The Night of the Hunted

Jean Rollin's The Night of the Hunted is a typically moody, abstractly haunting film from the idiosyncratic horror auteur. More even than most of his work, this film dispenses with any actual concrete horror in favor of a vague sense of disquiet that's almost entirely psychological and mental. This is a haunting study of the nature of memory and its linkage to identity and human consciousness, and the fear here arises almost entirely from the loss of memory, from the feeling of one's sense of self slipping away with one's memory. It's about fear of the loss of self, making this an entirely existential horror film.

The film opens in the fashion of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly: a young woman (Brigitte Lahaie), dressed only in a filmy nightie, runs out of the dark forest one night and into the path of a car driven by Robert (Alain Duclos). She tells him that her name is Elisabeth, and she's running in terror of something, but she doesn't remember what — moments later, she doesn't even remember that her name is Elisabeth. Her memories keep slipping away from her; it's not just amnesia, but the slippage of even short-term memory, so that if Robert were to be out of her sight for just a few minutes she'd forget him too. Naturally, she clings to him desperately, and he takes this confused, frightened girl back to his apartment, where he comforts her and they soon have sex, in a scene of cheesy, gratuitous softcore of the kind that Rollin almost always slotted into his films, and yet here the sex is tinged with desperation and a genuine thirst for connection. Elisabeth lives only in the present moment, she says, and she clings to each moment like a precious raft in a sea of nothingness, because each present moment is all she has to hang onto. She urges him on, demanding that he stay with her, that he not let her forget; her intense desire for a memory to cling to makes what could otherwise have been a rote, porny sex scene surprisingly poignant, both passionate and deeply sad.

Apparently, though, this whole situation doesn't leave enough of an impression on Robert, who, hapless as most male Rollin heroes, soon goes off to work, leaving Elisabeth alone to forget him, and herself, all over again. She's quickly found by the doctors she'd apparently been fleeing at the beginning of the film, and they take her to an apartment building that houses other patients, like her, whose memories are continually erased. Most of Rollin's previous work was set in the majestically ruined countryside, in crumbling ancient castles and disused graveyards, but The Night of the Hunted is an urban film, with a very different aesthetic. Rollin's haunted rural castles and fields had always been both creepy and beautiful, mingling fear and foreboding with the strange allure of death and the supernatural. In this film, though, the sinisterly blank apartment towers and concrete wastelands of the city are merely creepy, the building's surfaces and interiors as blank as the minds of the inhabitants. The building, obviously an abandoned office tower, is nearly undecorated, its walls stark white or black, and the patients, with their missing memories, wander aimlessly through these blank, sterile spaces, the austerity of their surroundings reflecting the emptiness of their lives.


It's a haunting, disturbingly poetic film, especially in its first half, before a series of pointless sex scenes and pseudo-scientific exposition dumps disrupt the poetic vibe. At the apartment, Elisabeth meets two other women who are afflicted as she is: Catherine (Cathy Stewart), whose memory is so bad that she can't even remember how to eat, and Véronique (Dominique Journet), who Elisabeth seems to vaguely remember from her previous life. The scenes between these women are evocative and poignant, as they struggle from moment to moment to remember something, to hold onto some memory, some experience, some person who means something to them. They invent stories and memories for each other. Catherine and Elisabeth pretend that they were childhood friends, though like everything else that game too soon slips away from them. Later, they encounter a woman who's constantly searching for her lost child: she remembers, or thinks she remembers, that she once had a child, but not the child's name or even its gender.

Rollin is delving into the nature of memory and what it means to the construction of one's identity: without memory these people are nothing, no one, barely even alive, their very selves erased along with their pasts. These scenes are deeply emotional, infused with tenderness and sadness, the film's opening already forgotten because these mysteriously afflicted people truly live exclusively in the present tense. In her previous collaborations with Rollin, The Grapes of Death and Fascination, Lehaie, who started her career as a porn actress, projected a fierce carnality, a feral, sexualized violence that made her the ultimate femme fatale. She seems like almost a different actress here, her intensity transmuted into vulnerability, melancholy, a sense of loss that seems to infuse her every gesture, her every fragile, innocent expression.

The film falls apart a bit at around the halfway point, replacing this moody exploration of loss and mental anguish with a number of gratuitous scenes of violence-tinged eroticism, which seem to have come from an entirely different film. Robert also returns towards the end, and the plot is needlessly explained in multiple exposition-laden speeches delivered by the sinister doctor. But the film's final image, which compares the memory-less Elisabeth to the shambling walking dead of a zombie film, provides an effective, eerily romantic finale for a strange, and strangely affecting, film. The Night of the Hunted is ultimately uneven and flawed, only sporadically delivering on its promise and its evocative study of memory and identity. At its best, though, the film achieves the haunting quality of Rollin's other films without any of the supernatural or horror elements that generally characterized his other work.

Fascination

Fascination is a very apt title for a Jean Rollin film. Rollin's ethereal horror oeuvre revolves around the idea of fascination: fixation, obsession, fetishism, the irresistible allure of danger and death, great beauty tangled up with supernatural horror. His cinema repeatedly examines the fascination of the director and, often, his protagonists, with the strange, unsettling, eerie occurrences that haunt his movies. From film to film, Rollin wove together increasingly familiar images and themes that constitute the subject of his fascination: beautiful women naked or dressed only in diaphanous see-through gowns, gothic rural settings, vampirism, seduction, ruined castles lit by candles, secret societies that seem to flicker on the edges of the material world, trapped between states, their exact nature uncertain.

Fascination embodies so many of these fixations that it feels like an ultimate statement of the director's vision; perhaps not his best film but definitely one of his most characteristic, which is why it's also become, within this unusual auteur's cult, one of his most iconic works. The story is, in the usual Rollin fashion, extremely simple, a bare sketch of a scenario used to set up the dreamy, vaguely menacing atmosphere that is the film's true substance. The thief Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire) betrays the rest of his criminal gang and flees their revenge, arriving at a nearly empty rural estate where the only residents are a pair of girls, Eva (Brigitte Lehaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Maï). Marc holds the girls prisoner while fending off his gang's attacks, but it soon becomes clear that if this is a hostage situation, who's the hostage and who's the captor might be the reverse of what Marc thinks.


Certainly, Marc believes that he's the one in control here, but a driving theme of the film is the exploration of power's relationship to gender and sexuality. Marc is a sneering, arrogant jerk, dominating these two girls from his position of power, waving his phallic gun around as a symbol of his sexual and physical dominion over them. Eva and Elisabeth sometimes play their expected roles, cowering in fear before him, but soon their show of fear and submissiveness gives way to a much more playful, mocking attitude, skewering his belief in his dominance, suggesting that they're really the ones in control. While taunting him with the prospect of sex, they actually go to bed together, in a scene of sumptuous softcore eroticism that could've come directly out of one of Rollin's adult productions. When Eva does give in to Marc, she's quite open about her motives: she wants to keep him there until nightfall, using her sexuality to lure him into what increasingly seems like a deadly trap.

There's clearly something sinister going on here, even if the hapless, arrogant Marc laughs off all the premonitions and warnings about the fate awaiting him once midnight strikes. Elisabeth, who seems slightly less unhinged than her compatriot, warns Marc that he should flee, that something horrible is in store for him that night. Anyone who enters the orbit of these girls is trapped within "the universe of madness and death," she says, clutching the gun she's stolen from their guest. Later, the girls are joined by more members of what seems to be a blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping club of wealthy bourgeois women, but Marc still doesn't catch on. The audience is a few steps ahead of him anyway, having been warned more explicitly by the gorgeously morbid prologue in which these women daintily drank ox blood from goblets while standing in a slaughterhouse, their frilly dresses dragging in the bits of cartilage and bloody flesh strewn across the reddened floor. The leader of this club, Hélène (Fanny Magier), warns Marc, "Beware, death sometimes takes the form of seduction," but even then he treats this night like a game, so secure in his masculine superiority that it never occurs to him that he's not in control, that he's become the prey rather than the predator.


The film's most enticing predator is undoubtedly Eva, who is especially terrifying in a sequence where she methodically, ruthlessly kills the members of Marc's gang, stabbing one man in the side during sex and then prowling after the others with a black robe billowing around her naked body, a scythe held threateningly in front of her. She's a sexy, seductive grim reaper, blonde death with a vicious blade that easily outdoes Marc's puny gun as far as penetrative phallic imagery goes. Rollin had first featured Lahaie in one of his bills-paying adult film productions, then given her a small but unforgettably intense role in his moody zombie classic The Grapes of Death.

Here, she magnifies and extends the sexy insanity of her part in that film, killing with her mouth locked in a horrible/alluring rictus grin, baring her teeth and smiling as she slashes throats with her reaper's blade. There's something feral about her, an animalistic quality that somehow only makes her more appealing, and more unsettling. Rollin captures her in evocative closeups in the moments before the kill, her eyes above the blade, her lips below it. Rollin seems to be asking, which is more dangerous, the scythe or the girl who wields it? Her alluring lips, her piercing eyes, they're as deadly as a knife to the guts, and with her, one leads to the other — her beauty and sexuality are lures into death and oblivion.

The strange attractiveness of death and perversion are at the core of this film, which perfectly captures the fascination that these beautiful, deadly women hold for their victims. Rollin makes the girls and their surroundings ravishing: the mansion, lit by candelabra, is lavishly decked out with fancy furniture and paintings, the surfaces of which Rollin's camera frequently probes whenever it's not being distracted by the lovely anti-heroines. Sensual and chilling in equal measures, Fascination is a nearly comprehensive catalogue of Rollin's obsessions and themes, exploring the appeal of the macabre and the impotency of male power through this hypnotically languid horror tale.

The Grapes of Death

The Grapes of Death marked a return to form for the idiosyncratic horror auteur Jean Rollin. After 1974's remarkable but commercially unsuccessful Lips of Blood, Rollin, unable to get even the typically miniscule budgets his particular brand of surreal, dreamlike horror required, began churning out straight-up softcore porn under the aliases Michael Gentil and Robert Xavier. The Grapes of Death, produced in 1978, four years after his last horror project, was Rollin's retreat from the adult film ghetto. It's a fantastic return, too, with Rollin tackling the zombie genre and adapting his sensual, hypnotic aesthetic to this creepy tale of a rural wine-producing region overrun by shambling, rotting, diseased and insane farmers.

This decay of civilization is seen through the eyes of Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), a young woman who's planning to visit her fiancé at the winery he manages. Instead, her train journey is interrupted by a zombified man who kills her friend and chases her off the train into a typically desolate Rollinesque countryside. This rural landscape is alternately brightly sunny and shrouded in fog, utterly without logic or concern for continuity. The film has a strangely gorgeous, pastoral atmosphere that clashes against the periodic outbursts of sloppy gore and disgusting, smeary makeup effects. Fleeing from her zombie pursuer, Élisabeth runs across a foggy bridge, surrounded in fluffy white clouds, then runs into a large open meadow that Rollin films in a stunning wide shot, the sun a glowing blue pinprick just barely cutting through the thick soup of the fog. Élisabeth arrives at a cemetery, looming out of the fog with massive stone crosses atop its locked gate, but soon after, the fog disappears in between shots, and the heroine is running across a rocky, barren hillside, bathed in gorgeous summery sun.

Weather and landscape are both prone to this kind of slippage in Rollin's films, with their uneven regard for the niceties of continuity. The countryside itself provides many of the chills here, with this terrified young woman stumbling across this desolate, unwelcoming land, coming across crumbling stone buildings in various states of decay and destruction, as though the land was already abandoned and falling apart long before this zombie plague further decimated the region. Rollin has always loved the gothic ruin of collapsing castles and old buildings situated in bleakly beautiful, unpopulated surroundings. He makes these scenes both sinister and oddly appealing, because he's obvious fascinated by the poetic ruin of these landscapes even as he uses them as foreboding settings for tales of death and terror.


Rollin is adept at finding a languid, melancholy form of poetry in the trashy, violent, sexually charged B-movie material that drives the often fragmented narratives of his films. Here, he makes his zombies more sad than terrifying, as they stumble around, their faces melting with oozing open sores that pour multicolored liquids down their cheeks and over their foreheads. The effects are primitive and ugly, and also somewhat disgusting — especially in the disturbing scene where one zombie repeatedly smashes his head against a car's window, leaving pus-yellow streaks on the glass until he finally manages to shatter it. Rollin makes this zombie plague explicitly a kind of disease, caused by pesticides used on wine grapes, and the sufferers of the plague are in various states of mental and physical decay, some of them utterly blank, their minds erased, and others tragically seeming to understand that they're losing their minds and being possessed by violent urges.

There's a strange poignancy to these zombies. When the initial zombie is first chasing Élisabeth, he abruptly gets tired and slumps down to a seat on the railroad tracks, cradling his head in his hands, exhausted and frustrated; Rollin, interestingly, pauses to consider the emotions of the zombie, too tired to continue chasing his prey. Later, Rollin gives one of the zombies a surprisingly affecting (and creepy) death scene, using the last of his energy to bloodily kiss the severed head of the woman he'd loved and killed, whose head he'd been carrying around in front of him like a talisman ever since.


Élisabeth's journey across the countryside is structured around her encounters with various people affected in various ways by the plague. She leads the blind woman Lucie (Mirella Rancelot) through the wasteland of a ruined, burning village with dead bodies strewn everywhere, the blind woman unable to see the wreckage all around her — and later, unable to see the zombies, her former neighbors, gathering around her and slowly closing in. Towards the end of the film, Élisabeth falls in with a pair of farmers, unaffected by the disease because they drink beer instead of wine, who provide an opportunity for a sudden diversion into political commentary. The action suddenly halts for these two to briefly discuss politics, improbably connecting the zombie outbreak to the French Resistance and modern anti-militarism. It's such a clumsy and truncated bit of forced commentary that it almost feels like a parody of the kind of social issue messages that, following George Romero, have become de rigeur for zombie movies.

The film's most memorable cameo appearance comes from Brigitte Lahaie, an adult film actress who had appeared in one of Rollin's earlier porn ventures, and had apparently impressed the director: she'd go on to be an important muse in his next few features, and is here already a formidable screen presence. Her unnamed character (appropriately credited only as "la grande femme blonde") is a mysterious woman who Élisabeth encounters while fleeing from the zombies. Seemingly unaffected by the plague — in a typical Rollin flourish, she eagerly shows off her naked body to reveal the lack of rotting wounds — she nevertheless projects a curious, magnetic menace in her ferocious, teeth-baring smile. Her teeth permanently clenched, she looks like she's either holding back some intense inner turmoil or preparing to devour anyone in her path. She makes only a brief appearance here, but her unhinged, terrifying performance is unforgettable, especially since she also strikes some unexpected notes of poignancy within this portrayal of a deranged psychopath.

Moody, chilling, poetic and strangely moving, The Grapes of Wrath is another fantastic, utterly original horror piece from Rollin. It's slightly more straightforward and conventionally horrific than many of his earlier films, with more gore and action, but it's still primarily reliant on its dreamlike atmosphere, on the sense of an eerie journey across a haunted wasteland where the terror arises as much from the abstract aesthetics as from the actual supernatural or monstrous threat.

Lips of Blood

[This piece was previously posted as a guest review at Jeremy Richey's blog Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience, one of the Internet's very best resources on Rollin.]

Jean Rollin's best films use B-movie horror plots and low-budget production values as portholes into an eerie, unsettling dream world that ultimately has little to do with typical blood-and-gore horror movies. This is especially true of Lips of Blood, one of the director's finest works, and one of his most dreamlike and abstract. The film is a slow, sensuous study of the power of memory and the lure of childhood fantasies, a feverish dream of a film that chronicles a quest that's as much mental as physical.

Frederic (Jean-Loup Philippe) is at a party when he sees a photograph of a ruined castle that triggers a previously suppressed childhood memory or dream. He comes to believe that he's been to this castle as a boy, and that he's forgotten it for some reason; his childhood is a blur to him, and he's long felt disconnected from the stories that his mother (Natalie Perrey) has told him about his forgotten boyhood. The photograph instantly opens a path into his memories, stirring up images of a dreamlike night that he spent in the castle, watched over by a beautiful young girl (Annie Belle) dressed in white. He'd repressed the memories of the castle and the girl, but now that they've entered his mind again, he becomes obsessed, fixated on discovering the castle's whereabouts and trying to locate the girl.


Frederic is haunted by this dreamlike memory, and the film is all about the power that this fixation has over him. At the party at the beginning of the film, he compliments a girl on her perfume, prompting her to pointedly respond, "scents are like memories; the person evaporates but the memory remains." In Frederic's case, the memory too had evaporated for twenty years, but now it's wafted back up into his senses, and he begins seeing the mysterious girl from the castle everywhere. He goes to see a movie — the poster outside is for Rollin's The Nude Vampire, but the theater's actually showing The Shiver of the Vampires, suggesting how intimately connected all these gothic vampire fantasies are — and the girl appears in the theater, beckoning him to follow her. She leads him to a crypt, where Frederic unwittingly releases a quartet of creepy vampire girls (Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, Anita Berglund, and Hélène Maguin) who shadow him throughout the rest of the film, continually intervening to rescue him from the mysterious forces that seem intent on stopping him from locating the castle or the girl who dwelled within it.

The film moves at a typically lethargic, dreamlike pace, blending gothic horror imagery — bats and graveyards and vampire girls clad in gauzy robes — with a weird conspiracy thriller vibe. A photographer (Martine Grimaud) who tries to tell Frederic about the castle winds up dead, another woman poses, unconvincingly, as the girl from the castle, and a mysterious assassin tracks Frederic through the night, while the vampires stalk around the fringes of the plot, fading out of the shadows. Rollin's films have often been comparable to the surreal quest narratives of his contemporary Jacques Rivette, with worse acting and more nudity, and nowhere is that comparison more relevant than here. Rollin renders the city as a quiet, nearly unpopulated stage, pools of colored light highlighted in the darkness, shadows cast large and threatening on stone walls as Frederic wanders around the city, searching for answers and chasing phantoms through the streets.

The film feels like a loosely connected series of set pieces, with Frederic's frazzled state of mind creating the sense of disorientation and confusion that dominates his increasingly desperate journey. He begins to doubt his own sanity: the girl from his memory, or his dream, pops into being and blinks out of existence just as suddenly, leading him through the night, eventually guiding him directly to the answer he seeks, the location of the castle from the photo. Meanwhile, the vampires attack and kill random people, baring their uncomfortable-looking fangs and bloodying their mouths on the necks of their victims. At one point, the Castel sisters disguise themselves as nurses in order to rescue Frederic from the mental hospital where he's been locked up by his mother, who seems to know something about all these secrets and mysteries.


Indeed, Frederic's mother provides the obligatory burst of exposition that suddenly explains the story towards the end of the film, setting up the fantastic final act in which Frederic confronts the true nature of his reawakened memories. He's found what he's been searching for, and in the final ten minutes of the film Rollin adopts a tone of lunatic celebration, reveling in the embrace of the supernatural and the bloody. The supernatural is rarely to be feared in Rollin's work. The supernatural is, instead, erotic, alluring, haunting, beautiful, a fixation for Rollin just as the castle becomes for Frederic. There is thus an air of real melancholy in the final act's confrontations between vampires and vampire hunters; Rollin's sympathies are obviously not with the men with their stakes, menacing these girls, but with the vampires themselves, so young and lovely and sensual, retreating in fear before the men. The vampires are the real victims, not to be feared or hated but desired, respected, adored, just as Frederic desires the girl from his memory, who is, of course, also a vampiress, using her power to lure him back to her, to get him to set her free.

Rollin makes the embrace of the supernatural a cause for celebration here, particularly in the ecstatic coda, in which the long-imprisoned vampire relishes her newfound freedom, taking pleasure in the sensuality of nature. Together, Frederic and his vampire love run along the striking, apocalyptic, by now very familiar beach that so often symbolizes the pathway between worlds in Rollin's work. It's here that Frederic embraces his fate and is reborn, and in the finale — at once gloriously silly and wonderfully romantic — the lovers sail off together in a coffin, heading off into a new undead existence together.

Demoniacs

Jean Rollin walks a very fine line in his trashy B-movie exploitation flicks. So much is "bad" and amateurish in his movies, from the wooden acting to the flimsy props to the ridiculous scripts, that it's sometimes difficult to determine just why the resulting films aren't bad, but in fact create a kind of budget poetry and eerie beauty from these minimal building blocks. Demoniacs perhaps proves just how easy it is for a Rollin film to tip over from that atmospheric minimalism into more typical sub-B-movie horror tripe. Demoniacs feels very much like a Rollin film in most ways; he's taking a brief detour from his obsession with lesbian vampires, but otherwise the film provides plenty of eerie beaches, ruined castles, sinister clowns, and languid softcore sex scenes. The usual shoddy production values and amateur acting are very much in place here. All the elements are there, but for whatever reason the ineffable magic that allowed Rollin's earlier films to transcend their trashy premises is missing here.

The story concerns a band of pirates who wreck ships by guiding them into the rocks with false light signals. After one of these shipwrecks, while the pirates are gathering their loot, two sisters (Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier) stumble to shore, the sole survivors of the wreck. The pirates attack and rape the girls — in a sequence staged so incompetently that it's laughable and discomfiting rather than harrowing — and leave them for dead on the shore. The girls aren't dead, though, and they eventually make their way to a ruined castle where the devil (Miletic Zivomir) is trapped along with two strange retainers, a clown (Mireille Dargent, donning clown makeup again after Requiem for a Vampire) and a bearded man who looks like Rasputin (Ben Zimet). The devil gives the girls his power through a sexual ritual, sending them off to get their revenge against the pirates.


It's a compelling enough story in its broad strokes, but Rollin, typically, isn't that interested in telling it. Instead, there are endless scenes of the pirates loitering around a bar where a psychic barmaid (Louise Dhour) stares into space and issues dire pronouncements about spirits, demons and violence. The pirate captain (John Rico) is occasionally plagued by a guilty conscience, which provides opportunities for some striking visions, as he sees the two girls from the shipwreck, dripping with blood, posing with skeletons and a creepy black stone angel with glowing red jewels for eyes. Mostly, though, the film feels slack and empty; it's just over an hour and a half long but feels much longer, its slowness not hypnotic as in Rollin's best films but draggy and numbing.

The highlight of the film is undoubtedly the presence of Joëlle Coeur's vicious nymphomaniac pirate Tina. Coeur isn't really any better an actress than the average Rollin star, but she does project a savage form of sexual menace that makes her an especially magnetic, memorable screen presence. Tina's a deadly femme fatale who's turned on by evil: in the opening scenes, she watches with a wicked smirk as her fellow pirates attack and rape the two survivors of the shipwreck, and all the violence moves her to strip down and seduce the pirate captain into her arms. Rollin treats her to multiple closeups in which she smiles that sinister, lusty smile, sensually shaking her long hair away from her face, throwing her head back, overcome with arousal at the prospect of violence and pillaging. Her performance is totally unmodulated, violently sexy, awkward and erotic in equal measures, and she brings a level of energy and enthusiasm to the film that's otherwise totally missing. Her constant posing — putting her hands on her hips and thrusting to and fro in a sexually charged celebration of death and destruction — is blatantly theatrical, making her a caricature of erotic evil, a nasty cartoon character come to fleshy life.

If only Rollin had built a worthier movie around this devilishly unrepressed villainess. The credits sequence introduces this as "un film expressioniste de Jean Rollin," but that description is far more apt for the director's earlier movies, which truly did create expressionist beauty from low-grade horror schlock. This film just meanders aimlessly without ever taking advantage of its most promising elements; even the revenge quest of the two girls is disappointing. With all the power of the devil at their fingertips, the best the sisters can do for vengeance is to make some statues fall from pillars while Tina runs around screaming, in what must be the silliest and least convincing sequence in a movie with some very stiff competition for that title. A few compelling moments aside, Demoniacs is one of Rollin's weaker efforts, where the unique alchemy of his approach fails to come together, leaving only the multiple failings of performance and plotting that are usually glossed over by the director's idiosyncratic aesthetic.

Requiem for a Vampire

Jean Rollin's fourth film, Requiem for a Vampire, was the director's most abstract and bizarre vision yet. Rollin's surreal, alternately eerie and ridiculous vampire movies had always worked according to their own distinctive anti-logic, but here, more than ever, he'd seemingly reached a new level of confidence that allowed him to eliminate narrative altogether, focusing exclusively on the languid establishment of a mood through his vibrant imagery. There's hardly even any dialogue at all, and long stretches of time go by with not a word being spoken. The result is a pure expression of the director's obsessions, a dreamlike series of disconnected scenes in which the film's two beautiful heroines wander aimlessly into (and then out of) a gothic vampire tale.

Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mireille Dargent) are introduced in a nonsensical opening sequence in which they're dressed as clowns, fleeing from mysterious pursuers, engaged in a gun battle in which their male companion is killed. They burn the car, shed their clown makeup and baggy clothes for tiny skirts, pigtails and knee-high socks, and head off through the barren countryside. This prologue is never explained, but it sets the tone of casual absurdity that will drive the film. The film moves at a relaxed pace, the camera slowly tracking around from a distance as the two girls wander through high grass, coming across an overgrown cemetery where they curl up together under a gravestone, and eventually arriving at a stone castle that's populated with vampires.


Rollin's heroines are inquisitive and bold, and they prowl through the castle like a pair of sapphic Nancy Drews, peeking around corners with their eyes wide, investigating these ruins, pausing only briefly to roll around naked together in bed. They come across a strange tableau in which skeletons in robes have been arranged around an altar, with a vampiress (Dominique Toussaint) sitting nearby, playing the organ and leering at the girls with comically large fangs sticking out over her lips. Even when the girls begin fleeing from the vampires and their savage, caveman-like servants, the pace remains narcotized and unsettlingly slow: a chase sequence plays out clumsily in a long shot in which the girls seem to be traipsing casually through a field of flowers while the vampires slowly advance in the distance. Rollin leaves large gaping ellipses that create a subtle sense of disorientation: after one caesura, the girls appear staring numbly ahead, vampire bats affixed to their necks, and then after another cut the bats are simply gone and the girls are left with twin red marks on their necks.

Rather than telling a story, Rollin seems to be working out his symbolism and fetishism of the vampire mythology at a purely primal, sensual level. The leader of the vampires keeps women chained in the basement of the castle, where they're raped and bitten by the vampires and their servants in an over-long and very gratuitous sequence, bathed in red colored lights as the women writhe around on their chains, culminating with a vampire turning into a bat to nestle in the pubic hair of one of the women. Rollin revels in this kind of outlandish imagery, celebrating the gothic sensuality of the vampire legend. During the arcane rituals at the film's climax, a vampire plays the piano in a graveyard while the two girls are led off one by one to be "initiated" by the male vampire, who can only transform virgins into his kind.


The film is a riff on sexuality and virginity, presenting a warped vision of the sexuality often associated with vampires. The two heroines, set to be inducted into vampirism, react in very different ways: while Michelle gives into her new vampiric thirsts, luring a man to the castle by stripping for him before she feeds on him, Marie finds a man as well but just has sex with him and then hides him away, telling the vampires that she couldn't find a victim. Rollin is reversing the usual hypocritical puritanism of so many horror movies, in which women who have sex are inevitably consumed by the movie's evil in the end. Here, it's the virgin who's corrupted, who gives into vampirism, while Marie, because she's no longer a virgin, retains her humanity and refuses to drink blood. Rollin isn't really interested in the love story, though, and at the film's climax, Marie's lover abruptly (and rather comically) gets sick of all this supernatural weirdness and runs off, leaving the two girls to escape together, reunited after the split caused by their different attitudes about vampires and sex.

That's a typical happy ending for Rollin, the girls wandering off into another adventure, leaving behind the rather melancholy and self-destructive vampires in their decrepit graveyard. Throughout the film, the girls flirt with the supernatural, with death and decay, and experiment with their sexualities, and then reaffirm their friendship and leave the darkness and the blood behind, presumably to return to their "ordinary" lives of dressing like clowns while engaging in shootouts and high-speed car chases.

The Shiver of the Vampires

Jean Rollin's The Shiver of the Vampires is a wonderfully strange, clever piece of B-movie trash/art, a film that revels in its nakedly exploitative eroticism and lurid atmosphere. Set in the modern day, the film nevertheless swaddles most of its characters in clothes that evoke both old-fashioned fancy dress and hippie attire, which gives the film a very strange feel in terms of period, as though it's outside of time, somewhere that the modern era hasn't truly touched. Indeed, its foggy graveyards and crumbling, towering stone castles feel like remnants of an earlier time, and when the newlyweds Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) and Isle (Sandra Julien) first appear driving a car, it feels like a radical intrusion into the film's strange period vibe. It's a sublimely ridiculous movie that tweaks its voyeuristic perspective by having its hapless hero, Antoine suffer through a baffling sequence of encoded sexual humiliations at the hands of his beautiful new bride.

For some reason, Isle decides that the creepy old castle owned by her strange cousins (Jacques Robiolles and Michael Delahaye) is the perfect honeymoon destination. That's only the beginning of the couple's troubles, as Isle repeatedly pushes Antoine away, refusing to consummate their marriage. Isle, it turns out, is much more interested in the erotic pleasures offered by the emaciated vampiress Isolde (Dominique), who appears to the virginal bride by popping out of a grandfather clock or leaping dramatically out from the curtains behind Isle's bed — this is a vampire who really knows how to make an entrance. After one night with Isolde, the next night Isle again turns her husband away, banishing him from the bedroom, then excitedly strips down and goes looking for the vampire. When she doesn't find her undead lover, Isle embraces the clock instead, languidly wrapping her naked body around its cold wood, so like a coffin, as a stand-in for the chilly body of the lesbian vampire.

The film is devilishly clever in its examination of sexual frustration, as poor Antoine is continually blocked from access to his new bride, who apparently prefers a feminine touch. When Antoine spends his wedding night alone, while Isle is seduced by Isolde, he lays in bed with a large phallic torch hilariously standing in for his erection, angled up from between his legs. Later, the castle's two sexy sapphic servants (Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce) stand over him and argue about which one of them will slip into bed with him; giggling, they decide they both will, but as soon as he wakes up, exaggeratedly rubbing his eyes as if convinced he's still dreaming, they jump out of bed and run naked and laughing out of the room, disappearing so quickly that he's convinced he might not have seen a thing. Meanwhile, the two fey vampire cousins have been having their way with a local girl, and gang up to rape the man-hating Isolde, while the servants writhe around naked in bed together: everyone but Antoine is getting some action, as he's left out of both the nocturnal supernatural conspiracy and the sexual games that accompany it.


Rollin's visual aesthetic renders this supernatural fantasy/nightmare in bright, unreal colors — the castle itself is often shown in cutaway shots where it's bathed in rainbow hues as though there are unseen spotlights shining up on it from the grounds — and shadowy, foggy haziness. The narrative is reduced to almost nothing: the newlyweds arrive at the castle, witness strange occurrences, wander through the moldy halls and decaying grounds, and Antoine occasionally makes half-hearted attempts to escape. It's a narrative perpetually suspended, and the whole thing has the texture of a dream, complete with its own loaded symbology. At one point, Antoine and Isle are strolling around the paths surrounding the castle, when Antoine abruptly shoots a dove. Isle, already transitioning into vampirism, is drawn to the dead bird and repeatedly brings it to her lips, finally resting its white body on the coffin of Isolde as an offering, bright red blood dripping over the wood.

This dreamlike film drifts along in this way, its images sensuous and erotically charged, really selling the draw of the undead, making the ease with which Isle is seduced away from her husband very understandable. There's a darkly comic vibe to the film, as well, particularly in the characters of the vampire cousins, who several times discourse in alternating lines on the history of their family, spouting pseudo-philosophical nonsense while trading lines, each one thrusting his head into the frame in turn. This film is a celebration of the surreal, the strange, the sexually polymorphous, as opposed to heteronormative marriage as represented, increasingly, by Antoine alone, without even his wife to support him. Even the servants, humans enslaved by the vampires, don't return to the normal, physical world after their joyful victory over the vampires: instead, in an extraordinary shot, Rollin holds a static view as the girls kiss and go dancing off in spiraling circles, disappearing into the darkness in the distance, their diaphanous gowns twirling around them, making them seem like spirits swallowed up by the night.

The climax is a showdown between Antoine and the vampire cousins, returning to the same bleak, apocalyptic beach that served as an otherdimensional realm at the end of Rollin's previous film, The Nude Vampire. Here, the beach, with the waves breaking against the rocky shore, serves as a grim backdrop for an anticlimactic conclusion in which Isle makes her choice and Antoine must watch as his wife engages in a suicidal, incestuous menage a trois with her cousins, while all he can do is impotently fire his pistol in the air, having no effect on these supernatural beings. The allure of the grave and of death ultimately wins out over the possibility of normality, marriage, a return to the ordinary world. Those things no longer hold any appeal for Isle; Antoine is the film's sole representative of normality, which is why in the end he's left alone and unfulfilled, shut out of the sensual, appealingly weird world of death and undeath. It's a neat trick that Rollin pulls off here: although humanity technically wins in the end, it's obvious that gay vampires just have so much more fun.

Lips of Blood: Guest Post at Fascination

Taking a quick break from this week's worthy Film Preservation blogathon and its celebration of Alfred Hitchcock, I have authored a guest post for Jeremy Richey's great blog Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience. Jeremy, who also runs the equally fantastic movie blog Moon in the Gutter, is among other things one of the Internet's primary champions of and authorities on the French horror auteur Jean Rollin. His blog dedicated to Rollin is one of the best resources on this cult director. I have recently, in part because of Jeremy's advocacy, been exploring Rollin's work in some depth, so when he asked me to contribute a piece on Rollin to his blog, I was thrilled.

So head over to Fascination to read my review of Rollin's Lips of Blood, which is quite possibly my very favorite of his films, a haunting and typically bizarre film about memory, nostalgia, and the allure of the supernatural.

The Nude Vampire

One pretty much knows what one is in for with a film titled The Nude Vampire, and Jean Rollin's second feature (his first in color) certainly delivers on the promise of stiff acting, absurd plotting, and blatantly exploitative sequences that offer little besides titillation. What's notable about this film, though, is that it's also sensuous, moody, chilling, and strangely poetic, a trashy B-movie with copious nudity that intermittently becomes something much stranger and more mysterious. It's a very visual film, its dialogue sparse, and what little there is of it mostly silly and inconsequential. It's the images that matter, images of a surreal, unsettling strangeness — unsettling because Rollin's aesthetic is so matter-of-fact, making the supernatural and the bizarre seem utterly quotidian.

The film's visual emphasis is confirmed right from its extraordinary opening sequence, in which it takes nearly ten minutes for anyone to say a word. Instead, Rollin simply delivers one mysterious, outrageous set piece after another. Cult scientists in red hoods strip a girl wearing a similar hood and inject her with color-coded chemicals that drip into beakers around the lab. The bright chemicals look like dyes prepared for Easter eggs more than scientific solutions, but no matter. The pacing is slow, almost narcotized, and Rollin cuts between steady, silent closeups: the red-hooded men, their eyes peering out through thin, ragged slits in their cloth hoods, the beakers and scientific equipment around the room, the girl's eyes peering out from behind her own hood. In the next scene, a girl (Caroline Cartier) in a gauzy orange dress, naked beneath the thin, translucent material, runs through the darkness, pursued by men in animal masks. This sequence is evocative and beautiful and creepy, the girl and her pursuers casting elongated shadows on the blank walls of the buildings, Rollin making excellent use of wide expanses of negative space with the girl trapped between these monstrous shadow-creatures. The deliberate pacing only adds to the creepiness of it all, with Rollin frequently cutting in inscrutable closeups of the men in their gaudy, sinister masks.

The girl is soon cornered by these masked men and shot, and the scene is witnessed by Pierre (Rollin's half-brother Olivier), who escapes and follows the masked men back to a mansion, which he decides to investigate. His inquiry leads him — in a sequence that prefigures Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut — to a suicide cult that seems to be connected to his father Georges (Maurice Lemaître). The plot never even remotely makes any sense, but it doesn't really need to: Pierre just wanders around, stumbling into trouble, witnessing what seems to be a war between his father and some mysterious supernatural beings, who are struggling over control of the girl in orange, who's not dead, it turns out, because she's supposedly a vampire. There are countless absurdities along the way, like the fact that when Pierre calls his painter friend Robert (Pascal Fardoulis) for help, Robert first dresses up in a tuxedo before going to get his friend.


It's a nutty, outlandish movie, and a very trashy one. The action periodically comes to a halt for Rollin to deliver scenes of blatant titillation that are as woodenly staged as everything else in the film, which renders them almost as unsettling as the horror set pieces. At one point, there's an extended sequence in which a naked girl models for Robert, caressing her breasts with fingers capped with long golden nails, and it just goes on and on and on, punctuated with periodic cutaways to Robert's leering face in an uncomfortably tight closeup that accentuates his exaggeratedly pervy expression. Rollin has the instincts of a pornographer mixed with the sensibility of a visual poet — certainly not a verbal poet, though — and he often stages scenes from odd angles that seem intended primarily to provide a voyeuristic glance up a girl's dress.

But these obvious softcore flourishes are really the most boring aspect of the film, so obviously catering to simple titillation that the images fail to be even remotely exciting, in any sense. Rollin's eroticism is more memorably embodied in the pair of twins (Cathy and Marie-Pierre Castel) who serve as Georges' servants and seem to exist primarily to dress up in a succession of outrageous sci-fi fetishism costumes. In one scene, as Georges talks on the telephone, he idly plays with the girls' clunky, bizarre costumes, seemingly as a substitute for the bored doodling that most people do while on the phone. The twins are eerie and strange, like almost everything in this movie, and later they become perfectly synchronized, hand-holding avenging spirits, their faces smeared with blood as they relentlessly pursue their victim through a graveyard.

The film is rough and uneven and obviously has no budget — not even for effects; when one woman holds a pistol to her head and shoot herself, it's totally bloodless — but Rollin turns this necessary minimalism into an asset. It's a very stark film, set in dark, empty urban streets and rural estates that tower imposingly over the tiny figures of the characters in sweeping long shots where everything is covered in fog or darkness. The soundtrack is fairly minimal too, with long periods of near-silence occasionally interrupted by some stiff dialogue or a fragment of scraping strings from Yvon Serault's score.

Within this minimalist context, Rollin makes the supernatural seems utterly concrete and physical. When Pierre's father is attacked at the climax by a group of supernatural beings, they parade towards the camera looking like a band of hippies, led by a kid who's obviously (and comically) struggling to hold a black flag aloft. Similarly, when Pierre enters a chateau where he hopes to learn the secrets he's been chasing, he's confronted by a calm, utterly normal old couple who usher him towards his fate. After Pierre is gone, Rollin stays with the old couple, who seem lonely and slightly melancholy, always waiting in this empty house for visitors seeking answers, always left alone again when they depart. The camera tracks away from them, pulling back to emphasize their loneliness, a moment of surprising emotion, one sign of the strange sadness that lingers at the fringes of this film. Rollin has a feel for such quirky moments, like when two of Georges' assistants walk away through a field in a long shot, chatting, and refreshingly seeming as baffled about what's going on as the audience likely is.

The Rape of the Vampire

Jean Rollin's first feature, The Rape of the Vampire, establishes virtually all of the templates for this trash auteur's distinctive approach to no-budget sexploitation horror. Surreally dreamlike and strange, with a plot that never makes a shred of sense, Rollin's film wanders dreamily from one set piece to another, the connections between them as ephemeral as the neural pathways linking one moment to another in a dream. This debut was shot in black-and-white, and though a bright, garish color sensibility is integral to the director's later work, the color is hardly missed here, as he crafts an equally potent, moody aesthetic in stark sun and shadow.

The film is actually split into two unequal parts, and though the story, such as it is, continues more or less seamlessly from one part to another, they're definitively split apart and there's even a second credits sequence that runs before the second part begins. The bridge between the two parts of the film is like crossing from the real world, where a rational explanation, however unlikely, is still possible, to the truly unhinged world of the surreal, the nightmarish, the supernatural, where rationality is utterly banished and the semblance of a plot is all but entirely erased.

In the first third of the film, the psychoanalyst Thomas (Bernard Letrou) and his friends visit a remote village supposedly haunted by four vampire sisters. Thomas doesn't believe the sisters are actually vampires, he thinks they've just been manipulated into thinking they are, and he seeks to cure them of their delusion. He even seems to be right: the sisters worship before a pagan altar and are given orders by their god, who turns out to be an old man from the village, hiding behind the altar, delivering instructions to the women for his own mysterious purposes. This segment ends with virtually everyone dead, climaxing at the bleak-looking beach, with wooden posts like prison bars, that Rollin would return to again and again in his oeuvre. That beach is a conduit into the unknown, and as the film transitions into the second segment that constitutes its final two-thirds, the rational explanations and pseudo-scientific jargon of the first part are jettisoned in favor of an enthusiastic embrace of the supernatural.


This shift is announced especially by the arrival of the Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger), a campy and outrageous figure who's constantly baring her fangs and laughing sinisterly, often without any context whatsoever: Rollin seems to love cutting to her in mid-cackle. The Queen's plans are typically hazy, but there's lots of grave-robbing, hypnotized girls hooked up to tanks of blood from which the vampires drink through long straws, sinister operations and rituals, a vampire priest holding an upside-down cross, and so on. The film's imagery is wild and weird, climaxing with a very chintzy vampire wedding that looks like the vampires are actually staging an amateur play: it's set on a stage with a huge and clumsily constructed bat in the background, its wings seemingly made from bedsheets.

There's a strong element of theatricality in Rollin, certainly, a sense that these vampires are performing for someone, maybe just for one another. The vampires even repeat the trick that the old man had pulled in the first part of the film, setting up an altar that seems to be speaking to some vampire supplicants, but actually houses a tape recorder playing back a loop of the Queen's voice. The supernatural is very ordinary in Rollin's world, the artifice paper-thin. There's little boundary between the real and the unreal, and the rough, clumsy low-budget aesthetic lays bare the artificiality of it all. There's a raw, one-take feel to much of the film: if a statue falls off a shelf and nearly hits the vampire queen in the head as she descends on a reclining victim, no matter, it's good enough, and Rollin leaves in this unscripted accident. The blood wedding, with its amateur drama club feel, is another good example; the vampires for some reason feel the need to stage their rituals with shoddy dramatics and awkwardly constructed props, performing for an audience of other vampires, who sit playing bongos in the theater seats and storm the stage for an impromptu celebration at the climax of this "play."

That's the essence of Rollin right there, the real and the unreal, the theatrical and the seemingly unstudied, the supernatural and the ordinary, colliding within his utterly idiosyncratic cinema. He presents a fractured and nonsensical dream world that leaps without warning from one thing to another at the speed of thought, giving the impression of a film edited according to the momentary whims of the dreamer. Action can jump suddenly from one location to another without warning or narrative justification, and the connections between scenes are often, let's say, mysterious. Even the seedy eroticism that always characterizes Rollin's work follows this (il)logic: women are rarely seen taking their clothes off in this film, instead leaping effortlessly from clothed to naked in between shots. All of this combines to make Rollin a true poet of trash, locating a strange kind of unsettling poetry and even beauty in his outrageous dream world.