Really digging into horror cinema (or any cinema) means engaging with all kinds of work. You’ve got masterpieces that are both entertaining and artistically profound. You’ve got cheap B-movies that aren’t “great works of art” but evince a love of the creative process and feature some worthy ideas. You’ve got utter trash that is all the more lovable for just how trashy it is. The highest highs and the lowest lows both have their pleasures.
But sometimes a work can be hard to classify. There are ideas there. There are moments, elements, a look, a shot, a concept that intrigues, a performance that holds your attention, but it doesn’t exactly come together for you. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re encountering an artistic choice, where filmmakers have really taken a chance on something different (narratively, in how a film is cut, in a non-naturalistic style of performance) or if it is frankly just ineptitude. Are the themes and ideas of a given film complex and nuanced, ironically presented and rich in their ambiguity, their seeming ambivalence in fact the point, or has an intended message just been muddled, having haphazardly thrown together actions, events, character choices, and images, resulting in a film that fails to achieve cohesion?
Continuing my intermittent journey through the relatively limited terrain of Polish Horror (See others here), today’s entry is just such a film. From moment to moment, I found it quite watchable, and there were elements to enjoy, but I’m still not quite sure what to do with it and I suspect some of its more puzzling aspects may simply represent failures of good storytelling. But maybe they are intentional subversions of standard narrative conventions and expectations. Either way, I don’t think my role here is to judge “quality,” but to discuss whatever of interest may be found in a given work. So, without further ado, here we go…
Lubię Nietoperze (1986) (I Like Bats)
The first act of Krystyna Kofta’s and Grzegorz Warchol’s sometimes evocative, sometimes blackly comic, and sometimes narratively obtuse and meandering I Like Bats is quite an enjoyable vampire flick. Izabela, or Iza for short (Katarzyna Walter), is a modern, independent vampire in a small town, who is regularly hounded by her aunt and the ghost of her grandfather (who expresses his wishes by making his absurdly angry looking portrait fall from the wall) to finally settle down, get a man, and stop vamping around.
But Iza doesn’t want to hear about it. She seems happy living her life her way and rolls her eyes at her aunt’s entreaties. She spurns the advances of one pushy, entitled local creep and seems to take pleasure in hanging out with her bats, making pottery for her aunt’s curio shop, and apparently preying solely on unpleasant men, often those who first try to prey on her.
Her un-lifestyle seems quite satisfying and she resists her aunt’s insistence that it’s time to start acting like a ‘real woman.’ I think the film is most gratifying in these early scenes of her presenting herself as vulnerable (sometimes dressed as a prostitute, sometimes simply being a woman walking home alone at night) only to turn the tables on some sleazebag, and sometimes getting to be fully badass, walking away from exploding vans, luxuriating in the rain and the night, and indulging in quality time with her beloved, shrieking, chattering bats.
But then a guy comes to the curio shop, buys a tea set and the main story starts in earnest, as does the narrative and thematic ambivalence. Basically, she falls in love (for some reason) with this psychiatrist and has herself committed to his institution to be cured of her vampirism (does she really want that cure or does she just want him – it’s not clear). He doesn’t believe her and treats her for delusion, but eventually, he comes around, falls in love and, after a bout of artfully filmed sex (her first time), ala Pinocchio, she becomes a ‘real girl,’ seeing her reflection for the first time, and they get married and have kids. But in the final moments, it’s revealed that the vampirism has passed to her young daughter.
But this middle stretch gets difficult because the motivation for so many character choices and the moments when a character actually feels something and changes somehow all felt like they happened off screen. The film maintains a light, ironic tone, often set to the playful score by Zbigniew Preisner (who scored a few Hollywood films but would be best known internationally for his work with Kieślowski, e.g., Red, White, Blue, or The Double Life of Veronique), and there is no real sense of urgency to the proceedings. It’s hard to fathom what she sees in the psychiatrist (named Professor Jung – perhaps there’s something to read into this – maybe we are to take all these figures as archetypes and not characters as such), and his journey from skepticism to passionate love feels unearned. The world of the film is one where nothing has stakes (argh – sorry) or happens for a clear reason. Cars crash and no one notices. Kids break shop windows and come in to retrieve their ball and no one mentions the window. A woman in a bar gets bored, takes off her top and starts dancing and no one bats an eye (again, I can’t help myself). Things just are. And then they are something else.
All the same, it is disappointing when this cool, self-possessed character, who seems to rather enjoy her vampirism, suddenly sees a pretty boring guy, gets immediately love sick and starts pining after him; worse still, in the end, she’s somehow happy to have so dramatically changed. It all feels so disheartening that, given the ironic elements, I wonder if this is intentional. Are we meant to view her change as a fairy tale happy ending (the virginal dead girl gets “kissed” by the prince and “comes to life”) or are we perhaps supposed to see the inherent personality erasing loss of self in this recurring narrative?
Fairy tales often progress in an unquestioning mode. Things simply are the way they are. Whether a fish talks or a bean stalk grows into the clouds, characters accept everything as natural; nothing is ever shocking and I Like Bats does lean on some fairy tale elements. No one really questions the existence of vampires (they only deny that Iza could be one as apparently in this world, all vampires are men – is this some comment on how a certain kind of sexual desire is perceived?). The cinematography (which is really quite attractive) is often dreamy and artful. The location used for the institute is Moszna Castle, a palace with 99 turrets sometimes referred to as “Polish Disneyland” (also – and I wonder if this was meant to function as a kind of visual pun given that the castle is quite well known in Poland, and there is a strong theme of sexual desire running under the vampirism – “moszna” in Polish translates as “scrotum” – so take that as you will).
Furthermore, the film seems to take place in some unspecified time with some modern sensibilities but costuming and cars that seem from a more distant past. Similarly, the setting seems to be deliberately unfixed – signs are in Polish, but in one scene, they visit an institute where vampires are imprisoned in cages on the beach at “the ocean” (while Poland is on the Baltic Sea, it is nowhere near the ocean). There are many advertisements (for cigarettes mostly) in English and Iza’s small town seems surprisingly multi-cultural for my (perhaps incorrect) impression of Poland in the 80s. This all comes together to imply a dreamlike no-place and no-when, peopled by odd characters who sometimes act for no-why.
This had been on my radar for some time just because it is a Polish vampire movie (and there aren’t many if any others exist at all), but I recently got the chance to see it with English subtitles because the Severin Films remaster just came to Shudder (sadly, it’s quite difficult to do screen captures from Shudder – so the pics here are from an inferior print – the newly remastered version really looks so much better) as part of a set of movies accompanying the second edition of Kier-La Janisse’s fascinating House of Psychotic Women (the first edition of which I wrote about here). Her focus is on films that present “female madness” and I’m very curious how she frames this one. Though it is her explicit reason to be in the clinic, Iza’s vampirism does not read as any kind of mental illness. She seems quite happy with it and the way she lives. If anything, her insistence on the attention of this man seems like the unmotivated compulsion. Maybe therein lies the madness?
She seems constantly surrounded by sleazy, irritating, or pathetic men, and she seems to exclusively feed on those who in some way hunt her, who desire her, sometimes acting on that desire violently. Professor Jung doesn’t seem much interested in her at all, either because he doesn’t like women, or he doesn’t want any distractions from his work (two explanations he gives), or he just doesn’t like her. Is his indifference the magic spell that infatuates her so? She is only upset that he doesn’t take more interest. And in the end, when finally he comes around, rescues her from the beach-vampire-cage institute, and takes her off to go skinny dipping/make love to her until she’s human, she seems very happy in her “normal” human family life. If anything, the reveal of her daughter’s fangs (and penchant for killing gardeners) plays as a darkly comic twist – that even though Iza has put her dark past behind her and settled down into civilized life, this unruly female desire resurfaces in her offspring. Does the film want us to be happy for Iza in her newfound “normalcy” and to laugh at how the “problem” persists or does it want us to mourn for Iza’s loss of identity as she disappears into bland conformity and to laugh at how good it is that her lost vivacity continues in her child? Un-life will find a way.
It is a consistently watchable (and again, the look and feel and sound of it all is striking and expressive) and frequently enjoyable film, which still puzzles in its often confounding character beats. Is this an issue of poor editing and half-baked writing, or is it instead successful in ironically telling us a fairy tale that we should view as facile and even harmful, its disjointed, apparently unmotivated qualities supporting that reading? It’s hard to find much analysis on it in either English or Polish (thus, I’m particularly curious to see what Kier-La Janisse has to say). The short English descriptions online present a quirky vampire romance (but I found no real analysis or criticism beyond user reviews saying “weird, great movie” or “weird, boring movie”) and much of what I’ve found in Polish either describes it as a bit of superficial, erotic schlock produced late in the communist regime as a kind of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the public entertained and thus pacified (attacking it as regrettably ‘low art’) or uses it as an example of how Polish cinema really didn’t respect and therefore didn’t succeed at genre film (attacking Polish film culture for being over-snobbish when it comes to matters of ‘low’ and ‘high’ art). Hey, if any Polish readers know of more insightful readings out there, please let me know – I’m very curious and limited by my embarrassingly weak Polish skills.
For my part, I watched it twice in a couple days and enjoyed watching it both times, but I can’t say if I think it’s good or not. It has been interesting to consider and it’s certainly got moments that shine. It’s fascinating how sometimes watching something from a culture you didn’t grow up in (even if you’ve lived there for a while – I’ve been in Poland for 14 years at this point), you can be more forgiving of faults, more open to reading what seem like very strange choices or even mistakes in a more charitable light. I often feel like maybe there’s something culturally informing all this that doesn’t land for me, that just goes over my head. It makes for a rich and sometimes mysterious viewing experience. If you’re not in a hurry, and you’re in the mood for an odd little piece of off-kilter vampire cinema from a specific time and place (trying to be no time or place), perchance this one is for you.