Top ten new to me in 2025

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Ah, tradition, late tradition. A tradition of lateness.

Growing up, my family was always a presents at midnight on Xmas Eve family. The idea was, starting at 9-10pm, we’d gather in the living room around the cardboard fireplace and have a little party – snacks and Christmas music and eggnog and such, and wait until the proverbial clock struck twelve before any presents could be exchanged.

At least that was what we told ourselves. In actuality, we had moved about a 5-8 hour drive from my grandmother’s house (traffic dependent and on Dec. 24th, you could be sure there would be traffic), so it was as or more likely that we wouldn’t finish our journey back to the old homestead before 1 or 2 in the morning. When we got there, my grandma might be asleep, and so then we would start preparing snacks and get the decorations up from the basement. I’m sure that there were Christmas Eve’s when we didn’t end up actually opening gifts until well after sunrise on Christmas Day.

Following Vonnegut, so it goes…

And it is no less true here, or in any other aspect of life. In theory, every year, I do an end-of-year summation, and every year, I don’t even start it until January. This year, publishing closer to Valentine’s Day then Christmas, I admit I feel a degree of shame (at this rate, eventually I’ll be publishing a 2028 sum up in 2030).

As always, I’m not the best at keeping up with new releases (though I’ve got a couple), so I make no claim to list the “best of 2025” (I watched about 20 horror flicks released last year, so a “10 best” list doesn’t mean much).

So, this is a list of my ten favorite new watches (from any year) that I haven’t written about yet at length. Some of them, I’d intended to devote a full post to. Some of them I just really liked and would like to promote them to all of you lovely eyeballs out there in the dark.

These come in the order of watching. Some spoilers ahead…

Smile 2 (2024)

I liked but did not love the 2022 predecessor to this. It had elements to appreciate, but didn’t entirely stay with me. But I really got into the sequel. It built on the foundation of the first, delivering solid scares and some cool, creepy stuff, but also grounding itself in a solid story of one person’s very believable struggles. The first was a simple curse movie scare fest that jumped on the ever popular “all modern horror movies have to be about trauma” bandwagon, but the sequel really had its own tale to tell (while, yes, still dealing with a curse, a demon, creepy smiling people, and the oh so common t-word).

We follow Skye Riley, a young pop star trying to re-enter the limelight after falling down a rabbit hole of pain med addiction and self-hatred, following a terrible accident which had resulted in the death of her boyfriend. It’s a familiar vibe and Naomi Scott is great in the part. I believe her drama. But I also believe her pop stardom, which brings some real energy to the proceedings. Given the weight of what she’s already going through, and how hard she’s already pushing back against it to move forward in her life, when she gets cursed, it lands with an extra punch and what happens to her carries additional tragedy. Working so hard to recover, to live, only to succumb to the madness and self-destruction that this demonic entity brings is particularly sad.

But for all of this ‘sadness,’ what I loved here was the vibrancy, the desperate force pushing up against all that is pulling down. It is a fun movie. The music, the dance, the style all energize. The typical “horror movie stuff” (jump scares, creep outs, misdirects, etc.) land pretty well, with a couple of moments successfully getting to me, and I feel it makes some big swings with a strong, feel bad ending that is at once terrible and enjoyable in its ambition, all carried out in a pretty cool, full stadium climax.

But what stands out the most to me was one stellar sequence of Skye’s curse haunting her, pushing her towards madness. As always in these movies, she is regularly beset upon by creepy visions of people smiling menacingly at her, but there is one scene in her apartment when dancers with whom we’d previously seen her rehearsing start appearing and hunting her throughout her home. In the earlier dance scene, they had been very much manipulating her body, making an object of her. Now, their choreography has them moving as one inhuman mass, filling hallways, climbing walls, stopping with sudden, terrifying, smiling stillness, and by the end, still manipulating her body as an object, mirroring the earlier dance. You feel the connection between the movement work that is part of her career, her performance, her art, and this apparition, but it has been repurposed and recontextualized so well and so effectively. It is really scary, and so refreshing in the scare being based in simply well trained bodies performing at a high level, rather than any kind of special effects, computer generated or otherwise. It’s an exceptional scene in a solidly enjoyable horror flick.

Hellbender (2021)

I’d heard for years that this was a good one and I’m really happy to have finally checked it out. A truly independent production, written, acted, and filmed by a family of 4 on their own property during Covid lockdowns, I was genuinely impressed with how well this all came together. This Adams Family is one to watch going forward.

Fittingly for such a small film (but it feels bigger) made by blood relatives, this is really all about family. Izzy lives with her mother in a remote house in the woods, and has always been told that she has very serious medical conditions that preclude her from being anywhere near other people. Home schooled, she has lived her whole young life in a state of quarantine lockdown, alone with her mom. But until the events of the film, it doesn’t seem that she’s felt particularly restricted. The two of them have a warm, loving relationship, and they have fun together, notably in the form of their two woman metal band which regularly practices, but never gets to play a gig.

The music plays a huge role in the film. When they don their corpse paint and rock out, it sounds cool and sets an atmosphere, but more importantly, I felt connected to the depth of their relationship – the ways they can play together, create together, be expressive together. It feels rich and meaningful, and in the music, powerfully freeing. Izzy’s mom seems cool – not like some sort of religious extremist trying to protect her delicate daughter from the corruptions of the world.

Thus (significant spoiler coming), when a tragic penny drops and we come to understand that its actually the other way around and that she, a witch, is in fact trying to protect the world (and herself) from the potential danger her daughter poses, it makes sense and the film and their relationship is pushed into a new conflict, crisis, and dark potential.

It is all folksy and witchy as all get out, and I loved its magic. It felt specific and unique – all to do with blood and earth and life and power. It is messy hedge craft, but it felt grounded in internal logic. Furthermore, the film reveals by slow drips a really interesting and novel mythology, and I enjoyed watching that click into place, particularly given how tied it is to the emotional arc of the story. It is exciting to see Izzy grow into what she can be, but there is also a horror to it. Everything has a cost in this life. Nothing is free. It is impossible to claim power without doing harm, and there is no going back. Great little movie and I really look forward to seeing more from the Adams’s. I know they’ve got a couple other flicks. I should give them a try.

(edit: I just watched their new release on Shudder – Mother of Flies – I appreciated it more than I loved it, but there’s still a lot to recommend, and it gets major extra points for its truly independent nature and knockout production design – check it out!)

Dead Talents Society (2024)

This was one that I’d thought I’d write a full post about, but somehow just never found the time. What a hoot! So fresh and fun – rooted in horror movie conventions and tropes, but ultimately deeply moving, with something to say. I think I first heard about it on the Colors of the Dark podcast, with co-host Elric Kane likening it to One Cut of the Dead (2017) in its balance of being set around “horror” stuff, but really being more about a very warm hearted emotional core; I think quite an apt comparison.

From writer-director John Hsu, who had previously delivered the worthy but (in my opinion) not entirely satisfying Detention (2019) (a fascinating film in its own right, based on a popular video game and detailing a particularly dark and surprisingly long period in Taiwan’s history through the lens of a creepy ghost story), this is a terrifically entertaining story of a newly dead girl who’d never excelled in life now trying to find success as a ghost.

The conceit of the film is that once the survivors of one dead stop thinking of them and leaving out offerings, the ghost begin to fade, but if they can establish themselves as a ghost story that people know and are frightened of, they can persist. Thus there is a whole dead society, essentially ghostly influencers chasing scares, fighting for the best spots to haunt, fighting to be remembered and known.

It’s a device that allows for endless play with the tropes of Asian ghost cinema – lots of elements of J-horror and K-horror. So many ghosts take on the personas and tricks of apparitions that might be familiar from Ringu, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, or Noroi: The Curse, among many others, and there’s a great deal of fun to be had with the behind the scenes comedy of how they create their best scares, all of the top ghosts having their own support teams that serve as costumers, stagehands, and technicians. These elements aren’t really scary for the viewer cause it’s all seen from backstage, but there is great horror movie fun to be had in seeing it all created. I think a bit of watching the technicians in Cabin in the Woods manipulating the young sacrifices into splitting up or dropping a knife they clearly shouldn’t so the horror tropes play out as they must.

But the problem for our young protagonist is that she’s just not particularly good at it all. I read an interview with Hsu where he described his inspiration for the film. He’d been watching a horror movie that didn’t really work for him. He could see some ghost working so hard to scare, but he wasn’t reacting, and it just made him cry. It was so sad to see this apparition giving it all to no effect. So it is with the unnamed rookie at the center of the film. She is doing everything she can, but just can’t get there, though it is in a moment of crying out her frustration at her own failure that she comes the closest.

At the heart of this all is a deeply sympathetic and heartfelt tribute to the ordinary. Most people will never be exceptional – it’s mathematically impossible. And yet we are all instilled with the dream that we might be, and therefore, the burden that we must be, and that if we aren’t, we’re failures, losers – worthless disappointments. Furthermore, I don’t want to make uninformed cultural leaps, but (based on cultural stereotypes and my experiences teaching English in mainland China) I’m guessing that in Hsu’s native Taiwan, parents can be particularly demanding when it comes to expectations of their children’s success, potentially rooting this all in Hsu’s own emotional, personal experience.

There is endless heart to this deeply funny movie about ghosts making gory spectacles of themselves to frighten the living, but more than anything else, I feel it carries a moving, grounded message of self-acceptance, of loving yourself even if you never rise above the crowd. A person still has value, even if they’ll never be a star. I laughed, I cried. It was better than Cats (not difficult, but still).

The Exorcism (2024)

This is an interesting case. I understand that of the two films released in 2024 in which Russell Crowe played an exorcist, this was the one not particularly well received (I still haven’t seen The Pope’s Exorcist, but I’ve heard it’s good, goofy fun). Furthermore, I’m on the record on this here blog as not being much of a fan of exorcism films – in fact, I tend to actively dislike them, turned off by the extent to which they often come across as propaganda for Christianity, or at least religiosity.

But I really loved this. Was it a perfect movie? Not at all. Was it even a good movie? Maybe not. But I was utterly pulled in by it, and genuinely moved on both dramatic and horror levels by its story of a down on his luck actor struggling with substance abuse issues trying to repair a relationship with his estranged daughter as he takes on the role of a priest in an exorcism film, the set of which might be possessed itself – in the process of filming, he starts to unravel, and for his daughter it’s unclear if he’s simply relapsing or if there is an actual supernatural threat. I was captivated from the drop and found it consistently interesting and emotionally stirring. But I think for the film to fully connect and feel more meaningful, some meta-information is necessary.

The Exorcism is directed by Joshua John Miller and was co-written by he and his partner, M.A. Fortin, and I couldn’t help but read it as a deeply personal movie. Miller’s father was Jason Miller, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and most notably as pertains to this flick, the actor who portrayed the troubled Father Karras in The Exorcist (1973). He also, as I have heard, struggled with alcohol throughout much of his adult life. Honestly, that’s everything I know of his biography, but with that seed planted in my brain, even though I heard an interview where Miller claimed this was not about his father, it just felt so autobiographical, so real and raw.

In this story that does ultimately become supernatural, the substance abusing parent tries so hard to do right by his child and carries such shame when he so consistently fails her. On the surface, this is a fairly tropey little scare flick that has some ideas but rarely surprises. But for me, it was so infused with love and regret and a kind of wish fulfillment – by the end, the troubled parent does rise to the challenge. I do not actually know anything about Miller’s relationship with his father, and I could simply be projecting, but I was hit hard by how confessional and revealing and loving it seemed to be.

Also, I really enjoyed David Hyde Pierce in a supporting role as a consulting priest working on the movie. He’s pretty intense here and it was something I hadn’t seen from him before.

Mute Witness (1995)

Speaking of intense – who boy, was this a ride. More a thriller than straight horror, this story of a mute practical effects makeup artist working on a horror film being cheaply produced in newly open for business early 90s Russia, who accidentally witnesses a snuff film being shot on set after hours and gets caught up in a twisty tale of murder and the mob and art and commerce, is just non-stop tense excitement, the action running as endlessly as this very sentence, which is topping out at about 100 words – yeesh (laconic I am not). Probably half of the run time consists in a single near wordless chase scene as she evades capture by the killers. It is cleverly plotted, thrillingly shot, and had me holding my breath for minutes at a time.

A real calling card for first time director (he also wrote and produced), Anthony Waller, you’d expect him to really professionally thrive after this. Unfortunately, his next effort was 1997’s An American Werewolf in Paris, a follow up to the classic John Landis flick – Sadly though, I remember this sequel being – how can I put this politely – abysmal. But based on the strength of his first movie, which was just so well put together and exciting and smart, perhaps I ought to give his second film another chance. Perhaps at this point I could look past the ugly 90s CGI and see a hidden gem beneath. We’ll see.

Anyway, Mute Witness is stylish, chilling, and totally worth your time. It’s all about plot and effect in the moment and I can’t say that a lot of its ever twisting story has stayed with me in the half year since I watched it, but I remember being just on the edge of my seat the whole time and having a genuine blast. It could be time for a re-watch.

Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

I just love me a town with a secret. Some traveler comes to a new place where everything just seems off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but things are clearly not right – this is not ok – you are not safe. And in the best cases, you’ll never truly understand why. So it is in this truly creepy Spanish sundrenched horror flick.

A British couple, Tom and Evelyn, who’s in a late stage of pregnancy, book a small boat to go visit the idyllic little Spanish island where Tom had had a great time as a young man. They go to get away from the noise and crowds on the mainland, and at this they do succeed, cause this place just seems deserted at first, and quite recently so. All they can find after a while are a few silent children. Or the children find them.

I feel like there’s a connection between this and The Birds (1963). In Hitchcock’s film, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, we never really learn how this has come to pass – what has made all the avians so homicidal so suddenly. And yet, there is a feeling, maybe more in the story than the film, that it is some kind of revenge of the environment on the polluting, destroying, unthinking human world. So it is, here, but in this case, some switch has flipped in the children and no adult is safe.

Birds

We don’t understand how this is happening, but it seems like the bloodlust gets passed almost like a contagion, and (significant spoilers ahead) the film ends with the same apocalyptic satisfaction as many a zombie flick as a couple of tykes hop on a boat and head for the mainland, wondering if kids there will play like they do.

Children

Just as I enjoy the mysterious setting, I also always appreciate a horror film that can maintain success when you can see everything. This is daylight horror, the heat beating down upon everyone, ratcheting up tension. The land is parched and the British couple is in a state of distress before any children start hunting them. It’s a good scary movie. And it goes places – like wow, major points for not holding back. At all. Eventually Tom answers the question of the title, and learns that he will kill a child if he needs to. And it gets brutal.

And then there is one scene, one special scene, that even with spoiler warnings I don’t want to give away, but, oof. When the contagion of killing comes to one particularly young one, it is a bold move on the part of Serrador, the director. Respect.

 Finally, while the mystery of this killing is never explained, there is a feeling of an emotional logic behind it. As with the birds in the previously referenced classic, the human world is not kind to children. We hear radio reports of atrocities done. There is abuse and neglect, and harm never ceases. Thus it feels as if this mania for murder is somehow the emotional result of the ways that adults have ever failed the young. This kind of poetic logic is so much more satisfying than a third act info dump about a curse or an experiment or whatever plotting element a lesser film might have introduced.

Only one negative note on this front, the film begins with perhaps a 10 minute sequence of real footage of children as victims of war and poverty and all manner of human evils. I understand what these clips are doing there, but as actual documentary footage, they are a hard watch, and in my opinion, an unnecessary watch. We get it – there are real life horrors being committed and children unfairly get so much of the brunt of it all – but I want to enjoy my horror movie and not just subject myself to raw images of the holocaust and the like. I suggest you do yourself a favor and just skip it. I can pretty much promise sparing yourself that will not detract from your experience of the rest of the film.

Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

I’m not sure quite how this happened, but before 2025, I’d never gotten around to watching any of the Final Destination films. But last summer, all but the newest showed up on a streamer I have and I decided to start working my way through the series. And I’m so glad I did. Some of them are pretty great. And the others are movies too. But seriously, the conceit of an unseen, but still personified, willful Death serving as the killer of a slasher-esque body count flick is fun, particularly with the potential for playful creativity in the Rube-Goldberg device accident set pieces, as Death repeatedly sets in motion complicated series of events that kill off his targets in what looks like (fairly extreme, but that’s a lot of the fun too) accidents. And all of the films, this included, are such a hoot in teasing what might be the source of the next mayhem, with lots of false starts and potential danger around every corner to keep you guessing.

Weirdly, I think I particularly enjoyed watching these because at the time, I was doing a lot of carpentry, frequently up on a high ladder, in somewhat precarious positions, with the ever present threat of human error, or just inopportune gusts of wind, looming over my delicate head. Nothing happened. I was fine. Always have been so far. But it somehow made these movies more fun, rather than offputting (which I might have expected them to be, given my circumstances).

So when at the end of the summer, the 6th and latest outing (which sure feels like it should be the final one, but I understand they’ve announced there will be more – not to mention the fact that part 5 had felt even more final than this) came to streaming, I was excited to pop a bag of popcorn and take it in. And I was not disappointed in the least.

The initial inciting incident of cheated death on the Sky Needle-esque tower is a big opening (as these films often do quite well – Part 2 might be my least favorite film of the series, but the initial scene on the highway with the log truck cannot be scoffed at). I enjoyed the emotion of it, its stylishness, and the real excitement as it all goes to hell.  And following that, there are so many great death scenes pulled off with real verve, real flair. You know things will go poorly for all involved, but the movie is so playful, teasing how it might or might not happen this time, and it really lands some great surprises. At least one sequence I had to immediately rewind and watch a second time, so perfectly had it been executed. It was like a perfect passage in a book that you need to re-read and truly savor before moving on.

So all of that – all of the stuff you go to a Final Destination movie for – is pretty great, but there was one more element that really got me, and stayed with me more than anything else (important spoiler coming). From the beginning, Tony Todd, star of one of my favorite movies of any genre, Candyman (1992), among many many others, had been with the franchise, primarily as a mysterious undertaker who provides ominous expository explanations into Death’s intentions in his rich, gravelly baritone. I think he was in every installment, though in some, they weirdly recast him, as a voice on the phone, or a cinema usher. But here, he reclaims his initial role, with a bit of backstory connecting his character to our opening scene, and, knowing that Death will be coming for him soon, he gives one final gravitas laden speech before he tips his hat and makes his exit: “I intend to enjoy the time I have left. And I suggest you do the same. Life is precious. Enjoy every single second. You never know when… Good Luck.”

The thing is, before the film was released, Todd had already died of stomach cancer. That context alone made these lines poignant. I’d come to this movie for a bloody good time, not to find myself weeping, and yet there I was. Later I read that, knowing that he was very sick and wouldn’t get better, he had improvised the line as a final goodbye to his work and his fans and co-workers, and it was all the more moving for it.

The movie is a great Final Destination flick. But it also features a surprisingly powerful little moment of life. As a fan of Todd’s, I am so grateful to have witnessed it.

Hocus Pocus (1993)

So I know this one is beloved of many, a core Halloween movie of their childhoods that helped inculcate in them a love of the macabre and all things witchy. But I just never gave it a chance. I think I was 14 when it came out and I just felt too old for a silly looking Disney kids movie, the trailers of which had done it few favors. Well, shows what I knew, cause now that I’m in my late 40s, I have no qualms about watching a frivolous film for children and I rather loved it.

I can’t say this is a perfect movie. Some of it does really feel a bit more like a made-for-TV Disney channel release than I would have liked (particularly whenever it was exclusively focused on the school bullying/flirtation drama of the young cast). But if you go in ready to sit through some saccharine, you will be rewarded with a terrifically fun kids witch movie, full of energy and humor that lands, and just Halloween vibes out the wazoo. Seriously, I could imagine making this an annual Halloween watch, as I know it is for many folks.

Also, it has horror touches that I was honestly a bit shocked by. For something so sweet, it has no shortage of actual danger: witches that do actually suck the life out of children and kill them, those witches are hanged until they are dead (though of course they come back a couple hundred years later), a whole town is cursed to dance until they die (they are saved, but the curse is seriously meant), a cute talking cat is killed twice (and the second time it sticks), the witches are also killed a second time (in this case, being burned to ash in a pottery kiln), a zombie is raised, children are lured to their intended doom by a sweet song, and by the end the villainous witches, who are solidly, unrepentantly EVIL, but are no less the most fun and lovable part of the movie, meet their third and final deaths in a churchyard. This is a light, fun children’s movie, but it fully commits to its story and is willing to put the kids in serious danger. And it really works.

And I’ve just got to sing the praises of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy as the witchy Sanderson sisters at the center of it all. Their stylized performances are just pitch perfect, walking a delicious line between goofy and dangerous, portraying funny, sinister, child eating monsters, who are just so perfectly goofy and so precisely drawn with real craft and vocal and physical precision. Also, I had no idea Sarah Jessica Parker could be that hilarious. I never got into Sex and the City, but I feel somehow that when she landed that show, and it really made her a star, she missed her calling in drawing room farce.

So yeah, if you’ve never checked out this gloriously Halloweeny flick, do yourself a favor and watch it post haste!

The Thing from another World (1951)

Howard Hawks is one of those old Hollywood names with which I’ve long been familiar without actually seeing any of his work. A prolific director, producer, and screenwriter, as I understand, his films often featured the thrill of no nonsense men working together at a high level to achieve difficult things. He also pioneered the archetype of the “Hawksian Woman,” a tough talking masculine female character who never fails in undercutting those men’s pomposity.  That is all on strong display here in this genuinely exciting adaptation of the novella Who Goes There?

I love when I finally get around to a bit of “horror homework” and find that it is totally justified in its acclaim. This 1951 alien invasion flick (the 50s not being famously good for horror, but following this, being full of aliens) was off like a shot from the get go, as a group of journalists, military men, and scientists set off to the arctic circle to investigate what seems to be a spacecraft that’s landed there. The set up is exciting, but so is everything else about this movie. Everyone talks a mile a minute, often over each other in a delirious balance between being absolutely naturalistic and highly stylized – cause it isn’t a mess – but rather a taught violin string being pulled tighter and tighter.

And it isn’t only the way of speaking – the ensemble acting is at such a high level – dynamics between characters in constant flow – everything is received and responded to and just so alive. Small actions, props changing hands, jokes told, friends needled for their foibles, and lovers flirted with through trading of barbs: it is non-stop and breathless, never letting the film’s tension drop, and grounding its sense of adventure and fear in believable relationships. This is effective for the action and the horror, but at the end of the day, it is also just fun, bringing to mind much later scenes of characters shooting the shit such as Vincent and Jules talking about hamburgers in Pulp Fiction, or Laurie and the girls talking about school at the beginning of Halloween. And speaking of “girls,” I just loved Margaret Sheridan’s “Hawksian” brassy broad, Nikki. I didn’t need the romance between her and the Captain, but I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of her sharp, acerbic screen time, and appreciated that she gets to make a real contribution to the action (I can think of other 50s sci fi where the lone woman in the picture is relegated to bringing the men coffee and sandwiches).

But this is a horror blog and this movie gets scary. I was honestly impressed with how intense it can be. The setting is so isolated and the characters are utterly vulnerable in it. The alien itself isn’t a whole lot to look at, but it is big and powerful, and can appear and attack in a burst. There are jump scares and rising dread, and hushed, excited, fearful sequences of hunting and hiding and trying to lay a trap for this danger from another world. And it must be said that this movie contains at least one top shelf scene of terror and action that I just can’t imagine could have been safely executed, however many precautions were taken. Having determined that the alien is susceptible to heat, the men lure it into a closed room where they douse it with kerosene and light it on fire. And then they keep throwing more oil onto the already burning creature. I think there’s one cut in the scene, but mostly, this is done in one take, on a cramped set, with a bunch of actors among the burning crates. It is terrifying and impressive – really something special, and groundbreaking – I’ve read it was the first full body burn effect of its kind.

Finally, I was struck by something in the ethos of this movie. When I think of 50s alien invasion movies, the conventional wisdom that comes to mind is that it’s all a thinly veiled metaphor for creeping communism, during a McCarthy-esque red scare. But in this case, while the cast is predominantly military, you have a sense that they are stuck in a bind between a monster from beyond the stars and their superiors in Washington who want a potential new weapon preserved. One side wants to destroy them and the other will cold-bloodedly use them, sacrificing their lives for “the greater good.” Meanwhile, our protagonists are fighting for their own survival, orders be damned. It gave a very different feeling than I’d expected, both heightening the threat as they have no support, no one in their corner, and freeing the film of what I’d expected to be at least a bit of propagandistic messaging.

This was a great movie that really stands the test of time. I can’t wait to watch it again.

Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)

This was a great surprise. The work of Hammer Studios has long been a blind spot for me. I know that for many Brits of a certain age, Hammer was synonymous with horror, but I’ve still only seen a handful (maybe this will be the year to remedy that), maybe fewer than 10, and while I have loved some of those, they haven’t given me the motivation to run the series, as it were. I’d heard the title of this movie for a while and had expected something quite campy. I knew that by the early 70s, Hammer (and film in England in general) had far greater license for titillation, and I thought this sex swapping iteration of Stevenson’s novel would play more as a bit of a joke, but as directed by Hammer mainstay, Roy Ward Baker (of The Vampire Lovers, among many, many others), it is played absolutely straight, pun intended. And in this, it delivers absolutely classic, classy, good old horror style, bubbling over with atmosphere and suspense, as well as a shockingly modern exploration of gender in its narrative, treated with a truly disarming sensitivity and humanity. Shocked, I tells ya, shocked!

Story wise, this is an amalgamation of Jekyll & Hyde, the murders of Jack the Ripper, and the historical case of the grave robbers/killers, Burke and Hare, all with a gender bending twist. Seeking to create an elixir of life, Dr. Jekyll starts sourcing female bodies to harvest their hormones, convinced that the secrets of life lie in their mysterious endocrinology; at first from the morgue, later from the shady resurrection men, and finally taking matters into his own bloodied hands, from the streets. But what he hadn’t expected was that while the elixir could, in fact, extend life, it would also change the sex of any male subject to female in the process.

In the beginning, he is tortured by the cost of his experiments, but bolsters his will, knowing that the scientific benefits are worth the cost, but once he becomes his own subject, unleashing his feminine side, the seductive Edwige Hyde, it becomes more a matter of Hyde killing to prolong her own existence. She’s a killer to be sure, but like a vampire, we understand this bloodshed is necessary for her to go on. Also, like a vampire, she is just sexy and cool, unhampered by “morality” – like a Disney villainesse who takes her top off and stabs prostitutes. But I think a really interesting detail in all this is that once Hyde first comes into existence, the line between her and Jekyll is blurred. Are they totally separate consciousnesses? We have reason to doubt that. When first transformed, are we watching a brand new person discover herself, or are we watching the same person as before rediscover themselves after a profound transition? It’s not entirely clear. Is he fighting to remain himself and not let this discreet personality overwhelm him, or has he discovered that he prefers life as Edwige and is in crisis about what that means for him, the importance of his own sex and gender cast into a destabilizing doubt? What I feel we do know is that she is not his “evil” side, the killer within. He’d already been a killer, and before that, complicit in killings. She is simply his feminine side, and in that femininity, she comes across as more confident, more bold, more free. And he can’t handle it or her.

Past all that, it is really solid, classic horror on a budget. Foggy old London town, a scream in the night, blood splattered across an alley wall. Baker does so much with quite little and I was utterly taken in by the vibes and the style. And there are a couple of just tremendous sequences of clever, effective filmmaking. Late in the film, Hyde has decided to take the blood of the young ingénue that gives Jekyll some reason to continue as a man, and she follows the young girl through the darkened, murky alleys, gleaming blade brandished in her fist. Throughout the hunt, the soundtrack drops out and we are left with only footsteps and the swish of Hyde’s crinoline petticoat. It is a quiet, gendered sound and it grows more and more threatening as Hyde nears on her target, its feminine delicacy much scarier than something more bombastic. It’s a simple choice, but so effective.

But I think the centerpiece of the film has to be the first transformation from Jekyll to Hyde, featuring the kind of in-camera movie magic that I just adore. He drinks the formula and starts to react, and then in one long shot we watch him approach the mirror, looking into it and seeing himself. The camera moves between him and the mirror to watch him fall back into a chair, head in hands, lingering there for a while before finally coming behind him, looking over his shoulder into the mirror once more. But now, as thinner, less hairy knuckled fingers drop from the face, we see Hyde’s feminine features looking back from the glass. The change has been worked. Edwige, in all her glory, is here, and she is bad!  It’s a great trick of the camera, I assume carried out, by virtue of a team of grips moving the real mirror out of the way and replacing it with essentially a window onto an identical room where the actress playing Hyde (Martine Beswick, who’s great) is now seen. But it all happens in one take and the first time I watched it, I just bought the magic of what I was seeing without question. It was only later that I went back and was astounded at how seamlessly it had been pulled off. Now it would so easily be done with computers, but Baker’s simply designed (though probably quite difficult to actually do) mechanical illusion just amazes. I recommend watching the whole movie – it’s great. But if not, at least do yourself the favor of checking out this one bit of exemplary cinematic trickery.

—

So that was 2025. I watched 121 horror flicks, 86 of which were new for me. These were the ten best of those. I managed 11 posts through the year. I would have liked to do more, but life is hard, you know, and as an exercise that largely feels like throwing carefully chosen words into an uncaring void, let’s say this is good enough. But every year, I hope to do better, so it’s 2026 now. Let’s see what’s coming. 

Wherever and whoever you are out there in the darkness, thanks for being here with me and giving your time and attention. I wish you all the best in the year to come. Unless you’re a jerk. Try not to be a jerk.

Italian Neorealism Folk Horror: Il Demonio

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As is regretfully so often the case, it’s been a minute since my last post. There is some kind of irony in the fact that as a horror blogger, I can so rarely successfully publish a post during October, and on top of that, in the lead up to Halloween, I think I found the time to watch fewer horror movies than any other month this year. I guess I was just too busy Halloweening to engage with others’ work. And here we are, the high horror holidays are well behind us (so is Thanksgiving to be fair) and out my window, winter has fully arrived and the whole world is cast in greyscale as the snow falls from leaden skies. And so, with this somewhat bleak yet beautiful view as a backdrop, I’d like to focus this month on a recent monochromatic discovery as desolate, striking, and magical as any turning of the seasons.   

In my last post on The Whip and the Body (1963), I was blown away by the central performance of Daliah Lavi, an actress that I’d not previously heard a thing about, but who just knocked my socks off in Bava’s ghostly, kinky, gothic-psychodrama masterpiece. Having praised her work in that film on social media, a commenter suggested I check out what Lavi had described as her favorite film and performance, Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio (The Demon), and hey, isn’t it refreshing to have social media actually deliver what it promises – making connections with strangers that can broaden your horizons and introduce you to new things – rather than just being the usual cesspool of conflict and ugliness? So thanks, whoever you were, cause this was a tremendous movie: gorgeous, tragic, folksy, witchy, and genuinely surprising. It was a really refreshing watch – nothing about it was at all ‘typical’ – the sort of underseen deep cut about which I’m more than happy to spread the word.

There will be spoilers, but I’m not so sure this is the kind of film that can really be spoiled, so read on. (But if you want to watch it first – and you should – it’s great – I did so on Tubi)

Il Demonio (1963)

As I understand, Brunello Rondi was a frequent collaborator of Fellini’s, but this was his first solo feature film, and it is a doozy! A fascinating cultural artifact, documenting southern Italian folk beliefs and practices at the time, this is also a blistering portrayal of one young woman’s psychological damage and social downfall, trapped in an isolated, religiously conservative, deeply superstitious village, expressing her pain and torment through the only avenues available to her: the aforementioned folk beliefs and practices.  I feel justified in discussing this as a horror movie – it’s chock full of witchcraft and possession, but past that, there is no shortage of real life horrors. The main character, Purif (Daliah Lavi), is abused and ostracized, beaten by her family and raped by strangers (and her family, for that matter) – she is isolated and outcast, chased and stoned, and her home is lit on fire. But her nightmare is no less psychological, tormented by thoughts, desires, and impulses beyond her control. It’s a lot.

It’s also just so rich in cultural detail, in little kernels of life, in human comedy and brutality and fear. It is often a deeply funny movie, but ultimately sad more than anything else. And on top of all that, through all the cruelty and pain and absurdity and nuance, it is starkly beautiful. Seriously, every scene has something that made me laugh or gasp or hold my breath at how staggeringly stunning it all was. I can’t overstate my excitement at the filmmaking – truly cinematic pleasure amidst all these scenes of madness and misery – and that’s one of the main things I come to this genre for. What a treat!

In short, Purificazione, AKA Purif, having had sexual relations with a local villager, Antonio, is tossed aside by him in favor of a more “proper” match. We never know the extent of their previous relationship, except that she’s been left wounded and obsessed, and that he now views her as little more than an animal. With no other outlet for her suffering, Purif turns to witchcraft: cursing him, disrupting his wedding, and hexing his bridal bed. At the beginning of the film, the townspeople mainly see her as an off-putting nuisance, a weirdo they have to put up with, and occasionally drag away screaming when she has an episode; but over time, especially after she publicly declares her allegiance to Satan, writhing in the town square in demoniac ecstacy, what had once been mere cautious distaste grows into full-fledged terror and hate. She is subjected to exorcism (as well as folksier and more sexually invasive treatments), she is branded a witch, and she is blamed for all the troubles of the village, from dead children to bad weather, until they finally set out to burn her corruptive influence out of the very air.

This is an interesting piece, full of supernatural vibes, but concurrently, also rooted in psychology, a well observed document of human feeling and action and social constraints and taboos. Regardless of the spells and potions and some mysterious goings on, I never felt that there was actually anything otherworldly in the proceedings. Purif’s “witchcraft” is the kind of sympathetic magic you can imagine a child creating for themself. She feels so strongly, her hurt is so powerful, that of course the blood that falls from a needle stabbed into her breast, mixed with a bit of her hair, baked in the oven to ash, and sprinkled surreptitiously in his wine, would be enough to curse Antonio to suffer as she suffers, to ruin his life as he has hers.

Similarly, I never felt that there was any ‘demon’ in the literal sense in her possession. But that doesn’t exactly mean that it’s “not real.” It is real for her. It is real for the whole world in which she lives. How could it possibly be more “real?” She, and everyone she knows, lives in a realm of magical thinking wherein everything is true. Even if her possessed affectation is rather an available physical and verbal expression to give voice to her feelings, to her mental torment, than it is a case of some sinister “spirit” entering her body and refusing to leave, she is still possessed by that feeling, by her, let’s call it ‘madness.’ The wicked freedom that comes with ‘being possessed’ gives her free rein to howl out all the frustration and anger and sadness inside – it lets her laugh at any authority that might scold or belittle her for either her original ‘sin’ of physical pleasure or her inability to get her feelings under control, to tamp herself down into a socially acceptable persona, to let it go, “be normal.”

Accepting this loosely in the horror canon, I think it is interestingly situated – both as a late piece of Italian Neorealism (which is admittedly not at all a horror sub-genre), and a rather early example of Folk Horror (which is). On the Neorealism side (and I am NO EXPERT), as I understand, it fits the bill: a focus on underprivileged ‘real’ people, often episodic more than narrative based, and featuring qualities of a documentary style, including the presence of non-actors and shooting on-location. We’ve got all of this. Occurring in a remote village in southern Italy in 1963, it may be set in ‘the present,’ but it is as far from the bustling modernity of Rome as is Antarctica. In one shot, for about one second, a road can be glimpsed with cars passing by, and it feels shocking that they could even exist in this world, as incongruous as a boom mic dipping into a shot in a cheap B movie. But I’m sure this must be intentional, as significant as the nearby highway in Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling (which shares some similar themes).

While the main characters are professionally portrayed (Lavi is outstanding once again), the village seems primarily peopled with non-professionals. Just characteristic locals with craggy faces, and not so many teeth, and it is such an added value. They aren’t often called on to “act” too much, but their presence grounds the whole piece. Finally, the episodic nature of it all gives vast opportunities to follow the life of this place, of these people, as the seasons come and go, and they plant, and they marry, and they reap, and they die, all along carrying the traditions that make them themselves, that define their community for good and for bad. To liken it to yet another film, I was often put in mind of Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) (but maybe that’s because I don’t know much about Italian Neorealism past what I’ve read on Wikipedia – I’ve seen only a handful of old Italian flicks that aren’t horror, so of course I think of one of them…). You really feel the life of the place. Sometimes it’s quite funny, and sometimes tragic, but it is constantly so vibrant, thrumming with life.

On the Folk Horror front, this is really a case in which the “horror” is “folk.” The villagers are a threat to the ‘witch’ – not the other way around. While their folk beliefs have a kind of rural loveliness, they also doom Purif to suffer, and many take advantage of her in her outcast state, sexually and otherwise. The beliefs that hold the community together bind her in an inescapable hell of rigid social mores in which her own inner drives – healthy and natural ones like sexual desire, and problematic ones like her possible mental illness can only be understood as the influence of the infernal.

 Interestingly, in the scenes of possession and exorcism, there are direct precursors to The Exorcist (1973). Purif thrashes in her bed, her hands pressing towards her crotch just as she fights them away, suggesting a kind of tortured masturbation that Regan would later experience, and most notably, during her exorcism, she even does the “spider walk” that would be excised from The Exorcist’s theatrical release ten years later.

That said, however, these could not be more different films. In Friedkin’s religious horror, a young girl is assaulted by something from beyond society, beyond mankind, and so much of the horror is rooted in the realization of its radical evil – science fails her and reason fails her, and she can only be saved by virtue of faith. In Il Demonio, Purif is beset upon by the intolerance of her village, by their inability to understand the world in any terms beyond the religious and the supernatural. And she can’t understand it any other way either. In a way, faith is the monster here; a belief that sentences her to all kinds of pain. You can’t help but feel that if Purif lived in a modern city, she might not exactly enjoy perfect mental health (who does?), but with some therapy, with some good pills, and with a more open society around her (where she wouldn’t immediately be cast as a fallen woman for one dalliance with some guy), with all of that, she might be closer to alright.

She is far from alright.

That said, though the horror lives in the beliefs and actions of the villagers, I actually don’t feel that Rondi’s film views them in an entirely negative light. At no point does it feel like there is a snide authorial voice saying, “hey check out how cruel and stupid these superstitious dummies are!” Rather, there is a documentarian’s generosity towards these people and this place which a modern perspective might judge harshly. The villagers live in an unforgiving world that offers few comforts, and if they have developed a series of beliefs and practices that give them a sense of meaning and agency in the face of the vast indifference of the sun and the wind and the saints, I can’t entirely discount the value of that faith. And truly, those folk beliefs are so much of what makes Il Demonio singular, presenting so many ethnological details along the way (the film opens with thanks to the particular ethnologist whose work had inspired it).

During Antonio’s wedding, after he and his bride have had to answer questions at the door and then hop over the threshold to enter, the candle on his side of the church begins to flicker as if it might go out and the entire village watches with baited breath, excited and fearful, as that would be a terribly dark portent. Was this the result of Purif’s curse? Who knows?

After the wedding, the two sets of parents prepare their adult children’s marriage bed – a scythe is placed beneath to ward off the devil, raisins are spread in a cross on the bedsheets to absorb all evil from the room, a bag of salt is places under the pillows, and there is an elaborate ritual governing how and when the newlyweds may enter the room.

There is a long procession up the hill to the village, everyone carrying heavy stones that represent their sins, some of them being whipped by others – when they reach the town square, they are called on to publicly admit their wrongdoings and put down the weight of their sin, and some of it is so much worse than anything that might be attributed to the local madwoman/witch – the father that angrily turned out his disobedient son (who subsequently died) or the lonely widower who admits to having sexually abused his teenage daughter both seem so much more shocking than Purif and her dalliances with hedge magic, but they both seek and are apparently granted absolution and thus can continue to be part of society. Not so with Purif. It is in this scene that she declares her possession and starts to flop about in the town square. It feels performative, almost calculated as she listens to all of the other villagers’ declared sins and then chooses to top them. Furthermore, she does not want and will not accept forgiveness, and will never fully be a part of this society again.

In a striking scene, as Purif sits in a nearby tree, eating an apple and laughing, seemingly the whole village is gathered on a hillside to drive off storm clouds that threaten to wash away freshly spread seeds – they recite their liturgy, beat rocks with sticks, and ring bells to repel the rain – and it is kind of beautiful. These are poor people of little power, standing together against the dark times to come. Their folk magic is just as simplistic as Purif’s curse in the opening scene, but it comes with the weight of repetition and history, and it is a moving form of natural sorcery. Of course, then they notice Purif, decide this coming storm is all her fault, chase her to her house and try to light it on fire – so yeah, sometimes these otherwise bucolic impoverished folks are just the worst.

Finally, by the end, the villagers cut down a grove of precious old growth trees to build a ritual fire in the square and they carry burning brands through the village streets to cleanse the town of Purif’s darkness. At first, it’s genuinely scary – is this enraged mob actually going to burn her? But when it is clear that it is just a benign ceremony of purification (as they seek Purificazione), it takes on a different character, even at times fun and festive. Sadly, that doesn’t mean it ends well for Purif – but how could it really? The only way for her to thrive is away from here, but that world is forever beyond her reach.

Truly, there is nowhere for her to go. At one point, her family hides her in a cellar, pretending that she no longer exists, that she has moved away. This imprisonment seems heartless, but it’s hard to blame the family in this moment. It is actually for her protection, and their own (see the aforementioned attempt to burn her out of her family house). Early in the film, we saw her father beat her with a belt after some of her more wild actions had gotten back to him. Incensed at the shame she’d brought on the household, he lost control and her brothers had to fight him off of her. At that point, he seemed monstrous. But by this moment in the film, you can kind of understand what he’s going through.

Purif is our protagonist and we are entirely in her corner, but how can one not sympathize with those who have to deal with her all the time? She is always getting into trouble and it is always weird trouble. She steals a pack of goats to lay siege to the church where Antonio is being wed. Later that night, she attacks his home (which has wisely been guarded against such an eventuality), attempting to hex his first born by throwing a dead cat at his threshold. She shows up at the death bed of a child where all the women are uncontrollably weeping (in ritual fashion) and entirely inappropriately makes it all about Purif. She’s a problem for herself and others and no one knows how to deal with it. Not the priest (who does make an effort), not her father (who beats and imprisons her), not her mystic uncle (who takes sexual advantage of her), not Antonio (who no matter how often he throws her to the ground and leads angry mobs against her is always moments away from tearing off her dress), and of course not Purif herself.

Purif in shadow, about to throw a cat.

The best she can do is to choose to be the problem that she is, to choose herself against the society she does not fit into. As in Matka Joanna od Aniołów (1961), Purif’s possession, not her exorcism, feels freeing, revelatory. Whether she’s trying to lasciviously lick a crucifix or demonically speaking in tongues, embracing “wickedness” allows Purif a freedom she has no other access to, and it feels so, so good. Towards the end of the film, after trying to strangle a nun who’d tried to lead her in prayer, Purif defiantly refuses salvation – for the first time in her life, she feels powerful, and that can’t be lost.

This is a unique and special piece and I’m so glad I gave it a chance. What brought me to it was Daliah Lavi and she does not disappoint. It is a totally different style of performance from The Whip and the Body, released the same year, but it is probably even more impressive (I guess the fact that she’s in almost every frame helps with that). From start to finish, the filmmaking wows at every turn, Rondi making such good use of the ragged, sun drenched environment. Purif is usually in black and she just pops against the brightly lit stony village and its surrounding hills. Rondi also does so much with long shots, pulling back, for example, from a close focus on Antonio sitting with his future mother in law, to an extreme wide view where Purif can be seen watching on a hill in the distance, to a snap zoom on her own distraught face. And it is a film of faces. The supporting cast, which I assume to be non-professional actors, offer so much character and Rondi captures every coarse feature with the same crisp contrast that he does the arid landscape.

And for a film with so much visual contrast, it is rich in ambivalence and nuance. On one level, it is a story of witchcraft and folk magic and possession, but then we never feel there really are any demons or that there is any magic, but we also feel, in the ways that are most important for the life experience of its characters, that all of that is real anyway. I don’t think we’re ever meant to be wondering if something is ‘real’ or not. Clearly, there are “realistic” explanations for everything – at least it feels that way, but then there are some things that are never explained. Did Purif’s curse actually cause the candle in the wedding ceremony to almost go out? Did it cause the terrible bleeding rash that Antonio developed? Did the spirit of the recently deceased boy meet her at the river? How did she know the tree at the convent was so important (where someone had recently hanged himself)? I don’t know, and interestingly, I feel the film isn’t interested in me asking those questions. What people experience is simply, in fact, what they experience. And this is about those people and their experiences. It is heady and affecting and really worth seeing.

This is only nominally a “horror movie” and it won’t scare you or gross you out, but if you feel you could have patience for what I’ve described, I think you’ll find it’s really worth your time. It was worth mine.

Working out the Kinks: The Whip and the Body

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It’s so good to give things second chances. Years ago, I’d tried watching today’s film, having read that it was really worth checking out, and I just couldn’t get into it, couldn’t get past certain oddities of its existence, and I gave up. And what a shame it would have been if I’d never come back, cause having finally watched it (multiple times now), I gotta say, it’s an (admittedly somewhat flawed) frickin’ masterpiece! So, let’s just get right into it and dig into Mario Bava’s eminently gothic, eerily old fashioned, surprisingly kinky, and mind blowingly beautiful 1963 classic, The Whip and the Body.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

So let’s begin with what I couldn’t get past the first time as I think it could be a hurdle for many. This movie is Italian (though you might not know it from the opening credits where everyone goes under an English name – Mario Bava is listen as John M. Old). Generally, genre pics in Italy in this era never shot sound on set, often featuring a polyglot cast, each speaking their native tongue and dubbing it all in post for each market where the film was to be released. That’s just par for the Italian horror course.

This film also stars the inimitable Christopher Lee, an actor with both great physical presence and a voice of rich and silky timbre. But he didn’t do his own ADR for the English language release (something he said he’d always regretted) and the first time around, hearing him dubbed by another voice was just so offputting that I couldn’t take it and had to stop. Fortunately, when I decided to try again, the version I found on Shudder only came in Italian with English subtitles, which really did make it better. Since then, I’ve rewatched in both languages and I think the Italian dub is just superior all around – the sound mix is more effective and the voice actors simply more expressive. The English voice work feels stilted and artificial in comparison. Though the lead actors were actually speaking English, if you have the option, I strongly recommend the Italian – and you will be rewarded with a real gem.

In short, Bava’s film is about Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), a young noblewoman who has just married the milquetoast younger brother of her former lover and lives in his family’s castle on a craggy coast where the wind literally never stops howling. Her husband, in turn, still carries a torch for his cousin, Katia, who lives in the castle as well. Along with Nevenka’s aged father-in-law and a couple of servants, they all live in unsatisfying stasis, until one day when Kurt (Christopher Lee), the older brother and lover in question, returns. He’d been sent away for murdering (after probably abusing) a servant girl and no one is happy to see him back.

But no matter how Nevenka hated him and how he’d physically and emotionally abused her (and others), she can’t help but respond to his unfeigned desire (so unlike her husband), and though I don’t think she understands herself and is disgusted by her own feelings, she does get off on the beatings, as in an early scene where he finds her on the beach and brutally whips her before they passionately make love among the rocks and crashing waves as he coos, “You haven’t changed I see. You’ve always loved violence.”

Then in rapid succession, first Kurt and then the Count (her father in law who’d hated and feared Kurt) are both murdered in the dark of night with the same dagger (the very one that he’d previously used to dispatch the poor servant girl) and the film’s (psychological?/supernatural?) horror begins in earnest as Nevenka keeps seeing Kurt outside of every window, looming over her bed, creeping from his tomb, leaving muddy footprints that only she can see. His voice coasts on the howling wind, and his ghost haunts her conscience, her heart, and her yearning flesh. And it goes from there.

First off, it must be noted just how much this resembles an entry in Roger Corman’s Poe cycle: the castle on the rocky coast, the indeterminate setting (in the past, some time; in a castle, somewhere), the particular psychological flavor of repressed feeling surfacing as violence and madness. All of this is for very good reason. Apparently the producers had shown co-screenwriter/assistant director, Ernesto Gastaldi, Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum and requested something in that vein. And I can really see it. Watching the film, Poe came to mind more than once, especially in terms of pathetic fallacy, wherein a character’s internal state is externalized in the setting, in the environment (think The Fall of the House of Usher).

This castle, lashed by the wind, by the sea, locking up so many warring emotions, its characters isolated together, doubting one another, sometimes both loving and hating each other and themselves in equal measure, feels quite like something old Edgar could have written, or at least like something old Roger could have adapted, walking that blurry line between insanity and a real ghostly threat. I particularly liked a haunting scene in which Nevanka is draw to her late lover’s room late at night by the sound of whipping, but in a bit of a  jump scare, hanging vines that have been beating against the window knock it open, letting in the omnipresent gale. For her, he is everywhere – on the wind, in the trees, invading the castle of her mind.

But while I really do like Corman’s work, the visual splendor that Bava brings to the proceedings just raises this all up to another level. It is just breathtaking filmmaking, and at the same time, it must be said that it is all so effective – not simply pretty shots to be pretty, but it all serves the film, it all helps to get into Nevenka’s tortured mind and body, and it absolutely sings. The camera glides around, looking for the nuances of fear and passion in her expressions, finding the sadistic glint of joy in Kurt’s eye. The camera brings to life what could sometimes be a staid and static family drama, highlighting beauty and monstrosity, often at the same time and in the same place. I felt such cinematic joy in its stunning presentation of psychological horror and trauma that come with a searing pinch of beauty that can lead a character to her own destruction, making me feel for her while at the same time grinning from ear to ear at the absolute glory of it all. It’s the kind of movie that makes my attempts at description inexcusably, self-indulgently florid.

It’s often said that a given film couldn’t be made today, and I think in this case that may be true. In many aspects, it’s all pretty old fashioned, but it works so well. More on this in a bit, but Nevanka’s portrayal is one we don’t generally get any more (which is probably for the best): the trembling woman, in love with not only her abuser, but her abuse. While that kind of representation can even be harmful when writ large across culture, in the isolation of this one story, it is poetic and gorgeous and tragic, and I adored every melodramatic moment of its distillation of awful need and sublime suffering. But it’s not only issues of outdated gender issues. The filmmaking itself is quite old fashioned as well, but in ways that really work for it.

These days, when we make a historical piece, there tends to be a lot of care put into accuracy – caring about the buttons a man would have on his jacket in 1906 that he wouldn’t have had in 1850 for example. Now, there are often failures (my wife is into historical costuming, so I hear about them – apparently hair is pretty much always disastrously wrong), but effort is made, and there is an industry of professionals who do the work. That wasn’t always the case. Often when watching older films set in an even earlier period, everything is more non-specifically “old” (and this is especially true for low-budget genre work). Are we in the late 19th century, the early 18th? Who knows, but men sometimes toss on a cape, and women’s dresses are long and pretty. I’m pretty sure they also have long fake lashes, which look more 1963 than anything else, but are striking when a small band of hard light falls across eyes in the darkness.  All of those anachronisms are certainly present here, but as the saying goes, I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

In being so ahistorical, the location never specified (the Wikipedia entry just says that it is set “in Europe”), it all takes on the quality of a fairy tale / psychological allegory / dream-nightmare. Thus, all of the fear and desire is lent a broader significance. It feels bigger than itself in what I can best describe as a theatrical fashion. Not anchored by base realism, not flattened into something “natural,” the viewer’s willing suspension of disbelief can go further, can make other connections, approaching the ineffable, the subconscious. And the same can also be said for other aspects of Bava’s work.

I’d previously mentioned the beauty of the filming, but past the camerawork, I must praise how the film is lit, which is something we don’t often discuss with more modern movies. For quite a while, it has been in vogue to “realistically” light every shot when possible, even going so far as to film night scenes only with natural sources (the moon, candles, etc). As I understand, technology has developed to make this more and more viable (it was a great technical feat when Kubrick did it in Barry Lyndon, but is now much more easily achievable), but even when standard lights are still used (which is usually the case), the approach tends to be attempted realism – light that looks like it comes from real sources in the filmic space. That wasn’t always true. Bava lights scenes so expressively; in one shot, Lee passes out of a pale blue light from the left, into a sickly green light from the right, into shadow, into a red light from below – where are these well focused lights coming from, and how are they colored with such saturation in this old timey setting?

It is totally unrealistic, but each offers a different view of his character – ghostly and dead and monstrous. He is such a fearful presence, but looking out of Nevanka’s eyes, she doesn’t pull away from his kiss, and we are treated to a really special, creepy, unsettling moment. Throughout the film, expression and feeling trump “realism,” and this is a breath of fresh air in this era when even well-shot films can sometimes feel dark and muddy. That said, this isn’t a neon lit exercise in pure color. It isn’t “style over substance.” Everything serves the piece – it’s just that it serves it by underlining emotion and atmosphere rather than just making it look like a place being lit by a source.

Furthermore, I think that when a director has a heavy hand with light and shadow and color and camera angles, it’s easy to imagine a lessened focus on the work of the actors, the performers simply being flexible props to costume and light and move through the shots in service of visual storytelling – and it’s even easier to expect that in a case like this where we can’t even hear their original voices, but it is absolutely not so. Though this must have been a very technical shoot, with actors having to hit very precise marks to achieve the director’s vision, I feel they are also given real room to do their work. There are great stills I can capture and include in this post, but you have to watch the film to see how gently the lens explores the contours of the actors’ faces, the light and shadow catching and amplifying the delicate and nuanced work they are doing. And particularly in the case of the two leads, Lee and Lavi, that work is tremendous: layered, intriguing, and exhilarating.

I came to this movie because I knew I knew and loved Lee and Bava, but I hadn’t known anything about Daliah Lavi, who I must say floored me as Nevenka. What a performance! I knew Lee’s name first, but it is absolutely her film, revolving as it does around her inner turmoil, and she gives such an exquisitely detailed performance. An Israeli actress and model, it looks like she did a fair amount of work through the 60s, but I’ve not seen any of it. Seriously, judging from what she did here, I don’t know how she wasn’t a bigger star.

There is a centerpiece scene that serves as an encapsulation of the film’s strengths – the performances, the camera, the music, the lights. Nevanka, terror stricken, seeing Kurt’s ghost around every corner, and who is furthermore haunted by her scandalous desire for this man who had been so cruel to her, overhears her husband declare his love to his cousin. It had been, I think, pretty obvious, but explicitly hearing it wounds – even if her feelings for him were cool to begin with, the betrayal lands. In the next shot, we see her before her mirror, running her hand over the skin of her neck, over her bodice, her body hungry for contact, needing to be needed, when suddenly Kurt’s dead and ghostly face appears behind her.

Over a wordless minute, as they rotate around each other, his face is almost perfectly still, but a question seems to pass over it, while she is in turn terrified, lustful, defiant, amorous, and hateful. And as she moves in and out of shadow, the light somehow enhances each of these expressions in different ways. Finally, she takes up her scissors in defense, but he gingerly plucks them from her hand. She leaps across her bed to ring a bell and call for help, but his whip easily binds her wrist and he proceeds to lash her bodice off, leaving her lacerated and beaten. She cries out how she hates him, but bites her knuckle and sinks into her bed, giving herself over to sensation, to this extremity. By the end, no matter what she says, her eyes tell a different story – she is bound by desire for him. For this. The ghoul moves in for a kiss and we fade to black. It is an absolutely delicious performance.

For a period piece made 62 years ago in which there is no nudity, this is an extremely horny movie. So much desire and almost all of it repressed – so terrible is that desire for Nevenka, so confusing. In modern times, there can be some effort made to present kinkiness with some model of best practices: safe words and explicit consent and all that good stuff. Here, there is none of that, but there is a nexus of sexuality and self-recrimination and anger and need that rings true – complicated and not at all nice, but significant and real, making demands that can’t be denied. Kurt is a monster and an abuser, and she gets off on it, and she needs that release – perhaps she even needs the shame that comes with it – human psychology is complex. The buttoned up existence she otherwise leads will never satisfy her and that is part of her horror. He is a monstrous threat, but for her, the unquenchable need she feels is even worse. Just as her body is scoured, her psyche is possessed, her agency broken – by her own nature, her carnal drive that will not be denied. That is her nightmare, her horror. And in true Freudian fashion (without going into too many spoilers of the ending), it is the inevitably failed repression of these impulses that results in murder and madness.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t fare well with the censors in the early 60s. It got banned in its native Italy, and the English language version cut 14 minutes, including all of the sado-masochistic stuff, resulting in a story that was entirely unintelligible (and was released in America with the title What! which seems fitting for a film that makes no sense, having had its very heart removed). For all that it has many old fashioned elements, its boldness in terms of unconventional sexuality is quite modern (or is it – I mean the works of both de Sade and Sacher-Masoch predate it by more than a hundred years). And its horror, Nevenka’s horror, lands.

There is little killing and almost no gore (though there are some graphic whippings and throat cuts), but this piece lives somewhere between the sumptuousness of the gothic and the tension of the psychological – and it is a treasure. The dubbing is really unfortunate and I can’t say I was totally enamored of some scenes with characters who weren’t Kurt or Nevenka, but all of that said, I am so glad I watched it. Give it a try – stick out the language issues, and I think it will be more than worth your while.

Return of the Lesbian Vampires (Part 6)

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I’ve been at this for about 4 years now, having written about 184 horror movies new and old in all sorts of sub genres – slashers, hauntings, monster movies, possessions – I try to cast a wide net and cover a lot of territory. And of course, I take an active interest in what seems to stick with visitors to the site. What brings people here? What do people actually take the time to read in full, having clicked through? What goes largely unexamined? And according to Google Analytics, far and away, there are two leaders of the pack: my comparison of King’s book of “The Shining” and Kubrick’s film (nice – I’m proud of that one) and my (to date) five part series on “Lesbian Vampire” movies. I’m happy to say that the text on The Shining clocks more minutes of being read than any other individual post, but it can’t compete with the massive number of visitors that come in to read about “lesbian vampires” (which should really be otherwise named, lest we contribute to bi-vampire erasure, but the sub-genre is called what it’s called).

If that includes you, and you would like to check out the other entries in the series, you can do so here: Part I (Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary), Part II (The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Vampyros Lesbos), Part III (Nadja, Blood of the Tribades, and Bit), Part IV (Requiem for a Vampire and Alucarda), and Part V (Daughter of Dracula and Vampyres).

Having done those 5 previous posts, about two years ago, I stopped. I knew that, for all that they generate a ton of clicks, not everyone stays to read (I suppose many are looking for a more lurid presentation of the content than I offer – but not you, gentle reader, I know you’re here to stay…). And also, I had just kind of run the course on most of the, let’s say, “more highly regarded” examples of the genre. But I hadn’t actually exhausted the canon, and it is nice to bring new readers in (if you just got here, I hope you stick around and check a few other things out), so here come a few more: some newer, more modern takes and some classic 70s Eurosleaze as well.

It is an odd sub-genre, but I do consistently like it. Some of my all-time faves (i.e., Daughters of Darkness) fall within its borders, at that sweet-spot nexus of arthouse and grindhouse – a description for which I must give credit to blogger and podcaster, Stacie Ponder. They can feature idiosyncratic takes on the concept of the vampire and frequently it’s a stretch to say that they always even feature “lesbians” (more accurately, most are bisexual – probably the best description might be “Sapphic”); they can be trashy and artsy and veer more towards erotic dramas than horror; and it must be said that there is consistently a weirdness (to say the least) about the juxtaposition of their generally emancipatory textual messaging and their frequently male-gaze-y form, overwhelmingly directed by men with a desire to titillate. But I do dig them. So let’s dig in. Today we’ll be covering (in no particular order) two films from the heyday of the subgenre: The Female Vampire (1973) and The Velvet Vampire (1971), and two more recent entries: The Moth Diaries (2011) and We are the Night (2010). There will be spoilers.

The Female Vampire (1973)

AKA The Bare Breasted Countess, AKA Erotikill, AKA The Black Countess, AKA The Swallowers

Ah, Jess Franco, what a specific filmmaker. An auteur’s obsessive pursuit of the precise themes and images that fascinated him, and a 14 year old boy’s choice of those obsessions. He directed hundreds of films, most of which no one outside of a select circle of cult cinephiles has ever even heard of. He could exert masterful control over the camera, framing shots of great beauty and evocative, wistful sadness, and he would often snap zoom in on a breast or patch of female pubic hair like a salivating cartoon wolf with his eyes bugging out of his head. He contained multitudes I guess.

Now, I would not recommend this film as a starting point for Franco. It is simply too much like him and I think it could be a hurdle too high for one who hasn’t already decided they appreciate what he offers (perhaps start with Vampyros Lesbos). And I must say I appreciated The Female Vampire (or at least aspects of it) more than I liked or enjoyed it, but it is surely worthy of consideration.

If you know Franco, you know pretty much what to expect: Lina Romay, basically naked for most of the run time (she was in more than a hundred of his movies over the course 30 years – and they were a couple for 4 decades before marrying in 2008, both passing away four years later), sexualized vampirism, vampires that don’t mind sunbathing, gorgeous photography of a lush exotic location (in this case, the Portuguese island of Madiera), an erotic death trip wherein the physical act chases a kind of oblivion reflected in the all-consuming vampire of the title, groovy tunes, awkward, but enjoyable dialogue, and editing less concerned with narrative drive than mesmeric flow, totally comfortable lingering on a given shot as long as the director’s fascination is held.

The plot comes off as almost a porn parody, but that isn’t the way the film actually feels. At its heart is Romay as Countess Irina von Karlstein (We have a Carmilla reference – Lesbian Vampire box checked), an ancient vampire cursed to voraciously consume any she is drawn to. And in this case, the metaphor is taken to a literal extreme. She not only seduces the objects of her desire and inevitably destroys them, but she drinks their life force by performing oral sex, the “little death” (as the French would have it) of her victim’s orgasm not so little in her case.  And it must be said that this is one more “Lesbian” Vampire better described as bi-, pan-, or omni-sexual (not that I can claim to really grasp the distinction between those terms, but the point is that she’s an equal opportunity seducer/predator).

Again, the concept reads as laughable – the vampire who “sucks” her victims to death, and the early seventies featured plenty of silly sex farces in this vein (impossible to avoid the puns), but this is not one of them. There’s no silliness, no (intentional) absurdity. The tone is somber – Franco takes it all seriously; these themes and story beats could seem puerile or trashy, but for him, it is all worthy of artistic investment; whether or not it consistently captivated me as an object of art (not always, honestly), I never doubted that it was one. And while I run hot and cold on Franco, I love that commitment – to have the courage of your convictions that what you, personally want to see is truly important and should be shown – that’s a guiding star that many artists fail to hew to. Regardless of how you judge his work, I wouldn’t call it compromised. And that purity of artistic intent (even in something schlocky and sexploitational) really speaks to me.

Irena is a magnetic black hole at the center of everything. She carries a stillness, a quiet (she is mute), soft, sad insistence that others simply fall into. And it is easy to feel for her loneliness – she is drawn to new lovers, and they to her, and it always ends the same, with her alone, and yet she can’t keep herself away, can’t stop (some of this becomes textual in voiceovers, but it would be clear without them). There is a striking early scene when she appears before a reporter who had questioned her about mysterious deaths on the island. The reporter is startled to find Irena in her bedroom as she returns from the bath. She’s terrified, comprehending that Irena is a threat, that she is in danger, but as Irena’s gaze becomes more lascivious than predatory, the woman softens, and before long, she invites the countess into her bed. The scene is erotic, full of reciprocated desire, and it goes the way of all the sex scenes in this movie – eventually, the reporter convulses in pleasure and lies still. Irena is left alone with a corpse. She rubs herself against the cooling body in futile necrophiliac desperation, but the former paramour will not return. She’s gone and Irena is still here. There is so much nudity and so much sex in this film, but it rarely feels ‘pornographic’ in the sense that it should “get the viewer off.” In this moment, it is much more a feeling of pathos. And Franco takes more time with it than I think anyone else would have.

Which brings me to what was most difficult for me – I just wish it were all a bit shorter, tighter. But I know that isn’t what he did. As I’ve read, there are many different versions of this film. When he made it, he shot three different cuts for different markets: a very short (72 minutes) “horror” version (which I’ve read had all of the sex excised, without which, it made little sense), a medium length (82 minutes) “erotic horror” version, and a longer (96 minutes) porn version which included hardcore inserts. What I found available to watch was an even longer (100 minutes) cut, released many years later (and I believe this was Franco’s preferred version). This one lacks the hardcore shots, but seems to include much that wasn’t in the other three. And I must honestly say that it did try my patience a bit, leaving me more than a little sleepy by the end. I appreciated it, but I probably would have appreciated it more if there had been at least 10 minutes less to appreciate. But this was the only one I could find, and I’m glad to have checked it out. Furthermore, for all of my initial coolness, as a couple days have passed, I find myself thinking about it often and liking it more and more. It does linger in the memory.

There is a lot to take in here – it is frequently beautiful, a real mood, and it makes such good use of its setting. Madiera, the subtropical island where it takes place, is uncharacteristic for a Carmilla riff, as is the fact that the action occurs mostly during the day (Franco’s been here before), but is kind of thematically perfect. I’ve never been, but I understand that Madiera is an island of perpetual spring. Always about 23 degrees Celsius (approx. 73 F) and sunny on the coast of the island, and always wet and lush as you near the mountains at its center. This eternal, unchanging beauty mirrors Irena’s stasis. She cannot change. And her unending need is what pulls others to her.

Otherwise, the music is far-out and fun (with one recurring theme that sounds so much like a jazzy piano bit from a Peanuts special – did I miss the one about Charlie Brown and the sex vampire?), the performances are enjoyably uneven, and I rather dug a playful subplot with Franco as a Forensic investigator who figures out that vampirism is afoot, but the cops won’t believe him. And it must be said that Romay is very, very good. This was her first lead role at 19 and she carries the film in a mostly unassuming fashion. There is something very intimate and private about both her performance and how the camera watches her. She is an enigmatic presence, but there are moments when something surprising shines through, such as a scene where she seems to have really fallen in love and tries hard not to destroy her lover – in the early moments, she is girlishly sweet in a real departure from the rest of the film, before things go the way they inevitably must and she is despondent.

As a “vampire” movie, you don’t get much of the typical markers. It’s generally sunny and outside of a scene of sado-masochistic whipping, there’s nary a drop of blood (except when Irena carnally wriggles about in a blood bath in the final scene), but it is giving a different kind of vampire, and hey, we have a big tent in horror land.  Again, this is not recommended if you haven’t already seen and liked at least one other Jesús Franco film. But if you have, this is worth giving some time to – but don’t be in a hurry or start watching it too late. A strong cup of coffee might be a good idea as well.

We Are the Night (2010)

This next movie is almost the opposite of the last. Whereas Franco’s film paid only the smallest lip service to the concept of “plot,” this one has plot to spare, maybe even too much. Directed by Dennis Gansel, Wir sind die Nacht follows a young woman, Lena, who starts the film getting chased by the cops for pickpocketing the wrong Russian gangster, before she gets pulled into the orbit of a trio of attractive female vampires (in this world, there are only female vampires- whether by choice or because it simply doesn’t take for men, I wasn’t quite sure). Of course, she gets chosen to join them and has to struggle with her newfound need for blood. It’s all fun at the beginning (as it usually is), but everything eventually takes a dark turn (as it usually does), particularly due to the fact that Louise, the main vampire, gets jealous of the burgeoning romance sparked between Lena and the cop who was chasing her in the first scene. It’s all well-worn territory, and it is…fine.

When we first meet her, Lena is an intriguing character – low on glamour, but she’s a street rat with a striking self-assurance, a presence that draws more attention to her than she might like. And it is initially fun to hang out with the vamps and party the night away – there’s plenty of somewhat generic clubbing, but also some enjoyable thrill of danger – playing Russian roulette or speeding the wrong way down a tunnel in a stolen sports car, courting disaster, knowing you’ll walk away from it, but it’s still dangerous, and exciting.

Otherwise, it is capably filmed with some decent action here and there (the initial chase, a climactic fight that moves from wall to ceiling to out the window, etc.) and there are occasionally some nice shots that stand out. But ultimately, I gotta say, it wasn’t really for me.

As I keep writing about “Lesbian Vampire” movies, I’ve had to put some thought into the subgenre’s attraction. Now, they are not uniform of course, but their most common narrative pattern features some striking older female vampire targeting an ingénue, seducing her to the dark side and probably away from her dickish husband (though to be fair, the first feature today was not telling this story). That vampire is often presented as cruel, as a monster; perhaps she’s even coded as a kind of fascist (as Kümel did in Daughters of Darkness), but wow is she appealing, and even as the young woman is pulled into a possibly abusive relationship of drastically uneven power dynamics, her embrace of the vampire’s offer, her rejection of her socially expected role as “wife,” of, let’s say more broadly ‘the patriarchy,’ tends to feel downright emancipatory and sexy. And in that, there is the pinch of horror that keeps bringing me back to the genre – that dramatic tension of beauty and awfulness, and desire and fear, and freedom and bondage, out of which abject monstrosity is preferable to constraining normalcy. It’s good stuff.

Now Gansel’s film, on the surface, seems to follow very similar story beats, but it really feels different in a way that at best left me cold, and at worst turned me off. Louise is in fact an older female vampire, targeting a younger woman. And unlike many, she would seem to actually have no interest at all in men. But she doesn’t enrapture – she doesn’t enthrall, fascinate, beguile, or any other synonymous verb. And it’s not because she’s a vicious monster – I mean there’s some of that, and it’s a good time, but mainly she lacks appeal because from the beginning, she’s just a pushy, jealous, boringly petty figure. She just wants Lena to ‘love her’ instead of the pretty boy she’s actually into, and the film doesn’t give her much to do to successfully entrance Lena (I have a thesaurus), or more importantly, us. By the end of the movie, she doesn’t feel like a delicious, compelling monster so much as simply “the bad guy,” and (spoiler alert!) the bad guy loses so that the young lovers can run off together.

I don’t mean to be some closed minded ideologue, but it’s hard to cheer the victory of bland heteronormativity in my Lesbian Vampire movies. It’s like Ally Sheedy at the end of The Breakfast Club getting all pretty in pink and suddenly being happy with the athlete. Honestly, there was something off about this movie from the beginning – in an early scene, celebrating Lena’s new nightlife, Louise takes all the vamps shopping and Lena does come out of this almost unrecognizably glammed up – just put a pink bow in her hair. Really, if I’m going to watch this story again, I’d rather just re-watch Bit (2019), which uses its collection of intentionally exclusively female vampires to interestingly examine something about power – how it is abused, how it empowers, how it can or can’t be managed – who gets to wield it and why, and do they do any better than those who had it before? It is emotionally significant that its main character is invited into this sisterhood, giving extra meaning to everything. Plus, it’s just more fun.

So yeah, this was not my favorite, but hey, maybe it will be yours. Who knows? If you do choose to give it a try, I strongly recommend finding it in the original German with subtitles. The subtitles aren’t great (often things feel poorly translated), but the English dubbing is really wooden.

The Moth Diaries (2011)

So off the top, I must say that when I first watched this about 8 months ago, I really liked it and knew that I wanted to write about it whenever I got back to the Lesbian Vampires, but then when I re-watched it last night, I found I had cooled quite a bit on it. Which impression is most accurate? Who knows – but I’ll try to give voice to both experiences as best I can.

Directed by Mary Harron (known to genre fans for American Psycho, but I also really liked her non-horror The Notorious Bettie Page), this is an adaptation of a 2002 novel of the same name about Rebecca, a student in an all-girl boarding school who feels jealous and threatened when her best friend, Lucy, falls into the orbit of Ernessa, a mysterious new girl (who’s probably a vampire – or maybe a ghost?). Despite the fact that the novelette is directly discussed in the protagonist’s English class, this is very much a riff on Carmilla, and generally it does well by that source material, while also being rather its own thing.

What I liked best here are the relationships. At the beginning, Rebecca loves Lucy so fiercely, and it’s not clear if we’re simply seeing the intimacy of a dear childhood friendship, or if there is, in fact, a romantic or sexual component to that love. I don’t think it’s clear to Rebecca either. She’s been through some hard times (her father committed suicide a few years back) and Lucy has been her lifeline to the world – they enjoy each other, and it all seems totally positive, but Rebecca is also utterly dependent. Thus when Ernessa shows up and Lucy starts drifting away, Rebecca is thrown into absolute crazy making crisis, and the possessive jealousy she feels regarding her friend is dark and controlling. Still, she’s not wrong – Lucy is being seduced by a vampire who will use her up till there is nothing left – an abusive partner who cuts off ties to former friends.

And the Ernessa – Lucy relationship reads. Ernessa does fascinate. Played by Lily Cole, she has a vaguely otherworldly quality and it’s easy to see how Lucy falls for her. It’s also easy to see how bad she is for Lucy (who does, in fact, begin to waste away). But it’s hard for Rebecca to help her friend when she, herself, is so transparently being motivated by her own jealousy (leading to unengaged with questions as to the nature of her own desire for Lucy). Everyone can see it. No one really talks about it.

Along the way, there are little touches that contribute to the vibes and themes of magnetic attraction, power imbalance, and emotional abuse inherent in the story: a sexy new English teacher who is inappropriately familiar with Rebecca, harsh treatment by the matrons of the school, a moving scene in which one girl sneaks out to lose her virginity in a field near the school, but brings along all of her friends to camp out nearby in case she needs them – the sex is unpleasant and unsatisfying, but she accomplishes what she set out to do and the presence of the other girls in their sleeping bags just out of sight helps establish a sense of shared repressed desires, even for something that may hurt and leave them wanting. There is a repeating visual motif of moths (it’s in the title), creatures that are drawn to light, incapable of pulling themselves away, doomed to be burned by its brightness.

And I do appreciate that this is a rare example of a “Lesbian Vampire” movie in which the vampire is only actually interested in women (also, out the 17 films I’ve written about in this series, only one had a woman as a (co-)director, so having Harron behind the camera is rather a novelty). The attraction between Ernessa and Lucy is evident, and this is both threatening and enticing for Rebecca. Lucy has the room next to hers and Ernessa is always there. One night Rebecca wakes to her friend’s moans and goes to investigate – and is startled when she opens the door and finds the two having vigorous sex, or is Ernessa feeding on her? Either and both – though no blood is visible and this is a vampire movie with no fangs. She watches for a moment and then closes the door and goes back to bed, but I think there is a shocking appeal for her, just as it is frightening in its near-violence and sexual domination. And then, it’s never discussed – no one needs to “come out” and you don’t have the impression that the other girls would take issue with it. But given how the door is unlocked and they are making such noise, it feels like they (or at least Ernessa – Lucy has little agency at this point) want to be heard, that Rebecca is being invited into the room – a part of the larger seduction that Ernessa is attempting on Rebecca throughout the whole film, reaching out for the protagonist to join her in death.

So all of this has been of the good. What about last night’s viewing? I guess it just came off with less drive for me on re-watch. There is an evenness to the pacing that just felt plodding, and the knowledge from the beginning (even with direct textual reference) that this was a Carmilla story sapped rather a lot of tension from the narrative. Of course Ernessa is a vampire – even if Rebecca has mixed motivations, we never doubt that she’s right about the danger her friend is in. It all just felt a bit flat last night. Was that the fault of the film, or was I simply in a different headspace? I’m not sure.

Either way, there was a lot to like here. I appreciate how Harron uses this school setting to manufacture images of gothic fiction in modern day – the gorgeous old stone walls of the dormitory, the girls all sleeping in long white nightshifts as they sneak about by the light of the moon. It is generally a bloodless vampire movie, except for one dream sequence, which must have given good grist for the trailer, in which Ernessa showers in blood as Rebecca watches and screams, spattered with it herself – as she is taunted with her friend’s destruction, and prompted to, like her father before her, open up her wrists. It’s an effective moment in a film that has many. I just wish it had pulled me through a bit more forcefully.

So, yeah – I wouldn’t call it a “top tier” Lesbian Vampire movie, but if you’re looking for something made this century, this is a decent option, and I imagine it might have played better with its intended audience, who I assume were teen girls in 2011 – sometimes I think it’s important to temper criticism with the knowledge that a given piece was not really made for you.

The Velvet Vampire (1971)

Finally, riding directly on the coattails of Daughters of Darkness (1971) comes this desert bleached take on the Lesbian (bisexual) vampire from Stephanie Rothman, making this the only film from what I’ll call the “golden age” of Lesbian Vampire movies directed by a woman. Rothman worked in the field of exploitation cinema and this is no exception. Made on a sixth of the budget of Daughters of Darkness, this hits many of the same beats: a young married couple with a strained relationship dynamic is pulled by a glamourous female vampire in an isolated location. She seduces the husband first, as he’s simply easy sport, making the wife uncomfortable and jealous, but the wife may really be her main target. I was struck watching The Velvet Vampire at how even some costume/set choices seem to overlap. Can it be a coincidence that they both have dining room scenes with the alluring, elegant vampire in sparkling silver by candlelight?

Left: Daughters of Darkness – Right: The Velvet Vampire

On the exploitation front, this is clearly a cheap B-movie and outside of Celeste Yarnall as Diane Le Fanu, the titular vamp (and also, her name is our de rigueur Carmilla reference – the book was written by Sheridan Le Fanu), the acting is more what one expects of an American cheapie than a European Arthouse flick. One also imagines that the desert setting and the almost exclusively daytime shooting were money saving choices. There are some odd choices here and there and some lapses in logic, along with a middle stretch that lags. But in spite of all that, I really liked this movie.

For all of the modesty of its budget, it is frequently gorgeous to look at in terms of setting, costumes, and cinematography, occasionally touching on real beauty in some of its vampiric moments, as well as the essential sadness of Diane’s endlessness, outliving (and using up) all of her lovers, all of her servants, anyone whose life she touches. It also clearly has a sense of humor, and while it’s not at all a “comedy,” I’m sure that at least some of its absurdity is intentional, representing successes of the script rather than failures (I wasn’t sure for a little while, but by the end, that was my read). There are some bigger laughs, but also a lot of small smirks here and there, such as when on the first night, Diane is watching the couple in bed through a one way mirror as she sits in her sumptuous red room on her voyeur throne. She clearly enjoys watching the husband pleasure his wife, but then when she refuses to reciprocate and, satisfied, rolls over to go to sleep, Diane looks so put out that her show has ended early. It’s not hilarious, but it is a funny little moment in a film with many such moments. Additionally, there are some solidly surreal dream sequences with the couple in a bed in the desert and Diane entering to seduce them each through a rather Magritte-esque mirror. And the music absolutely cooks. Seriously, I would buy this on vinyl if it were released, but as far as I know it hasn’t been. It’s got this great mix of distorted psychedelic groove and folksy strings, as well as a bit of tight Blues. Vibes for days.

Most significantly, any movie in this subgenre lives or dies (or, um, un-lives? Un-dies?) based on the strength of its central bloodsucker. Earlier in this post, I criticized We Are the Night for failing to give its Louise many opportunities to beguile her film’s ingénue or us the viewers. That is absolutely not true in this case. Yarnall’s Diane is gently magnetic, with a sly, sardonic smile and an easy confidence that pulls in husband, wife, and viewer. She is allowed to be entirely a predator, a cold hearted user through and through, but you can’t help but love her and want the young couple to fall into her trap (plus, they’re no gems, so it would be no great loss). Past that, her take on being a vampire is rather specific and, generally, I’m there for it.

First of all, there is the daytime. She tends to stay pretty well covered up during the day in her long gloves and wide hat, but the sunlight doesn’t stop her from tooling around in her bright yellow dune buggy (ye gods, is it funny when she first appears in it, leaping over the dunes in the most incongruous appearance of a vampire I can think of). This leads to a hilariously thinly veiled seduction of Lee (the husband) as she describes handling the vehicle in the most explicit terms (“as you move in rhythm with it – up and down, in and out… through the dunes,” prompting him to huskily respond “Diane, I think I’d like to drive your buggy.” Sexy. But to be fair, a surprising amount of Lesbian Vampire movies ignored the notion that vamps were “creatures of the night.” A) Carmilla was active during the day, and B) it was cheaper to film in daylight and especially in the early 70s “golden age,” these things were on a tight budget.

Past the day lit dune buggying, I rather like how she isn’t particularly magical or powerful. Sure, Diane needs to drink blood, and she does, but other than being eternally young, she has no supernatural powers. In the very first scene of the movie, as she walks to the art gallery where she will meet the young couple and immediately invite them to visit her remote desert home, she is assaulted by a guy on the street who attempts to rape her. She makes quick work of him, but it is a bit of a struggle first. No, she’s not turning into a bat (or a cloud of moths for that matter). She isn’t super strong. She isn’t particularly fast. At one point, her hand is stabbed and a couple of scenes later, she’s still wearing a bandage. Her only power is her easy charm. Her power is sexiness. I don’t think she literally mesmerizes husband or wife, but she is mesmeric, even as she smiles and glows through tales of people’s throats being ripped open by some mysterious threat. There is an easy going self-assurance that comes with eternity – she knows she will get what she wants and she knows she is wanted. Also, that wanting defines her – she is an eternal hunger – always wanting and inevitably destroying, but always appealing.

The young couple was, however, not particularly appealing for me, but they are interestingly written. When we first meet them, Lee (the husband) is trying to pick up Susan (the wife) at an art show. He’s pretty pushy and she gives him a real hard time. When we learn they’re married, it’s evident that they are playing a kind of game with each other. Within minutes, Lee has gotten them invited to Diane’s place and Susan is already jealous at his interest. You have the impression that they are trying to live an early 70s ideal of sexual freedom – young, without hangups, both able to have romantic adventures, and yet, the moment the captivating Diane enters the picture, it is clear that neither is as modern or as unbound by convention as they’d like to believe (I think of John Lennon singing, “You think you’re so clever and classless and free, but you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see”). They can be possessive, be jealous, be hurt. Still, they are both lured by her and thus, keep pushing the line, pushing themselves, pushing towards their end.

I can’t say that the ending entirely did it for me, but that’s because I don’t like my evil sexy vampires to lose, but at least when she does, I feel it is tinged with tragedy rather than feeling like an unquestioned triumph of good.

So yeah, this was a fun one – not very successful on release, but it’s rightly acquired a ‘cult’ status over the years. It won’t be for everyone as it is a cheap production and some of the acting suffers, but if you like these kinds of movies (and perhaps if you’ve read this far, you do), then I definitely think this is worth checking out. Honestly, its low-budget “failings” are really part of its charm, and when it succeeds, it really pops. But do try to find a good copy. I started watching it on Tubi and the quality was terrible, leading me to think it was simply an ugly film. Then I noticed it was also on Shudder (which I understand always tries to have the best quality available) and the difference of the transfer was night and day.

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And so I think that’s it for this most recent foray into the realm of Lesbian (read: Sapphic) Vampires. As always, it’s been gratifying to explore this kinda-trashy/kinda-artsy slice of horror cinema at the intersection of the vampire’s erotic promise and a compulsive fascination with oblivion (romantic poetry smuggled under the sensationalistic cover of a bit of blood and a lot of nudity). I wouldn’t generally recommend any of these movies as an entry point to the subgenre, but for the initiated, there are still depths to be plumbed (that came off dirtier than intended). There are still characters who can beguile, still filmmaking that can wow. And it is always one of the great pleasures of digging into genre, to gain a more complete view of the permutations of where that genre can go. Even in the case of a variation that rubbed me wrong, such as We Are the Night, it feels enriching to puzzle out why and to be able to look at it in the context of the history, the ongoing tradition, of certain stories and characters and tropes.

I don’t know when the next entry of this series will come – it could be another couple of years for all I know. But sooner or later, it has to happen – I mean, I just today learned that a made for TV Polish black and white adaptation of Carmilla was produced in 1980. How could I possibly resist?