and the alien contact record.
- Mechanism
- Life energy rather than blood; transmission by draining, and it spreads.
- Cross-reference
- The alien record, which has an equal claim and will be told so.
A shuttle recovers three bodies from a derelict in a comet's tail, brings them to London, and London empties. The desk cannot cleanly assign this: the mechanism is vampiric, the origin is extraterrestrial, and the two registers this paper maintains both want it. We have filed it here, marked the dispute, and await correspondence from our own alien desk, which is us.
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UR-1985-FRT / Neighbourhood complaint
Plate XL
Fright Night
1985
Tom Holland
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Boy Who Reported It and Was Not Believed
Period contemporary · suburban America
- Jurisdiction
- Residential. Two adjacent properties and a shared fence line.
- Mechanism
- Ordinary neighbourly access, plus one correctly withheld invitation.
- Confidence
- High on the report; nil on the response it received.
A teenager observes his neighbour accurately, reports it through every channel available to him, and is disbelieved by police, mother and friend in turn. The desk files this as a documentation failure rather than a horror: the evidence was correct, contemporaneous, and freely offered, and the system that received it had no category for it. We have run that story about drainage and had the same result.
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UR-1987-BOY / Household siege
Plate XLIV
The Lost Boys
1987
Joel Schumacher
film
Plate held; no cut on file Garlic in the Bathtub
Period contemporary · Santa Carla
- Jurisdiction
- Home & Hardware, decisively. The dwelling is the battlefield.
- Mechanism
- Improvised domestic countermeasures, sourced entirely from the kitchen.
- Confidence
- High on method; the desk has independently verified the plumbing works.
The only filing in the register where the successful counter-strategy is assembled from the pantry, the bathroom and the garden hose by people with no budget and no institutional backing. Holy water is plumbed. Garlic is deployed at bulk quantity. The stakes are made in the workshop. This desk has argued for years that most household emergencies are solved with inventory rather than expertise, and we regard this entry as the register's single best supporting document.
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UR-1987-NEA / Itinerant provisioning
Plate XLVI
Near Dark
1987
Kathryn Bigelow
film
Plate held; no cut on file Vampires With a Logistics Problem
Period contemporary · the American southwest
- Jurisdiction
- Itinerant. No fixed address anywhere in the file.
- Mechanism
- Daily relocation with a hard curfew and no permanent storage.
- Disposition
- Filed under Provisions. The clearest supply-chain document on the clock.
Strip the capes and this is a file about people who must find lightproof shelter every single day, feed irregularly, carry everything they own, and never once miss the deadline. The desk finds the taped-over motel windows more instructive than any castle in the register: the condition is not glamorous here, it is a routing constraint with no slack in it, and the group fails for the ordinary reason that a plan with no margin eventually meets a day that needed some.
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UR-1988-VKS / Self-diagnosis
Plate XLVIII
Vampire's Kiss
1988
Robert Bierman · Nicolas Cage
film
Plate held; classification unresolved He Diagnosed Himself and Nobody Checked
Period contemporary · a Manhattan literary agency
- Jurisdiction
- Occupational and clinical. An office, a subordinate, and an untreated collapse.
- Mechanism
- Asserted by the subject. Never corroborated by anything in the file.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1977-MAR, the register's other undetermined filing.
A man decides he is turning, buys fangs from a shop, and behaves accordingly while an entire office declines to intervene. Like Martin, nothing in the document confirms the condition — and unlike Martin, the file is a comedy, which the desk finds the more uncomfortable of the two. The register retains it undetermined. What it plainly does record is a workplace watching somebody disintegrate and filing no report.
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UR-1991-TVD / Serial origin filing
Plate L
The Vampire Diaries
1991
L. J. Smith
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Small Town With Two of Them In It
Period contemporary · Fell's Church, Virginia
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and hereditary. A town, a founding family, and an old quarrel.
- Mechanism
- A diary kept by the witness, in the tradition of UR-1897-EPI.
- Disposition
- Origin filing for three television registers. See UR-2009-TVD onward.
The register returns to its oldest and best format — a young woman keeping a dated journal while something moves through her town — and the desk notes the continuity with approval. It also seeds the largest broadcast estate in the archive: three series across thirteen years, all of them filed separately below, because this desk does not bundle.
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UR-1991-VTM / Rulebook filing
Plate LI
Vampire: The Masquerade
1991
Mark Rein-Hagen · White Wolf
game
Plate held; boxed set Somebody Finally Wrote Down the Rules
Period contemporary · wherever it is played
- Jurisdiction
- Constitutional. A written body of law with penalties, courts and offices.
- Mechanism
- Concealment as statute: the first law is that the population must stay hidden.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1998-STA, UR-2003-UW1, UR-2013-ORG. Every council filing descends from here.
The desk has spent this register arguing that the persuasive part of any hidden population is its committee structure. This filing is the argument in book form: clans with recorded lineage, an elder hierarchy, princes holding cities, and a codified law whose entire content is that the archive must never be allowed to exist. It is the register's only entry written as legislation, and it shaped nearly everything filed after it.
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UR-1992-BUF / Franchise origin, film
Plate LIII
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
1992
Fran Rubel Kuzui · from a script by Joss Whedon
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Duty Arrives Without a Handbook
Period contemporary · Los Angeles
- Jurisdiction
- Hereditary office. One holder at a time, selected without consultation.
- Mechanism
- An inherited post, an assigned trainer, and no induction whatsoever.
- Disposition
- Origin filing for UR-1997-BUF and UR-1999-ANG.
The archive acquires its first inherited post: a role that passes to one person at a time, comes with a supervisor nobody interviewed for, and has no written procedure. The desk, which has itself inherited an office with no handover notes, finds this the most relatable filing in the register and declines to be embarrassed about saying so.
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UR-1995-ADD / Complicity filing
Plate LVII
The Addiction
1995
Abel Ferrara
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Philosophy Student Who Knew Exactly What She Was Doing
Period contemporary · New York University
- Jurisdiction
- Academic and moral. A philosophy department, and a thesis on atrocity.
- Mechanism
- Dependency, argued about at length by somebody qualified to argue.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1973-GNH and UR-1936-DGT, the register's other dependency filings.
A doctoral candidate studying how ordinary people participate in atrocity contracts the condition and continues her research from the inside, which the desk regards as either the register's worst methodology or its best. The filing's position is that complicity is not something you catch. It is something you keep choosing, with full access to the literature explaining why you should not.
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UR-1996-DUS / Establishment filing
Plate LVIII
From Dusk Till Dawn
1996
Robert Rodriguez · Quentin Tarantino
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Bar Was the Problem the Whole Time
Period contemporary · the Texas–Mexico border
- Jurisdiction
- Commercial premises, trading overnight, with a stated closing time.
- Mechanism
- A venue that admits customers freely and does not intend them to leave.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1872-STY. Invitation, inverted: here the guest is the one admitted.
The register's one hospitality filing, and it inverts the threshold rule completely: nobody is invited in, the premises invite you, and the door opens outward for exactly as long as it takes to fill the room. The desk notes that the sign, the parking and the opening hours were all accurate. Everything advertised was true. That is what made it work.
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UR-1997-BUF / Franchise, broadcast
Plate LIX
Buffy
1997
Joss Whedon · The WB / UPN
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing Seven Years of the Same Office, Properly Minuted
Period contemporary · Sunnydale, California
- Jurisdiction
- Municipal, and badly zoned. A town sited over a known hazard.
- Mechanism
- The inherited post of UR-1992-BUF, now with an institution behind it.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1998-STA. Two filings, one year apart, both discovering committees.
The register's deepest institutional document short of the covens: a governing council with archives, funding and a disciplinary procedure, opposed for seven years by the one employee who reads her own contract. The desk records the planning failure as the load-bearing fact. A school was built over the hazard, the hazard was known, and the town's response was to hold a prom.
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UR-1997-HEL / State instrument
Plate LX
Hellsing
1997
Kouta Hirano
comic
Plate held; no cut on file The Government Keeps One and Points It at the Others
Period contemporary · England, under a chartered organisation
- Jurisdiction
- Chartered and national. A body answerable to the Crown, with a budget line.
- Mechanism
- Containment by employment: the most dangerous subject on file, under orders.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1998-ULT and UR-2004-VHL. Three filings, three state responses.
The archive's bluntest institutional answer: rather than destroy the subject, charter an organisation, put him on the establishment, and deploy him against the others. The desk finds the arrangement entirely plausible and faintly familiar — every institution it has ever covered eventually decides that the thing it cannot defeat should be given an office and a reporting line.
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UR-1998-STA / Statutory era
Plate LXII
Blade
1998
Stephen Norrington
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Condition Acquires an Institution
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Organised and self-governing. There is a structure, and it keeps minutes.
- Mechanism
- Inherited status versus acquired status, with the difference enforced socially.
- Confidence
- High on bureaucracy, which the desk regards as the tell.
The register's subjects stop being individuals and become a sector: councils, elders, archives, property, and an internal class distinction between those born to the condition and those merely turned. The desk has said the same thing about the alien file and will say it again here — the moment any hidden population is shown maintaining records and arguing about seniority, its plausibility goes up rather than down. Nothing invented behaves this administratively.
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UR-1998-ULT / Task force filing
Plate LXIII
Ultraviolet
1998
Joe Ahearne · Channel 4
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Word Is Never Used Once in the Whole File
Period contemporary · London
- Jurisdiction
- Policing and public health, jointly. A seconded officer and a standing unit.
- Mechanism
- Forensics, carbon-tipped rounds, and video sights, because they cast no image.
- Confidence
- Very high. The unit reasons from evidence and revises when the evidence changes.
Six hours of procedure in which the word is never spoken — the unit says "leech code five" and gets on with the forensics. The desk rates this the register's most disciplined document precisely because of that refusal: the moment an investigation adopts the folklore vocabulary, it inherits the folklore's assumptions. This one keeps testing instead, and reaches the uncomfortable finding that the other side has a public health argument.
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UR-1998-CRP / Modernisation programme
Plate LXI
Carpe Jugulum
1998
Terry Pratchett
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Family That Trained Itself Out of Its Own Weaknesses
Period contemporary to its world · Lancre
- Jurisdiction
- Dynastic and aspirational. A family modernising itself on purpose.
- Mechanism
- Systematic desensitisation: holy symbols, garlic and daylight, trained out by drill.
- Cross-reference
- Every countermeasure filing in the register, all of which this one anticipates.
The only entry in the archive where the subjects have read the countermeasures and run a programme against them — daily exposure to holy symbols, garlic with meals, curtains open — and it works, right up until stress restores every reflex at once. The desk considers this the sharpest observation in the register: the training holds in the seminar room and fails the moment anything actually happens.
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UR-1999-ANG / Franchise, spun off
Plate LXIV
Angel
1999
David Greenwalt · Joss Whedon
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Same Condition, Relocated to a City With Lawyers
Period contemporary · Los Angeles
- Jurisdiction
- Corporate. The opposition is a law firm with a functioning HR department.
- Mechanism
- Restored conscience as a condition of employment, revocable on contentment.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1997-BUF, from which this filing is spun off.
The archive's antagonist stops being a count and becomes a firm: billable hours, a client list, a basement archive, and a policy on immortality benefits. The desk has maintained throughout this register that institutions are the persuasive part, and this filing is the argument's conclusion — the most frightening thing anybody here encounters is a retainer agreement.
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UR-2000-LV1 / First duplicate filing
Plate LXVI
The Little Vampire
2000
Uli Edel
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1979-KV The Little Vampire, Refiled in Live Action
Period contemporary · Scotland
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, relocated. The family moves; the problem is already there.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged from the origin filing: friendship, and a curfew.
- Disposition
- Duplicate of UR-1979-KV. Retained separately, not merged.
The first refiling of the 1979 novel, moved to a Scottish estate and given a boy who arrives as an outsider before he ever meets one. The desk keeps this on its own card rather than folding it into the origin entry, because a chronology that merges every adaptation into its source stops being a chronology and becomes a bibliography. Same file, different filing date, its own dot on the spine.
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UR-2001-DUD / Southern estate, origin
Plate LXVIII
Dead Until Dark
2001
Charlaine Harris
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Waitress Who Could Hear What They Were Thinking
Period contemporary · Bon Temps, Louisiana
- Jurisdiction
- Public and legal. The condition has been disclosed and is being legislated.
- Mechanism
- A synthetic substitute reaching market, making disclosure commercially viable.
- Disposition
- Origin filing for UR-2008-TBL.
The register's decisive break with concealment: a manufactured blood substitute reaches shelves, and the population comes out because it can now feed without committing a crime. The desk regards the causality as the important part and rarely stated elsewhere — it is not tolerance that ends the secret, it is the product launch. Rights follow logistics. They always did.
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UR-2002-BL2 / Strain escalation
Plate LXIX
Blade II
2002
Guillermo del Toro
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Outbreak That Preys on the Register Itself
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Institutional, under emergency. The council co-operates with its own hunter.
- Mechanism
- A mutation whose hosts feed on vampires rather than on people.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1954-EPI. The condition acquires a condition of its own.
The epidemiological turn taken to its conclusion: the population that has spent the register as the pathogen is handed a pathogen. The desk records the administrative detail as the interesting one — a standing authority suspends a standing grudge, seconds its enemy, and runs a joint containment operation, which is exactly what our public-health filings describe institutions doing when the alternative is worse than the humiliation.
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UR-2002-TDN / Polar night filing
Plate LXXII
30 Days of Night
2002
Steve Niles · Ben Templesmith
comic
Plate held; no cut on file Thirty Days Without the One Countermeasure That Works
Period contemporary · Barrow, Alaska
- Jurisdiction
- Municipal, and briefly unreachable. One road, closed by season.
- Mechanism
- Latitude. The sun does not rise for a month, and somebody checked the almanac.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1922-WIS, whose invented sunlight rule this filing weaponises.
The best applied use of the archive's least sourced law. If sunlight is fatal, then somewhere above the Arctic Circle there is a town with a calendar-shaped hole in its defences, and this filing is what happens when the attackers read the almanac before the residents did. The desk rates it the most competent piece of planning in the register, by either side.
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UR-2002-SHK / Village depopulation
Plate LXXI
Shiki
2002
Fuyumi Ono
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Doctor Treated It as an Epidemic and Was Right
Period contemporary · Sotoba, a village of thirteen hundred
- Jurisdiction
- Rural public health. One clinic, one doctor, and a village that will not move.
- Mechanism
- Deaths above baseline, clustered by household, tracked on a chart.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2009-STR and UR-1954-EPI. The register's epidemiological line.
A country doctor notices the death rate has risen, starts counting, maps the cases by household, and works out what is happening from the data alone. The desk rates this the most rigorous investigation in the register — and notes what the filing does with it, which is to hand the reader the other side's case too, until the question of who is exterminating whom stops having a comfortable answer.
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UR-2010-SHA / Village depopulation, animated
Plate CI
Shiki
2010
Tetsurō Amino · from Fuyumi Ono
animated series
Plate held; duplicate of UR-2002-SHK The Village Chart, Animated
Period contemporary to the novel · Sotoba
- Jurisdiction
- Rural public health, as the novel, with the village given more room.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged. Deaths above baseline, clustered, and one physician counting them.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-2002-SHK. Own card by rule.
The adaptation's contribution is time spent on the other side's domestic arrangements, which turns the doctor's correct epidemiology into something harder to cheer for. By the closing filings both populations are conducting exterminations and both have a defensible account of why. The desk declines to adjudicate and notes only that the data was never in dispute.
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UR-2003-UW1 / Institutional archive era
Plate LXXIII
Underworld
2003
Len Wiseman
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Faction That Keeps Minutes
Period contemporary · a war traced back to 1202
- Jurisdiction
- Two hereditary factions under a war older than any living participant.
- Mechanism
- A coven with a chain of command, a treasury, an estate, and a written history.
- Confidence
- High, and rising with every filing cabinet shown on screen.
The desk's favourite institutional filing in the register, because these subjects maintain records. Elders are woken in rotation, briefed on the centuries they slept through, and expected to sign off on the account — a continuity-of-knowledge procedure better than most of the organisations this paper covers. A hidden population that has solved succession, custody of its archive, and orderly handover is not behaving like a legend. It is behaving like a company.
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UR-2004-BL3 / Oldest file reopened
Plate LXXIV
Blade: Trinity
2004
David S. Goyer
film
Plate held; no cut on file They Went and Dug Up the 1897 Subject
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Institutional, with an exhumation.
- Mechanism
- The register's founding subject located, revived, and deployed as an asset.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, whose subject this filing reopens after a century.
The archive's oldest case file is not cited here, it is dug up and put back to work. The desk notes the procedural absurdity with some sympathy: an institution facing a problem it cannot solve goes to the basement, retrieves the founding document, and discovers that the founding document has opinions. We have done the same thing with our own back issues and had comparable results.
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UR-2004-NWT / Licensed truce
Plate LXXVI
Night Watch
2004
Timur Bekmambetov · from Sergei Lukyanenko
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Truce Has Been in Force for a Thousand Years and Is Administered
Period contemporary · Moscow, under a standing treaty
- Jurisdiction
- Treaty-based. Two supervisory bodies police each other under an ancient accord.
- Mechanism
- Feeding is permitted, by licence, issued in advance and checked afterwards.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2007-MI1 and UR-1991-VTM. The register's treaty-and-licence tradition.
The register's most bureaucratic filing outside the rulebook: an armistice with two inspectorates, mutual oversight, and a permit that must be obtained before feeding and produced on demand. The desk has argued throughout that institutions are the persuasive part of any hidden population. Here the whole plot turns on a licence, correctly issued, being used for something it was not intended to cover.
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UR-2005-DIS / Contested filing, origin
Plate LXXIX
Twilight
2005
Stephenie Meyer
novel
Plate held; finding contested The Entry Under Dispute
Period contemporary · Forks, Washington
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic; small town, high rainfall, low ultraviolet.
- Mechanism
- Direct contradiction of the standing sunlight finding at UR-1922-WIS.
- Disposition
- Retained under dispute. Not struck. Five film filings follow.
This filing contradicts the register's most durable rule, and the desk has been asked more than once to strike it. We decline. The sunlight finding was itself invented in 1922 by an unlicensed adaptation and adopted as law purely by repetition, so an archive that treats it as unchallengeable is not defending evidence, it is defending seniority. The correct disposition for a document that disagrees with the consensus is to keep it, mark the disagreement, and record which of the two ever had a source. Neither did.
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UR-2005-FLD / Consent and symbiosis
Plate LXXX
Fledgling
2005
Octavia E. Butler
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Arrangement Written as a Symbiosis
Period contemporary · northern California
- Jurisdiction
- Judicial. The file ends in a convened hearing with representation on both sides.
- Mechanism
- Mutual dependency with a chemical bond, and the consent problem that creates.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1991-GLD. The register's two serious treatments of consent.
The register's most uncomfortable filing, and the desk means that as the compliment it is. The relationship is symbiotic and genuinely beneficial to both parties, and it is also chemically binding, which makes every subsequent agreement inside it impossible to call free. The document refuses to resolve that, and ends instead in a formal hearing — the archive's only case settled by argument rather than by fire.
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UR-2008-TW1 / Contested filing, first adaptation
Plate XCI
Twilight
2008
Catherine Hardwicke
film
Plate held; finding contested The Disputed Finding Reaches the Screen
Period contemporary · Forks, Washington
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic; the origin filing, adapted without amendment.
- Mechanism
- Sunlight demonstrated as decorative rather than fatal.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-2005-DIS. Contested, retained, first of five.
The contested finding stops being a sentence in a novel and becomes a photographed exhibit, which under this register's own rules makes it harder to dismiss rather than easier. The desk notes without pleasure that the 1922 rule it contradicts also entered the record as a picture rather than an argument. Two images, no sources, a century apart. We are obliged to treat them the same way, and we do.
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UR-2006-HLU / Chartered organisation, animated
Plate LXXXII
Hellsing Ultimate
2006
Studio Gonzo / Satelight / Graphinica
animated series
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1997-HEL The Charter, Animated in Full
Period contemporary · England, under the same charter
- Jurisdiction
- Chartered and national, as the manga, with three organisations in the field.
- Mechanism
- Containment by employment, escalating to open war between institutions.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-1997-HEL. Own card by rule; an earlier 2001 series diverged.
The manga filed at UR-1997-HEL is a printed serial and is not animated; this is, and the register keeps them apart because they are different works with different endings. What the longer form adds is the war between the three chartered bodies — a Protestant organisation, a Catholic one, and a stateless remnant — conducted as institutional rivalry with the actual monsters on staff. The desk has said this throughout. The committee is the story.
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UR-2009-TW2 / Contested filing, second
Plate XCVI
New Moon
2009
Chris Weitz
film
Plate held; finding contested The Second of Five
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic; jurisdiction now shared with a second non-human party.
- Mechanism
- Absence, and a formal approach to a governing body abroad.
- Disposition
- Second of five film filings. Own card by rule.
The desk records that this instalment introduces a standing authority with premises, robes, archives and a stated jurisdiction over the condition — which, as at UR-1998-STA, is the sort of administrative detail this paper finds more persuasive than anything supernatural in the file. A hidden population that maintains a governing council and summons people to it is behaving like every other institution we cover.
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UR-2010-TW3 / Contested filing, third
Plate CIII
Eclipse
2010
David Slade
film
Plate held; finding contested The Third of Five
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Territorial. A negotiated boundary between two parties, and a breach of it.
- Mechanism
- A treaty, a line on the ground, and a temporary alliance against a third.
- Disposition
- Third of five film filings. Own card by rule.
A boundary agreement, a dispute over its terms, and a joint operation between parties who dislike each other — the register's most conventional piece of diplomacy, conducted entirely between non-human signatories. The desk observes that the treaty is honoured throughout and broken by nobody, which puts these filings ahead of most of the human governments elsewhere in our archive.
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UR-2011-TW4 / Contested filing, fourth
Plate CIV
Breaking Dawn — Part 1
2011
Bill Condon
film
Plate held; finding contested The Fourth of Five, Being the First Half of the Last Book
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and medical. Marriage, pregnancy, and an unplanned conversion.
- Mechanism
- The condition transmitted as a treatment of last resort rather than an attack.
- Disposition
- One novel, split across two filings. See UR-2012-TW5.
The register's clearest illustration of why this desk refuses to bundle. One book was released as two films fourteen months apart, and a chronology that merged them back together would erase the gap, the decision that created it, and the fact that audiences waited out a cliffhanger for over a year. The split is the document. We file it as two, because it was published as two.
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UR-2007-MI1 / Shared jurisdiction filing
Plate LXXXV
City of Bones
2007
Cassandra Clare
novel
Plate held; partial jurisdiction A Treaty in Which the Vampires Are One Signatory of Several
Period contemporary · New York
- Jurisdiction
- Shared. A vampire clan as one party to a multilateral agreement.
- Mechanism
- Turning as one outcome among many, governed by a written treaty and its courts.
- Disposition
- Later volumes are outside this register's remit, not bundled into this card.
The register's first filing where vampires are not the subject but a party — signatories to a standing accord alongside several other populations, with representation, obligations, and somewhere to complain. The desk carries the first volume and the adaptation that followed it, and states plainly that the remaining volumes are out of jurisdiction rather than folded in: this register declines to bundle, and it equally declines to claim files that belong to somebody else's beat.
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UR-2007-TDF / Polar night, filmed
Plate LXXXVI
30 Days of Night
2007
David Slade
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-2002-TDN The Almanac Plan, Filmed
Period contemporary · Barrow, Alaska
- Jurisdiction
- Municipal, unreachable, and now with the phone lines cut first.
- Mechanism
- As the comics, with the infrastructure sabotage moved to the opening.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-2002-TDN. Own card by rule.
The adaptation opens by destroying the town's helicopter, phones and dogs before anything else happens, which the desk approves of on procedural grounds: it establishes that the attackers understand infrastructure. Everything after that is a siege, correctly conducted, against a settlement whose only real defence was on a timetable.
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UR-2007-VAC / Boarding institution
Plate LXXXVII
Vampire Academy
2007
Richelle Mead
novel
Plate held; no cut on file A School With a Formal Feeding Policy
Period contemporary · St Vladimir's Academy, Montana
- Jurisdiction
- Educational. A boarding school with a curriculum and a duty roster.
- Mechanism
- A stratified society: mortal royalty, sworn guardians, and the fallen.
- Confidence
- High on structure. The class system is written down and examinable.
The register's condition acquires a syllabus. Three castes with defined obligations, a guardian corps trained on site, and a feeding arrangement conducted under policy rather than in alleys. The desk notes that this is the only filing where somebody has thought about consent as an administrative problem and produced forms, which is exactly what an institution does once it stops being a secret.
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UR-2012-TW5 / Contested filing, fifth
Plate CVIII
Breaking Dawn — Part 2
2012
Bill Condon
film
Plate held; finding contested The Fifth of Five, Being the Second Half of the Same Book
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- The governing council of UR-2009-TW2, convened in the field.
- Mechanism
- A hearing, a body of witnesses, and a finding delivered without violence.
- Disposition
- Closes the contested series at five film filings and four novels.
The series ends in what is, stripped of its weather, an evidentiary hearing: two sides assemble witnesses, a standing authority hears the matter in the field, and the finding is accepted. The desk has spent this register complaining that the archive settles its disputes by stake and fire. It notes, with the sourness of an institution proved wrong by a document it dislikes, that the contested filings are the ones that end with a procedure.
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UR-2008-TBL / Southern estate, broadcast
Plate XC
True Blood
2008
Alan Ball · HBO
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing Rights, Legislation, and a Product on the Shelf
Period contemporary · Bon Temps, Louisiana
- Jurisdiction
- Civil rights, and the backlash to them. Legislatures, churches, and bars.
- Mechanism
- Disclosure enabled by a product; assimilation contested for seven years.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2001-DUD, the origin filing.
Seven years of the archive's only sustained look at what happens after concealment ends: statutes, marriage cases, employment disputes, a hostile church, and a mainstreaming faction arguing with a separatist one. The desk regards this as the register's most complete institutional document, and notes that not one episode of it turns on a stake. It turns on a bill.
-
UR-2008-BHM / Shared tenancy, precedent
Plate LXXXVIII
Being Human
2008
Toby Whithouse · BBC Three
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Flatshare, Eleven Years Before Staten Island
Period contemporary · Bristol
- Jurisdiction
- Shared tenancy. Three occupants, one landlord, and a rota.
- Mechanism
- Abstinence maintained by housemates, which is to say maintained unevenly.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2014-DOC and UR-2019-WWD, which the desk had wrongly treated as the first.
The register had been crediting the Wellington filings with inventing the vampire flatshare, and this entry corrects us by six years. The treatment here is straight rather than comic: the recovery is fragile, the housemates are the support structure, and the relapses are handled the way relapses are. Same premise, opposite register, filed on its own card so the priority is visible.
-
UR-2009-THR / Clinical trial filing
Plate XCIV
Thirst
2009
Park Chan-wook
film
Plate held; no cut on file It Came From a Vaccine Trial
Period contemporary · South Korea
- Jurisdiction
- Medical. A hospital, a trial protocol, and a transfusion.
- Mechanism
- Contamination during treatment. The register's only informed-consent case.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1954-EPI. Vampirism as a clinical outcome rather than a curse.
A priest volunteers for a vaccine trial, dies, and does not stay dead. The desk singles this out because it is the only filing in the register where the subject signed a form beforehand: there is a protocol, an adverse event, and a duty of care that nobody discharges. Everything that follows is a complications report nobody filed.
-
UR-2009-STR / Outbreak filing
Plate XCIII
The Strain
2009
Guillermo del Toro · Chuck Hogan
novel
Plate held; no cut on file A Plane Lands and Nobody Gets Off
Period contemporary · New York
- Jurisdiction
- Public health. A CDC team, a quarantine, and a chain of custody.
- Mechanism
- A parasitic worm with a vector, an incubation period, and a reservoir.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1954-EPI, whose epidemiological turn this filing completes.
The register's condition finally gets the response it has deserved since 1954: an epidemiologist, a containment protocol, and an autopsy that establishes the mechanism on the page. The desk approves of the method and notes the outcome, which is that the correct institutional response arrives, performs competently, and is overruled by somebody with money. That is also the ordinary result.
-
UR-2009-TVD / Broadcast estate, first
Plate XCV
The Vampire Diaries
2009
Kevin Williamson · Julie Plec · The CW
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Diary, Serialised for Eight Years
Period contemporary · Mystic Falls, Virginia
- Jurisdiction
- Municipal and hereditary. A founding council that has always known.
- Mechanism
- A town whose institutions were built around the problem from the start.
- Disposition
- First of three broadcast registers. See UR-2013-ORG and UR-2018-LEG.
Eight years, and the useful finding is municipal rather than romantic: Mystic Falls has a founders' council, an archive, and a policy, and has had all three for a century and a half while telling residents there is nothing to know. The desk has covered that town. Every town has that council. Ours is called the planning committee.
-
UR-2010-STK / Post-collapse itinerancy
Plate CII
Stake Land
2010
Jim Mickle
film
Plate held; no cut on file An Apprenticeship, Conducted on Foot
Period contemporary, after the collapse · the American interior
- Jurisdiction
- None remaining. The state is gone; settlements and militias have replaced it.
- Mechanism
- Overrun. The condition is ambient, and the human factions are the live threat.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1987-NEA. Both files are about provisioning a journey with no margin.
The condition has already won and receded into weather, and the file is really about a trade being taught on the road — technique, caution, where to sleep, what to carry. The desk notes the finding common to every post-collapse entry in the register: once the supernatural threat becomes routine, the dangerous party is whichever group of people has organised around it fastest.
-
UR-2010-RDL / Suburban abstinence
Plate C
The Radleys
2010
Matt Haig
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Family Next Door Is Abstaining
Period contemporary · a Yorkshire village
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic. Two parents, two children, and a secret kept from the children.
- Mechanism
- Abstinence, maintained by rules, and a handbook consulted like a parenting guide.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1998-CRP. Both files are about a programme of self-management.
A middle-class family manages the condition the way this paper's readers manage everything else: with rules, avoidance, a book of guidance kept out of sight, and a policy of not discussing it. The children have not been told what they are. The desk files this under Home & Hardware without hesitation — the mechanism is not blood, it is a household that has decided the subject is not to be raised.
-
UR-2007-IAL / Adaptation, third of three
Plate LXXXIV
I Am Legend
2007
Francis Lawrence · Will Smith
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1954-EPI The Same File, With the Ending Removed Again
Period 2012 · Manhattan
- Jurisdiction
- Outbreak; one fortified townhouse, a dog, and a laboratory in the basement.
- Mechanism
- A cancer therapy that worked, then did not stop.
- Disposition
- Third adaptation of UR-1954-EPI. The title's meaning inverted a second time.
Three adaptations across forty-three years, and only the first keeps the sentence that gives the book its title. The desk files all three side by side, arranged by period so they fall in 1968, 1977 and 2012 — and observes that the register's single most quoted idea has now been adapted out of its own adaptations twice. That is not a remake. That is a redaction with a budget.
-
UR-2012-HTL / Hospitality, animated
Plate CVII
Hotel Transylvania
2012
Genndy Tartakovsky
animated film
Plate held; no cut on file The Register Opens a Hotel
Period contemporary · a resort built for the purpose
- Jurisdiction
- Hospitality. A licensed resort with staff, bookings and a house policy.
- Mechanism
- Concealment as an amenity: the guests are hiding, and paying for it.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1996-DUS, the register's other licensed premises, run rather differently.
A widowed father builds a fortified resort so his daughter never has to meet anybody, and then runs it as a going concern with a booking system. The desk files it seriously: it is the only entry in the register where the protective architecture — walls, staff, isolation, a controlled guest list — is examined as a thing that harms the person it is built around.
-
UR-2013-MI2 / Shared jurisdiction, adaptation
Plate CX
City of Bones
2013
Harald Zwart
film
Plate held; partial jurisdiction The Accords, Filmed
Period contemporary · New York
- Jurisdiction
- Shared, as at UR-2007-MI1. The clan appears; the file is not theirs.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged from the novel. Turning as a hazard of proximity, not a campaign.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-2007-MI1. Own card by rule; series not continued on screen.
The adaptation gets its own card because this register gives every filing one, and the desk notes the outcome with professional interest: the screen version stops after a single instalment while the books continue for five more, which is the exact inverse of the Twilight sequence a few cards back. One source, adapted to exhaustion; another, adapted once and abandoned. The register records both without preference.
-
UR-2013-ORG / Broadcast estate, second
Plate CXII
The Originals
2013
Julie Plec · The CW
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Family Firm, Relocated to New Orleans
Period contemporary · New Orleans, founded by the family in question
- Jurisdiction
- Territorial. A city divided by treaty between three standing factions.
- Mechanism
- A thousand-year-old family holding property, seats and grievances.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2003-UW1. Both files are ultimately about who chairs the meeting.
The estate's middle register, and its most institutional: a city carved up by written accord between three populations, with quarters, representatives and a standing dispute over the terms. The desk has now seen enough of these to state the pattern plainly. Give any hidden population two hundred years and it produces a treaty, a council, and somebody arguing that the treaty was never valid.
-
UR-2013-OLA / Depleted supply
Plate CXI
Only Lovers Left Alive
2013
Jim Jarmusch
film
Plate held; no cut on file They Buy It From the Hospital Now
Period contemporary · Tangier and Detroit
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic and procurement. Two households and a preferred supplier.
- Mechanism
- Purchase, not predation. The wild supply is contaminated and unsafe.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2009-DAY. Both files are about an input that has stopped being reliable.
Centuries old, and the practical problem is sourcing: the general population is contaminated, so they buy medical-grade stock from a contact at a hospital and worry about him retiring. The desk finds this the most quietly convincing filing in the register. Immortality does not produce grandeur. It produces a long relationship with one reliable supplier and real anxiety about losing him.
-
UR-2014-DOC / Consented documentary
Plate CXIV
What We Do in the Shadows
2014
Jemaine Clement · Taika Waititi
film
Plate held; subjects consented, plate declined The Only Crew That Got a Release Form
Period contemporary · Wellington
- Jurisdiction
- Shared tenancy. Four subjects, one hallway, one unresolved dish rota.
- Mechanism
- Cohabitation, and the ordinary domestic failure to divide labour fairly.
- Confidence
- Highest available. Filmed with consent, on the record, over months.
Methodologically the strongest document in the register and the desk will hear no argument: the subjects agreed to be filmed, the crew obtained protection, and the resulting footage covers routine life rather than a crisis. What it records is a chore dispute that has run for years, which is exactly what this paper has always maintained an immortal household would actually contain. Five centuries of existence and the dishes are still the standing item.
-
UR-2014-AGW / Solitary jurisdiction
Plate CXIII
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
2014
Ana Lily Amirpour
film
Plate held; no cut on file She Polices the Town Herself
Period contemporary · Bad City
- Jurisdiction
- Vacant. There is no authority in the town, so one is improvised.
- Mechanism
- Selection. The subject chooses by conduct, and follows people home.
- Confidence
- High on method; the filing states its criteria without ever explaining them.
A town with no functioning authority acquires an unelected one who applies a consistent standard to the men in it. The desk declines to call this justice and files it as enforcement, which is the honest word: the criteria are never published, there is no appeal, and the record shows they have so far been applied accurately. Those three facts do not sit together comfortably, which is the point.
-
UR-2014-STV / Outbreak, broadcast
Plate CXVI
The Strain
2014
Guillermo del Toro · Carlton Cuse · FX
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Containment Protocol, Serialised
Period contemporary · New York
- Jurisdiction
- Public health, escalating to civil emergency across four years.
- Mechanism
- As the novels, with the institutional failure given room to develop slowly.
- Disposition
- Adaptation of UR-2009-STR. Own card by rule.
The advantage of the longer form is that the collapse can be shown at its real speed: the agency is competent, then underfunded, then overruled, then irrelevant, over four years rather than four hundred pages. The desk considers the slow version more useful. Institutions rarely fail in a scene. They fail across a fiscal year.
-
UR-2014-VAF / Adaptation, single instalment
Plate CXVII
Vampire Academy
2014
Mark Waters
film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-2007-VAC The Academy, Filmed Once
Period contemporary · St Vladimir's Academy, Montana
- Jurisdiction
- Educational, as the novel. The caste structure survives adaptation.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged from UR-2007-VAC.
- Disposition
- One of six volumes adapted; the series stopped here.
The second entry in the register, after the 2013 City of Bones filing, where a six-book series is adapted once and abandoned. The desk notes the pattern now has enough instances to be worth naming: the archive is full of works whose adaptations stop after the first, and a chronology that only carried the successful franchises would misrepresent what actually got made.
-
UR-2012-UW4 / Containment era
Plate CIX
Underworld: Awakening
2012
Måns Mårlind · Björn Stein
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Hidden Population Becomes a Public Health File
Period twelve years after UR-2006-UW2
- Jurisdiction
- Public, at last. The population is discovered and the response is institutional.
- Mechanism
- Screening, detention, research contracts, and an attempted engineered strain.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1954-EPI. The outbreak logic, applied by the other side.
Concealment fails and the register acquires the filing it had been avoiding since 1954: what a modern state and its contractors actually do with a transmissible condition once it is on the books. Screening, detention, a research programme, and a corporation holding the samples. The desk notes that not one countermeasure in this file is supernatural, and that the archive's centuries of secrecy are undone in a single administrative afternoon.
-
UR-2010-PSG / Programme failure
Plate XCIX
The Passage
2010
Justin Cronin
novel
Plate held; no cut on file The Government Made Them On Purpose
Period 2016 onward, then a century after the collapse
- Jurisdiction
- Military research, then nothing at all for ninety years.
- Mechanism
- A virus developed as a force enhancement, tested on prisoners.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2012-UW4 and UR-2009-STR. Institutions as the actual vector.
The register's clearest statement of a suspicion running through its whole second half: the outbreak is not a visitation, it is a procurement decision. Twelve death-row subjects, a defence contract, a containment plan that assumes nothing goes wrong, and ninety years of consequences. The desk has read this programme's paperwork before under other names.
-
UR-2016-UW5 / Succession dispute
Plate CXIX
Underworld: Blood Wars
2016
Anna Foerster
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Institution Argues About Who Runs It
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Internal governance. Two surviving covens and a vacant chair.
- Mechanism
- Council politics, a bid for the seat, and a hereditary claim on the blood line.
- Disposition
- Closes the institutional arc opened at UR-2003-UW1.
The war ends and the paperwork does not: what remains of the covens spends the filing arguing about seniority, membership of the council, and who is entitled to what. The desk closes this arc satisfied. A population that survives discovery, containment and near-extinction, and then immediately convenes a meeting about the chairmanship, has proved the thing the register kept asserting — that the durable part of any secret society is its committee.
-
UR-2016-CDT / Cartel jurisdiction
Plate CXVIII
Certain Dark Things
2016
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
novel
Plate held; no cut on file Ten Subspecies, and a City That Banned All of Them
Period contemporary · Mexico City, nominally vampire-free
- Jurisdiction
- Municipal prohibition, unevenly enforced, in a city that declared itself clean.
- Mechanism
- Distinct subspecies with distinct biology, competing as criminal organisations.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1974-KRN, the register's other filing to insist there is more than one kind.
A taxonomy the register has needed since 1974: multiple lineages with genuinely different biology, treated as ethnic and commercial rivals rather than as one condition. The desk approves particularly of the municipal detail — the city has declared itself free of them, which means the population it does have is illegal, unrecorded, and therefore run by whoever handles contraband.
-
UR-2017-LV2 / Second duplicate filing
Plate CXXI
The Little Vampire
2017
Richard Claus · Karsten Kiilerich
animated film
Plate held; duplicate of UR-1979-KV The Little Vampire, Refiled in Animation
Period contemporary
- Jurisdiction
- Domestic, animated. The bedroom window survives every adaptation.
- Mechanism
- Unchanged again. The origin filing has proved unusually stable.
- Disposition
- Second duplicate of UR-1979-KV. Filed on its own date.
The second refiling of the 1979 novel, and the reason this register was built the way it is. Three documents — a book, a live-action adaptation and an animated one — describe one continuing case across thirty-eight years, and a chronology that bundles them behind a single dot would hide both the gap and the fact that the story kept being worth refiling. Each gets a card. The desk considers the animation the most faithful of the three to the original's central and easily missed point, which is that the vampire is the one who has to be home on time.
-
UR-2018-LEG / Broadcast estate, third
Plate CXXII
Legacies
2018
Julie Plec · The CW
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The School the Estate Finally Built
Period contemporary · Mystic Falls, Virginia
- Jurisdiction
- Educational. The problem has been institutionalised into a boarding school.
- Mechanism
- Enrolment. Three populations, one campus, and a safeguarding policy.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2009-TVD and UR-2013-ORG, which this filing closes out.
Thirteen years and three registers later, the estate arrives where every institutional filing in this archive arrives: somebody founds a school and writes a policy. The desk marks the completion of the arc rather than the plot. A hidden population becomes a governed one, and the last stage of governance is always education, because that is how a thing stops being a secret and becomes a curriculum.
-
UR-2009-DAY / Commodity filing
Plate XCII
Daybreakers
2009
Michael and Peter Spierig
film
Plate held; no cut on file They Won, and Now They Have a Supply Problem
Period 2019 · a fully converted economy
- Jurisdiction
- Economic. The condition is the norm; humans are a raw material in shortage.
- Mechanism
- Farming, rationing, substitution research, and a coffee shop dilution scandal.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1982-FVR and UR-2001-DUD. All three treat blood as a commodity.
The filing this desk would have commissioned. The vampires win, inherit a functioning economy, and immediately face the only problem this paper genuinely understands: demand growth against a depleting input, with substitution research underfunded and rationing arriving late. There is a scene about diluting the product to stretch stock. We have written that article about coffee.
-
UR-2019-WWD / Flatshare, serialised
Plate CXXIV
What We Do in the Shadows
2019
Jemaine Clement · FX
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing Six Years of the Same Chore Dispute
Period contemporary · Staten Island
- Jurisdiction
- Shared tenancy, relocated, and now with a documented human employee.
- Mechanism
- Cohabitation, over six years, with the same unresolved division of labour.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2014-DOC, whose method this filing extends by five and a half years.
The 2014 filing established that centuries of existence do not settle a chore rota. Six further years of consented footage confirm it, at length, with an ongoing dispute about a ceiling. The desk regards the extended run as the single strongest evidentiary contribution to this register: not because it is new, but because it is the same finding, replicated, over a much longer observation window.
-
UR-2019-NOS / Serialised abduction file
Plate CXXIII
NOS4A2
2019
Jami O'Brien · AMC · from Joe Hill
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Man With the Car and the Very Long Route
Period contemporary · New England, and a place reached by driving
- Jurisdiction
- Interstate and long-running. Decades of missing children, never connected.
- Mechanism
- Vitality drawn from children, transported by car to a constructed place.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1985-LFC. Both files take something other than blood.
A predator who takes years rather than pints, driving children to a place he has built out of what he has taken from them. The desk files it in this register on the mechanism rather than the iconography — nothing here has fangs — and notes the archival point: the cases span decades and are never linked, because no institution keeps a file long enough to see the pattern.
-
UR-2021-MDM / Congregational filing
Plate CXXVII
Midnight Mass
2021
Mike Flanagan · Netflix
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Parish Took Communion Without Reading the Label
Period contemporary · Crockett Island
- Jurisdiction
- Congregational. One island, one church, and a declining population.
- Mechanism
- Distribution through a sacrament, to a community that queues for it weekly.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1872-STY. The threat is admitted, formally, by the household.
The register's most efficient delivery mechanism by a wide margin: an institution the whole community already attends, already trusts, and already accepts things from without inspection. The desk has spent this register arguing that the invitation is the vulnerability. Here somebody simply used the standing weekly one, and the congregation did the distribution themselves.
-
UR-2021-BRS / In-flight incident
Plate CXXVI
Blood Red Sky
2021
Peter Thorwarth
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Outbreak Was at Thirty Thousand Feet
Period contemporary · a transatlantic flight
- Jurisdiction
- Aviation. A sealed tube at altitude, with no exit and no ground support.
- Mechanism
- A managed condition, destabilised by injury during an unrelated crime.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2023-DEM. A sealed vessel, a fixed passenger list, and no way off.
The register's second sealed-vessel filing after the Demeter, and the confined space does the same work: a fixed manifest, no exits, and a duration nobody can shorten. What distinguishes it is that the condition is under medication and stable until a hijacking interrupts the dose. The catastrophe is a treatment interruption, caused by people committing an entirely unrelated crime.
-
UR-2022-DAY / Organised labour
Plate CXXVIII
Day Shift
2022
J. J. Perry
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Hunters Unionised
Period contemporary · the San Fernando Valley
- Jurisdiction
- Industrial. A union with membership rules, a rate card, and a paperwork officer.
- Mechanism
- Piecework, priced by fang condition, with the invoice contested afterwards.
- Cross-reference
- UR-2023-RNF, the register's other employment filing, from the opposite side.
The register's hunters finally organise: a local with dues, a grading schedule that prices the work by the condition of the evidence, and a compliance officer following the protagonist around with forms. The desk has waited a hundred and twenty cards for somebody to ask who pays for all the stakes. The answer is a union, and there is a dispute about the paperwork.
-
UR-2023-RNF / Employment dispute
Plate CXXXII
Renfield
2023
Chris McKay
film
Plate held; no cut on file The Familiar Files a Grievance
Period contemporary · New Orleans
- Jurisdiction
- Employment. A working relationship of unusual duration and no written terms.
- Mechanism
- Dependency, framed by the filing itself as a workplace problem.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1897-EPI, where the same employee appears without recourse.
A hundred and twenty-six years after the founding document, its most exploited minor character attends a support group and articulates the arrangement as what it always was: unbounded hours, no compensation, and a principal who characterises reasonable requests as betrayal. The desk files this under Employment and observes that the register took an extremely long time to ask the servant anything.
-
UR-2023-CND / Head of state filing
Plate CXXX
El Conde
2023
Pablo Larraín
film
Plate held; no cut on file The General Was One the Whole Time
Period contemporary · a Chilean estate, with a two-century backfile
- Jurisdiction
- Familial and financial. An estate, heirs, and an audit of hidden accounts.
- Mechanism
- Two three centuries of appetite, latterly institutional rather than personal.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1973-SRD. Both files put the condition in a boardroom.
A former head of state, two and a half centuries old, is dying at his estate while his children go through the books looking for the money. The desk files it as the register's most direct statement of a thesis running through the whole second half: the metaphor stopped being about hunger some time ago, and the audit scene is the horror.
-
UR-2024-ABG / Containment reversed
Plate CXXXIII
Abigail
2024
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin · Tyler Gillett
film
Plate held; no cut on file They Kidnapped the Wrong Child
Period contemporary · one locked house
- Jurisdiction
- Criminal. A professional crew, a client, and a twenty-four hour hold.
- Mechanism
- The crew locks itself in with the subject, by design, as a security measure.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1872-STY, inverted. Here the guest was carried across the threshold.
A crew secures a remote house, seals it, and holds a child inside overnight for a fee, having performed no diligence whatsoever on the asset. The desk notes the inversion with some enjoyment: the register's central rule is that the threat must be admitted, and this is the only filing where the victims went out, collected it, and carried it in themselves.
-
UR-2025-TAL / The order that keeps the records
Plate CXXXVII
Talamasca
2025
AMC · the Anne Rice Immortal Universe
television series
Plate held; broadcast filing The Archivists Get Their Own File at Last
Period contemporary · the order, observed rather than consulted
- Jurisdiction
- Archival. An order whose stated function is to watch and to write it down.
- Mechanism
- Observation, files, and a policy of non-intervention that does not hold.
- Cross-reference
- UR-1976-INT, UR-1985-LES, UR-1988-QOD, UR-1994-IWV, UR-2002-QOD, UR-2022-IWV.
The register's natural conclusion: an organisation that exists to do exactly what this desk does for a living, staffed by people who have decided that watching and filing is itself a defensible way to spend a life. We are aware of the resemblance. We note that their non-intervention policy fails on contact, and we decline to speculate about ours.
-
UR-1985-VHD / Far-future filing
Plate XLIII
Vampire Hunter D
1985
Toyoo Ashida · from Hideyuki Kikuchi
animated film
Plate held; no cut on file The Register's Last Card, Ten Thousand Years From Now
Period 12,090 AD · the Frontier
- Jurisdiction
- Aristocratic and terminal. The Nobility rules, and has ruled too long.
- Mechanism
- Hereditary rule by an immortal class, with a hunter of mixed descent against it.
- Disposition
- The latest period in the register by ten thousand years. Sorted accordingly.
On the period clock this filing sits alone at the far end of the spine, ten millennia past every other card, and the desk considers that placement the most useful thing the second arrangement does. It is also the only document here in which the vampires won, held power for thousands of years, and are now simply an exhausted aristocracy managing their own decline. Every institutional filing in the register was heading here.
No filings match. The register is complete; your criteria are not.
The rulings
The desk has graded the rumours against the register above — what holds, what everybody repeats without explaining, and what turns out to have been invented once and believed ever since. They are filed at The Vampire Rulings.
What to read
Eight filings carry the rest of the register, and there is a shelf that would let a reader catch me out. Both are at Selected Vampire Readings.
Counsel asks me to state plainly: the works above belong to their respective authors, studios and estates; the file references, jurisdictions and dispositions are the desk’s own apparatus and have no legal standing whatsoever; and nothing in this register should be read as advice to invite anybody in on the strength of a good manner at the door. That last clause was counsel’s, and I have signed it under protest and with my own pen, since I photograph poorly and sign for everything.
The outbreak register follows this one on Wednesday and inherits its logic straight from the 1954 filing below, where the record forks. Seven more run weekly from there to Halloween. The paper has asked me to file all of them, on the reasoning that I am already awake, and I have accepted, on the reasoning that the alternative is going home.
— Casimir Vane
