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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.

Lesbian Vampires Part III – More Modern Examples

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So here’s a little look behind-the-scenes on ye old blog. Since starting this thing, I’ve been compulsively checking Google Analytics to see if anyone is reading it.  Most weeks I get about 15-30 visits. On a low week it can hit single digits and on my best ever, I managed 77. And so I have some sense of what visitors seem to respond to. One other interesting metric I check is how often different posts have been viewed over time. It’s here that I came upon something interesting the other day. Back in August, I did two posts on the often artsy, sometimes exploitative, always beloved subgenre of the “Lesbian Vampire” film. Far and away, “Lesbian Vampires – part II” has somehow gotten more action than anything else I’ve written (far more, for some reason, than part I).

Well, as all the films I covered in those two posts were from the seventies or earlier, and I had long been planning on returning to check out some more contemporary fare, I’m going to follow what seems to be the will of the people and dig into a few more Lesbian Vampire movies – this time, all from the 1990s or later. These will all be first time watches for me, so I’m curious about a few things. Something I love about the films previously discussed is how they take place at what I think Stacie Ponder (of the blog, Final Girl, and the podcast, Gaylords of Darkness) termed the ‘intersection of arthouse and grindhouse’) – at once gorgeous, deeply felt art pieces and trashy b-movies peddling flesh and blood. Does that enticing aesthetic still carry into future endeavors? Most of the older work clearly falls within the bounds of ‘exploitation cinema’ and however much those films may (and I think they often do) carry out a progressive/feminist/emancipatory project, they were all clearly made by men for the titillation of a presumably straight male viewership. In more recent times, does the work still maintain that typical perspective of a ‘male gaze?’ Does it somehow upend it? Can you actually find a good Lesbian Vampire movie written/directed by at least one LGBT+ female-identifying person (I want to cast as wide a net as possible), and if so, beyond it being good for people to be given the room to tell their own stories, does it change anything in how those stories are told?

So, let’s find out…and, as always, there will probably be some spoilers, so be forewarned…

Nadja (1994)

This one had been on my radar for quite a while and I’m glad to have finally checked it out. But I’m also relieved I didn’t do it before last summer when I wrote about Dracula’s Daughter as it is a direct remake. Really, it’s an interesting case in terms of looking at film history, and specifically this subgenre. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda (and with David Lynch tellingly signed on as an executive producer – he also has a small cameo), this is a surprisingly faithful retelling of a film from the 30s, which embraces the dreamy qualities of a subgenre from the 70s, but is so much a product of its time – an early 90s black and white arthouse picture, frequently talky and surreal, some of it shot on a lo-res toy camcorder (when not really striking high contrast cinematography), alternatingly dwelling in genuine existential angst and cool ironic detachment. It is groovy and surreal, philosophical and pretentious, dreary, dreamy, and often quite funny. It’s a little bit of everything.

And generally, I’ve got to say it works, though in the beginning, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. Especially the first time there was an ultra low-res sequence (they seem to coincide with moments when a character is under vampiric influence), I wondered if I had it in me to get through the whole thing. But somehow it is really very watchable, even captivating – striking a delicate balance between its circuitous but deeply felt philosophizing and its offbeat sense of humor. It’s atmosphere is just as rich as any of the beautiful seventies pictures that come to mind when I think of Lesbian Vampires, but it is a different kind of richness: more a heroin chic fugue state, the mind impossibly trying to muddle its way through essential questions of death and love and hate and attraction, trailing off and staring into the middle distance for a time, before sardonically joking it off and lighting another cigarette.

In terms of plot, it is very similar to its source, but there are some modernizations, some additions, and some subversions along the way. Among other things, the attraction between Nadja (the titular daughter of Dracula) and Lucy is able to be explicitly acted on in a way that would not have been possible in 1936 (the MPAA rated it R for “bizarre vampire sexuality”). Lucy is married to Jim, the nephew of Van Helsing, who (as in the original) starts the film having just been arrested for driving a stake through the heart of this seemingly harmless immigrant from Transylvania (using public domain shots of Lugosi from White Zombie).

Lucy also describes how she has lost all contact with her family as they didn’t “approve of her lifestyle” but now she’s married so they should be ok with her. She and Jim, especially under the heightened emotions of hunting and being hunted by the undead, repeatedly declare their love and need for each other, but their marriage feels barren and empty. In one night of real attraction (if not passion), she gets bound, physiologically and emotionally, to the magnetic, soft spoken Nadja, striking beneath her cowl, who happens to be into a bit of menstrual blood play. Not entirely happily (no one in this film is ever really “happy” – it’s not that kind of picture), Lucy falls under her spell.

And the film as a whole casts a mesmerizing spell as well, especially in terms of its look and sound and feel. It can be just so sumptuous sometimes, inky blacks and ivory whites cast into stark relief. Visually, it harkens back to its 1936 progenitor while also prefiguring A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (maybe I’m overstating it and it’s just that all three are b/w movies about a vampire girl in a cowl). But also, the toy camera sequences which had initially distanced me can be very effective, creating a hazy, deeply pixelated effect, which is ugly and modern, but produces a visual fog familiar for a contemporary viewer. It’s utilized in moments when a character is not in control of their mind, of their perception, and it successfully pulls the viewer into that muddled, frustrated headspace. It’s not “pretty,” but it is effective.

Returning to comparison with the 1936 film, though more explicit, this feels less focused on the element of sexuality. In that film, Countess Zaleska was driven by her relationship to (and abhorrence of) her vampirism, and her blood lust was clearly a metaphor for other desires that might have been deemed ‘unnatural’ at the time. The implication of her attraction for the fairer sex dominated the film – both forbidden and alluring – never directly spoken of, but so, so present, and her whole focus was freeing herself from her ‘curse.’

In this more recent outing, Nadja goes home with this woman who probably never should have married a man and their relationship doesn’t need to be coded. Even though Lucy speaks of past trouble with her family, in the eyes of the film, the sexuality of their encounter feels more commonplace and therefore less significant, less dominating. When her father dies, Nadja speaks of being able to make a fresh start, but I never really get the sense that she wants to stop being a vampire – or to stop being attracted to women. It’s nice that she doesn’t have to be a tragic closeted person, desperate not to be herself, but there is an erotic charge missing – being tempted by the forbidden. I wonder if in our more enlightened times it is still as possible to generate the allure of the taboo. In Nadja, we rather dig into the allure of ironic cool and poetic ennui. Ultimately, Nadja perhaps gets a better ending than Zaleska – she at least lives, but in the body of her brother’s lover, her identity now subsumed into that other woman’s. Maybe continuance is worth it, and maybe it would have been better to be murdered by her familiar and die as herself.

Ultimately, I don’t know that this moody, poetic piece really caused me to plumb the depths of our modern listless existence, but I did rather appreciate the viewing experience. Just as much a reflection of the time and place in which it was produced as Vampyros Lesbos or The Vampire Lovers, this is both a solid 90s experimental film and a surprisingly fun little vampire flick.

Blood of the Tribades (2016)

This ultra-low budget feature (approx. 20,000 USD) from Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein took me a bit by surprise. Clearly an homage to the work of Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, and Hammer Studios, it is a crowdfunded labor of love, full of crumbling stone edifices, diaphanous gowns,  bloody breasts, and gendered violence. It may not succeed on every level, but its love for the source material is obvious and the filmmakers do a lot with what they have. As described on their Kickstarter page, the intention was to embrace the style and atmosphere of the early 70s subgenre, while including explicit socio-political messaging. Generally it is successful on both counts. It is also one of the very few examples I’ve been able to find of a Lesbian Vampire flick (co-)directed by a woman.

The film’s premise is that 2000 years ago, the vampire Bathor established a small town of vampires as a kind of utopia and then went off to conquer the continent. Since then, the undead residents have lost their way, dividing along gender lines and seemingly having purged the village of racial others. A group of men (who all drink from a fountain of Bathor’s blood, which seems to actually be making them sick) have started hunting down the women for causing their illness, being irreligious harlots, tempting them with their flesh, and not giving them sufficient offspring. For their part, the council of women’s leaders underplay the threat and try to keep the peace, though their members keep getting crossbow bolts in their hearts whenever they disrobe. Finally, two women escape the carnage with some outcasts (who I believe had been excluded based on race), and we learn that one of them can actually read the ancient words of Bathor and return the community to its founding values (if she doesn’t get staked first).

Socio-politically, it’s not subtle (men, and at least one woman, motivated by religious zealotry, attacking women for their sexuality, murdering them for making them feel inadequate – a (white) women’s movement, which fails to include women of color and pushes for a kind of moderate incrementalism, thus enabling the men’s violence – religion being corrupted and weaponized to subjugate minority populations and punish sexual/gender expression), but it more or less works. One thing I would take issue with though is the implication that the political element is a novel addition. I think the filmmakers behind the classic 70s Lesbian Vampire films may not have brought very intentional messaging to their films, but regardless, the films themselves were deeply infused with politics, often expressing feminist sentiments, even if a given director was just trying to make something lurid to sell tickets, or simply indulging in his own personal peccadillos. For example, the climax here is directly political in its language, but at the same time, it seems to directly recreate the blood ritual of The Blood Spattered Bride, a film whose politics may have been ambivalent, but no less urgent – the politics was always there.

The question this prompts for me is how much weight should be given to intent. If Franco or Kümel created something just because they wanted it to be beautiful or sexy and along the way it happened to communicate emancipatory feminist ideals, is that less valuable than a work where that was the intention from the get go? Or is art more ‘pure’ when made without seeking to make a statement (even though a statement can so freely be read therein)? I honestly don’t know.

If anything, the film’s body politics is given increased parity. For example, while there are plenty of bosoms on display, there is easily as much male nudity. The vampiric men’s rights activists have a tendency of assailing one of their own for being insufficiently fervent in his misogyny, stripping him down, strapping him to a large bondage X and whipping him bloody with roses. It all has a vibe of repressed desire being redirected into a kind of homoerotic sado-masochism, and along the way, there are rather a lot of penises (one even flies through the air, impaled on a crossbow bolt).  On the other hand, until the final, more bloody, sexual, and tragic-romantic ritual between the two remaining ladies, while the women are often nude, there was surprisingly little suggestion of eroticism (the “tribades” of the title being an archaic word used before the inhabitants of Lesbos became unanimous with the idea of female same-sex attraction) – rather, there is a lot of child-like frolicking about. Now, did this circumvent a male gaze, freeing the female vampires from objectification (though when in this state, there are usually leering male figures, waiting to kill them) or does it infantilize the women, robbing them of sexual agency? I’m not sure, but it is a change, one which many critics focused on, stating that the film ‘subverted the sexist tropes’ of its progenitors.

One other difference is the lack of seduction. A recurring trope of the earlier films is the older Lesbian Vampire (often Carmilla) luring the young ingénue to the dark side of both vampirism and sapphism, along the way, turning her against the (often abusive) man in her life. While seductive and freeing, this could also be read as presenting an older, predatory lesbian, preying on and turning younger women. That element is wholly lacking in this case, particularly as every character in the film is already undead. There is perhaps a political merit to this, but I regretted the absence of temptation.

I came to rather like this one, but I think it’s important for a viewer to comprehend its budget in advance and therefore temper expectations. I was initially put off by what I’d deemed the “cheap” look of the film – there is some exterior photography that’s quite attractive, aided by the available locations, but the interiors suffer, particularly the men’s headquarters in which the walls are just covered with sheets, masking whatever modern space they had to work in. Past that, reading the performer’s bios, it seems that most came out of the local Boston art community, specifically, the burlesque scene, and that few had much previous film acting experience. However, knowing more about the project, I appreciate its successes more and can more easily overlook its failures. To be fair, many of the early 70s films also had quite low budgets, but benefitted from working in Europe, where there’s a desolate castle around every corner, and shooting on grainy film, which can cover shortcomings in an artful haze. It’s harder to pull off this kind of picture in the States on high def digital.

The only criticism, I would really make is that there is rather a lot of world building (the whole history of the vampire village, its founder, the religion, etc.) and I think a strength of the originals was their disinterest in logically explaining anything, instead dwelling in a space of Eros-Thanatos psycho-sexual tension. While this film commits to its inspiration’s vibe, often succeeding far better than the toy crossbows might suggest, I think the exposition undercuts some of its potential power.

Still, this was a charming watch – doing so much with limited resources, and evincing an understanding and love of what made those 70s films so special. The passion that went into the project feels somehow more palpable than with many more polished, higher budget creations.

Bit (2020)

Brad Michael Elmore’s film is just tremendous fun. If I was missing the element of seduction in the previous film, this one has it in spades. However, it is less about the allure of some mysterious woman (though there’s a bit of that), than it is that of vampirism, of power, of ‘the night’ – and the night life. Temporarily leaving aside the “Lesbian” part of the equation, something I always appreciate in my “Vampire” content is fun. I remember slogging through Interview with the Vampire, irritated with Louis’s constant moaning, only to then pick up the second book, The Vampire Lestat and feel such a breath of fresh air – Lestat loved being a vampire – it’s sexy and powerful and a really good time and he wasn’t complaining about having those things. Elmore’s movie takes a similar tack, also bringing to mind such films as The Lost Boys and The Craft.

As in those two examples, the film centers around a young person, Laurel (Nicole Maines), who comes to a new city and falls in with a gang of exciting, young supernatural types (in this case, a group of radical, feminist, lesbian vampires who (mostly) hunt predatory and/or irritating men). We understand that Laurel has been through a hard time, particularly during her just completed, final year of high school. But it’s never exactly stated what that hard time was. I’d assumed coming out, but having read later that the actress is trans, I suppose it could have been transitioning. Either way, it’s clear that leading up to this, things had been emotionally and psychologically hard and that, unsure of the direction she wants to go in her life, she needs to take some time (in this case, crashing with her older brother in LA) to find her way.

When Laurel finds herself a vampire, and further, in a like-minded community, it is thrilling and empowering – it’s also just fun. Sure – she’s a protagonist of a teen vampire movie, so she’s reluctant to kill people and comes slowly to the whole blood drinking thing, but being a part of this group just feels so good. There’s a lovely scene where after some bad stuff has gone down and Laurel has had her first kill, thus completing her transformation, she’s on the roof with the leader of the group, Duke. After filling Laurel in on some personal history (and essential exposition for the narrative), Duke offers to show her one more thing. Laurel declines, saying she can’t handle any more changes tonight, but Duke insists, saying something like, “you’ll like this – everyone likes this.” And then she shows her how to fly. And it is so sweet. It’s Lois and Superman. It’s Peter Parker swinging around the city for the first time. It is a young person who’s been through such difficulties feeling lifted and free and strong.

And before this, I have to say, I actually loved the exposition (not a sentence I often write), which was all presented in a kind of disco dance sequence as we learn of Vlad, Duke’s sire. An ancient vampire, he’d held her, and a bevy of other ‘wives,’ in his thrall for decades before she was finally able to overcome him and free herself. I loved how lame he seemed. We keep cutting to Vlad on the dance floor, surrounded by his collection of sexy ladies who have been magically made to love him, with their costumes changing periodically over the years, and he just never looks cool. There is no way he could be surrounded by women without magic. On one level, it’s just funny, but on the other, it underlines the domination, the slavery at work – which is at the heart of Duke’s socio-political drive. She’s learned the hard way that power is not safe in the hands of men.

Of course, there needs to be a story, so as in The Lost Boys and The Craft, our protagonist has to be thrust into conflict with the leader of the pack, in this case, Duke. I would rather that hadn’t been necessary, but where the story goes is still enjoyable, so ok – I’ll take it. And I appreciate how the arc of the vampire storyline is rooted in emotional character issues. Laurel struggles to balance her need to find and live her truth and fulfill her responsibilities. We learn of past suicide attempts and know that she’s had a support system of family and at least one close friend. But there is a tragic inability to do right by those that have stood by her if she is to go off and become her own complete person.

Caught up in the joys of her new un-life, she irreparably fails a dear friend. Reluctant to give into her newfound bloodlust (not letting herself fully be herself), she tries to repress it and accidentally strikes out at those she wouldn’t have normally chosen, ultimately hurting a member of her family. In refusing to hunt as Duke and the others do (going after, e.g., rapists, right wing internet trolls who tweet at young girls to kill themselves, and pretentious faux ‘allies’ who talk a big feminist game for cultural cache), Laurel inadvertently ends up breaking the key rule of ‘bite club’ and turning a man (the biggest no-no for Duke – who has a nice line about how nice it would be ‘to make every woman a vampire and let men be scared to jog at night’), which pushes the story into its final act conflict. While I would have loved to stay in the space of joyful power and sexy discovery, I do like that this turn really grew out of the character in emotionally significant ways.

Another aspect I really enjoyed is that though efforts were made to film the women and their relationships and attractions without a lecherous ‘male gaze,’ the film does not feel neutered. There is still an element of desire and sexuality. Elmore is able to establish and dwell in a space of sexual tension, playing out the flirtation and seduction without it feeling like the camera is leering. It’s a tightrope walk and I think he’s quite successful.

This is a crowd-pleasing (for the right crowd) take-back-the-night party, and it does as well by its vampirism as it does by its diverse LGBT+ characters. It’s also striking the extent to which it manages to wear its socio-political viewpoint on its sleeve without ever feeling preachy or propagandistic. Balancing the emotional truth of its protagonist, the dictates of its narrative, and its progressive perspective, it successfully delivers an equally entertaining and moving, contemporary Lesbian Vampire picture.

—

So, there we have a few ‘modern’ examples of the genre. To answer my question from earlier in this post, I didn’t really find any made by a female and LGBT+ identifying person, which is a shame, but I’m glad I did watch these three. Still, I know I’ve skipped a great deal and there is still more homework to do. There is a huge gap between 1994 and 2016. I have the impression though that the Lesbian Vampire kind of disappeared into a general late night Cinemax “sexy vampire” for a stretch of the 90s and early 2000s (and many of those flicks just don’t look that interesting/good); however, she’s somewhat resurfaced of late. Also, recently, between social advancements opening doors for more people to tell their own stories, and the extent to which digital has made filmmaking so much more affordable, leading to a boom of micro-budget independent work, there is so much more explicitly ‘queer horror’ (though, for whatever reason, still vanishingly few “Lesbian Vampire” movies made by out-queer women). I wonder if this sub-genre, with one foot forever in 70s exploitation cinema, has much of a place in the current filmmaking landscape, or is it only approachable as something to either subvert or homage? I don’t know, but there are still a few other examples from the last 15 years I’d like to check out. But I’ve also watched very little Jean Rollin, and life is so short…

Polish Horror Series #6 – I Like Bats

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Really digging into horror cinema (or any cinema) means engaging with all kinds of work. You’ve got masterpieces that are both entertaining and artistically profound. You’ve got cheap B-movies that aren’t “great works of art” but evince a love of the creative process and feature some worthy ideas. You’ve got utter trash that is all the more lovable for just how trashy it is. The highest highs and the lowest lows both have their pleasures.

But sometimes a work can be hard to classify. There are ideas there. There are moments, elements, a look, a shot, a concept that intrigues, a performance that holds your attention, but it doesn’t exactly come together for you. Sometimes you don’t know if you’re encountering an artistic choice, where filmmakers have really taken a chance on something different (narratively, in how a film is cut, in a non-naturalistic style of performance) or if it is frankly just ineptitude. Are the themes and ideas of a given film complex and nuanced, ironically presented and rich in their ambiguity, their seeming ambivalence in fact the point, or has an intended message just been muddled, having haphazardly thrown together actions, events, character choices, and images, resulting in a film that fails to achieve cohesion?

Continuing my intermittent journey through the relatively limited terrain of Polish Horror (See others here), today’s entry is just such a film. From moment to moment, I found it quite watchable, and there were elements to enjoy, but I’m still not quite sure what to do with it and I suspect some of its more puzzling aspects may simply represent failures of good storytelling. But maybe they are intentional subversions of standard narrative conventions and expectations. Either way, I don’t think my role here is to judge “quality,” but to discuss whatever of interest may be found in a given work. So, without further ado, here we go…

Lubię Nietoperze (1986) (I Like Bats)

Polish film posters from the 70s and 80s are a trip!

The first act of Krystyna Kofta’s and Grzegorz Warchol’s sometimes evocative, sometimes blackly comic, and sometimes narratively obtuse and meandering I Like Bats is quite an enjoyable vampire flick. Izabela, or Iza for short (Katarzyna Walter), is a modern, independent vampire in a small town, who is regularly hounded by her aunt and the ghost of her grandfather (who expresses his wishes by making his absurdly angry looking portrait fall from the wall) to finally settle down, get a man, and stop vamping around.

But Iza doesn’t want to hear about it. She seems happy living her life her way and rolls her eyes at her aunt’s entreaties. She spurns the advances of one pushy, entitled local creep and seems to take pleasure in hanging out with her bats, making pottery for her aunt’s curio shop, and apparently preying solely on unpleasant men, often those who first try to prey on her.

Her un-lifestyle seems quite satisfying and she resists her aunt’s insistence that it’s time to start acting like a ‘real woman.’ I think the film is most gratifying in these early scenes of her presenting herself as vulnerable (sometimes dressed as a prostitute, sometimes simply being a woman walking home alone at night) only to turn the tables on some sleazebag, and sometimes getting to be fully badass, walking away from exploding vans, luxuriating in the rain and the night, and indulging in quality time with her beloved, shrieking, chattering bats.

But then a guy comes to the curio shop, buys a tea set and the main story starts in earnest, as does the narrative and thematic ambivalence. Basically, she falls in love (for some reason) with this psychiatrist and has herself committed to his institution to be cured of her vampirism (does she really want that cure or does she just want him – it’s not clear). He doesn’t believe her and treats her for delusion, but eventually, he comes around, falls in love and, after a bout of artfully filmed sex (her first time), ala Pinocchio, she becomes a ‘real girl,’ seeing her reflection for the first time, and they get married and have kids. But in the final moments, it’s revealed that the vampirism has passed to her young daughter.

But this middle stretch gets difficult because the motivation for so many character choices and the moments when a character actually feels something and changes somehow all felt like they happened off screen. The film maintains a light, ironic tone, often set to the playful score by Zbigniew Preisner (who scored a few Hollywood films but would be best known internationally for his work with Kieślowski, e.g., Red, White, Blue, or The Double Life of Veronique), and there is no real sense of urgency to the proceedings. It’s hard to fathom what she sees in the psychiatrist (named Professor Jung – perhaps there’s something to read into this – maybe we are to take all these figures as archetypes and not characters as such), and his journey from skepticism to passionate love feels unearned. The world of the film is one where nothing has stakes (argh – sorry) or happens for a clear reason. Cars crash and no one notices. Kids break shop windows and come in to retrieve their ball and no one mentions the window. A woman in a bar gets bored, takes off her top and starts dancing and no one bats an eye (again, I can’t help myself). Things just are. And then they are something else.

All the same, it is disappointing when this cool, self-possessed character, who seems to rather enjoy her vampirism, suddenly sees a pretty boring guy, gets immediately love sick and starts pining after him; worse still, in the end, she’s somehow happy to have so dramatically changed. It all feels so disheartening that, given the ironic elements, I wonder if this is intentional. Are we meant to view her change as a fairy tale happy ending (the virginal dead girl gets “kissed” by the prince and “comes to life”) or are we perhaps supposed to see the inherent personality erasing loss of self in this recurring narrative?

Fairy tales often progress in an unquestioning mode. Things simply are the way they are. Whether a fish talks or a bean stalk grows into the clouds, characters accept everything as natural; nothing is ever shocking and I Like Bats does lean on some fairy tale elements. No one really questions the existence of vampires (they only deny that Iza could be one as apparently in this world, all vampires are men – is this some comment on how a certain kind of sexual desire is perceived?). The cinematography (which is really quite attractive) is often dreamy and artful. The location used for the institute is Moszna Castle, a palace with 99 turrets sometimes referred to as “Polish Disneyland” (also – and I wonder if this was meant to function as a kind of visual pun given that the castle is quite well known in Poland, and there is a strong theme of sexual desire running under the vampirism – “moszna” in Polish translates as “scrotum” – so take that as you will).

Furthermore, the film seems to take place in some unspecified time with some modern sensibilities but costuming and cars that seem from a more distant past. Similarly, the setting seems to be deliberately unfixed – signs are in Polish, but in one scene, they visit an institute where vampires are imprisoned in cages on the beach at “the ocean” (while Poland is on the Baltic Sea, it is nowhere near the ocean). There are many advertisements (for cigarettes mostly) in English and Iza’s small town seems surprisingly multi-cultural for my (perhaps incorrect) impression of Poland in the 80s. This all comes together to imply a dreamlike no-place and no-when, peopled by odd characters who sometimes act for no-why.

This had been on my radar for some time just because it is a Polish vampire movie (and there aren’t many if any others exist at all), but I recently got the chance to see it with English subtitles because the Severin Films remaster just came to Shudder (sadly, it’s quite difficult to do screen captures from Shudder – so the pics here are from an inferior print – the newly remastered version really looks so much better) as part of a set of movies accompanying the second edition of Kier-La Janisse’s fascinating House of Psychotic Women (the first edition of which I wrote about here). Her focus is on films that present “female madness” and I’m very curious how she frames this one. Though it is her explicit reason to be in the clinic, Iza’s vampirism does not read as any kind of mental illness. She seems quite happy with it and the way she lives. If anything, her insistence on the attention of this man seems like the unmotivated compulsion. Maybe therein lies the madness?

She seems constantly surrounded by sleazy, irritating, or pathetic men, and she seems to exclusively feed on those who in some way hunt her, who desire her, sometimes acting on that desire violently. Professor Jung doesn’t seem much interested in her at all, either because he doesn’t like women, or he doesn’t want any distractions from his work (two explanations he gives), or he just doesn’t like her. Is his indifference the magic spell that infatuates her so? She is only upset that he doesn’t take more interest. And in the end, when finally he comes around, rescues her from the beach-vampire-cage institute, and takes her off to go skinny dipping/make love to her until she’s human, she seems very happy in her “normal” human family life. If anything, the reveal of her daughter’s fangs (and penchant for killing gardeners) plays as a darkly comic twist – that even though Iza has put her dark past behind her and settled down into civilized life, this unruly female desire resurfaces in her offspring. Does the film want us to be happy for Iza in her newfound “normalcy” and to laugh at how the “problem” persists or does it want us to mourn for Iza’s loss of identity as she disappears into bland conformity and to laugh at how good it is that her lost vivacity continues in her child? Un-life will find a way.

It is a consistently watchable (and again, the look and feel and sound of it all is striking and expressive) and frequently enjoyable film, which still puzzles in its often confounding character beats. Is this an issue of poor editing and half-baked writing, or is it instead successful in ironically telling us a fairy tale that we should view as facile and even harmful, its disjointed, apparently unmotivated qualities supporting that reading? It’s hard to find much analysis on it in either English or Polish (thus, I’m particularly curious to see what Kier-La Janisse has to say). The short English descriptions online present a quirky vampire romance (but I found no real analysis or criticism beyond user reviews saying “weird, great movie” or “weird, boring movie”) and much of what I’ve found in Polish either describes it as a bit of superficial, erotic schlock produced late in the communist regime as a kind of ‘bread and circuses’ to keep the public entertained and thus pacified (attacking it as regrettably ‘low art’) or uses it as an example of how Polish cinema really didn’t respect and therefore didn’t succeed at genre film (attacking Polish film culture for being over-snobbish when it comes to matters of ‘low’ and ‘high’ art). Hey, if any Polish readers know of more insightful readings out there, please let me know – I’m very curious and limited by my embarrassingly weak Polish skills.

For my part, I watched it twice in a couple days and enjoyed watching it both times, but I can’t say if I think it’s good or not. It has been interesting to consider and it’s certainly got moments that shine. It’s fascinating how sometimes watching something from a culture you didn’t grow up in (even if you’ve lived there for a while – I’ve been in Poland for 14 years at this point), you can be more forgiving of faults, more open to reading what seem like very strange choices or even mistakes in a more charitable light. I often feel like maybe there’s something culturally informing all this that doesn’t land for me, that just goes over my head. It makes for a rich and sometimes mysterious viewing experience. If you’re not in a hurry, and you’re in the mood for an odd little piece of off-kilter vampire cinema from a specific time and place (trying to be no time or place), perchance this one is for you.

Lesbian Vampire Films – Part II

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

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

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huzzah!