Perfectly “Lovecraftian” – From Beyond

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I make a lot of plans. For example, I’ve got a long spreadsheet for this blog, listing things I know I want to cover – I don’t have it all scheduled, but I know what I want to devote my time to, and there are topics I’m really looking forward to eventually dealing with. But “the best laid plans of mice and men” and all that…sometimes you just see something and have such a strong response that it jumps to the front of the line, and that’s what happened with today’s movie, Stuart Gordon’s 1986 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “From Beyond.” But hey, at least when my plans go askew, no one gets an eye sucked out…which only happens once in this movie, but it is memorable.

Now, I’d watched this before about nine years ago, but I think conditions weren’t right for me to really appreciate what was on offer. I was watching it in the background while I was in the kitchen, baking cookies, and though I remember basically enjoying the movie, it hadn’t done a whole lot for me – fair as I hadn’t given much to it, myself. But a few weeks ago, I got home on a hot Saturday afternoon, exhausted and desperately needing a bit of easy fun as a reprieve from the summer heat and my other responsibilities, and as this had just popped up on Shudder, I gave it another try and just LOVED it.

So let’s get into it. I expect this will be short (though that expectation is often wrong) as I mostly just want to shower praise upon the film, and I’m certain there will be spoilers…

From Beyond (1986)

An immediate follow up to his cult breakout hit, Re-Animator (also based on a bit of Lovecraft) from just one year earlier, this was Stuart Gordon’s second feature, bringing back Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs from the first film, as well as much of the creative team (he’d come up in the theatre and was accustomed to working with a company). The script was co-written by Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli, who had also co-written Re-Animator, as well as having worked before with Gordon at the Organic Theatre in Chicago. Gordon would go on to do three more Lovecraft films with Paoli: Castle Freak (1995) (arguably at least, inspired by “The Outsider” and again working with Crampton and Combs), Dagon (2001), and Dreams in the Witch House (2005) (for the TV series, Masters of Horror). While I haven’t seen ‘Witch House,’ the others are really enjoyable. But, I’ve gotta say, for my money, From Beyond is my favorite of his Lovecraft adaptations, hands down. In a few ways, it is just more “Lovecraftian.” Some of that is obvious – it’s a story of otherworldly creatures beyond our comprehension that breach reality and drive people mad. They’re squiggly and goopy. There are tentacles involved. It all fits a common perception of what Lovecraft’s work consisted of. But I think it goes much deeper than that. So first, a bit of a digression re: Lovecraft.

On Lovecraft

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is a peculiar case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I imagine it may not be all that dissimilar from others’. I really like his oeuvre, but I can’t praise all aspects of it. Even overlooking the disturbingly blatant xenophobia and racism (a negative trait which he was not alone in having – if you ever pick up Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm,” for instance, be prepared), I sometimes feel like he didn’t actually write stories. I mean, he did write. A lot. Probably more than 100 tales were published. But they don’t always feel like stories in the classic sense. He didn’t seem particularly interested in character, and protagonists seemed to rarely have much, if any, agency over the events that would play out (thematically appropriate for him, but not always dramatically satisfying). Rather, the recurring narrative would be that of a witness. Some “normal guy,” who sometimes knew enough about the odd things that went bump in the night to sensibly try to steer clear of them, would be thrust into a situation wherein he would discover/observe/experience some shuddering horror beyond that which could be understood by his meager human intelligence. It would shake him to the core, but by the end, he would generally get away, such that he could tell the terrible tale, and through this unlucky narrator, H.P. could lay out some horrifying concept he’d dreamed up.

So with character and plot so decentered, I think the primary appeal of his work exists in two complementary qualities: theme and style. When I first encountered his texts, it was as if he had managed to exactly pin down just what this idea of ‘horror’ was that I’d become so enamored with: an encounter with that which is beyond what we can accept, what we can endure. He generally wrote in a sci-fi/weird fiction mode, creating (in many, though certainly not all) of his works, an extended mythos of all manner of wild, trans-dimensional, ancient beings, godlike to us petty humans, who do not really seek to harm us, so much as they just don’t care about us at all, and in going about their endless, unfathomable, arcane pursuits, just so happen to mortally, psychically, and spiritually threaten and/or destroy us in the process. We inhabit a world far larger, darker, and more terrifying than we can imagine, suffused with alien threat (paralleling his own xenophobia) and if we could see reality as it actually is, our feeble minds and souls couldn’t hope to endure. The thing is, for me, I don’t think this “cosmic horror” of his needs “cosmic” elements, per se. Rather, he paints pictures of encounters with things that shatter our previous conceptions of reality, of morality, of scale, and in so doing, can break us – and not all of them need include massive beings lying in slumber, waiting to awaken and devour the stars. I think this encounter, this revelation of unbearable reality is what “horror” is in life and having an author focus so specifically on setting it down on the page was exciting for me when I first discovered his writing many years ago. Also, the mythos itself is fun and odd and specific – it’s so refreshing to have something that plays the role of the demonic without having to buy into a Judeo-Christian mythology and ethical-moral hegemony.

Referenced below, ‘Under the Pyramids’ was also published as ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,’ and credited to Harry Houdini in its first publication (it’s written first person from his perspective)

But the other thing he focuses on, and what really gives me pleasure in the reading, is his style. He is trying to do so much, to suggest things that test the limits of the imagination, and he will use every damn synonym in the thesaurus to do it. The phrase “over-the-top” cannot hope to capture his lexical abandon. An adherent of the school of thought that says what you can’t see is scarier than what you can, he wrote extensively of the narrator’s reactions, while painting around the edges of the thing itself, maintaining the implication that words couldn’t contain the truth of this horror. But, regardless,  along the way, he did use all the words. Hemmingway he is not. A favorite, thrillingly overwritten passage comes from his 1924 story, “Under the Pyramids,” in which Harry Houdini finds himself in Egypt, captured by sinister Bedouins (ah, the much mentioned xenophobia) and lowered by a rope into a hole in the ground, wherein he will discover ancient nefarious mummified beasties with crocodile and hippopotamus heads, carrying out their dark rites in worship of some eldritch, indescribable, god-like thing, rising into the chthonic darkness. But well before he gets to the horrific payoff, the process of being lowered under the earth just sings:

“Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible—hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac—one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.”

I mean, yeah. That there is a good time! Is it good writing? I don’t know. Maybe? But also, maybe I don’t really care. When I can put myself in the mood for it, his prose is just such a blast. This is writing that is unashamed to go big, and while it is as over-the-top as can be, I don’t feel it ever ventures into a realm of campiness. It is a blast exactly because it is “too much,” but the whole point is to take that “too much” totally seriously – and be broken by it. It’s refreshing in our modern, jaded times to encounter anything so dialed up to eleven, while still being entirely earnest.

Written in 1920, ‘From Beyond’ wasn’t published until 1934, first in “The Fantasy Fan,” and then reprinted a few years later in “Weird Tales.”

So, with that, let’s actually come back to the film in question, which I think is an excellent adaptation of Lovecraft’s horror themes and exaggerated, but lovable style, while filling in some of the gaps his writing leaves open to make for a most satisfying viewing experience.

The Film

First off, the adaptation is, on one level, quite faithful. Most of what happens in the story makes it to the screen: in the text, the narrator goes to visit his friend and colleague, the scientist, Crawford Tillinghast who, in his attic laboratory, has created a sonic resonator that can tune the pineal gland to function as a kind of sense organ, perceiving layers of reality typically unnoticed. However when in the presence of the resonator, whatever lives in those other realms with which we are usually out of sync can perceive us as well – and attack. The mad doctor turns against our narrator, but when the police arrive in the end, Tillinghast is dead, our narrator has destroyed the machine, and he can go on, forever shaken by this encounter with that which came from beyond!

The film takes all of these details as a premise, as a starting point, but then it builds from there extensively. Now, Tillinghast (Combs) is actually the assistant to the mad (and we come to learn, also quite kinky) Doctor Pretorius (in a nod to Ernest Thesiger’s fabulously mad scientist in The Bride of Frankenstein). In a standout cold open, they get the resonator to work, discover the squiggly things beyond, and Tillinghast manages to escape with his life (though not his sanity), having destroyed the resonator, while his boss loses his head to something bigger, something worse.

Tillinghast is rescued from the psyche ward by Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a psychiatrist who believes Pretorius’s machine could help schizophrenia patients, and has Tillinghast freed so that he can repair the resonator, enabling her to carry out her own experiments. Once operational, Pretorius returns, now one with the thing that had consumed him, mad with power and lust (the machine’s effect on the pineal gland results in a heightened state of arousal, even as goopy monsters abound), and mind shattering horror ensues.

Past that, I don’t really want to go too much into the plot (and there is a surprising amount of plot – twists and turns and reversals of alliance all over the place). Suffice it to say that Yuzna and Paoli run with the initial premise of Lovecraft’s text, do justice to it, and then add in an actual “story” on top, resulting in a really engaging, colorful, gory, inventive horror flick. Most of all, without ever undermining its own seriousness, it is fun and oh so “Lovecraftian.”

Firstly, beyond just faithfully following the concept of the text, it features wild special effects that live up to most expectations viewers would have of a “Lovecraft piece.” There are all manner of slimy, fleshy creatures that defy logic. The Pretorius-thing is in a state of constant flux, flesh distending and becoming other as it seeks to consume and absorb. Monstrous, cephalopodic tendrils undulate through the ether, wetly grasping at victims. There is an unearthly, pink-purple glow (truly high 80s) permeating the “science” of it all. And there are some jaw dropping moments of gore and weirdness: Tillinghast returning from the gullet of a transdimensional beast, bald and scarred, his pineal fully awakened and rising out of a newly formed orifice in his skull to lead him on a murderous brain-devouring, eye-sucking rampage; the Police sergeant accompanying the experiment to keep an eye on the mental patient (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead (1978) as well as countless others) being devoured by a swarm of insects from another dimension until he’s a quivering, meaty skeleton on the ground; and Pretorius eating Tillinghast whole, only for him to climb back up out of his mouth, beginning a goopy game of ‘whose body is this and whose hand is reaching out of whose chest?’ Fun stuff.

But in line with what I wrote above about Lovecraft’s prose, what really makes this feel so in the spirit of his writing is not the tentacles or the goopiness or the existence of horrors well beyond our ken. It is the style, and that best surfaces in the performances. Our three central characters are all obsessed and/or mad in one way or another, and their performances are so perfectly tuned – all achieving a heightened style without tipping over into self-parody. Ted Sorel’s Pretorius is sadistically menacing while also being quite playful and sardonic. He brings great intensity and focus to his madness – not ranting and raving, but deadly in his single-minded desire to consume physically, psychically, and sexually, anything or anyone he can lure into his orbit. Barbara Crampton’s Dr. McMichaels walks a fine line between personally motivated clinical interest and being wholly seduced by the power and allure of the machine, and her fluctuations between self-erasing compulsion and rational self-interest, between victimizing and being victimized are carried with a great deal of nuance. Both performers are excellent.

But the movie really belongs to Jeffrey Combs. While of course, I enjoyed him in Re-Animator (and also Bride of Re-Animator – but I never saw Beyond Re-Animator) as Herbert West, his performance here is just perfectly calibrated, threading the needle with exactly the right amounts of mania, terror, earnest feeling, and fragile humanity in the face of the unbearable, as well as periodically bringing a hint of humor which sells the horror without undercutting it, without diminishing its seriousness. When, after their first encounter with the newly, fleshily otherworldly Pretorius, in which Tillinghast just barely saves the sergeant from being devoured by turning off the machine at the last second, and he says simply, “that – will be quite enough of that,” Combs’s delivery elicits a genuine laugh from me every time – but this small comic moment works with the drama of it all, rather than detracting from it. Without jumping around a lot, he gives a rather physical performance, the play of different mental-emotional-spiritual tensions acting out in his body, his voice, his eyes, and breath. All three actors are on the same page with that Lovecraftian excess, but Combs absolutely shines, delivering moments that in their personal horror, are such a freaking delight. It is pitch perfect horror-melodrama (which really is harder than it sounds) and deeply satisfying.   

And there are some elements which don’t feel much like Lovecraft, but still bring something to the table. As mentioned, there can be occasional notes of comedy here and there. When it arises, though, it is just for a moment and doesn’t dominate the scene (a bit of a departure from the more blackly comic tone of Re-Animator) – still, old H.P. never really came across as a funny guy, so this is a change, but I think a welcome one.

But the most significant introduction is that of sex, something that Lovecraft didn’t generally touch on (if at all – I haven’t read his full catalogue, but I’d be genuinely surprised). The film adds the conceit that the pineal gland is responsible for regulating the sex drive (which, from a quick skim of the Wikipedia page, I don’t believe is true), and thus, when the resonator stimulates the pineal, allowing the veil to be lifted between worlds, the air is filled with a sexual charge. Furthermore, those who succumb to the call of the machine do so out of a kind of sexual obsession, an utterly non-cerebral, even physical drive – a hunger they can’t fully understand or resist – to see, to know, to experience – to possess. This can lead them to monstrous actions in pursuit of their new sensory addiction, and also result in their own violation (a warning, if sexual assault is something that will just ruin a movie for you, as in Re-Animator, in one scene, Barbara Crampton’s character is subjected to unwelcome, sexualized contact – before a giant, slimy, mandibled  thing tries to eat her head).

In a way, to connect to a different author, it made me think much more of Clive Barker than Lovecraft – the mutable body, blurred lines between minds and flesh and sexual need – desire and pain and compulsion all tied up in knots with some unknown quality of the spirit. The addition of sex takes the experience beyond the realm of the merely cerebral – the horrors now existing in an interpersonal space, between bodies and minds, just as it also invites creatures that tread between worlds. Unfortunately, this sexual element didn’t always land for me on first viewing (and I found myself thinking how amazing it would have been if Barker had somehow been brought onto the project to help develop it – but I’m pretty sure he was developing Hellraiser (1987) at the time) – sometimes it felt tacked on and underdeveloped – an excuse to include some ticket-selling titillation and put Crampton in leather gear, though having watched the film a few times in the last couple of weeks, I can now better see its integration through the whole film. Still, even if I think it could have been explored more deeply, it certainly augments the piece.

So that is From Beyond. If you are in the mood for something that goes big, that takes itself seriously while still having just a bit of room for humor, that has crazy physical effect work, that captures a truly “Lovecraftian” style of madness, of excess, of Horror (all on a tidy little budget at Charles Band’s Empire Entertainment in Rome), this is your movie. It sure made my day, and might currently be my favorite Lovecraft adaptation.

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A quick non-Lovecraftian aside – if you are a regular reader, I am sorry it’s been a couple of weeks longer than usual. Life got in the way. It’s even kinda funny. After watching this the first time, I thought, “Wow! Fantastic! Loved it! Let’s get a quick post up about that and not overthink things!” And then more time went by than ever before actually publishing. I’ve been preparing a performance for the cabaret I work with (among other things, finally making that “Youth Runs Wild!” 50s teensploitation act I wrote about months ago) and there has been a great deal of arts and crafts to do in order to build everything. Along the way, I have put this movie on in the background so many times while sewing or hot gluing or painting, keeping it fresh in my mind and always thinking, “Today will be the day I write!” though it’s been weeks since that initial hot Saturday on which I first watched it. Argh. I try to get a post up bi-monthly, but that’s not always feasible. Anyway, I have high hopes for what’s coming next – thanks for sticking around…

Nostalgic Cult Classics: Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Toxic Avenger

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A while back, I wrote about my long journey to becoming a horror fan. I certainly wasn’t one from the beginning – I just got scared too easily. I have a distinct memory of being seriously disturbed out on the playground of Ocean City Elementary while some kid detailed (to other kids, not even directly to me) the kill scenes in one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies (from what little I remember, I think it was probably part 5, The Dream Child). And yet, around this time (I would have been 10 or 11), I did discover something that was more my speed: cult classics, B-movies, flicks that were “so bad, they’re good,” films that didn’t take themselves seriously enough to frighten me, but were still chock full of outrageous, fun, gratuitous, over-the-top, schlocky, campy material: Attack (and later, Return) of the Killer Tomatoes, Elvira – Mistress of the Dark, Big Trouble in Little China, Frankenhooker, Ghoulies, My Mom’s a Werewolf, so many titles I can’t even remember, and of course, today’s two cinematic gems, Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) and The Toxic Avenger (1984).

At the time, I remember how that not-seriousness really let me enjoy them. I wasn’t yet up for what I understood horror to be, but I could really get a kick out of gory dismemberment as long as it didn’t feel too real (even if realistically shown, it was ok if it didn’t feel too serious, hence scary). Returning to at least these two films as an ‘adult’ is interesting. They both still have elements that I can enjoy on their own merits, but neither is something that I’m often in the mood for now, even if I could watch them on repeat 35 years ago. But the nostalgia is strong in them. They both take me back to a time and a place, and a memory of dipping my toes into material that I might not have been fully ready for, but that was part of the appeal. 

But more than the stroll down memory lane, I also find them both fascinating to consider, especially as I have fully become a horror fan, and what’s more, someone who is interested in thinking and writing about horror, about categories (are they Camp? Trash? Satire? Exploitation? Do these terms even matter – are they useful?), about aesthetics, and about the pleasures I (and presumably others) derive from content that others would find distasteful, unpleasant, or even abhorrent. I no longer describe a movie as ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ – that feels unnecessarily belittling now, but in addition to the truly great masterpieces of horror which are so rightly praised (and, to be fair, tend to be my favorites) as ‘good’, I still have a really warm place in my heart for fun, cheap, trashy, unpretentious excess (unburdened by ‘quality’) – and I think it can be enjoyed for what it is and not only as a work of nostalgia or sociological-theoretical interest.

So, let’s get into these. There will probably be spoilers, as well as descriptions of some pretty absurd stuff, so you’ve been warned. Also, on the other side of the ‘reviews,’ I have a bunch of thoughts on cult movies/camp/sleaze, so I cordially invite you to stick around for that (this is a long post – make sure you’re hydrated).

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Primarily special effects and Claymation artists who have worked on a wide range of projects from Robocop to Critters, from Elf to Team America: World Police, the Chiodo brothers (Stephen, Charles, and Edward) have written and directed only one feature film, giving them free reign to create outlandish, ridiculous, gloriously silly things, and it was, of course, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Following the model of a 50s sci-fi monster movie (The Blob (1958) is all over this thing), what it lacks in narrative drive or acting that might traditionally be deemed “adequate,” it makes up for in genuinely inspired set dressing and matte panting, very effective, if low budget, effects work, and endless creative, absurd, clown-horror gags. Also, it has one of the all-time great eponymous closing credits songs, written for the film by The Dickies (in my book, it’s right up there with The Ramones’s Pet Sematary). 

In short, a young couple up at Lover’s Lane sees what looks like a meteor strike in the nearby woods and they go to investigate, finding a circus big-top set up in the middle of nowhere – which is also a spaceship – filled with bloodthirsty clowns who have seemingly come to earth to eat everybody, cocooning most of their victims in something like pink cotton candy so they can insert laughably long twisty straws into the rose colored concoction and suck out their blood. The young couple tries to get the police involved, but encounters difficulty from both the older officer (because he’s just a mean, abusive, awful cop) and the young deputy (because he’s the girl’s ex). But eventually the deputy witnesses a clown eating some citizens, he comes on board, and having learned that the clowns can be killed by puncturing their big, red, confetti filled noses, they all team up with some goofballs in an ice cream truck to send the alien jesters packing.

But really, this is not about the story, or the characters. Most of the performances are perfunctory at best (and some don’t quite make it that far), and the narrative goes about where you would expect it to. And that is all fine. As prefaced, this is a pretty ‘campy’ movie (a term I mean to be at least somewhat distinguished from ‘camp’ as one might discuss in terms of Oscar Wilde, John Waters, Susan Sontag, or Ed Wood, Jr.). It knows how silly it is and it just doesn’t sweat elements of ‘quality’ that are not its focus (i.e., clown based menace and mayhem).  

So what does it have, you may ask? How about a sequence where one of the titular clowns quickly crafts a balloon animal dog to track the young couple, it’s inflated head sniffing about, hot on their trail? A big creepy clown disappearing in plain sight by copying the stiff, regular movements of an animatronic gorilla outside a drug store? A puppet theatre for an audience of one, a kind of Punch and Judy show that culminates in the single viewer being fatally wrapped in candy floss? The terrifying sight of too many clowns getting out of one tiny car? An amusement park security guard who is pied-in-the-face to death, one of the clowns leaving a giant cherry on the pile of cream that is dissolving his flesh, leaving only his bones and a badge? A motorcycle gang making fun of the littlest clown for riding a funny tiny bicycle with training wheels, leading one of them to destroy his bike, so he jumps out of frame and jumps back in with boxing gloves. The jerk who broke his bike mockingly says, “What are ya gonna do? Knock my block off?” and so he does, the thug’s bloody head flying off of his shoulders.

And it’s not like the clowns only target ‘bad people.’ We get a scene outside a clown-themed burger place (that is not McDonald’s) with a big, freaky clown luring a little girl outside, a giant mallet gleefully held behind his back – her mom yanks her back inside before the clown gets to mutilate her, but even if that isn’t shown, the suggestion that it might be is already planted in the imagination.

Similarly, this is a PG-13 movie and therefore can’t offer the kind of gratuitous nudity it might otherwise, but it does tease it. There’s a shower scene where we see the girl of the young couple undress, implying that evil clown stuff is coming her way (some particularly animated popcorn on her discarded clothes threatens to do something though we don’t yet know what). The camera stays at her feet as she undresses, and on her face in the shower. Then it cuts away to another scene, and when we finally see her attacked in the bathroom, she has finished the shower and is fully dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater, even wearing her sneakers already. I can’t help but think that this is all intentionally playing with audience expectations, teasing what isn’t shown.

But when the attack comes, it is weird, gross, playful, funny, and kinda great. The popcorn has somehow sprouted into fanged clown heads on wormy, phallic bodies that shoot out of the hamper, the medicine cabinet, and the toilet, chomping at her as she fights them off with the shower head and curtain (I guess they’re not that tough). She then runs out of the bathroom to hear her boyfriend’s voice at the door, but when she opens it, it’s a big, scary clown! The door slams and she runs to her bedroom window, seeking escape, only to see a clown fire patrol below, eager to catch her. Finally she turns and sees that another has found his way inside, who shoots her with a clown gun that captures her in a giant yellow, polka dotted balloon, now needing to be rescued by our heroes.

But the pièce de résistance of the whole film has got to be the shadow puppet scene. It is certainly the bit that I’d best remembered through the years, and on re-watch, it absolutely holds up. A bus passes a stop to reveal a big, old clown that wasn’t there a moment before. He gets the attention of those waiting at the stop and starts to make shadow puppets of increasing complexity and delight: an adorable bunny, a trumpeting elephant, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, and a sexy belly dancer. Everyone watches and laughs and claps, loving the show. It’s sweet how much they like it, and also funny how the clown’s big sausage fingers couldn’t possibly be forming these amazing images. Finally, as the clown directs a sinister chortle at the camera, the shadows take the shape of a red eyed tyrannosaurus which, with a mighty roar, bends down and gobbles up all of the once enchanted, now terrified and screaming viewers in its umbral maw, devouring them whole. It really is a joy. Check it out here.

So, yeah – this is not a film about the story, but is rather an excuse to have a series of almost completely unrelated monstrous clown gags. And they are fantastic unrelated monstrous clown gags, easily making up for any of the film’s (many) shortcomings. But I want to return to one of those. Earlier, I commented on how this movie doesn’t expect much of its actors, but I must say there is one exception: John Vernon, who plays the mean, awful police chief, is just great in this part. I know him best from Animal House, where he plays the mean, awful dean, and as I understand, he really made his career playing wholly unlikeable, comically nasty characters. That’s just what he does here, and every time the camera is on him, he really brings the scene to life, along the way, adding a surprising note of something like social commentary to this deeply silly movie.

He is a bad cop, and what’s more, he is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with policing. He directs his energies at those he preemptively suspects of wrongdoing (in his case, “young people”), while completely ignoring the calls of help of people being murdered by clowns, convinced that everyone is just trying to make a fool of him, both under and over policing his community at the same time. He is abusive to those he arrests, joking about their lack of rights now that they’re in ‘his’ territory. He only attacks, threatens, and belittles, refusing to see where the real threat lies. He makes fun of his deputy for how his ‘police academy training’ causes him to care about idiotic things like “civil liberties.” But when he gets his comeuppance, it’s a treat.

Earlier in the film, convinced that everyone was just pulling his leg with this clown nonsense, he’d declared that they weren’t ‘going to make a dummy’ out of him. So, of course, that’s eventually what happens. The deputy returns to the station, finding clown prints everywhere (big and red, and climbing the walls), and eventually his crooked boss propped up on the knee of a clown that has gorily shoved its hand into his torso to pull his internal strings as one would a ventriloquist’s dummy. His cheeks are rouged (with blood), and trickles of the red stuff at the side of his mouth suggest the articulated mouthpiece of such a doll, as the clown uses him to tell the deputy not to worry because “all we wanna do is kill you.” It’s the only time a clown gets anything like words, the rest of the time just uttering funny little squeaking sounds, and it is cool, creepy, and intimidating. Plus, Vernon does it so well.

My grandparents had cable and I remember one summer when this was just on HBO constantly. As the film had come out in ’88, I can only assume this would be the summer of ’89, making me ten at the time. And it was just perfect: funny, silly, gross, and creative, with some pretty outrageous stuff in it, but still tame enough to be shown on TV at noon on a Tuesday. It was filled with moments of horror (the clowns do kill a lot of people, the image of the clown sucking blood out of the candy cocoon was disturbing, and the aforementioned dummy scene was pretty creepy), but the campiness made it all fun for me. I remember some friend having the Friday the 13th game for Nintendo and that I didn’t like playing it cause it felt scary (even though it was an 8-bit system and you could barely see anything – Jason was effectively a purple and white blob chasing you around the screen), but this movie was a blast and I couldn’t count the number of times I watched it. It’s a pleasure to have returned to.

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

If today’s first film was TV-friendly, this next one was decidedly not (though it somehow got a cartoon version for kids, so go figure). From Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma Entertainment, The Toxic Avenger is crude, cheap, and ugly, with nudity that precludes it from being shown in the middle of the day as well as gory, sometimes shocking violence that is so over-the-top (though also frequently quite silly) that some viewers will just not be able stomach it. Positioned somewhere between a superhero satire and a monster movie, between mean-spirited schlock and loving camp, this is a wholly independent movie that you had to go to the video store for.

Now, though I didn’t take quite as much pleasure in returning to it as I did with the first feature today, there was still a charge of nostalgia, and beyond that, it has really prompted a lot of thoughts about camp and exploitation, about the concepts of taste and aesthetics, about how we watch a film and about how a filmmaker can push and/or play with our boundaries. Troma successfully builds and maintains an absolutely loyal fan base for their weird, little pictures that are as far from mainstream Hollywood as can be imagined – and that wouldn’t happen if these movies weren’t quite special in their intentionally ugly, utterly idiosyncratic way – if they didn’t invite the viewer to a uniquely loveable viewing experience (even while viewing horrible things).

As with many a superhero origin story, we start with a put-upon weakling, in this case, Melvin, the scrawny, gawky mop boy at Tromaville Health Club, where he’s ill-treated by everyone, but especially a quartet of bullies who, when they’re not chain smoking in the gym while pumping iron, are chugging whisky as they speed around town, actively trying to run down pedestrians for points. As with many a slasher film, things really get kicked off thanks to a prank gone wrong. One of the bullies convinces Melvin that she wants to leave her boyfriend for him, so he should meet her by the pool in a pink leotard and tutu. This he does, only to have the lights turned on, realize he was making out with a lice infested sheep, and be chased by all the laughing customers of the club until, in terror and shame, Melvin leaps out of a second story window, landing in an open vat of bubbling green toxic waste on the back of a flatbed truck, stopped by its drivers so they can do an insane amount of cocaine.

Melvin goes through a pretty gross transformation sequence, becoming a giant, greenish brown monster, covered with boils, forever stuck in his now filthy leotard and carrying weaponized mops. He is also instilled with an overwhelming urge to destroy evil wherever he finds it. And it so happens that his small New Jersey town of Tromaville is full of depraved scumbags. From the 80s stereotypes of punk-street gangs to the nefarious Mayor that they all directly report to, who is furthermore making deals to line his pockets by poisoning the town with toxic waste, this is not a nice place to live. And yet, it’s also implied that the town is filled with ‘good people’ who would be able to live their lives in peace if only some kindly monster would brutally tear apart all of the ‘bad guys.’

Along the way, Toxie (as he will later come to be affectionately called in the sequels), rescues and falls in love with a nice blind girl Sara, who moves in with him in his lean-to shack at the toxic dump site, adding that feminine touch that makes a toxic dump shack feel like a home. By the end, the corrupt mayor calls in the National Guard to take out this vigilante monster, but the good people of Tromaville show up to protect their toxic defender.

I feel that the seed of the story is satirization of the classic superhero narrative, a genre of fun kids’ entertainment which often carries quite reactionary messaging about how the world is full of dangerous elements and that the only way for them to be dealt with is by masked vigilantes who carry out a form of extra-judicial justice.

I think that vibe is right on the surface in something like Batman, but even in the more kid-friendly Spider-man comics, there is an impression that the city streets are full of gangs and muggers that normal people are being victimized by. It’s one thing to fight colorful supervillains, but the presentation of our modern cities as such threatening hellscapes in order to justify a ‘hero’ having someone to fight, someone who deserves to have violence used against them, definitely carries a message.

This is a theme that some comic books and later some comic book movies would eventually pick up and interrogate, but that generally followed Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen books which were published 2 years after this was released.

Thus, The Toxic Avenger offers criminals that are so reprehensible, such unforgivably monstrous people (vicious, racist, drug addled rapists, murderers, and gleeful sadists), that the hero of the piece can be even more of a monster – absolutely physically brutal in how he dispatches them. For example, among other things, the “good guy” of the movie crushes a drug dealer’s head in a weight machine, stabs out another guy’s eyes with his fingers, blends an assailant’s brains with a milkshake mixer (along with milk, whipped cream, and a cherry of course), deep fries a robber’s hands until he dies of shock, bashes heads together until brains ooze out, rips another guys arm off and beats him with it ala Beowulf and Grendel, burns one bully girl’s butt off on hot sauna stones, takes scissors to the other bully girl (weirdly, it happens off screen, but as we don’t see it, we assume the worst – in one longer cut, he just cuts her hair), disembowels the mayor with his bare hands (in front of a crowd which cheers with joy as the mayor tries and fails to push his guts back in before dying), and murders a seemingly nice old lady (who we learn after the fact was a slave trader) by locking her in a hot dryer and then crushing her in a steam press, all of this earning him the love and loyalty of the good people of the town.

I think that in its exaggeration, the movie shows how this superhero “kids’ stuff” was not that dissimilar to conservative fantasies like the Death Wish or Dirty Harry movies. But in its ludicrous excess, I feel Troma’s movie communicates a different message, rather showing the absurdity, the silliness of both the fear mongering and the violent response of “the good.” 

Now, while I wasn’t into horror yet when I first watched this, I was absolutely a Marvel Comics kid and I don’t think the satire of reactionary messaging made it through to me. I just got the joke of ‘it’s a comic book super hero origin story and there are bad guys and isn’t it funny that it’s all so extreme?’ And obviously, this is not a “message movie.” It’s a movie having grotesque fun with taking awful things beyond where you thought they could go. But still, the reactionary-as-absurd reading feels very present.

But like I said, this really is not a movie about a message. It’s also not a movie about making do with a limited budget and making ‘artful’ decisions to create something ‘beautiful,’ perhaps by showing less and implying more, ala a low budget, gorgeously shot Val Lewton joint. Nope, Troma rather follows an exploitation film ethos of showing you what you couldn’t see in a ‘Hollywood’ picture because they don’t have to follow any dictates of commercial ‘good taste.’

It wears its low budget proudly and rather than ‘overcoming financial limitations’ with clever cinematography or nuanced performances, it instead embraces a home grown, rough hewn look and feel, featuring outlandish acting that exists somewhere between Pink Flamingos, The Three Stooges, and a skit on Saturday Night Live as played by middle schoolers. This description may come across as negative, but I don’t mean it to be so. I think the anti-style of the performances is key to the film’s success, underlining the campy not-to-be-taken-too-seriously-ness of the whole proceedings. 

Some of this comes from the performers themselves, dialing everything up to eleven and mugging for the camera, and some is a filmmaking choice, such as Toxie, after his transformation, always sounding as if he’s been poorly dubbed by the most polite, square jawed, good guy imaginable, when he isn’t grunting and growling. He also periodically takes a break from gutting baddies to help little old ladies cross the street or rescue a baby caught in a tree.

But it’s not always so simple as the violence and cruelty being artificial, just a silly act, and therefore more of something to laugh at than be shocked by. Sometimes, the envelope is pushed far enough that even if an effect is clearly unrealistic, the fact of what is being played can still elicit a strong response. While I remember really liking this movie when I was maybe 12 (give or take – I’m not sure), and in many ways it is the perfect movie for a 12 year old, there was one scene that always got to me and that really delivered the horror.

Early on, we see the four bullies from the health club out for a night drive, swilling booze and playing their favorite game. One of the girls reminds the driver of the rules – how many points he gets for running down different kinds of minorities (all of whom are described with racist epithets). Then, to all of their joy, they come across a kid on a bike and slam into him, the kid flying over the car and lying bloody in the street. You don’t get any points if he lives, so the driver backs up, steering the tires directly over the kids head, crushing it with a wet pop. The two girls run out of the car and gleefully take Polaroids of the dead kid for their collection (we later see one of them getting off to these photos in the sauna). The fact that the effect is clearly fake (a melon in a wig, filled with corn syrup and food coloring) doesn’t detract at all from the overwhelming wrongness of the scene. I remember around when I first saw this, some yahoos in a pickup running me off the road when I was on my bike and this scene always connected with that genuinely scary memory for me. And the idea of such terrible people having so much fun targeting someone like me just for kicks was real horror – the kind that stays with you – the kind that teaches you something unbearably sad and scary about the heartlessness and cruelty of the world.

And at the same time, as the whole film constantly goofs around with extremity, having a punk rock, offensive blast with poor taste, I feel even this scene is kinda played for laughs. It’s all too much – villains so beyond believable humanity that it is a joke. But it also shook me to my core. This movie is silly, and it’s horrible, and it feels fake, and it feels real, and it’s fun, and it’s deeply, disturbingly wrong, and sometimes it’s even hilariously sweet (especially in the absurd romantic scenes played out between Sara and Toxie – walking among toxic waste at sunset, hula hooping, decorating their shack, making tender love – all to delightfully cheesy music). A line is walked between sincere feeling and a kind of camp detachment. In many ways (aesthetically, in terms of special effects and acting, even “morally”), it is all intentionally ‘bad.’ But that is where a camp appreciation comes in. Even if it is bad, that doesn’t mean it can’t be loved (and not in a superior, so-bad-it’s-good) sense, but as its own, weird self.

Somehow, in probably just trying to make a fun, crazy, cheap movie and turn a profit, Kaufman and Herz created something special. It is both ‘the thing’ and ‘not the thing,’ both sincere and ironic, mean and sweet, naïve and jaded. In terms of horror, it mostly follows the tropes of another genre (superheroes), but it features one of my most memorable instances of kindertrauma, and therefore one of my strongest ever experiences of ‘art-horror’ (as opposed to ‘real life-horror,’ like learning about Nazi death camps or something). And yet, it was also just a really funny, stupid good time that I watched again and again, along with its sequels, when I was exactly the right age to enjoy it. It’s an irony that when one is old enough to handle its violence, one is probably too old to fully appreciate its humor.

Re-watching it for this post, I felt perhaps that time had passed – that it was harder to laugh at it as much as I had more than thirty years ago, but I still found it fascinating, and maybe more than anything else, I respected the chutzpah that went into making it. It can be hard to commit yourself so wholly to making something that most people won’t like. That takes courage and will and not just anyone can do it. These days, I feel a bit inundated by the trolls of the world just out to get a rise out of people and therefore don’t have too much hunger for such button pushing, but it’s weird how a movie like this can feel almost innocent in its juvenile, perverse love of serving up shock and disgust and slapstick and inane jokes and all manner of gratuitousness. The grotesquerie is real. But so is the love.

—

The last few months, I’ve been hung up on a question of aesthetics. When writing about Fulci’s Murder Rock, I noted how its sleazy vibe excused any failings and offered its own peculiar pleasures. I went on a run of 50s ‘teensploitation’ movies, enjoying them both as cultural artifacts of their time, and specifically digging those elements which, from a certain perspective, might not be deemed ‘good,’ but are there to be reveled in. I found real enjoyment in a couple of Lesbian Vampire movies that really fit into an erotic-Euro 70s ‘sexploitation’ mode. And in this post, it has been interesting to take this trip down memory lane to two movies of my adolescence that both edge into realms of campy exploitation and which were both key steps on my path to eventually falling in love with the horror genre. In all cases, I have been wondering: what exactly is the appeal of what might be deemed “sleaze” or “trash” or “exploitation”? There is a distinct aesthetic quality that I catch a whiff of but I can’t put my finger on.

Also in the last couple of months, I’ve read Calum Waddell’s book analyzing American exploitation films from 1955-1977, “The Style of Sleaze” and a book of essays edited by Jeffrey Sconce, “Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins on Taste, Style, and Politics.” I’ve read Susan Sontag’s “On Camp” and a thesis written by James W. Macdonald, “The Art of Trash: Evaluating Troma Entertainment as Paracinema.” And through all of these, I still haven’t pinned down what that artistic quality is that I find reflected in these works, which feels so aesthetically satisfying. Now, it’s not exactly “camp,” but camp is part of how I enjoy them, and it’s worth touching on.

However, I don’t even want to attempt a definition of “camp.” For all that her essay was iconic, I don’t think Sontag was all that successful, herself, some qualities just defying definition (quick – define art!). But some elements I find helpful are Sontag’s description of life as an aesthetic posture, a section from Charles Ludlam’s manifesto for his “Ridiculous Theatre” company about how “Bathos is that which is intended to be sorrowful but because of the extremity of its expression becomes comic. Pathos is that which is meant to be comic but because of the extremity of its expression becomes sorrowful. Some things which seem to be opposites are actually different degrees of the same thing,” and the moment on the 1997 episode of the Simpsons, Homer’s Phobia, when the John Waters voiced character describes ‘camp’ as “the tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic,” and Homer responds, “Oh yeah, like when a clown dies.” In addition, I think it’s key that a camp appreciation is ironic, but isn’t mean or judgmental. It celebrates failure with a genuine joy in the failed thing as opposed to mocking it with a disaffected smirk. Camp distinct from snark.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space doesn’t care about its ‘failings.’ It just wants to make crazy clown horror gags and can shrug off the rest. The Toxic Avenger takes it a couple of steps farther and actually celebrates what one might term its own ‘crappiness.’ Thus, I think much of how I might enjoy some of the described material is through a camp lens – but that describes my way of watching and appreciating, and not the qualities which I find worthy of appreciation in the given work. So, there must be another element to identify: in low budget material that might be deemed ‘sleazy,’ there is often a direct, honest attempt to deliver something to the audience. You can see the strings, and it might all be pretty slapdash, but they promised to ‘turn you on’ or ‘gross you out’ or ‘shock your sensibilities’ and without any shame, they are damn well gonna try (and may or may not succeed, and as discussed, failure can be lovely).

I came up in the theatre and have a deep love of overt theatricality – theatre that leaves room for the viewer’s imagination to do its work: shows made out of cardboard and duct tape and bodies and passion in a poor medium that depends on the audience to show up, forever doomed to make art in a world of commerce and die if no tickets are sold. How could I not love to see that spark of struggling-to-create so visible in the final product? In Sconce’s book, he includes an essay of his own, “Movies: a Century of Failure,” wherein he writes, “Much of the romance of exploitation cinema stems from this valorization of film production itself as an elemental struggle against the conspiratorial forces of the universe. For many trash cinephiles, this is the essence of the art form, a medium of exploitation that has always been less about realizing some idealized, artistic vision than the act of creation itself, transforming the cinema as a whole into an existential metaphor of affirmation in the face of chaotic absurdity.” He describes so well something I’ve always loved about making theatre – that sense that you are in a noble battle against reality to pull something into being – for a moment and then it’s gone. It is a romantic, Quixotic notion. Maybe the element I’m finding in this sleaze-trash-cult-exploitation work is just ‘theatricality’?

I feel this element can be found in both of today’s films. What they may lack in ‘traditionally understood quality,’ they make up in an unmistakable joy in the act of their own creation, of committing to the ridiculous idea, of abjuring half measures and always using one’s whole ass. Returning to the notion of camp, I found it striking that Troma Entertainment was referenced in the two abovementioned books and in neither case positively. I feel there was a judgement that it doesn’t satisfy as a kind of camp pleasure because it is done too intentionally, and thus fails (and though neither volume mentioned Killer Klowns, I have the sense it would have been viewed similarly harshly). For me (and I admit I am no expert), I feel that misses a key point. If, as Sontag wrote, camp views life as an aesthetic posture, then a ‘put on’ is no less real.

From a theatrical perspective, from a camp perspective, in terms of many (though certainly not all) tenets of gender theory, queer theory, and notions of “performativity,” we are what we play (as well as the ones who play – forever both and neither), and identity is all performed. The mask we choose to wear is as revealing, if not more so, as the face concealed beneath. Now, it is fair to say that an artist’s intention to adopt an artificial, “campy” mode does change how we understand their work – we appreciate it differently than work accidentally resulting in those ineffable qualities appealing to a camp sensibility, but I think it is needlessly limiting for that sensibility to close itself off to the pleasures found in material thus intentionally crafted. Honestly, it’s just weirdly snooty to look down on films (or anything else) for ‘trying too hard.’ If artifice weren’t a legitimate route to the ‘authentic,’ Wes Anderson wouldn’t have a career. These movies can be dumb on purpose, and thus can be dumb and, at the same time, be very clever and fun for how they choose to be dumb. Ambivalence can be delicious.

This seemingly paradoxical aesthetic tension describes a whole segment of horror works, often fan favorites, which will never win an Oscar, and which never need to – they’ve already served their audience, and their creators have gotten a nominal payday and can go on to try to make more. But though they will always exist outside of the purview of a mainstream “Academy,” and even also outside of the appreciation of many of the lettered scholars of exploitative trash, for whom I guess they’re not trashy enough or in ‘the right way,’ odd little treasures like Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Toxic Avenger surely deserve to be celebrated – and I think, by at least certain people, they always will be.

Lesbian Vampires 5: Spanish Sexploitation in the 70s

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So last week, I had planned to cover four films in my ongoing series on the Lesbian Vampire Subgenre, but I really fell down a rabbit hole on the first two selections (Requiem for a Vampire and Alucarda), wrote my longest post to date, and ran out of steam before I could cover the next two. So this week, we’re just going to plow ahead and get some first impressions out there on my next two entries: Daughter of Dracula (1972) and Vampyres (1974).  For all that I loved last week’s films, they only nominally featured “Lesbian Vampires.” The same cannot be said for today’s entries.

As mentioned last week, if you’re interested in the rest of the series, I invite you to check out Part I (Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary), Part II (The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Vampyros Lesbos), Part III (Nadja, Blood of the Tribades, and Bit), and Part IV (Requiem for a Vampire and Alucarda). Also, perhaps stick around and have a look at some of the other, non-Lesbian Vampire offerings on the site. 🙂

There will most likely be extensive spoilers ahead (also, if you’re in an office or something, there could be a stray nipple if that’s an issue for you), so enter at your own risk…

Daughter of Dracula (1972)

This Jess Franco flick was released one year after his superior Vampyros Lesbos and circles many similar images, themes, and impressions (it was also one of 11 films he directed in 1972 – the man worked). That said, for all that there are elements here worthy of one’s time and discussion, it must be said that this is not the place to start with either Lesbian Vampire movies or Franco’s catalogue. However, I think it does probably encapsulate much of what a Jess Franco picture is like: languid, gorgeous, moody, fleshy, erotic, occasionally absurd or campy, and ultimately utterly unconcerned with clarity, consistency, or even character (alliterate much?). His work is not for everyone – and that is certainly true of this early 70s sexploitation outing.

It is a vampire movie, but I’d be hard pressed to call it horror. The story is hard to follow at best and non-existent at worst. And while it devotes a significant portion of its runtime to the naked female form, during which its nominal “story” screeches to a halt (often a defining trait of ‘exploitation’ work), I’m not even sure that it’s ever particularly “sexy” at least not as conventionally understood.

Franco would reportedly shoot multiple movies at the same time and stitch them together in the editing booth (getting more than one picture on the producer’s dime and only paying actors and crew for one film) and this could result in a disjointed feel – as if the film we’re watching had been assembled out of a couple of different pictures (which sometimes is exactly what he did – it’s one of the ways that he was credited as having directed more than 200 films), and that is certainly the case here – it feels as if the main character is never in the same room as most of the rest of the cast, but is following her own story, separate from the giallo-esque mystery that occupies the rest of the players. And her story is barely even a ‘story,’ so much as it’s just her seductively playing the piano or making love to her beautiful cousin in long sequences which aren’t even always exactly ‘sex’ scenes so much as ‘squirmingly lounging in bed together, naked, slowly flopping about before the fangs come out’ scenes. But hey, they do look like they’re having a good time, which is often more than you get with mainstream sex scenes.

All of this may seem pretty negative out the gate, but I did actually rather like the film, particularly on a second viewing (during the first, I was just too sleepy to put myself in the right headspace to enjoy this kind of movie making). I’ve only seen maybe 5 Franco films so far, but my impression is that to appreciate his talents (and I do believe he was talented and had something artistic to offer the world), you have to watch the films differently than most typical narrative cinema. It’s not the abstract surrealism of Rollin, but it is a step removed from narrative arc, more simply luxuriating in the richness of the seen. While he seemed obsessed with certain themes or images (vampires, Poe, old crumbling castles, the sea, death, the body – particularly women’s), I suspect ‘telling stories’ per se just wasn’t that interesting to him. And it doesn’t need to be. Can’t a film be of value based on a different rubric? Can’t he just make beautifully shot films with gothic themes and loads of nudity because that’s what he loves – and well, there was a market for it?

In this case, the minimal story, such as it is, concerns Luisa Karlstein (Brett Nichols), her name our requisite connection to Carmilla, who comes to her mother’s death bed to be told that the family has long been cursed by vampirism and that the original count can still be found, undead, in the nearby family crypt. Concurrently, there is a police investigation into the many beautiful naked women that are being found with mysterious and fatal neck wounds, seemingly carried out by a perpetrator in a long coat with a wide brimmed hat, face covered with a black scarf, and carrying a cane.

This investigation largely feels like its own separate film and though Luisa is eventually revealed (unsurprisingly as we see her flash her fangs and bite women throughout the film), to be the killer in question, it feels as if she isn’t even in that detective film. Most of her time is spent striking up a sexual/bitey relationship with her cousin, Karine (Anne Libert), a childhood friend with whom she’d always shared an attraction. Also, we occasionally see her eye, in very giallo fashion, through the crack of a door, spying on some unsuspecting woman who’s getting undressed and will soon be bitten.

For all of the issues one could have with this film, no one could say it isn’t a Lesbian Vampire movie (which could be argued about both of last week’s movies). Honestly, on some levels, it is more of one than many much better films that I’ve covered in this series, given how so many of the vampires in question also engage in sexy time with men (Bisexual Vampire erasure is a thing). Luisa, however, is only ever shown to take interest in women, either sexually or as food. But beyond ticking boxes to be thus designated, I do also want to underline the merits of this piece.

First of all, it is simply, beautiful. The on location photography along the coast of Portugal is frequently breathtaking, whether viewing a crumbling castle, seagulls on the beach where a nude corpse will soon be found, or the ornate Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra (which I was excited to spot because I’d been there on vacation a few years back and it really is a very cool, interesting place – it’s always fun to see in person a historical sight used for a Lesbian Vampire movie).

Franco catches light and warmth and texture so evocatively – water sparkles more brilliantly that it does in life, old buildings loom with delicate menace and tired grace, and flesh seems so soft, full of life, yielding, sanguine, and lovely. From the snap zooms and play with focus to the sensuality of night shoots by natural light, everything about the film is just so aesthetically crafted and captured.

Otherwise, there are loads of moments that really click. Some performances are surprisingly effective, such as Alberto Dalbés who plays the inspector with such weary, bemused exasperation, or Daniel White as the current Count Karlstein, who is suspected of the murders, but is really just running around on his wife. And of course, Franco himself plays the cuckolded assistant, obsessed with the looming threat of supernatural danger.

While the narrative is clunky and hard to piece together, there is a unifying theme of attraction-desire-need-betrayal, and the whole piece works as a series of evocative glimpses into these emotional states.

Most striking is the above-mentioned repeated motif of Luisa’s eye in the crack of a door. There are a few extended sequences, obviously targeted at a sexploitation market, of women stripping down in an unhurried, surprisingly non sexual fashion, as they prepare for bed or a bath, before they finally see their assailant and scream as we cut to black. Each time, we jump repeatedly, over the course of multiple minutes, between the image of the nude woman at peace, unsuspectingly going about her business, wholly relaxed, all accompanied by some gentle, easygoing music, to an extreme close up of Luisa’s eye, as open as it can be, appearing shocked (as if she really hadn’t expected what was revealed under various discarded undergarments), along with an intense musical stinger. Then we return to the intimate relaxation of a woman simply taking her time. I find it interesting that the eye does not indicate lust or arousal, but rather being overwhelmed by the immensity of what is seen. This is a film that wants to look, that takes pleasure in looking. And what it sees is often slow and unperturbed (both in terms of sexuality and in the face of imminent death). But if this was being sold to shock and titillate, it tracks that the observing eye would be that image of intensity, of more than what can be expected or contained.

And speaking of ‘more than,’ there are some delightfully campy moments, such as the few appearances of Franco regular, Howard Vernon, as the decrepit, undead progenitor of the family line. Occasionally his coffin lid raises, his eyes pop open, and, if he’s lucky, he manages to sit up, sometimes very suddenly. And that is all he ever does. He never gets out of his coffin. He never has any lines. He never does anything at all. His biggest moment of action is when he just lies there and Luisa drops a topless woman on top of him so he can have something to eat. Then she closes the lid. Can he get up? Is he supposed to be an image of broken age, impotent, but evil, infusing the land with his darkness, but unable to take actions himself? Or did Franco just bring his friend in for a day, slap some fangs in his mouth, film him looking creepy in a coffin a few times and send him home, and this is what he had to show for it? Either way, it is a fun, campy element, which may also carry a touch of something evocatively tragic.

This is certainly a peculiar little film, and I think few would exactly call it “good,” but if you are open to its pleasures, they are there to be had, and I think it’s interesting to take in what might be deemed a ‘lesser feature’ by this intriguing euro-sleaze auteur. But again, don’t watch it yet if you don’t already like Franco. If, however, you do and want to see more, seek it out.

Vampyres (1974)

José Ramón Larraz’s film is a bit of a departure from much of the Lesbian Vampire canon. While it does directly feature women who are clearly lesbians (or at least bisexual) and are also clearly vampires (but maybe ghosts as well?), it strikes a different tone from so many of the other entries on this list. A bit of an early seventies exploitation piece, it is filled with the gratuitous nudity one might expect from the genre, but more than most, it really leans into being a horror film (rather than a moody, somewhat abstract fever dream); and it is a fun one at that. It has ominous, spooky atmosphere, people exploring scary places they shouldn’t, a real sense of threat, and while I feel the audience is situated more on the side of the Sapphic vampires in question, when violence finally strikes, it is brutal and gory, and those pretty ladies are really frighteningly monstrous. It’s all pretty great.

In short, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska) rise from their graves every night to go hitchhiking along remote country roads to pick up men, take them back to an abandoned mansion, sometimes bed them (hence the bisexuality), get them wasted on fine (possibly drugged) wine from a ‘remote region near the Carpathian mountains,’ slice them open, and feast on the wet, red stuff within, leaving their naked, bloody bodies in their own crashed cars on the side of the road. Our story centers on one such man, Ted (Murray Brown), whom Fran picks up and decides to keep for a few nights (which makes Miriam nervous), and also a pair of young campers, John and Harriet, who have parked their camper on the grounds of said picturesque abandoned mansion to do some fishing and painting.

We regularly shift perspective between Fran and Miriam, living their best unlives together, seemingly taking great pleasure in their nightly games, and in each other (though they occasionally sleep with these men, it really feels like their only real relationship is with one other – the men are meat); Ted, as he is trapped – sexually, emotionally, and eventually bodily, slowly realizing his own impending doom as his life is sapped away; and the young camping couple, with Harriet as the classic horror movie wife who realizes that scary things are afoot only to be consistently disbelieved and belittled by her husband, or boyfriend as the case may be.

Off the bat (boom, tish), the film really feels like a horror movie. From the double murder in the cold open (more on that later), to Harriet’s immediate discomfort with their campsite, a hand slapping against their window in the night (presumably a victim trying to escape), to Ted’s first morning after sleeping with Fran, waking in an empty bed as she’d disappeared before morning light, feeling weirdly drained and discovering an ugly gash on his forearm.

The music builds tension. There are legitimate jump scares. And there is violent, gory death that, while still sexual in its way, is a far cry from the more artistic offerings in most other Lesbian Vampire pictures. I mean, I don’t want to set expectations too high – this is surely not the scariest movie you’re ever going to see, but it does go for the dread, the terror, and the shock of the body viscerally reduced to flesh and blood.

While I really do like this film, one criticism I can make is that it does drag a bit in the middle, and I think that may be to do with the absence of a clear protagonist to follow, though the shifting perspective does make for a very interesting film. The easiest character to identify with, I suppose, who really feels the most like what we will come to know as a ‘final girl,’ is Harriet (Sally Faulkner). She just wants to have a pleasant holiday with her partner, but creepy things are happening, she notices, and ignored or mocked for her insight, she takes some initiative and investigates. It does not end well for her (understatement), and she has one of the smallest parts in the film.

Then there is Ted. I don’t like Ted. Sorry. I can vicariously get creeped out along with him, going along on his ride into dangerous circumstances, feeling his dread as he senses that all doors are slamming shut around him, but I just don’t feel like rooting for him to live. Interestingly, I’d say this is true of all the men we see taken home and victimized, and he’s just the one we spend the most time with. None of them are shown to be ‘bad guys’ per se – Fran and Miriam are not exclusively preying on rapists or abusers (ala a more recent Lesbian Vampire picture, Bit), but they all feel like people I wouldn’t really choose to hang out with. Entitled, pushy, know-it-all guys, it’s hard not to feel like they all ‘have it coming.’ But then I have to second guess myself – why do I feel that way exactly?

Sure, they meet some beautiful women on the road, give them a lift and it turns out that these lovely ladies want them to come back to their place to drink fine wine and have sex. Nothing is wrong with any of that, right? They aren’t shown to be predators. We aren’t even informed that they are cheating on their wives or anything. And yet, it’s hard to be on their side. While I don’t want to fall into a Reagan-era slasher-esque sex-negative judgmentalism, I just don’t like them and I’m perfectly glad for the girls to drink their fill. Thus, since Ted, our primary male victim, is essentially also our main character, the story loses some drive in the second act due to my ambivalence regarding whether he lives or dies.

Maybe it’s just that the film really does rightly belong to Fran and Miriam, as does the audience’s sympathies (at least mine; I can’t speak for the majority of viewers in 1974). And they are easy to love. Fran has this sardonic, worldly, knowing charm as she lures these men home and it is a pleasure to accompany her in this pursuit. Without being overly arch, her whole character seems to grow out of Dracula’s iconic “I never drink…wine.” In contrast, Miriam just plays everything so genuinely, so sweet. She can really sell her interest in whatever some guy is blathering on about. Light and dark in their respective personas, they make a nice pair. And it is interesting the degree to which they really have no interpersonal drama. No one seems tortured by eternity or the need to kill and feed, and beyond Miriam urging Fran to finish Ted off before he becomes a problem, they seem happy together.

Maybe there is a dramatic flaw in that they don’t seem to especially want anything they don’t have, and they aren’t in any way pressed to change. They like hunting and killing these men – so they do. They like squirming about in bed, naked and bloody, having torn some guy apart and then having sex in the shower. They do that as well. One might expect an element of jealousy to enter the picture – either about Fran’s pet blood cow, Ted, or about one of them seducing Harriet. None of that happens. So while for Ted, there is drama in his capture and torment, and while for Harriet, there is suspense in her investigations, the characters we most enjoy watching (again, I should really only speak for myself) are oddly content.

But, hey – good for them. The movie begins with the two of them making love on a bed before some shadowy male figure barges in and shoots them over and over. At the very end of the film, we hear from an estate agent that this scene had happened many years ago in the house and that the unknown murdered girls had been buried here, such that this old mansion is enticingly haunted. If their inciting event, their bloody, cruel murder, probably by some jealous boyfriend or husband, is what somehow made them into vengeful, misandrist, undead killers, then they deserve a modicum of happiness along the way.

It’s nice that they get to have that with each other. The gentle love and contentment here even sets us up for a shock when we finally see the blood flow – when push comes to shove, they are really and truly scary monsters. This is especially true close to the end, when they dispatch Harriet – not their typical target, but necessary under the circumstances – it is quite a rough scene, especially as it takes on a sexualized component, stripping her as she screams and begs, before slashing her throat.

Whereas the last few entries in this series were simply unconcerned with plot or continuity (and therefore, it felt pointless to pick them apart), this feels more like a conventionally told story and hence plot inconsistencies draw more attention to themselves. Were they actually made vampires when murdered years before? If so, why the implications that they are from Transylvania (the small region near the Carpathian mountains)? If not, were they already vampires when the shadowy figure shot them? Who knows? Why does a hotel clerk recognize Ted from the distant past? It’s almost as if it’s implied that he had been the long ago killer, doomed to return to them – but I don’t think he was; it just feels that way. Why do their victim’s watches all stop at midnight? That’s an intriguing detail that I don’t know from any other vampy content. Maybe that was when they were shot? Also, if every single morning the local police find another dead naked man in a car on the side of the road, someone is gonna get curious. Has this been happening every night for 30 years? Men might stop driving through this region. But all of these questions don’t really interfere with my enjoyment of the picture. Sometimes they offer an enjoyable moment of “hey, what?” But mostly, I’m happy to let them slide right by as the rest of the film is generally so very enjoyable.

All in all, this one comes highly recommended. It really blends much of the atmospheric, sensual pleasure of the Lesbian Vampire genre with an entertainingly sleazy exploitation horror flick, filled with spooky atmosphere, rampant sexuality, fairly rough violence, and solid horror beats.

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And there we have two films with a fair amount in common, but which are also strikingly different. More so than some I’ve covered, the element of same sex desire and even love is explicitly present, as is the vampirism. Both come from a Spanish director working in another country and another language. Both have a kind of sexploitation charm – clearly including extended sequences of nudity and sex which are not strictly needed for the story telling, but was being sold in the marketing, and as sexuality makes up a pretty large portion of human existence, it’s a pretty legitimate thing to focus on in its own right. For whatever reason (a subject for a future post), I have a soft spot for that sense of good-old fashioned, honest sleaze – there is something charming in its directness. I recently discovered a new podcast I’m enjoying, Girls, Guts, and Giallo, hosted by Annie Rose Malamet, and I really appreciated in her discussion of Hellraiser, her statement to the effect that she hates misogyny, but she hates prudishness more. I can dig it.

But then again, these movies just feel so very different from each other. Franco’s is this languid, gorgeous, weird, erotic art piece, indulging in a death tinged sexual meditation, whereas Larraz’s is a down and dirty horror movie, ticking all the boxes of Lesbian Vampires and of horror, but maybe not really getting into anything deeper than that – an emotional character piece this is not – but it is fun and satisfying.

That said, maybe we’re good on this genre for a while. There are still others I’d like to write about, but I’ve covered 15 so far, and maybe it’s time for a break. I started last post discussing how these Lesbian Vampire posts bring more readers to this site than anything else I’ve written. Exactly why is an ongoing mystery, but I sure do love them myself. That said, there are so many other things I’m looking forward to delving into. Let’s see where we go next time…

Lesbian Vampires 4: “Naiveté in the Seventies” Double Feature

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The last time I did one of these, I mentioned that my previous entries detailing the sub-genre of the “Lesbian Vampire” film have far and away been my best sellers (if I actually had anything for sale). But as the information I get from Google Analytics is limited, I don’t exactly know why. Are these films simply more popular than others? Do they have a lurid appeal that catches readers’ interest?  Do they straddle a line between legitimacy and exploitation, art-house and mainstream horror such that many have heard of them, but not all have watched them, and people want to know more? Are people just looking for girl on girl vampire porn and they stumble onto this blog only to be disappointed (I assume – maybe then they discover a strange artsy movie they didn’t know they’d be into)? Hey – as I’m assuming this post will drive traffic as others have before it, feel free to drop a comment and let me know what brought you here. Whatever it was, welcome!

Also, if you’re interested, you can check out Part I (Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses,The Blood Spattered Bride, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary), Part II (The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, The Shiver of the Vampires, and Vampyros Lesbos), and Part III (Nadja, Blood of the Tribades, and Bit).

In any case, following last week’s pride month – Queer Horror rundown, I thought I might thematically hop, skip, and jump back over to this idiosyncratic (and apparently quite popular) collection of beautiful, rich, weird, atmospheric films, generally run through with nominally LGBT+ characters or themes, but mostly filmed through the lens of a totally cis-het male gaze, and yet which still surprisingly feel quite feminist and revolutionary and artfully decedent. In Part III of this series, I touched on some more modern examples, but really the heyday of this material was undoubtedly the seventies and there are still so many films of note to examine therein. And so, that’s what we’re going to do…

I had planned to cover four films this week, but found that I had rather a lot to say about the first two and decided to just focus on them: Requiem for a Vampire (1972) and Alucarda (1977). Having watched them now, I must say that both are only barely Lesbian Vampire films, but I believe there are enough details to merit inclusion in this series and boy, oh boy are they worthy of discussion. As usual with longer write ups such as these, there will be spoilers, but I genuinely don’t feel that would really ruin one’s appreciation of either of these films.

Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

It was only about a year ago that I finally watched my first Jean Rollin film, The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), which I thoroughly loved. Before that, Rollin had always been a blind spot for me, an artist with whom I was intrigued, but also felt somewhat daunted by. So artsy, so dreamy, so poetic and, for lack of a more descriptive word, so French. But then Shiver really impressed me – weird and artsy, sure, but also fun, funny, sexual, morbid, visually striking, and confounding in a way that enriched the viewing experience rather than detracting from it. Since that time, I’ve caught up with Grapes of Death (1978), Fascination (1979), and The Living Dead Girl (1982), all of which showed a progression towards what might be considered more “normal” narrative horror cinema, while maintaining Rollin’s characteristic visual and textual poetry.

Thus, I was interested what I might find in what he’d called his favorite of his own movies – a film he’d written in a couple of days and then rushed into production before he could second guess himself, a piece he reportedly loved best for its purity: intentionally naïve, a series of events that flow one into the next without even lip service to the demands of commercially friendly story telling (though with enough naked girls that his American producer, $am $elsky (as his name is written in the credits), said he’d still be able to sell the picture – more on that later).

Requiem for a Vampire (AKA Caged Virgins) was Rollin’s fourth “lesbian” (or at least female) vampire film, and though I’ve only seen a handful of his other films, it does feel like a boiled down reduction of the elements and qualities that make his films stand out as undoubtedly his own.

We follow two girls, dressed as clowns, on a high speed chase through the countryside as they trade fire with the police car behind them. They escape, but the man they’re with is killed. They burn him and the car and walk through the tall grass until they find a place to wash off their clown make up. They steal a motorcycle, and then some French fries.

One accidentally gets buried alive after falling into an open grave, but her friend pulls her out. They’re stalked by bats and, mesmerized, led to a crumbling chateau inhabited by bestial men who chase them and try to sexually assault them, two female vampires who try to bite them, and one older male vampire, the last of his kind, wearily hanging onto eternity, though it long ago lost all meaning or him, and at least a little in love with death.

The girls have a bit of time to strip down and gently fondle each other in bed before they are told they need to lure victims to the castle the next day, which one happily does, feeding on him and beginning her transformation, while the other understands that her “virginity” is important for the process and instead finds a man to take it from her, thus sabotaging the plan of the undead. When it is apparent what she’s done, her friend must torture her to find the whereabouts of this man, but in the end the old vampire releases them and locks himself in a tomb to waste away as the girls walk off into the night.

Written out thus, it has a semblance of narrative flow, but this description does no justice to what it feels like to watch the film. Let’s try it this way: two female clowns look at a dying man as the lights fade, when the light returns, their faces are spattered with blood. Water shifts from clear to white to red to brown in stop motion. A girl approaches a roadside food stand and smiles. The proprietor chases her into the forest. He catches her and pins her to the ground, grabbing at her breasts. Bored, she allows him to for a moment before throwing him off, hiding behind a tree, and impishly thumbing her nose.

A girl falls into an open grave which the grave digger keeps flinging dirt into though he should really be able to see her. Then he drinks some wine and goes home. Everywhere the girls turn, bats watch them from the trees, eliciting shrieks of terror, before latching onto their necks and holding perfectly still, like furry bow ties, sapping them of their will. Later a similar bat clamps onto a naked woman’s crotch, making little sucking sounds as she squirms in what is probably terror and pain, but could be read as sexual pleasure.

A striking female vampire plays a grand piano in a cemetery, surrounded by candles (the image Rollin reportedly imagined first and built the rest of the action around). Scenes of gentleness and tender touch between the girls bleed into an extended rape sequence, then into a playful, even goofy, scene of seduction-chase-vampiric feeding, and then finally into another of sexual awakening and genuine pleasure, as fake looking fangs hang loosely from ancient lips, and one friend strips the other and, weeping, whips her, the tortured friend responding only with understanding and forgiveness. But this series of images also fails to capture the feeling.

So, how did I feel watching it? Languid, fascinated, tickled, morose, occasionally (but not too often) bored, amused, indulgent, mystified, softened, delicate, playful, amorous, melancholic – these were some of the emotions that passed over me at some point – does that help at all? If you haven’t worked this out yet, I find it a tough movie to wrap my head around.

It’s easy to toss around the word ‘dream-like’ when discussing a filmmaker like Rollin, but this really is a full surrealist piece. There is little reason for one event to lead to the next, but as it does, it feels utterly natural, the film washing over you in an almost wordless wave of impressions, emotions, archetypal images, and disruptive, chaotic actions, both whimsical and brutal (the film is mostly played without dialogue; this review has 500 more words than are spoken in the whole movie).

The two central girls are often tranquil, accepting each new turn of events without comment or reaction – and yet, they do feel present – our avatars in this tone poem of a film. For all that their bodies are obviously put on display, and the camera takes pleasure in looking at them, I feel they remain a subjective presence, with wants and interests, as much or more as any other figure in the film.

I must admit that on first viewing, I didn’t immediately love it as I had his others, but I could surely appreciate the commitment to a personal vision, the refusal to make anything other than exactly the art-work he felt compelled to capture on film. But on a second watch, I already found it growing on me. Knowing what to expect allowed me to open more to taking in the rich curiosity on offer. It must be said though that this can be a difficult watch, and I don’t recommend it as an introduction to Rollin. It feels a bit like the concentrated syrup you would add carbonated water to in order to produce a different Jean Rollin movie fountain beverage.

If you like his work, you’ll probably really like this. If you don’t like it, you’ll probably hate this. If you haven’t seen anything by him yet, this is not the best place to start. However, if you’ve watched a few of his films and find that he works for you, this really is a sumptuous, intriguing, whimsical, disturbing dream to lose yourself in for a time – a melancholic, hypnotic romp through an overgrown meadow of absurdity and death, gender and violence and sex.

But on that front, a warning – as mentioned above, there is a very long rape scene which I personally found trying, not least because it doesn’t connect with anything else in the ‘story’. The girls come to the castle and are taken down to the dungeon where bestial men rape nameless women who are chained up there for what feels like an interminable time. Then we move on and it’s never mentioned again.

On one level, this was reportedly called for by the producer to have more salacious content, making this possibly impenetrable art film more marketable as sleazy exploitation, but it does also play into themes the film dreamily revolves around. When so engaging with death and sex and violence, this content does not come out of nowhere – in contrast to the placid gentleness of the girls and the exhausted ennui of the ancient vampire, down in the dungeon of the subconscious, there is brutal, corporeal, sexual life – desiring and taking and hurting and fearing and suffering and fighting. While it is indeed hard to stomach, it doesn’t feel accidental that right in the middle of this meditative reverie, there is something so ugly. Still, the fact that these discordant measures do make a kind of musical sense inside of the symphony as a whole doesn’t make them any easier to listen to, or more to the point, to watch.

But that sequence aside, I find the rest of the film a distinct pleasure, and while I enjoy some of his later, more straightforward (but, to be fair, not that straightforward) works, I’m so glad Rollin had the opportunity to craft this specific, singular work of self-expression. It’s not the most “Lesbian-Vampire” of the Lesbian Vampire movies I’ve written about (the girls share some naked caresses and a kiss and vampirism is present, but it doesn’t feel like these features are really the focus of the film, so much as simply being some of the many images of eroticism and death and need that flash before our eyes), but elements are there, and it really is a very special piece worthy of consideration. I look forward to continuing through Rollin’s catalogue.

Alucarda (1977)

Directed by Juan López Moctezuma, this Mexican lesbian-vampire-satanic-cult-nunsploitation movie, also released as Innocents from Hell has been on my watch list for quite some time, and I’m so glad to have finally seen it. I was surprised to realize that I’d already covered one film by Moctezuma, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary back in my first Lesbian Vampire post, and now I’m eager to check out another film of his, Mansion of Madness, which I know is currently on Shudder.

I’ve had a very interesting experience of watching this twice in the last week. My first viewing, I came away tickled and enamored. It was all just absolutely unhinged: crazy, over the top, glorious excess at every turn. I hadn’t found it to be a work of great technical proficiency, or you know, “good” in the conventional understanding of the word, but it just felt so exciting in its weirdness, in its stylistic maximalism.  Then on second viewing, I found myself watching a surprisingly heartfelt, even angry movie – rich in imagery and feeling – for some reason, the second time I found myself taking it much more seriously. But the takeaway is that, in vastly different ways, both times I loved it.

To give the story in short, Justine (Susana Kamini), whose mother has just died, is brought to a convent that looks like it’s been carved out of a subterranean cave in 1850, somewhere in Mexico. Her roommate, who seems to appear out of a shadow, is an intense, young girl named Alucarda (they are both supposed to be 15, but the actresses are in their upper 20s – for the best, given how often they’re naked). Within moments of meeting each other, Alucarda (Tina Romero) becomes madly intimate and the next thing you know, the girls are rolling around in the woods, giggling, and declaring eternal love.

That shadow in the background will be revealed to be Alucarda. It’s a nice shot.

Almost immediately, they swear a death pact on the grave of Alucarda’s mother, releasing grunting, snorting, heavy breathing spirits into the air, followed by a Satanic ritual (first led by a forest spirit/central European gypsy/travelling tinkerer and later overseen by a goat headed representation of Satan himself) in which their breasts are cut and they drink each other’s blood, kissing it from their lips as outside, the thunder roars, it rains blood, some people have an orgy, and the only nice nun in the convent has a levitating, lightning shooting, blood spattered prayer session.

Shortly thereafter, they start defying god, declaring their love and obedience for the Devil, and generally wreaking blasphemous havoc. The church responds by torturing Justine to death in an exorcism ceremony. She briefly becomes a shrieking, bloody vampire who sleeps au naturel in a blood filled coffin, and Alucarda goes on a Carrie-at-the-prom-esque pyrokinetic revenge streak, igniting most of the priests, nuns, novices, and the convent itself with her vengeful stare, before crumbling into dust out of a sense of guilt and overwhelming grief.

You know, your usual vampire movie stuff…

One of the first things I appreciated was how wildly Moctezuma packs in every possible thing he can – every literary or filmic reference, every shocking display, every effect (special or otherwise), every supernatural element. Le Fanu is listed as one of the writers and there are extended bits of dialogue taken directly from Carmilla, particularly bits around the funeral procession, the tinkerer, and some intense love language (Alucarda comes on pretty strong). “Alucarda” is “a Dracula” backwards and Alucarda’s mother was named Lucy Westenra, Nina’s best friend from Dracula.

The way the gypsy/spirit/tinkerer pops in and out of existence seems like something directly out of a silent movie from the 20s, like Häxan (1922). The scenes of nuns writhing about in the church, going crazy brings to mind many other films, such as Ken Russel’s The Devils (1971) or the Polish film, Matka Joanna od Aniołów (1960), and as I already mentioned, the ending seems a direct rip off of Carrie. And I think it’s all great. Sure – take whatever you can and cram it together to make something personal and special and unlike anything that’s ever been made before. Not every inclusion works, but it feels like nothing is held back – like every idea that Moctezuma had, he included. And this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, while lacking in Hollywood polish, feels wondrously pure in its unique way.

Perhaps it’s because in writing about Requiem for a Vampire, I read how Rollin had intentionally wanted to make a work of naïve cinema, but I had naïve or outsider art on my mind while watching this, a label which I don’t think could even be fairly applied to Moctezuma (this was his third film and I really don’t know about his career or the Mexican film scene, so I don’t want to presume). But there is a simplicity here that is akin to such work – simplicity of technique, certainly not of theme or style or plotting – it’s full of all of that stuff. There are things that do not “work” (some peculiar synthesized sounds that seem out of place in 19th Century Mexico, the snorting, huffing, possibly flatulent noises that accompany any Devilish influence on the girls, some dramatic reactions such as when the chief priest declares, “We must perform………an Exorcism!” and a hundred nuns gasp in unison), but when these elements surface, my impulse is not to laugh at them as B-movie failings, but rather to clap in delight because it’s just so delicious. There is no “good taste” based shame or shyness holding this movie back and its earnest commitment is infectious.

This quality is even more present in the performances. Tina Romero’s Alucarda is always dialed up to eleven in every emotional moment. She meets Justine and in seconds is sharing all her secrets with her. When she’s angry, she spins and writhes in fury and rage, shouting to the heavens, her dark eyes cutting through and cutting down all she sees. And Kamini’s Justine goes along with it. More subdued than Alucarda, she nevertheless acquiesces to her paramour’s emotional needs. Perhaps she’s not so into the blood play and wishes that Alucarda would stop talking about death all the time, but when, atop her mother’s grave, Alucarda exclaims (with very few interjections from Justine),

“Are you afraid of dying? (…) I mean dying loving each other – dying together so we may live as one forever, with the same blood always flowing through our veins. Darling, darling Justine, I live in you; would you die for me? Oh I love you so. I have never been in love with anyone. And never shall, unless it’s with you! (…) You don’t know how dear you are to me. The time is very near when you will love me as much as I do you! You will make me cruel and selfish, but love is always selfish! You don’t know how jealous I am. You must love me to death! (…) Let’s make a pact – if we ever depart from this life, we shall do it…together,”  

(much of this, I believe, being directly lifted from Carmilla)

Justine simply responds, “Alright, if it makes you happy,” whereas most normal people with a healthy sense of self-preservation would probably have already slowly backed out of the room, terrified by how obsessively crazy Alucarda seems to be. But that isn’t the kind of movie this is. I’m never one hundred percent sure of Justine’s full feelings in all this (sometimes she is hesitant, or screams, or cries – but who doesn’t?), but it’s a filmic world in which she can be open to picking up what Alucarda is laying down.

And I couldn’t talk of this movie without getting into the subject of religious horror. I have mentioned before how religiosity is one of my least favorite currents in horror fiction. So often, stories of possession and devils and exorcisms just come off feeling like advertisements for the church, as if they are trying to convince me to tremble before the terrible threat of radical evil, and open myself to ‘The Lord’ as my only hope of salvation. It’s a big turn off.

When I watched this the first time, I was puzzled at how much the religious elements didn’t put me off, and I chalked it up to the film being just so crazy that I couldn’t help but love it in spite of its content and thematics. But on second viewing, I just connected so much more strongly to how angry the film feels. Like with many works of ‘nunsploitation,’ the dominant horror of the piece consists in the actions of the ‘good people’ of the church. The film shows the “satanic” elements to be ‘evil,’ sure. But the crimes of the priests and nuns by far seem worse. And it is in the kinky and/or sinister ceremonies of the church that the film has some of its most effective staging, that it shows the most stylistic flair.

For example, after witnessing the girls acting so impiously, the whole convent has a giant orgy of flagellation. The main priest is in the center of a circle of nuns, and everyone’s clothes are torn open at the back. All of the nuns whip him with flails, and in turn, all of the nuns are whipped by an outer circle of monks. Compare this with the satanic orgy that happened in the forest and only one is drenched in gore (there’s also a pretty funny moment later when a doctor comes to investigate the disappearance of Justine’s body – the nuns explain that no one noticed the reanimated corpse get up and walk away because they were all too busy flagellating themselves – it makes you think, “well, next time, don’t do it, and you don’t have to get whipped,” but the thing is, they really like getting whipped – and hey, that’s fine – no judgement, but they could do it while murdering fewer teenagers). All of the nuns wear very characteristic habits, more like the white wrapped bandages of mummies. When we first meet them, it’s puzzling why they always look so dirty and unevenly red. Later, you realize that they’ve been stained with blood the whole time, because they are doing this sort of thing non-stop.

Even on a much lighter level, the church does not seem like a good place. The first time we see a service, the priest is going on about damnation and hellfire and all these young girls are crying and screaming, terrified of what is going to happen to them, of how doomed their souls seem to be. Sure, when Alucarda and Justine start talking about Devil stuff, it is creepy, but everyone’s response of getting terrified and running away screaming only happens because they’ve already been well primed by the priest.

And then there is the exorcism ritual, with both girls, one in white and one in black, strapped to giant crosses, surrounded by hundreds of candles, ominous black robed holy men, and blood soaked nuns, writhing on their knees as the holy spirit animates them. Alucarda lashes out, vowing to kill them all until she’s knocked out. Then Justine’s clothes are ripped from her body and the priest drives a long needle into her flesh again and again, until finally, he finds her heart and she expires – you know, cause these are really ‘good people.’

On the other side, you know, with the “Devil,”  we saw, um, a dramatic, naked ritual with the two girls and a goat headed devil and kissing and, sure, a bit of blood, and stuff, and we saw some people having sexy times in the forest. Later, after Justine rises from the dead, the only kind nun in the convent finds her vampiric, blood filled resting place and Justine initially lashes out at her, clawing at her face. But after a beat, she registers who it is and ceases her attack, only for the ‘good guys’ to start throwing holy water at her, causing her, in her suffering, to rip out the throat of the only person at the convent to have shown her any kindness, Sister Angelica.

Then the first and only time we see the Satanic powers causing real violence is when Alucarda takes her pyrokinetic vengeance out on the monastery. And who could fault her? These people murdered her love (before she fell for a cute blind girl, but she also died – like I said, Alucarda moves fast). I think the film’s heart is really with the girls – there may be irreligious creepiness in all the devil stuff, but the moralistic institution is the real monster – and its cruel wielding of power could be metaphoric of any dominating authority – church, state, or otherwise.

But then again, it is hard to say, and that kinda makes me love it all the more. Is this an anti-clerical, anti-authority film, decrying the bloodthirsty hypocrisy of those who would police our morality? Is this a religious horror movie about two young girls being corrupted by evil forces and going on a killing spree, with heroic churchmen doing the hard things that must be done? Is this a folk horror masterpiece, revealing deep cultural truths? Is this a cheesy B-movie with terrible special effects, melodramatic acting, and bizarre soundtrack choices? Is this a sleazy sexploitation flick, foregrounding what are meant to be seen as young girls as they are stripped and sexualized and tortured? Is this a madcap, insane spectacle of cinematic excess and joy? The answer to all of that and more is probably, “yes.”

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And there we have it: two films that, if we are to be honest, only barely fit into the genre of the Lesbian Vampire film, but both of which seem really important and great in very divergent, and yet somehow related, non-Hollywood ways. Both walk a line between exploitation and high art. Both center the relationship between two young girls. Both have a smattering of vampirism here and there.  And both are, well, pretty weird.  They’re both also pretty special and unique little features.

As I said at the beginning, I had chosen 4 films for this week, but this is already quite a long post, so the next two (which are, without a doubt, 100% Lesbian Vampire movies) will have to wait until next time. A couple months ago, I fell into a routine of publishing bi-monthly, rather than once a week, but I think I’m on a roll and I should be able to get this next post up sooner than that. So please join me next week as we continue this series… See you soon.