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Argento and Aesthetic Terror: Inferno, Tenebrae, Phenomena, and Opera

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Recently I was down in Italy for a bit and, as mentioned in my last post, a highlight was getting to visit Profondo Rosso, the book/memorabilia store co-owned by Dario Argento and Luigi Cozzi. Obviously, I’m a fan of Argento’s work or it wouldn’t have been such a must-see, and yet, in one year of writing this blog, I’ve not yet tackled any of his films. How could this be? Perhaps he’s just loomed so large that it’s been intimidating? Perhaps, while I’d torn through his most acclaimed works when I was first really getting into horror many years ago, and he made such a deep impression, I haven’t necessarily returned to him with great regularity over the years, and it just hasn’t been at the forefront of my mind. Perhaps I just loved the sometimes maligned remake of Suspiria so much that, out of a kind of loyalty, I wrote about it before the original. I don’t know, but in any case, it’s time to remedy this fact.

It’s common to view his output in a few stages. The first consists of his “animal trilogy,” his first three gialli, all with some animal title: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cat O’Nine Tails, and Four Flies on Black Velvet. Of these, I’ve only seen the first. The second stage could be deemed his “golden years,” spanning from Profondo Rosso in 1975 until Opera in 1987. And then things start going downhill. There were still occasional flashes of brilliance in the next decade (The Stendhal Syndrome has its moments and I’ve read that Sleepless is worth the watch), but they were found among considerably less inspired work, and for the last twenty years, there has been little to recommend, hitting a nadir in 2012 with the unfortunate Dracula 3D (but I am holding out hope for his new film, Dark Glasses (coming this year) – it’s never too late for a return to form). Today, in order to paint a picture of this idiosyncratic, characteristic artist, I’d like to look at four works from his golden years: Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Phenomena (1985), and Opera (1987). Though these films are very different from one another, there are clear artistic preoccupations and practices that run through them, and taken as a whole, I think they offer an interesting portrait of this influential film maker. And someday I’ll tackle Profondo Rosso and Suspiria, each of which probably merits its own post.

Also, for a change, I’m going to be good about spoilers here. Coming out of the Italian giallo tradition, these films all turn on late plot twists and they really can be spoiled.

Inferno (1980)

A follow up to Suspiria and a continuation of the “three mothers” mythology of that earlier film (there being three ancient witches ruling the world), Inferno is a wild, fevered, occasionally brilliant, generally shambolic ride. In many ways, Argento takes many of his own tendencies to their logical extremes, both to good and ill effect. He doubles down on the bold, non-realistic use of saturated color that served him so well in Suspiria, lending the proceedings a surreal air. The kill scenes are all tight as a drum: suspenseful, creative, scary, and weird. The story is secondary to an ominous mood of being observed, hunted, and manipulated by powers beyond your ken and there is a threatening sense that no one is safe as each person who might be the protagonist is dispatched until only one remains, and that is probably just because the film had to end sooner or later – if it had been longer, he probably would have died too, to be replaced by yet another potential victim. It is mysterious, unpredictable, captivating, and a little difficult to hold onto.

The story, such as it is, is spare: a woman in a striking old New York building falls down a rabbit hole of three mothers lore (and down a literal hole, into a flooded, sub-basement corpse ballroom) and writes her brother in Rome, begging him to come to her, which he does. Everyone who seems interested in understanding the power of these three witches is hunted down and killed in spectacular fashion. Finally, the brother finds Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, in the basement, leading to a fiery, if inconclusive, conclusion. But more so than any other Argento piece I’ve seen, Inferno is disinterested in narrative. It is a film of moments, of uncanny, intense sequences which you have to be in the right mood for; if you don’t think too much about the plot and just go with it, you will be taken to some crazy, intense, glorious places (but that lack of a narrative center can also make it a difficult watch – I must say, it’s not my favorite). In this regard, it brings to mind Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, but whereas Fulci prioritizes the horror of nightmare revulsion over narrative, Argento leans into the thrill of nightmare style. But they’re both more nightmare than story.

A woman dives into a flooded ballroom to retrieve her keys and is startled by the corpses that float into view. Desperately, she escapes them (though they aren’t actually moving or doing anything, it feels like they chase her, as if they will reach out and attack). During a seminar, a music student reads about the three mothers and looks up to see a mysterious, beautiful woman holding a cat, staring him down and intensely speaking something unheard as the wind blows the windows open and the room feels full of magic and power and danger. A woman enters a library seeking forbidden knowledge and other patrons watch her slyly as if they’ve been waiting. Book in hand, she ventures into the basement where she stumbles upon a demonic book binder in a hellish workshop who tries to catch her and steal the tome (though until ten minutes earlier, he could have just gone upstairs and taken it from the shelf). Scared to be alone, a woman invites a stranger into her apartment to wait for a friend. She plays a record and tells him of the dark forces she fears. Suddenly the music and the lights start cutting out and flickering on again. The tension is ratcheted up as the stranger makes his way to the fuse box, ignoring her plea not to be left alone. Out of sight, he carries on a conversation with her until, after one moment of silence, she finds him with a knife through his neck. In his death throes, he falls upon her, pinning her down and dooming her to a similar fate. When the friend arrives, she falls right through a thin fabric wall (who built this apartment?) to reveal the horrors that have occurred. It goes on and on.

There may not be a protagonist. There may barely be a story. But every 10-15 minutes, there is a fresh, beautifully and suspensefully staged phantasmagoric crescendo. Often when people reference Argento, they talk about the colors (mainly because of Suspiria), and they are on display here, but the thing about him is that all this artfulness is in service of effect. There may be themes and imagery that run through his work (close-ups of eyes, voyeurism, identity, doubling, questioning the veracity of seeing, etc.), but it’s never art for art’s sake – it should thrill/terrify most of all – and look really cool while doing it.  Inferno delivers that.

Tenebrae (1982)

Whereas Inferno was a hyper-colorful, supernatural, gothic nightmare, with Tenebrae, Argento goes back to his roots, making a tight, twisty giallo thriller. There’s nothing supernatural; just a twisted killer hunting down pretty girls and the American crime author-cum-investigator who gets pulled into the stylish mayhem. Also, as a change of direction, it is all so white. Filmed in a modernist, brutalist, uncrowded Roman suburb, everything is sunny, out in the open, and exposed. And you just know that if a room is all white in a movie like this, sooner or later, it’s going to get painted red with an arterial spray; and when it does, it is truly a sight to behold – gruesome, gorgeous, terrifying and without warning.

The title references a pre-Easter church service in which the lights are extinguished one by one until there is a piercing sound, symbolizing the “total loss of god’s presence.” With this film’s religiously motivated killer, it is a fitting match. The film begins so bright, so stylish; and it is so much fun. The first kill sets the tone – the whole film is a flash of a blade in the dark, a slick, surprising, sometimes funny, sometimes scary romp. Throughout, there are moments of lightness and comedy (see John Saxon and his miraculous hat), and playful jump scares and plot twists. But by the end, the lights have all gone out and we are alone, screaming in the rain, having witnessed deadly art (literally – a very pointy statue plays a role).

A great example of this open and sunny, yet tense, vibe is the death of the main character’s literary agent, Bullmer, played by John Saxon. This is a unique set up – there’s no chase and the victim is taken completely by surprise, but for the viewer, there’s a fascinating, growing sense that something is wrong – something is going to happen – but what is it? Where will it come from? A series of innocuous images come together to imply danger in this open, “normal” space:

We see Bullmer standing in a modern piazza. It’s all concrete and right angles, suggesting open space and passages to other areas. He goes and sits on a bench in the center of the square.  People are going about their lives. A boy chases a bouncing ball. An old man greets a woman at a café, kissing her hand. A young man shouts at his girlfriend. Some punks stand outside a shop window, looking shifty. He takes in the life all around, enjoying it, but checking his watch; he’s waiting for his lover (who received a mysterious gift of red pumps in the previous scene). A droning, apprehensive bit of music begins, accompanying a series of short cuts: The young man yelling at his girlfriend and storming off. Bullmer looking concerned, but also like it’s not his business. The crying girl now walking in his direction. Bullmer rising and some people bumping into him. The crying lady still approaching. His face watching her – then a shadow falls over him, and he turns. He looks surprised, then happy. A blade in front of his abdomen. His face, concerned. Stab in the belly. Face in pain. Another stab. Another reaction. We see the ground and then his beloved hat falls onto it. We see him collapse in front of the bench. Crying lady approaching – she hasn’t seen anything yet. Shot of him as her legs enter the frame – he reaches out to catch her dress. Her face looking down – scream. On him, her legs, more legs run in. A crowd has formed around him. The red pumps walking, entering the crowd. Shot of him from above, dead. The red pumps back away, exit the scene.

There are much flashier kills in this movie, but this is such a masterful exercise in building tension out of nothing and it’s put together with such a confident hand that I can’t be the first to liken it to Hitchcock’s “shower scene.” There’s really no reason to be scared, but the tension builds, culminating in a brutal murder in broad day light in a populated area where no one sees a thing. No place is safe. And no time.

Add in the famous, gratuitous, because-we-can, long crane shot, the psycho-sexual-repression fueled violence, the meta-play of the film containing both a book called Tenebrae, which the killer bases his crimes on, and a character getting killed while listening to the record of the Tenebrae soundtrack, both giving the sense that Argento is looking directly at the viewer and his critics (mirroring himself with a horror writer who uses his artistry to manipulate), a rockin’ Goblin soundtrack, and some real narrative surprises and scares that deliver searing cinematic pleasure, and you’ve got a little masterpiece.

Phenomena (1985)

This next one is pretty strange, but for whatever reason, it holds a real warm spot in my heart. Jennifer Connelly, just before Labyrinth, plays Jennifer Corvino, a young girl with a psychic connection to insects, sent to a strict Swiss boarding school while her famous actor father is off filming a movie. Unfortunately, there is a vicious killer on the loose, targeting girls her age. So it’s up to her, a friendly entomologist played by Donald Pleasance at his warmest, his helper chimpanzee and Jennifer’s army of creepy crawlies to save the day. This is all accompanied by Argento’s usual visual flair, some of the spookiest music Goblin ever produced, and some oddly placed excerpts of heavy metal which often feel completely out of place.

An element I love here is the atmospheric use of nature. Set in a part of Switzerland (referred to in the film as the “Swiss Transylvania”) where the wind coming off of the mountains drives people mad, the supernatural vibe is rich. It all feels other than human, bigger, alien, and yet it is just the natural world in a very “civilized,” populated area – this is not the wilderness, but this totally normal, natural world is made to feel uncanny, weird, and threatening. The trees are always creaking, the wind never stops howling, and Jennifer’s insects are always on the move. It really creates a mood, an enveloping horror atmosphere in which I just love to dwell.

Also, I expect that the fact this was filmed right before Labyrinth (which I watched with great frequency when I was younger) lends it a strong taste of nostalgia even if I didn’t see it until my early 20s. Connelly delivers a similar, if perhaps more impassive performance, and she serves as a strong center around which the story can revolve. She is of course sometimes upset, vexed by the bug eyed murder visions that haunt her dreams, the teasing at school, the being kidnapped, drugged, and dumped in a rotting pool of human compost, but she is also often quite placid, at peace with the swarm outside the window, linked to a nature that buzzes gently without great emotional disturbance.

Finally, what makes this film so lovable is how utterly crazy it is.  It is filled with odd choices from top to bottom that just shouldn’t work (and sometimes, to be fair, they don’t), but usually do. And its execution of those weird choices sings with Argento’s usual sensory bravado, taking a plot description that could apply to an odd, charming, so-bad-it’s-good B-movie, and instead offering up a wild, glorious, so-weird-it’s-great powerhouse. I mean, at a key moment, the chimp shows up out of nowhere and attacks someone with a straight razor! How could anyone not love this oddball little movie?

But, as I said, not everything works. I think anyone who enjoys Argento, and Italian horror in general, knows that sometimes you just have to accept some things. It will always be dubbed, poorly, and the dialogue that makes it through will always seem strained and unnatural. This is no exception. Most of the characters speak in a stilted, on-the-nose fashion that can be laughable. But you can laugh, and love it, and go along for the ride, which is worth it (and in this case, having Connelly and Pleasance in such prominent roles, dubbing themselves, means that they can bring something slightly more natural to their text, so that’s nice). Also, as mentioned above, for the first time, Argento used modern music not composed for the film – it seems that he’d just gotten into Iron Maiden and Motörhead and had to include them…it doesn’t work. These are bands I like – I sympathize, but Argento just doesn’t stick the landing with matching the sound to the picture. But I’ve heard that while we may respect someone for their strengths, we love them for their faults, and that is clearly the case here. Somehow, all of the little things that don’t work, or the big things such as these music choices, just make me love the movie more – not in spite of its mis-steps, but because of them.

This, and all of Argento’s classic work, is clearly the product of an auteur – it always seems like one creator’s vision: sometimes peculiar, often intense, never dull. These are clearly not studio pictures with dictates from a group of risk-averse accountants. Argento takes big swings – and sometimes he doesn’t connect, but other times he knocks it out of the park. In Phenomena, everything is of a piece, from classic giallo kill sequences and plot twists, to the balance of beautiful, atmospheric original music and thrashing guitars, to the wind rustling the leaves and the chimp wielding a razor, to the juxtaposition of Jennifer’s peaceful communion with the insects and those insects tearing apart one who tries to harm her. It is a unique film, and one which I always find great pleasure in.

Opera (1987)

Considered by many to be Argento’s last great film (though others have said the same about Tenebrae or Suspiria or Profondo Rosso, so who knows…), this is a tight, often horrific thriller about a understudy thrust into the lead role in an avant-garde production of Verdi’s Macbeth, hounded by a killer who ties her up and tapes a row of needles under each eye to force her to watch the murders he commits. It is filmed with Argento’s characteristic verve, and it balances his visual creativity with a narrative that really holds together, even with its classic giallo character reversals and shocking twist revelations.

If anything, though there are really striking images (such as the needles under the eyes) and wild, propulsive film making (notably, all of the scenes of the opera in rehearsal or performance, or the raven eyed shots employed in the final act), this is the most conventional of all of the films we’re looking at today (possibly forecasting the direction he’d go in the next decade). Sure, there are still crazy moments, and funny character beats, and some really horrific sequences, but it feels more like it exists in our world. The stylishness is restricted to the work of the camera, the editing, and the scoring, but the people and fashions and locations (with the exception of the opera setting) all feel more “normal,” like they could fit in with any late 80s/early 90s crime thriller. Furthermore, it’s painted in much a more muted palette: murky beiges, tans, and browns.

But I don’t want to undersell its thrills either. From the opening shot of the opera house reflected in the eye of a raven, you can tell you’re in for something special. However murky this world may be, the cinematography is dazzling. The camera swoops like a bird. It creeps into places it shouldn’t be able to. It is constantly switching perspectives. Now we look through the eyes of the raven. Now through the eyes of the diva who refuses to sing with the bird and storms out of the opera house to get hit by a car. Now through the eyes of the killer. Now through the eyes of Betty, the young understudy who’s made to watch all the blood being shed. It even hides inside a door peephole, seeing the barrel of a gun, and then a bullet flying towards it, cutting away just in time for that bullet to fly out the back of a victim’s head. Argento has often circled the issue of seeing – witnessing – watching. Eyes have always been a preoccupation of his. The truth of what has been seen has regularly been called into doubt (see the late revelations in Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Profondo Rosso, and Tenebrae). In Opera, from one moment to the next, we’re not always sure what we’re watching: is it concurrent action, a memory, or a dark fantasy?

When the killer makes Betty watch, tied up, a victim of sight, Argento takes a sadistic pleasure in doing the same to us. And the violence here feels more realistic than in previous films. This may just reflect advancements in film technology that had taken place over the course of the decade, but I feel it’s an artistic choice. Just as the colors are less vibrant, so too is the violence less artificial and more grisly. The two elements are of a piece.

Then, the film ends on a peculiar note. Having been chased out to a rural landscape like something out of Phenomena (and actually, I’d misremembered this and thought it had actually been the final shot of that earlier film), Betty finally overcomes the killer and after a short interchange with the police, lies down in the tall grass and wildflowers to look at a lizard and disappear into the natural world. After the gloomy tones of the majority of the film, suddenly everything is so vivid and green. In voiceover, she speaks of how this will be her beauty now. She is done with “art,” of watching and being put on display, of human machinations and creation.  Was Argento communicating the same? I mean, he’s continued making films for another thirty years, but maybe he was just in a bad place – he’d just broken up with long time romantic and artistic partner Daria Nicolodi (who had been in almost all of his films since Profondo Rosso and sometimes shared screenwriting credit), who begrudgingly agreed to be in this one because her death scene was going to be so spectacular, and apparently the inspiration for the film had been Argento’s own artistic failure of directing Verdi’s Macbeth himself.

Argento: a style all his own

These are four strikingly distinct films, ranging from a nigh-abstract, supernatural, technicolor dreamscape, to a blindingly white, crisp psycho-thriller, to a nature infused insect-girl/razor-ape flick, to a psychological, gory horror show that problematizes watching, that questions art. And yet, each so clearly feels like it is from the same creator. The particular flourish with which he films what is often nonsensical or insane, the care taken in crafting the aesthetics of each piece, the recurring key images or themes, the maximalist glee with which he throws everything and the kitchen sink into a film to create an overwhelming sensory experience, and the freeing extent to which he just doesn’t give a damn about things that aren’t interesting to him (logic, how operas work, why things blow up or don’t, how dogs protect territory and don’t hunt girls endlessly for no reason, what Rhode Island looks like; this list could be its own post) – all this comes together to make a film feel like his and no one else’s. And isn’t the world more interesting, more delicious, more exquisite for it?

An Early Self-Aware Slasher Classic: Slumber Party Massacre

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So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing on the Slasher (particularly in its early 80s heyday) and its recurring protagonist, the Final Girl. But somehow, I’ve not yet devoted a post to just digging into one film. So, today, it’s time to remedy that with a discussion of a very special little movie, rather ahead of its time, which somehow threads the needle of not only balancing comedy and horror, but even more impressively, managing to be at once scary, deeply ironic, and heartfelt. It is at the same time a classic slasher, with tension and scares and brutality and gratuitous nudity, and a very sly deconstruction of that classic slasher, an occasionally hilarious, violent and gory, utterly feminist text, made during the height of the first slasher craze more than a decade before slashers would become anywhere near this self-reflexive. I’m talking, of course, of The Slumber Party Massacre.  I mentioned it recently in my run down of under-appreciated Final Girls, but it deserves more attention than that. I don’t know if I can get into what makes this such a unique movie without spoiling it, so if this sounds like it might be up your alley, go check it out first. I’m pretty sure it’s on at least Shudder and Tubi.

The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Based on a screenplay by author, Rita Mae Brown, Amy Holden Jones’s film succeeds, possibly accidentally, as both a straightforward body count flick and as a meta-commentary on the same. Financed by Roger Corman and distributed by his New World Pictures, first time director (she had previously been an editor) Jones had to work within a strict set of guidelines. Notably, the picture had to be short (longer films mean more reels and more canisters, and that all costs money), and there had to be plentiful nudity. This movie runs a tight 76 minutes and basically starts with one of the protagonists taking her top off. Balance that with the fact that it was written by Brown as a feminist parody of the then wildly popular Slasher formula, but Jones rewrote it, intending to film it straight, and you have a recipe for an odd, magical chimera of a film.  

The plot is as simple as can be. Trish, a high school senior, throws a slumber party with three of her friends to nostalgically relive childhood one last time before adulthood necessarily takes them their separate ways (I assume that their primary school slumber parties hadn’t included so many joints and beers and boys, but that’s kind of the point – the girls have already changed and that’s a genie that won’t be put back in the bottle). Trish wants to invite her neighbor, new girl, Valerie, but is too late in doing so and, feeling excluded, Valerie stays home to take care of her kid sister, Courtney (the three of them will eventually end up as the triumvirate final girl). Unbeknownst to all, an escaped murderer, Russ Thorn and his drill (with both an improbably long bit and an impossibly well-charged battery), is lurking about and will, by night’s end, claim 9 victims before the remaining girls manage to overcome him. Very simple – but that simplicity creates space for play.

First, the film is playful as a by-the-numbers Slasher.  Jones offers up a smorgasbord of false scares, one after another. Cats jump out of cupboards, carpenters drill holes through front doors just as someone is coming home, the camera implies a killer-pov psycho cam, sneaking up on a girl walking alone, only to have her flip the seeming assailant and discover that it’s just her hapless boyfriend. All of these and more come hard and fast following two initial kill scenes that firmly establish the brutal threat that Thorn represents.

But even when there is an actual attack, there is often a simultaneous comic undertone which makes for a strangely effective juxtaposition. For example, early in the film, we meet an attractive female phone company line worker, fixing something at the high school. Some boys lamely try chatting her up and then walk away. As they do so, an arm shoots out of the open door of her van, pulling her in. As the boys go off, amicably chatting, we see her screaming through her rear window before cutting to within the van where she’s bloodily drilled by Thorn. The violence of it is startling and severe – this is a horror movie and it does feel like it. However, the very moment that the arm snaps her into the vehicle, you can almost hear a “yoink,” and the obliviousness of the boys strolling away happily while she screams behind them has a whiff of the comic. Somehow, the fact this reads as funny doesn’t detract from the horror which lands seconds later, and similarly, the brutality of the attack doesn’t make the comedy feel heartless and cruel. It just is funny and then it is horrific.

Similarly, there is a great sequence in the climax (which seems to prefigure Butch on the way out of the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction) when the remaining girls are trying to fend off this psycho and Valerie finds herself in a basement workshop, desperately seeking a viable weapon. She picks up some small scissors – no good. She grabs a drill, but the bit is small and dinky. She finds a circular saw and runs the blade – great – this looks deadly, so she runs up the stairs only to have it yanked out of her hand because the extension cord isn’t long enough. Finally, she notices the giant machete that’s been in front of her all along. All of this intercuts with scenes of others, in terror, trying to survive the killer. It is intense, and exciting, and grim, but Valerie’s progression through potential tools is really a hoot.

But when the film wants to be scary, it is. Early on, when everyone is leaving school, one girl has to return to retrieve a book. The phone company worker dead in a dumpster, Thorn follows her in. There is a shot from above as she’s walking through the empty school gym to her locker that is really isolating. Visually, she seems so alone and small, so exposed in such a big space. She doesn’t know yet that there is a killer (though we do) and the combination of all this really contributes to an atmosphere of dread. The chase and kill that follow are capably shot and do not lack in tension, but this moment really stands out.

Where the film shines, however, and what makes it so memorable compared with its early 80s brethren, is its knowing relationship to its own tropes – the self-aware way that it fulfills the expectations of both its producers and viewers, and its subversion of those same expectations. I think it takes two approaches to this: being so on-the-nose that it becomes ironically ludicrous and directly, textually presenting gender roles counter to how one might expect. The latter is a bit simpler, so I’ll detail it first.

For all that it is filled with the requisite boobs and bloodletting of teenage girls, this is rather a women’s picture. Almost every speaking role is female – and this extends well past the main group of girls attending the party, presenting women in roles that would almost always be filled with men. We have the female phone company worker, doing manual labor; there is the girls’ coach (who tries to save the day later); and when the coach gets home, her handywoman is taking care of some home improvement. Furthermore, all of the main girls are athletes and we meet most of them at a basketball game, filmed to highlight their athletic prowess rather than just being an excuse to ogle them as they bounce up and down. The film passes the Bechdel Test in practically every scene, even when the girls are naked (which is not uncommon). They all have personalities and names and relationships and interests (especially sports, something often coded as a topic for boys to obsess over). And the girls are in control. There’s a funny exchange between the same two boys who had unsuccessfully hit on the phone worker as they decide to crash the slumber party:

Let’s go by and scare the girls tonight.
But we’re not invited.
Just a baby scare.
I mean, you know how girls love to scream.
I don’t know.
What’s the worst that can happen?
I mean, so they get mad at us.
They could beat the shit out of us.
That’s right, we did flunk gym.
Three times.

The men in this movie are in no way presented as braver, tougher, or more capable than the girls, and if anything, many are less so. At the same time, they’re also not set up exclusively as jerks, foils for the girls to play against. The next door neighbor wants to be helpful and supportive (he also wants to hunt snails with a meat clever by moonlight), and the teen boys are horny pranksters, but they’re also kind of sweet and really try to do the right, heroic thing, even if it doesn’t work out for them. In the end, the girls (three of them surviving, in a surprising spin on the ‘final girl’ trope) have to fight together to save themselves.

But of course, there is one key male figure, Russ Thorn, the killer, and he brings us to the other, more fascinating way that the film plays with expectations. In Thorn, the Freudian read on the Slasher killer (a sexually frustrated male sublimating libidinous desire into violence to compensate for his impotence) is consciously, explicitly, unambiguously on display. His weapon of choice is a giant, phallic drill, sometimes seen dangling between his legs. He is not at all cool – no enigmatic shape lurking in the darkness, no force of unspeakable evil beyond comprehension, no dark avenger striking out at those who have somehow transgressed in revenge for a past crime – he is just some guy. A crazy guy. A guy who wants to “drill” these young ladies. He doesn’t speak until the final scene, but when he does, it is obviously meant to suggest a common rapist: “You’re pretty – all of you are very pretty – I love you. It takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You love it.” This is all we get for his motivation. Nothing enigmatic – so obvious that it would be funny if it weren’t depressingly familiar.

Of course, in the end, Valerie uses her machete to chop his absurdly long drill bit in half, castrating him with such over-the-top symbolism that it flavors the primal scream of her attack with a kind of knowing laughter, but without undercutting the weight of the situation. Moments later, after the fight is finally done, the three survivors weep and shake and stare into the middle distance, horrified by loss that can never be repaired, by the extremity of the actions they have taken to survive. The momentary laugh does not rob the moment of its resonance. In this, the film has delivered the Slasher playbook to a tee, but the extent to which it so perfectly plays out the metaphor feels like a knowing wink – we know what we are watching – we know what the rules are – we know what this means (I don’t think it goes so far as to question these tropes – it is just showing what we expect to see, but it makes sure that we understand how to read what we’re watching). It never needs to communicate this textually, but the self-aware commentary is present nonetheless.

No scene in the film better plays with, and strikingly, draws attention to expectations by exceeding them, than after the basketball game at the beginning when the girls hit the showers (Corman famously declared that there should always be a shower scene in the first ten minutes – he was in the business of selling tickets). As the girls tell jokes and talk about the game they just played, the party they’re going to later, the respective merits of watching football or baseball on TV, and which player did what in the ballgame last night, a steady tracking shot slowly moves from one girl’s behind up to another’s breasts, to another’s back, before opening up to a wider shot to see all three as they soap themselves up and then zooming in again, down to that girl’s behind and up again as she turns, to catch her breasts, over to another’s back, before there’s an edit. The directness of the camera’s gaze draws attention to itself and its intention. It is showing what you’ve come to see, right – are you not satisfied? Never mind the fact that there’s nothing remotely sexual about the scene – though the camera’s gaze is direct, they aren’t filmed in a ‘sexy’ way, there is no sensual music to highlight voyeuristic pleasure, and they are discussing such quotidian, boring, normal things that friends might chat about. Is the camera audibly sighing, wondering if we can move onto something else yet? It almost feels like a thesis for the whole film.  But as I’ve already alluded to, somehow this ironic awareness, this distance, doesn’t kill the scares – doesn’t diminish the film’s effect as an effective exploitation, B-movie, low-budget horror film.

As I understand, critics at the time savaged Jones, accusing her of some kind of gender betrayal by so exploitatively filming female flesh and subjecting it to such violence. She has, over the years, lashed out at this, noting that, “nobody complains that Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Howard made exploitation pictures, but when a woman tries, she gets called a hypocrite and a turncoat. That’s B.S.” She’s not wrong there, but I think she could go further. With the degree to which it is genuinely woman-centered; features a real-world, familiar threat in its clearly metaphoric rapist, while belittling Thorn in his phallic overcompensation; with its ironic, comic treatment of the audience’s desire to see boobies; with its female manual workers and athletes; and its constant presentation of women who get to be actual characters with friends and hopes and conversations about something other than men –all while never quite waving a “this is the message” banner, while in fact being a successful, suspenseful, playful, well made horror flick, I think it’s an absolute feminist meta-slasher masterpiece.  

Lesbian Vampire Films – Part II

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Welcome (back) to my continuing journey through the somewhat niche sub-sub-genre of “Lesbian Vampire Films” in all their dreamy, artistic, evocative grandeur. For a brief overview of some common traits and discussions of Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, please check out last week’s post. Today we have another four standout examples to delve into.

I’ve planned this as a short series – two posts on films from the heyday of the genre (mostly the seventies, a bit from earlier) and a final post digging into more recent fare, and that means that I’ve had to make some hard decisions this week, choosing what to exclude. All of today’s entries are from 1970-1971, the period when Lesbian Vampires were most in vogue, and are all essential viewing, but if you like what you’ve seen, I’ll include some suggestions for further exploration at the end of the post. Also, to really examine these films, there will be spoilers, so enter at your own risk. And so, without further ado…

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

This is probably what many first think of when they think ‘Lesbian Vampire,’ and for good reason. Roy Ward Baker (The Monster Club and Asylum, among others, but my favorite of his is the 1952 Marilyn Monroe thriller, Don’t Bother to Knock) kicked off Hammer Studio’s “Karnstein Trilogy” with a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Le Fanu’s Carmilla. While it takes liberties (often sensible ones, both streamlining the narrative and adding new elements to build excitement, intrigue, or titillation), it follows the events of the book more closely than most films featuring seductive female vampires named Carmilla, Mircalla, and Marcilla. My understanding is that even though British censorship laws had recently been relaxed, allowing for the inclusion of more blood and breasts, the censor still objected to the lesbianism, but since the producers could declaim, “it’s in the book!” the literature respecting BBFC had to let it pass.

While this isn’t my favorite example of the genre (compared to what was happening on the continent, it feels a bit reserved and stately, but that is part of its charm), it is surely historically significant, both in terms of this sub-genre, and as I understand, for explicitly featuring a lesbian character in a British film at all. As portrayed by Ingrid Pitt in a well-rounded performance, neither an arch villain, nor a silly sexpot, Carmilla is not coded – she lusts and hungers for other attractive women in diaphanous nightshifts, and Emma, she might even love.

As in the book, Carmilla is in the habit of getting stranded at the estates of Austrian nobles so that she can befriend, seduce, and feed on the daughters of the house, while also going further afield to kill off some peasant ladies too. First we see young Laura meet this fate (the name of the novel’s narrator) and then we see Carmilla move to a new home and start in on Emma, who begins dreaming of being pinned under a great cat and starts suffering from anemia as small bite marks appear on her breast. Furthermore, in a worthwhile addition, while the master of the house is away in Vienna, Carmilla also seduces the governess, Mademoiselle Perrodot, who then becomes her accomplice and maybe also a vampire.

It is in these relations that the film shines: temptation and refusal – an invitation and acquiescence – romantic love declared and friendly love returned. When this turns into a house of mostly women (with one meddling butler), with shifting loyalties, trusts and distrusts, and attractions, it is most alive. (The men end up on a side quest to figure out what’s going on and return to save the day – the movie’s gender politics are, shall we say, dated.) And the three central women bring nicely different qualities. Pitt is gently commanding in the middle of it all. Kate O’Mara’s Mlle. Perrodot gets to transition from suspicious and protecting, through sexual curiosity, into being slyly devious. Finally, as Emma, Madeline Smith is the picture of doe eyed innocence, loving her new friend, but not quite comprehending how that new friend loves her (nor does she notice that her bosom friend keeps biting her, well, bosom).

The film combines a very British respectability and grand, traditional gothic horror settings and atmosphere (old castles, opulent costumes, candles and fog, painted backdrops) with a more frank presentation of sex and sexuality, and additional nudity thrown in because selling tickets is nice. Given its old fashioned style (I don’t mean this as disparagement, but it feels like a pleasant, old timey horror film for a rainy Saturday afternoon), the degree of sexual explicitness can be startling (though relatively tame by today’s standards). Still, it is all pretty matter-of-fact, which I think is essential in maintaining the style of the overall film.

That down-to-earth quality extends to Pitt’s Carmilla. Pitt grounds her nicely, both playing up the evident appetite and playfulness of a predator who has done this time and time again, and the lonely sadness that comes from having done this time and time again. I think her Carmilla, while she can kill off peasant girls heartlessly, is perhaps in the habit of falling in love with her more aristocratic prey, thus living a tragic existence of constantly destroying her loves. Near the end of the film, she tries to take Emma away with her, maybe to start an un-life together, but she’s defeated when the men of the house figure out what’s going on, find her hidden tomb, and bloodily stake and decapitate her.  One nice addition here, not in the book, is that in those final moments, Emma is somehow connected to her; she feels Carmilla die and cries out. A handsome young man, there to rescue her, tries to give comfort, but doesn’t understand what’s been lost.

All told, this is an interesting transitional film, hearkening back to Hammer’s output of the late 50s and early 60s, all fluttering capes and full bodices and bloodied fangs and the full moon behind a wisp of clouds, while also looking forward to a more libertine 70s with liberalized social mores and more psychologically explored monsters. Based on the earliest progenitor of this sub-genre, it looks to where it will go in the coming years, both in the UK with Hammer’s continuation of the Karnstein films, and across the channel, where Lesbian Vampires were really having a moment.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

There is no way I could discuss the Lesbian Vampire film without highlighting Harry Kümel’s sublime Les lèvres rouges (The Red Lips) featuring Delphine Seyrig as the subtle, chillingly seductive Countess Elizabeth Báthory. For my money, it is not only great for this sub-genre, but is also just about a perfect vampire movie, and her portrayal should be considered among the Lugosis, Lees, and Schrecks of the world. This is my third mention of this Belgian classic, having previously listed it as a comfort food favorite, and expounded on my appreciation of its groovy score. But this is an opportunity to really dig into what I think makes it so special.

Briefly, Stefan and Valerie, married only one day earlier (but clearly too soon), are waylaid in a grand, empty hotel in the Belgian resort town of Ostend in the off season, on their way to England to introduce Valerie to Stefan’s “Mother.” The only other guests are the glamorous Countess Elizabeth Báthory (claiming to be a descendant of her famous namesake) and her slinky, pouting secretary, Illona. The countess takes the young couple under her wing, seducing and manipulating them both, with her eye on Valerie as a potential new companion (Illona tires of her unlife). By the end, Illona and Stefan are dead, and Elizabeth and Valerie drive off into the sunrise (which, being vampires, does not go well for them). The plot is straightforward, but the film is nuanced in how it plumbs the depths of its simple story, and the film making is just as seductive as its countess.

Central to Kümel’s film is an ambivalence regarding its characters. We have some reason to feel for each, but I don’t think anyone is exactly the protagonist. Valerie is innocent and put upon, pulled between Stefan’s latent sadism and violence (perhaps she could have gotten to know him even a little before getting married) and the manipulation and domination of the countess, but past that, she is a bit blank. Stefan has cruel tendencies and beats Valerie, but we also learn of some heavy baggage he’s carrying (“Mother” is an older, overbearing, powdered and rouged gentleman, and aside from his fascination with violence and cruelty, Stefan seems deeply closeted and self-hating, taking it out on Valerie) – this doesn’t excuse his violence, but does make him a more complex character for whom one could sympathize. Poor Illona just can’t go on in this lifestyle any longer. And finally, Elizabeth may be a devious bloodsucker, but she is a constant treat to be around.

Seyrig brings delicate, playful, beguiling charm to every moment of screen time. The things Elizabeth does are cold, hard, and greedy – carelessly disrupting or destroying the lives of anyone she encounters to take just what she wants and leave what she does not, kicking her once lover into a shallow grave without batting one perfect eyelash. However, the way she does these cruel things is always so warm, soft spoken, open, and somehow innocent. There is always a glint in her eye, a gentle smile on her lips. We get the smallest glimpses of her hardness – we see her manipulations, and yet we, just like Valerie and Stefan are drawn to her, loving her for her elegant, soft power and grace.

In one sequence, after Stefan has beaten her, Valerie rushes off to the train station. Elizabeth follows and signals Illona to go to Stefan. After stopping Valerie from boarding her train, the seduction begins in earnest, including a magnetic speech that closely resembles text quoted in discussing The Blood Spattered Bride last week: “Stefan loves (you), whatever (I) may think – of course he does. That’s why he dreams of making out of you what every man dreams of making out of every woman – a slave, a thing, an object for pleasure. So, you despise me? So, I disgust you? Ha! Come, I’ll show you what men are made of.” Clearly, she plans for Valerie to find Illona and Stefan together, but when they return and find that Stefan has accidentally killed Illona, for Elizabeth, it is just as good, even better: Valerie’s fears of Stefan’s brutality have been confirmed.

Elizabeth starts issuing orders to Valerie in cleaning up the crime scene, and after the three return from burying the body, Valerie stays in the countess’s room, waiting for her expectedly (in the same place and position where we had previously seen Illona) to tenderly undress  and bite her. It’s not long before the two of them are sucking the blood out of Stefan’s wrists. We have seen Elizabeth expertly manipulate and dominate Valerie, grooming her to replace Illona. And yet, this success feels emancipatory, liberating.

The joy of the movie is the delicious tension between Elizabeth’s monstrous qualities (which Seyrig consistently plays against, never once telegraphing a drop of cruelty) and the way the film and her performance draw you into her orbit. I heard that Kümel chose the colors for her outfits (which are stunning, each grander and more luxurious than the last), red, white, and black, because he associated them with the Nazis. Perhaps the whole film works as a meditation on the allure of power. Though we see her heartlessness – destructively exercising her quiet power, it and she never stop being attractive.

That said, this film is not a thoughtful reflection about how the sexiness of power can lead to fascism, but rather a mesmerizing, piquant delicacy. The compositions, the trance inducing music, the exquisite play of character beats are all so luscious and creamy – but the darker implications add a hint of acidity to prevent the dish from being over-sweet. Though we take pleasure in Elizabeth’s triumph, the air of melancholy and the bite of harm done complicate that pleasure, and the whole effect lingers in the mind all the more for it.

The Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

So first, I must admit that the French director, Jean Rollin has long been a blind spot for me and this was the first film of his I’ve seen. From all I’ve read about him, I think this, Les Frisson de Vampires, was a good introduction: full of bizarre imagery, circling around the themes of sex and death on which I understand he often dwelt, made with little regard for “standard ways of making a movie,” and rich with a visual poetry and unreality unlike anything else out there, all while still having a rather simple and describable narrative (which will be less true with other films of his).

Once again, we have a newlywed couple, Isa and Antoine, on their way to their honeymoon (so common, it’s basically a trope of the Lesbian Vampire film). They stop to visit Isa’s cousins at their castle, only to learn that they’d died the day before. It turns out they had been vampire hunters until Isolde, a mysterious female, ‘travelling’ vampire bit them, and now they remain on their estate, in all their early seventies, velvet bellbottomed, frilly shirt, hippy-fop glory, biting local girls and staking them so they don’t rise again. In this, Isolde criticizes them as bourgeoisie. The cousins decide to bring Isa into the fold, and plan to turn her. Seduced by Isolde, Isa never consummates her marriage to Antoine, preferring instead to writhe naked on the beach with her cousins until the sunlight makes them all disappear in a puff, an effect right out of an old silent movie. But as is often the case, it’s not about the story.

It’s about the skull in the fishbowl. It’s about Isolde crawling out of the grandfather clock and caressing the nude Isa (who rather than pulling away as one might expect when a vampire exits a timepiece, curiously waits to see what she’s going to do and then gives a gentle smile of appreciation). It’s about the two maids/servants of the vampires walking the grounds naked beneath their sheer violet gowns, carrying candelabras through the cemetery in a haze of red light, or gleefully, innocently laughing and spinning about having destroyed their once master (their periodic joy being a high point of the film). It’s about the rocking electric guitar score, wailing away beneath otherwise languorous action, creating an odd dissonance of sound and image. It’s about the hilarious, eccentric cousins circling around the camera, finishing each other’s sentences in a lecture on the history of the cult of Isis, Satanism, and Vampirism in Europe, before finishing with a flourish and a series of little bows as the maids kneel, topless for some reason, before them and Isa and Antoine wordlessly get up and leave the room without reaction or explanation.  It’s about Isolde murdering Isabelle (former fiancé of both cousins) by embracing her under her cloak, before we see that she had been wearing 4 inch long, razor sharp pastie cones and has stabbed Isabelle through the nipples (now dabbed with chalky orange-red paint). And, on a narrative level, it is perhaps about the pull of family, of belonging, of the past, of attraction being stronger than that of a typical, normative relationship. It all comes together to pull the viewer into a surprisingly engaging dream of old castles, decrepit cemeteries, and erotic death trips.

As far as I can tell, though he was prolific, and obviously aware of mainstream film in France and abroad, it is most useful to view Rollin as an outsider artist, or even a Naïve artist – he did not fail to make ‘good films,’ but was working in a form that was all his own. He made a lot of movies (many pornographic, others just jobs for hire) under assumed names which paid the bills and kept the lights on, but everything on which he put his own name, he made in his way, for himself, if nobody else. For all of their nudity and blood, they were non-commercial affairs, far too weird and poetic for the standard horror crowd, and far too rooted in the fantastic, too full of horror elements for the world of French art cinema. 

This is no exception. It is a disjointed, ethereal viewing experience, but one that feels grounded in feeling, personal and important to its maker. The performances are sometimes stilted or unmotivated, but choices have clearly been made. There are lots of naked female bodies, but somehow, the camera never leers and instead, it all feels kind of innocent: a genuine, if sexed-up, meditation on death and family and need. There are strange sequences of events and sometimes the logic that has led from one moment to the next is obscured, but it never felt actually nonsensical or boring. I was captivated throughout. I laughed. I was sometimes surprised. I don’t think I really pondered any deeper themes or poetry, but I felt satisfied that someone else was in the process thereof.

I’m sure that with studio notes, this could have been a better “movie,” but were it a clean, sensible Hollywood vampire flick, it would surely be less of a film; it wouldn’t be the idiosyncratic, personal bit of magic that it is. I’m glad I finally sampled Rollin’s oeuvre and I definitely plan to watch more (many of his films can be found on the Kino Cult streaming platform – free with advertisements). The world is a richer place for having his films in it.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

I can’t be the first to observe that with Jess Franco’s film, a Spanish-German production filmed in Turkey, you really get what it says on the tin: Vampires. Lesbians. That’s the movie (there’s more, of course, but these are the broad strokes). Franco is often mentioned in close proximity to Rollin and they had many superficial similarities: both were prolific outsider-filmmakers, often funding their unconventional films with pornographic projects; both made Lesbian Vampire movies; more broadly, both gravitated to themes of sex and death and had very characteristic artistic proclivities; both offered a dreamlike viewing experience; and both attained a very strong cult following over the years – but beneath the surface, their work feel dissimilar, each with his own very specific style. That said, I must admit that most of what I know about Franco (as with Rollin) comes from what I’ve read. I had seen this one before, but it remains the only piece of his that I’ve watched.

Somewhat following Dracula, we have an estate agent, Linda (Ewa Strömberg) sent to discuss an inheritance with Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda), a vampire to whom Dracula has left a great deal. Linda had recently caught her, let’s say ‘peculiar,’ nude nightclub act. The routine, which opens the film and is later repeated, consists of the countess, in front of a mirror, removing her lingerie and dressing another nude woman who remains still as a mannequin, until lowering her to the ground and biting her neck. The scene establishes images of doubling and control, but it’s also a pretty weird way to start a film. Still, the audience in the nightclub seems to enjoy it (in a kind of subdued way like one appreciates a painting in a museum), and more significantly, the differences in how Linda and her boyfriend, Omar watch the act are notable. Linda is clearly more than taken with it and is breathlessly aroused by the end, while Omar looks rather like he’s putting up with a tedious art-thing and is surprised to find her so shaken.

Shortly thereafter, Linda visits her therapist, describes this experience in light of the fact that she had already been having erotic dreams of this mysterious performer before seeing her in the flesh, and wants to know what it all means. The therapist simply says that she’s unsatisfied and should “get a lover – or get a better lover.” This she does once she finally meets the beguiling countess.

If the vampire can sometimes be taken as a metaphor for unbound sexual desire, this is an example par excellence. In “exploitation” cinema, sex and nudity can sometimes be seen as “gratuitous,” a ploy to sell tickets. In this case, it is the heart of the piece. Franco’s film does not smuggle in some kind of hidden art beneath its surface of eroticism – the erotic, the sexual is the central artistic preoccupation, and the vampirism carries that theme evocatively. It’s all about bodies being “addicted to” each other; about needs beyond the bounds of the rational; about the liberation of giving yourself over to another; and about yearning for freedom, even from that ecstasy. That may seem grandiose – but it’s not – it is playful, unhinged, fleshy, and riveting. The chemistry between Strömberg and Miranda is palpable; the cinematography is fevered – hot and exciting, full of wide gorgeous shots and snap zooms to incisive details; the editing is delirious, often cutting between the main action and seemingly unrelated images, such as a scorpion on the beach, a kite in mid-air, or blood on the window; and the soundtrack is wild – an intense groove sold years later as “Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party” (though it actually contains music from three different Franco pictures).

It is also just a strange, totally engaging (if you don’t find extended sequences of “artistic” nude performance as laborious as Omar does), far-out little film. While the countess is clearly a vampire, she doesn’t follow many of the “rules” and is more likely to be sunbathing nude on the beach than sleeping in a coffin. Sometimes characters have extreme, baffling reactions, and sometimes something very creepy happens without eliciting much shock, such as when Linda finds a man (played by Franco) in the basement of her hotel torturing and killing a woman – she gasps and runs away, but never mentions it again (in our age of AirBnB and Booking.com, if we followed her example, every hotel would have bedbugs – negative reviews keep us all safe, Linda).

Finally, it does build to a surprising ending that left me a little disappointed, but perhaps it is meant to. Linda, so enraptured with Nadine, seems bound to escape her workaday, pedestrian life, but in the end, Linda kills Nadine, driving a spike through her eye, and she and Omar sail away as if awaking from a strange dream. I was initially puzzled at such a re-affirmation of the previous, unfulfilling stasis, but came across an astute reading in Bartłomiej Paszylk’s The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. He writes that it “leaves us with a convincing and complex picture of a woman torn between her sexual needs and the fear of becoming dependent on the person who finally manages to satisfy her.” Thus, I suppose it should feel unsatisfying – Linda chooses free-but-unsatisfied over-happy-but-tied-down; thus, this lusty vampire fever dream ends in melancholy.  The kite comes down to earth.

All in all, this is a singular, carnal, sometimes chaotic, periodically enigmatic, always engrossing movie, and I’ve really got to explore Franco more.

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And so, that wraps up this dive into the artsy, erotic, sleazy, aesthetic, and rather international world of Lesbian Vampire Films. I think I’ll take a break from them for a bit and cover some other topics I’ve been considering, but eventually, I plan to return for one more post on more modern iterations. But as I promised at the beginning to give some other recommendations…

Vampyres (1974) is good fun, featuring two young women sexually luring men to a castle to feed on them. The sun drenched and surreal The Velvet Vampire (1971) showcases a commanding vampire named Diane Le Fanu driving her dune buggy around the American west and seducing a young couple in their dreams. It’s also the only classic Lesbian Vampire film I know of directed by a woman. I have not yet, but plan to watch more of Jean Rollin’s work. His Requiem for a Vampire (1972) is without dialogue for more than half the run-time and is apparently very imagistic and improvised. Also, the two female protagonists are dressed as clowns, so if that sounds like your cup of tea, have a look. I also really want to try out his Fascination (1979), featuring the iconic image of Brigitte Lahaie with her scythe. Of course, there’s always Tony Scott’s ever so stylish The Hunger (1983), featuring David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve in a bit of a bloody love triangle. Alternatively, if you liked The Vampire Lovers and want more, the second entry in Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy, Lust for a Vampire (1971) features Carmilla haunting a girls boarding school (the third film in the trilogy, Twins of Evil (1971) is, I think, the superior film, but doesn’t actually feature any lesbian vampires…). The list goes on…

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Finally, a personal note: with this entry, my longest post yet, I’ve now published more than 102,000 words on this blog. I understand that’s a decent length for a novel (Frankenstein, for comparison is about 76,000, and Dracula is about 145,000) and just thought it was a milestone worth marking.

Huzzah!

Lesbian Vampire Films – Part I

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Existing within genre cinema writ large, and often struggling with the boundary between a “genre ghetto” and “legitimate cinema,” horror is really tied up in issues of categorization. Something isn’t just a “horror movie” – it’s a ‘slasher,’ a ‘ghost movie,’ ‘body horror,’ a ‘gore flick,’ an ‘Italian cannibal movie,’ a ‘melt movie,’ a ‘werewolf movie,’ a ‘giant bugs picture,’ ‘splatterpunk,’ ‘splatstick’; the list goes on and on, with new permutations, combinations, and subdivisions constantly being birthed. But undeniably, there are some heavy hitters when it comes to the classic monsters around which the genre gets organized, and one of the biggest is “The Vampire Movie,” a set of flicks on which I’ve spent surprisingly little time (so far, I’ve only really covered one). So, I’d like to start delving into a notable sub-sub genre thereof, the “Lesbian Vampire Films.”

It seems strange that this would even be a genre – I don’t know of any strain of ‘gay-werewolf movies’ or ‘pansexual animal attack flicks,’ but there are cinematic elements that tend to run through these films, and there are lots of these films (Wikipedia lists about 60, and I suspect there are more), that seem to tie them together as a type (perhaps O negative, terrible, I know). Not every element is applicable to every film, and the exceptions probably outnumber the rules, but there are enough to make it feel like its own thing, and it constitutes a really interesting, cinematically rich, and often really gorgeous current within the larger world of horror.

Some common traits involve surprising deviations from standard vampire lore. For example, a striking number of these movies feature a lot of daytime footage and often the vampire in question is totally unbothered by sunlight and rather enjoys lounging in the pool, hanging out on the beach, or tooling through the desert in her dune buggy. Also, it’s pretty rare that anyone has fangs. Beyond that, there is a dreamy atmosphere, a seductive, languid, sometimes romantic, and sometimes tragic mood that runs through many, though certainly not all of these films.  And, while loads of these are pretty low budget operations, or are working within a vein (sorry) of cheap exploitation, so many of them are just such aesthetic pieces, putting such care and artistry into their design, into their craft, into beautifully filming beautiful people in beautiful locations, rather than simply trying to make a scary movie (and, to be fair, the films of this sub-genre are almost never actually scary – though some can be intense in other ways).

Vampirism in general often works as some kind of sexual metaphor – consumed by a physical hunger which is socially dangerous, alluring, threatening, and impossible to control, the vampire can represent the disruptive force of repressed desires, and it’s not surprising that they might cross gender lines. However, it must be said that the specific vamps after which the genre is named are almost never exactly ‘lesbians,’ so much as ‘bisexual’ at most (bi-vampire erasure is a thing, I guess) – but I guess that just didn’t have the same lurid marketing bite (sigh – what is it about vampires that makes me pun?). I suppose at the end of the day, for all vampires, regardless of sex, it should really be what’s on the inside that counts, but male vampires on film never had quite the same explicit fluidity as the ladies. 

Finally, I really shouldn’t discuss the Lesbian Vampire without at least briefly touching on J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novelette, Carmilla. Published twenty years before Dracula, it is the literary basis for a huge swath of these films (with many others referencing Erzsébet Báthori, or Elizabeth Bathory). It is also a great little book which, in addition to basically inventing this entire genre, is atmospheric, engaging, creepy, sexy, and sometimes quite funny. It’s also a quick read. Check it out here as I don’t have the space to describe it in great detail, but I do highly recommend it.

I recently fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and have watched more of these films than I can cover in one post, so this will be the beginning of a short series (probably two or three posts in total), detailing some stand-out examples of this odd, compelling collection. Today, I’ll just sink my teeth (really – that’s the last one) into what I’ve watched most recently.

Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

Lambert Hillyer’s direct follow up to Dracula (it picks up the story minutes after the first film ends) is visually stylish, gothic, and cinematic, not to mention, just being a fun, exciting movie (it’s clear how much the medium had progressed from Tod Browning’s 1931 film to this, its first sequel of many). Gloria Holden stars in the titular role as Countess Marya Zaleska, feeding on both men and women and feeling really bad about it. From a modern perspective, the “lesbian” reading is a bit unfortunate as, linked as it is to her unwanted need for blood, her interest in her female victims (with looks that linger far more hungrily, more longingly than with the men) can be seen as the ‘unnatural thoughts’ from which she is desperate to be freed, but it still feels progressive for suggesting that interest at all (and this is after these elements were greatly reduced to appease the censorious Hays Code). Beyond that, this film feels like the progenitor of so many, more modern, vampire films. She is not simply a monster – she is a tragic, yet dignified, heroine. Though some advertisements implored viewers to “save the women of London from” her, she is a very human figure: remorseful, but hopeful – desperate to be free of her father’s curse, but constantly giving into her cravings.

In this, she comes off as quite modern, and the story feels like something from decades later. As opposed to Lugosi’s Dracula, she is the protagonist of her own movie, and she is a sympathetic one. She sees a psychiatrist about her condition, and after a failed experiment with what is basically addiction exposure therapy wherein she sends her servant to find a young girl to model for her, hoping to present herself with and withstand temptation (she doesn’t), she instead chooses to find a companion for eternity. It is regrettable that she chooses the rather irritating (I guess he’s supposed to be charming) male lead for this position rather than his bantering love interest, Janet, over whom she looms for a tantalizingly long time (a scene in which she slowly lowers towards Janet, maybe to kill her before the ‘hero’ arrives, was described by Ellis Hanson as “the longest kiss never filmed”). I can’t imagine how she thinks eternity with this guy is going to be pleasant, but things don’t end well for her anyway, so she never learns what a brat he can be. However, for all of her amenable traits, the film doesn’t lack a sense of threat. People are being killed and she is the one doing it.

And it all really oozes style – from the gothic horror set pieces of the cemetery carpeted with fog where she burns Dracula’s stolen body to end her affliction, to the mid-30s classy London interiors everyone inhabits, to the spooky castle, complete with giant spider web, to the statuesque charisma that Holden exudes. This flair is definitely evident in the filming, for example, the play of light in the young model’s eyes as Marya mesmerizes her before feeding or the smooth way Sandor, Marya’s jealous familiar, slides her hypnotic ring onto her finger as she dramatically poses to be dressed.  Past that, the adventurous parts are exciting and the comic relief lands without feeling out of place. It all comes together so effectively to create a moody, fun early horror classic, which I expect far too few have seen.

Blood and Roses (1960)

With this entry, originally titled Et Mourir de Plaisir (To Die of Pleasure) we move closer to the ‘house style’ of the Lesbian Vampire movie. An Italian-French coproduction, directed by Roger Vadim (And God Created Woman and Barbarella, among others), this dreamy, colorful film lays the groundwork for where the genre would later go. In fact, director Joe Dante called it the “origin of the Euro-horror film,” and I see what he means. While there had of course been horror movies made on the continent before, this is perhaps the beginning of a certain style – combining quite artfully filmed and erotically charged material with horror narratives, in this case, a spin on Carmilla. With little explicitly shown (one bared and bloodied breast), it is such a lavish, sensual, atmospheric outing.

The connection to the source material is relatively thin (which is often true). At a stylish Italian Villa, the cousins Carmilla and Leopoldo, as well as Leopoldo’s fiancé, Georgia, entertain guests in advance of their coming nuptials. Long ago, their ancestors, the Karnsteins, had been believed vampires and the locals had risen up and staked all but one, Mircalla, who could not be found and whose grave remains empty. After her disappearance, it was noted that any woman who became engaged to her former fiancé (and cousin) had a habit of dying before her wedding. Just as Mircalla seemed to have jealously guarded the affections of her cousin, so too, in the present, does Carmilla seem to yearn with unspoken and unrequited love. Though Leopold, Carmilla, and Georgia seem intimately close, Carmilla is clearly desolate due to the upcoming wedding.

Then, on the night of a grand (and beautifully filmed) masquerade ball, which Carmilla avoids, drunk in her room, before coming down dressed as her anagrammatic ancestor,  a fireworks display blows up a portion of the family crypt. Carmilla is drawn to investigate and afterwards, she isn’t quite herself. Perhaps she is killed and the vampiric Mircalla takes her place. Perhaps the spirit of Mircalla takes control of her living body. Perhaps she experiences a mental break and creates Mircalla to allow herself to act on darker impulses. It is mostly not clear (though a final shot suggests one reading).

Either way, it becomes clear that there had clearly been something between her and Leopold in the past, and he’s not really over it, as evinced in a moment when he and Georgia put an either drunk or newly vampirized Carmilla to bed – they undress her and the way he unabashedly stares at Carmilla while standing right next to his fiancé seems like it should probably concern Georgia more.  While Carmilla still seems to carry a torch for her cousin, it is now clearly Georgia for whom she really thirsts (plus, a poor servant girl turns up dead with mysterious holes in her neck). One might wonder if Mircalla had truly been killing her cousin’s brides out of jealousy, or simply out of lust. Sadly, after expressing her feelings one rainy day in the greenhouse and kissing some blood off Georgia’s lips, who doesn’t exactly reciprocate, but also doesn’t pull away, things do not go well for Carmilla/Mircalla (often a theme here), and (spoiler alert, but hey, it’s a vampire movie, this can’t be too much of a surprise) she ends up artfully staked on a tree branch in the dawn light.  

The permutations of the story take a back seat to mood and effect, but what effect – eerie and rich in its deeply saturated technicolor splendor, peppered with surreal dream sequences and breathtaking shots. There are moments of threat and suspense, but mostly this is a sad, enveloping presentation of the vampire as a powerful and free, yet doomed need, a sensual hunger. I have some trouble keeping the plot straight in my memory, but the sensory-emotional experience lingers, and the visual languor sets a roadmap for where the genre would go in the next decade or so.

The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

A fantastically rich and intriguing Spanish film, Vicente Aranda shot it late in the Franco regime and it can be rewardingly read as an allegory of life under such paternalistic fascism. A young woman, Susan, is newly married to a childhood friend, whom the credits name only as “husband,” and after a brief stop at a hotel in which she has a vision/fantasy/premonition of being raped when alone in the room, her wedding dress torn, they move on to his family home, a grand Castillo, somewhat gone to seed. That night, consummating the marriage, he rips her dress, just as in her vision, and from that point on, their new relationship is a minefield. He can be tender and considerate or violent and assaultive. But, more than anything, he is controlling and patronizing, treating her more as a child than a partner. It’s also a red flag that the portraits of all the women of the family are stowed away in the basement, and one, that of Mircala de Karstein, who killed her husband on their wedding night, has had its face cut out.

Susan has dreams of a beautiful veiled woman coming to her in the night, leading her to a dagger and imploring her to kill her husband, in one sequence, gorily castrating him. This dream woman is a dead ringer for the mysterious, naked Carmila that “husband” finds buried on the beach, breathing through a snorkel (it’s a bit odd) and brings home. There is a spark between the two women and “husband” somewhat fades to the background. By the end of the film, Susan has joined Carmila/Mircala in a sexually emancipatory ritual of blood-letting and drinking, and the two of them kill off a few local men, and attempt to run off together. As is a consistent theme here, it doesn’t go well for them.

Aranda undertakes some thought-provoking shifts of viewpoint. The beginning of the film belongs entirely to Susan: her fear and mixed feelings of attraction and revulsion. Oddly though, before the halfway point, right after she has admitted to hating her husband, the perspective moves to him for almost the remainder of the run time as he investigates strange goings on and implications of the supernatural. It isn’t until Susan has tried and failed to stab him that we return to her perspective. The viewer is pulled between two poles of identification and two different kinds of horror. Susan is in a horror film of domestic and psychological abuse, haunted by the violence of her dreams – her desire to free herself. “Husband” is in a horror film where a lesbian vampire is preying on his wife, and he must defeat this fiend. Overheard by a doctor friend of his, the words the women repeat in their blood ritual seems like what men’s rights activists think feminism is all about (if they were only so poetic): “Say it with all your heart – I hate him! – He has pierced your flesh to humiliate you – He has pierced my flesh to humiliate me – He has spat inside your body to enslave you – He has spat inside my body to enslave me.” More than a decade before Andrea Dworkin was mis-read as stating that “all heterosexual sex is rape,” this chant would seem to imply such a sentiment, and this seems to feed the husband’s fears and subsequent violence.

At this point, be warned: to describe what really makes this all work so well, I’m about to utterly spoil the ending.

At the end of the film, the two women have stopped to rest and maybe make love in Carmila’s coffin, where the husband finds them lying together, naked and serene. He shoots the coffin again and again until blood gushes out. A young girl, who had been in contact with Carmila, arrives and says the women will rise again before kneeling down before the husband. He shoots the child in the head, opens the coffin, brings a knife to a breast, and the film cuts to a newspaper headline that proclaims a man arrested after cutting out the hearts of three women. It is a brutal ending and I think its abrupt cruelty suggests the film maker’s position. The domineering, if sometimes kindly ‘lord’ may present himself as a caring, reasonable protector – he may be the one framing the story, offering the only available narrative, but that paternalism and control is a form of violence and he will not balk at ruthlessly destroying anyone who threatens the continuity of his power. It’s a shocking, chilling conclusion to a curious and provocative film, the quashed sexual revolution on screen (probably reflecting how Franco had so utterly stripped women of their rights) calling for a more complete socio-political upheaval off screen.

Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (1975)

This is an peculiar one. Filmed in Mexico by Juan López Moctezuma, this follows some of the patterns of the Lesbian Vampire film, while also going in some other directions, notably, a serial killer film and a B-movie action/cop procedural, complete with car chases (and cars that really like to blow up). Mary is an American artist bumming around Mexico in her ramshackle van, seemingly living a free-love, artistic, vagabond lifestyle, painting, embarking on relationships with men and women, and sometimes poisoning them and stabbing them in the neck with a hairpin before ravenously lapping up their blood. Also, she’s being chased by a creepy man in black whose face is always covered by a black scarf.

I will say that this did not strike me as strongly as the other three entries today, but it is still an interesting, unique case, even if the film making didn’t rise to the greatest heights. The most notable detail is how different Mary’s character is from many of the other female vampires of the genre. Even when some version of Carmilla, for example, is fated to a lonely un-life, unhappy in love, and probably gets killed by the end, she still feels powerful, dangerous, and alluring. She feels in control – she is the gravity of the film, pulling everything to her center – lovers, death, meaning. By contrast, Mary (and in this, she echoes Marya from Dracula’s Daughter) is cursed to crave blood thanks to her parentage (it’s obvious long before it’s revealed that the creepy guy following her is her dad), she is bad at killing (there is a great scene when, even having poisoned his coffee, she really has trouble finishing off a local fisherman on the beach – it’s awkward, tense, and fumbling, but she does finally do him in), and she is so upset and scared for much of the run time – by what is happening to her, by what she, herself is doing. Somehow, she is both the monster and a powerless, terrified victim. Unlike some others, she survives her picture and goes on to travel and kill and drink – but perhaps that is the worst fate for her, so it is hardly a happy ending – things do not go well for anyone.

Along the way, there are some scares and effective moments. The presence of the mysterious man chasing her (and killing his own victims along the way) flavors this more like a ‘horror’ movie than a dreamy-Euro-sensual death trip. Her lack of overpowering strength or mesmerism when killing brings to mind Romero’s Martin, who shares this quality – and occasionally the killings carry a kind of horror as they are not clean and sensual, but rough, out of control, and always in danger of failing, thus getting her caught and arrested. Also, one death is really quite sad as she finds herself in the bath with Greta, a woman who has brought her home (in a reversal of the pattern, it is the vampire who has been seduced), and she obviously doesn’t want to poison and kill her, saying that she’s never before chosen someone she knew, someone she cared about, but she cannot stop herself – tears are in her eyes as she brings the pin to Greta’s neck.

Compared with the other films today, it is not so visually striking, but the old, grainy film stock can be really quite forgiving, and it is certainly something different and worth checking out.

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So, with that, I think we’ll wrap up this first installment of my Lesbian Vampire rundown.  While these films don’t tend to be very scary, I think they represent an interesting corner of the genre. Something I often love about horror movies is feeling ensconced in an atmosphere, however unsettling – it’s a quality I don’t associate with many other kinds of films, and these are all about atmosphere – moody and otherworldly, with the nominal monster often holding the most appeal. It’s a rich place to dwell for a while.

Also, one warning that I hate to have to give – many of these are inexpensive European movies and when venturing into that territory, it’s important to know that animals were sometimes ill-treated in the filming (no ASPCA on site). If that is something that will ruin a movie for you, you should check first. I’m not happy to end a post about some films that I really do like on this note, but I’d be remiss not to.