It’s always nice to do something seasonal. Christmas has endless options of festive horror to choose from. We’ve had plenty of Leprechaun movies, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, The Wicker Man for May Day, Jaws for the 4th of July, Blood Rage for Thanksgiving, and who knows how many countless movies that take place on Halloween (all of this merely scratching the surface of holiday themed horror). But for Easter, nothing’s all that prominent. I know there are some killer Easter Bunny flicks out there, but none have a high profile, so I thought that it could be fitting to mark the celebration of a fellow rising from the dead with a couple of zombie films (while somewhat thematically following on from last week’s I Walked with a Zombie). And while I’ve written about one of his films before, and have watched a couple others, I still feel woefully uneducated when it comes to the work of Jean Rollin; therefore, this seems a perfect time to check out his two (reportedly good) zombie flicks: The Grapes of Death (1978) and The Living Dead Girl (1982) (from all that I’ve read, I doubt we need to examine Zombie Lake (1981)).
I’ll be discussing them in detail, so if you’d like to see them first and avoid spoilers, I watched them on Kino Cult. They’ve got a great collection of Rollin’s films (among others) and you can watch them free with commercials. ***Also, as a side note, if you’re looking for a good Passover movie, how about The Abominable Dr. Phibes? Not many explicitly Jewish characters, but it does feature Vincent Price carrying out an excellent series of murders inspired by the Ten Plagues.***
The Grapes of Death (1978)
Released in France as Les Raisins de la Mort, this is regarded as France’s first “gore” film. While the makeup work is a little ropey by today’s standards, it is still effective enough, and even if every application might not come across perfectly realistically, the film is not shy about going for the gross-out (I’ve read that it was so cold at night that the latex was hardening and falling off the actors – which gives you a vicarious shiver for Brigitte Lahaie during her outdoor nude scene). I understand this was a departure from Rollin’s typical lyrical-symbolic style, given the degree to which it really delivers the horror, as opposed to being more of an art-house meditation on eroticism and the death drive. And I must say, it is scary – much more so than other works of his that I’ve thus far seen. One of his biggest commercial successes, he referred to it, perhaps disparagingly, as “conventional,” with its financial returns breathing fresh life into his film career and helping him to move beyond the pornographic films he’d been making at the time to get by.
However, while it may be more “conventional” than many of his other works, and is certainly an effective, scary horror film, I think it is no less artistic, oneiric, or unique. This is a gorgeous and disturbing nightmare that flows with the slow but inevitable momentum of a terrible dream, its straightforward narrative actually contributing to its surreal power. Drenched in melancholy, paranoia, and a deep, sustained dread, this isn’t as superficially ‘weird’ as much of Rollin’s other output, but it is absolutely obvious that it came from the same creator, rich as it is with his recurring preoccupations, and filmed with a characteristic beauty.
Before anyone can object, I will admit that these aren’t exactly “zombies” as we generally understand them, so much as a kind of ‘infected’ – people exposed to a substance which makes them alternatingly placid and murderous as their still living bodies begin to rot. But hey – close enough. I’m happy to embrace a big-tent zombieism – from Voodoo to shambling corpses to rage infected Londoners to leprous, rural, Gallic killers – I don’t feel that splitting hairs in this case enriches the conversation. Do we have a mass of rotting, generally dead-eyed killers and a vibe of the inescapability of creeping death? Yup. Good enough. Zombie movie.
The story is uncharacteristically direct. A young woman, Élizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), is travelling to visit her fiancé, the manager of a remote French winery. Having befriended another girl on the train, they accompany each other to the bathroom to freshen up before arriving at their respective locations, noticing along the way that they seem to now be the only passengers. This mysterious emptiness and their sudden realization of their isolation immediately unsettles, but they continue to chat excitedly about where they are going and who they will meet. Once she’s brushed her teeth, Élizabeth returns to her compartment, leaving her friend to get ready. It takes longer than expected and soon, a new passenger takes a seat and begins staring her down, a young man with a bit of a skin condition – that is rapidly growing worse – that bulges, bleeds through, and bursts. She runs for the exit, where she finds her compatriot dead in the bathroom, but he follows. She pulls the emergency brake and disembarks, finding herself stranded in the middle of nowhere. Finally, she runs off into the surrounding greenery, not noticing that the killer just sits down on the tracks, looking exhausted and broken, not giving chase.
Over the course of the rest of the film, Élizabeth will constantly run from one terrifying situation to the next, no location actually safe, no person able to fully be trusted. There’s the remote farmhouse where the father, his sanity decomposing to match his flesh, impales his also infected daughter with a pitchfork before she and Élizabeth can escape. There’s the man with the putrescent forehead who rubs his yellow pus all over the window of Élizabeth’s stalled car, smashes his head against it repeatedly, and shatters it before she shoots him. There’s the blind girl Élizabeth encounters and walks home across a desolate expanse, who refuses to stay indoors and is subsequently crucified and beheaded by her lover.
And there’s the offputtingly overfriendly blonde woman (Brigitte Lahaie in her first “mainstream” role – she’d previously been in one of Rollin’s pornographic features and would continue working with him, notably in his striking Fascination (1979)), who conceals her bloodlust beneath a mask of sanity and gleefully tries to hand Élizabeth over to the crowd before blowing herself up, her calm composure and the intensity of her happiness, in the face of such horrific events, ironically suggesting the madness beneath.
It reads like a wild list of disparate events, but like a bad dream, every step leads inexorably to the next. We’re on a train that won’t stop, and we have no emergency brake. There’s plenty of dialogue along the way, but it almost feels non-verbal, like Élizabeth is running through a nightmarish haze, narrowly evading one terrible, logic defying threat, only to encounter the next. Surprisingly straightforward, the film more or less follows the Aristotelian unities: there is really one central action – discovery of, running from, and uncovering the awful truth behind the infected; there is this one stretch of rural countryside, though she moves throughout it; and the events basically unfold over the course of one day – we move into night as things get progressively worse, then must survive that darkness, and in the new light of day, make new, terrible discoveries. Set in bucolic farmland, it’s ‘daylight horror’ at its best.
And also like a dream, nothing actually feels weird when we encounter it. Each moment is true to its own necessity, and what could play as absurd, instead just feels scary, the whole piece suffused with inescapable dread. And sadness. There is a tragic, mournful vibe running through it all.
The infected are not mindless, but seem still aware of themselves and their actions. The farmer pitchforking his daughter looks down at her bloody corpse, asks “What’s happening to me? What have I done?” and calls on Élizabeth to kill him. The lover (and murderer) of the blind girl, who’d stripped her, nailed her to a door and chopped off her head, carries that head everywhere he goes for hours before finally kissing it sensually on its dead, bloody lips, and cradling it, lying down to die himself. And, ultimately, Élizabeth’s fiancé, the one it turns out was responsible for all this (thanks to a new pesticide he’d developed for the grapes, exposing his unprotected immigrant workforce, as well as anyone who tastes the new wine, to infection), knows what he now is and what he has done – he tries to send her away, but she refuses and he dies in her arms. The final shot of the film, with almost everyone else dead or dying, is of Élizabeth, infected herself, looking up at his now lifeless form as his blood drips onto her face – an image of mourning and love and physical need.
The whole film is similarly striking. While it is quite scary, consistently unsettling, and run through with sadness, it is never less than beautiful. The locations, the light, the sense of texture and the presence in the eyes of the actors – every moment is captivating. While it’s still assembled with Rollin’s trademark lack of interest in the traditional rules of a ‘well-made-film’ (notably, in terms of the lack of continuity in editing – at one point, a character walks around a corner and her costume changes – that sort of thing), Claude Becogné’s cinematography is just jaw-droppingly gorgeous. There is a tactile quality to it all, every moment compels you not to turn away, and again, there is a unique quality to the performances. Pascal and Lahaei both stand out in this regard – the former the trembling heart that holds it all together, and the latter a spellbinding emblem of the uncanny.
It’s really a little masterpiece. If you have the patience for its shaky effects, gloomy dreaminess, and inconsistent editing, it is both emotionally and artistically rewarding, as well as legitimately scary and haunting.
The Living Dead Girl (1982)
Released in France under the superior title, La Morte Vivante (simply “the living dead” but with feminine endings), it feels that we’ve come quite a long way stylistically from Rollin’s early, surreal vampire films. If he’d considered our first film today “conventional,” this is actually much more so, unfolding like a “standard” horror film, or even an dramatic art film. With an air of tragic romance and far more realistic gore work than Grapes of Death, this could pass as a straight horror-drama. But don’t let that fool you. While this might not be so dream-like or overtly symbolic, The Living Dead Girl taps into Rollin’s recurring preoccupations with the intersection of the erotic and death, exploring the spectrum between all the consuming need of life-sex-hunger-love-possession and the cessation of all of those things in the peaceful stillness and complacency of mortality.
And in an odd way, in sublimating his ongoing artistic impulses into something so, for lack of a better word, “normal,” Rollin crafts what might be a more moving and disturbing meditation on those themes than in some of his his earlier, more poetic and abstract (and also, to be fair, more fun) work. Unlike “Grapes,” it’s never exactly scary, but the Horror is strong in this one.
When some factory workers/grave-robbers store chemical waste in the crypts below an abandoned chateau, where the 2 years dead Catherine (Françoise Blanchard) is interred, she is revived, and they are summarily consumed. No decomposing corpse, she rises from the grave in the full bloom of youthful beauty, though her mind has clearly not recovered. With arresting impassivity, she goes upstairs and, with her long fingernails which presumably continued growing after death, pierces the throats of a young estate agent and her boyfriend who are using the chateau for a tryst, leaving their naked, rent bodies littering the premises, after stopping at an old photograph of two young girls which sends her into a reverie.
In flashback, we see Catherine and her best friend, Hélène (Marina Pierro), in the passion of childhood, declaring their eternal love for one another, cutting their palms to mix their blood, and swearing to follow one another even to the grave. In the present, though unable to speak, and barely able to order her thoughts, Catherine manages to dial the number of her old friend, opening a music box Hélène had given her as a child. Hearing the music, Hélène knows her friend must not actually be dead and comes running. She washes away the blood from Catherine’s flesh, gently puts her to bed, and hides the ravaged bodies.
Over time, Hélène nurses Catherine back to a greater semblance of life, feeding her new victims to sustain her. Finally, Catherine is aware enough to be horrified of her state and her actions and begs Hélène to let her die, to kill her if necessary. This Hélène cannot do and she practically force feeds her friend, the newly dead piling up in the crypt below, until finally Hélène feeds herself to the object of her affection. The final moments of the film are of Catherine devouring her friend, her captor, her tormentor, her sister, her lover, unable not to, howling and screaming in horror and grief as she does so.
It’s pretty heavy stuff, by turns, tragic and horrific. Hélène fights to do right by her friend, to help her, to love her unconditionally, to follow through on her solemn, if naïve, vow. But in doing so, she traps Catherine in her monstrous state, forcing her to harm innocent people. I had the impression that when Hélène was first called by the recently risen Catherine, she was struck by guilt. Her childhood love had died two years earlier and she hadn’t followed her – she still lived, and it seems may have not even attended the funeral. Perhaps she just couldn’t face the grief. Or perhaps over the years, the two had just drifted apart, and now that she’s back in her life, Hélène has a second chance to do what she’d sworn.
Catherine, however, only seems to suffer more as she’s brought further back to the world of the living. At first, she is distant, quizzical to find herself breathing, puzzled by her new-found life. It’s as if she doesn’t understand life yet, or herself, and certainly not what she is. The more self-aware she becomes, the more she knows that she does not want this. But Hélène won’t let her go. Late in the film, Catherine tries drowning herself, but Hélène pulls her back, reviving her with her own flesh and blood. It all feels like a parable of the necessity of letting things pass, letting death be. Nothing lasts forever; nor should it. Extending life thus is not only unnecessary, but a kind of evil, a form of cruelty.
Though it begins in a death-like stillness, Catherine’s experience grows only more horrific until she is pressed to destroy her only friend, descending into madness as she does. In the end, she’s left alive, cursed to continue, to carry on as this now animalistic monster – so emotionally and mentally broken by what she’s just done that it’s hard to imagine she might recover. Hélène has sacrificed herself only to doom her paramour to an eternity of hunger, violence, and misery. She only ever acts out of love and loyalty and in so doing, only causes pain.
This was a fascinating film. Considerably more of a traditional narrative than other Rollin works I’ve seen, but uniquely haunting in the way its themes play out, death hangs over it all in both its threat and its lure. And there is a deeply erotic undercurrent, although there’s rather little that’s actually explicitly sexual. Admittedly, there is rather a lot of naked flesh, but it rarely feels sexualized. Rather Eros suffuses the obsession, the devotion, the sense of being in the physical presence of the lover, but not physically acting on that love – all this juxtaposed with the frisson of danger that comes from one’s lover being a bloodthirsty ghoul.
Interestingly, Catherine and Hélène never so much as kiss (not counting a chaste peck on the cheek when putting Catherine to bed). We see them declare a child’s love for one another, and as adults, a romantic attraction is evident, but until the end, they only ever share the physical intimacy of a caretaker and an invalid or a child. Perhaps the sense is that this desire has always been repressed, that Hélène had to keep herself away, and now that Catherine has returned, she has the opportunity to see her desire fulfilled. In the end, she experiences the most complete expression of love and lust imaginable as she is literally consumed by her lover. For her, the promise of passion is met. Sadly, her drive towards romantic-erotic-tragic satisfaction is actually an expression of total greed which only does harm to the one she purportedly “loves.” Revived by chemical waste, you could call this a toxic relationship.
And along the way, of course the film is a visual pleasure, rich in atmosphere (even when things don’t quite make sense – like how are there always torches burning in the crypt – how long do those things last?), and endlessly evocative. Images exist in a more naturalistic vein than Rollin’s earlier work has led me to expect, but they still press themselves into the subconscious, languorous and melancholic, if not feverishly burning, crying out for relief. Sure, there are still some odd edits and a subplot with an American couple that didn’t do much for me, but if you are in the mood for its unhurried pace, artistic aspirations, and characteristic idiosyncrasies, this is a really striking, moving, disturbing work of horror.
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And so there is a bit of Rollin for you. It had been kind of a joke to choose a couple zombie movies for Easter, but these two, set in this rustic, verdant French countryside do feel appropriate for spring, for a time when nature brings fresh life. Neither of these are actually to do with such a natural and positive return, mind you. But their sad beauty still feels fitting in this often dark, rainy season as trees begin to bud with color, and the air feels fresh in its dampness (when we aren’t getting unseasonable snow from a winter threatening never to leave). I’m still no expert in his oeuvre, but in my limited experience, Rollin consistently delivers such a heady mix of beauty and sadness, touching something so full of life, but therefore also feeling it move towards death. I’m so glad to finally be working through his catalogue and I’m sure I’ll write about him again before too long.