The Nude Vampire (1970)

The impression one gets from Jean Rollin’s early films is that he wrote no screenplay, but worked instead from hastily-scribbled, vaguely-realized ideas in a notebook. This adds to both their charm and their incoherency. Rape of the Vampire (1968), his first full-length feature and the prologue in an extending series of vampire films, was a surrealistic, sometimes plodding journey through his nightmares and daydreams. Vampires abandoned in a decaying castle; vampires marching in a parade upon a beach, led by their Queen; vampires in a theater, conducting a wedding like a surrealistic play, interrupted by a violent, ’68-style riot; lust, paranoia, blood, and death. The film was not well-loved, but made enough money that he was encouraged to make a follow-up. That would be The Nude Vampire (La vampire nue, 1970), which once again made a commercial plea through its title, luring the unsuspecting raincoat crowd into another subversive and lysergic Gothic romp. French comic artist Druillet provided another fantastic poster, blending Art Nouveau with Avalon Ballroom-style psychedelia; personally, I would have found that a lot more alluring than the title. The film is another exercise in Rollin’s personal fetishes, with a plot that’s only slightly easier to follow than its predecessor; nevertheless, it’s an important film for Rollin as it addressed some of Rape of the Vampire‘s problems while taking major steps forward in realizing his own unique style.

A psychedelic treatment in a secret laboratory.

A mysterious opening is one of several sequences which resemble Holy Mountain-era Jodorowsky. A blue-hooded woman is in a laboratory of some kind, surrounded by men in red and black hoods. She’s stripped of her dress. A blood sample is taken. We see multi-colored fluids distributed into jars; Rollin, apparently, has shaken off black-and-white for good. Then we glimpse a red-headed girl (Caroline Cartier) in a transparent orange nightgown slipping out of a gate in a wall, and sneaking off down the sidewalk and into the nighttime streets. Men in black clothes and animal masks pursue her: a rooster, a stag, a jackal, a fly, a donkey, a cow. She passes a young man on a staircase leading off the street, and looks at his face, touching it in astonishment. He goes with her into an alley, where they face off with the silent masked pursuers. The improvisational jazz score goes wild. The man in the elk mask shoots the girl, and she drops to the ground; the animal-men carry her body away, and the helpless young man follows them back to the gated estate, where he is denied admittance by a guard.

Pierre (Olivier Rollin) is attended by his father's twin servants (Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel).

The next morning, the young man, whose name is Pierre (Olivier Rollin), confronts his wealthy father, Georges Radamante (Maurice Lemaître), since the place where the animal-men took refuge was Radamante’s private club. The father tells his son to mind his own business, and returns to the club with his two compatriots, Fredor (Jean Aron, looking like Dr. Strangelove) and Voringe (Bernard Musson), where they relax with drinks while watching the least-erotic dancing ever invented (a woman in a transparent, full-body leotard and Raggedy Ann hair writhes to a drumbeat while wearing conical pink pasties). After the dancer collapses to the floor – so exhausting was her writhing – their white-suited, freckled assistant, Solange (Ursule Pauly), arrives to receive her instructions from Radamante. Then she goes backstage and inspects the waiting dancers, one of whom, we learn, is a spy infiltrating the club. In the evening, everyone gathers once more in the gated building, but this time Pierre successfully breaks in, disguising himself as one of the guests. It seems it might be a very Eyes Wide Shut affair. When Pierre follows the guests into a small room, he sees a projector switched on, and the image of a blonde woman appears. Then that same woman steps out of the crowd, stands beside her own image, and shoots herself in the head. A hood is pulled over the dead woman’s face, and everyone assembled dons a hood as well. The corpse is taken into the main hall where the men in animal masks present that same mysterious redhead whom Pierre attempted to save the night before. Even though she’d been shot, she’s quite alive, and steps down the staircase to drink the spilled blood upon the body.

A man in a stag's mask keeps watch from the high walls of the secret club.

To complete this dream-like progression of events, everyone returns to the secret room, where now Pierre’s face is displayed from the projector. He’s handed the gun. As he steps before them, he breaks the cycle and fires the gun into the belly of the man beside him, then shoots randomly into the crowd of cultists and sprints out of the room, onto a walkway above the walls of the old building. Here the stag-faced man confronts him with a switchblade, a sentence I never thought I’d write. Pierre is out of bullets, but the adversary is slain by an Asian woman with a curved, sacrificial blade. “You must leave here!” she warns, and Pierre flees. As he leaves by the main gate, a gray-haired man in a yellow turtleneck and a silver cape (Michel Delahaye) takes him by the shoulder and says, “You will find your father at his office, my son. Go there at once – other mysteries await you!” We are twenty-three minutes into the film.

A spy posing as an exotic dancer infiltrates Radamante's townhouse.

Pierre heads to an office building to meet his friend Robert (Pascal Fardoulis), an artist who paints nude models (of course), and who’s researching the mysterious activities of the club. As they stare at photos taken of the redhead who drinks blood, Robert offers, “She could be a robot. That would explain why she’s invulnerable.” Pierre disagrees: “She put her hand on my cheek. I touched her. I know she can’t be a robot.” A buzzer sounds. Everyone gathers in the hallway, including Pierre and Robert, donning red hoods. The redhead is led down the hall by the rooster-man and the fly-man. The girl suddenly pulls off Robert’s hood, and smiles at him; a fight breaks out. Pierre is delivered to his father, where he’s given perfectly logical answers to all his questions. The girl is an orphan with a blood condition, which can heal her skin from bullet wounds (“just as long as no vital organ is hit”). As for all the animal masks and hoods – the girl is worshiped as a goddess by a suicide cult, and he has graciously loaned them his townhouse. He’s trying to cure her condition by searching for others who are like her. She can’t tolerate daylight, and “the hoods are to hide the faces of normal people from her. She has never seen a human face. She must not know that she is different from others.” It’s all so simple.

The Castel twins at rest.

Back at his townhouse, Radamante feels up his twin female servants while making plans to meet with a mysterious stranger in a country chateau. Those servants are played by Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel, who will become mainstays of Rollin’s filmography. For the first half of the film they wander about in outfits which consist of Roman centurion skirts and sliding discs of glass hanging over their bare breasts. In the second half, they silently stalk about the grounds of the isolated chateau, holding candles: a Rollin trademark. Radamante orders Solange to kill Robert, and she does so, but not before telling him that the redhead is really a vampire, and that Radamante and his associates are holding her captive so they can learn the secret of immortality.  At the chateau, the old men are wakened in the middle of the night by an ominous drumbeat. An army of vampires, led by the man in the silver cape, waits in the darkness, preparing to make their move. Pierre arrives, and later in the evening meets with the lord of the vampires, with whom he shares a mutual goal: to rescue the captive girl. After the chateau is finally besieged, Pierre is initiated into their sect by passing through a magical portal in a curtained theater attended by two kind, elderly immortals. This portal leads him back to the beach first seen in Rape of the Vampire, where he learns from the man in the silver cape that they are not really vampires – or robots – but part of a highly-evolved race of mutants. Or, as my wife put it, “Oh, he’s Magneto.”

Ursule Pauly, as Solange, offers some further exposition before killing Robert.

Like Rape of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire offers one hypothesis and phony explanation after another until finally the “truth” is revealed, though the storytelling is less clumsy and more assured in its stream-of-consciousness fluidity. Rollin was becoming more skilled at translating his dreams directly onto film, and it’s the images that you’ll remember: the men in the animal masks stalking the vampiress through dark streets; the army of vampires carrying candles through the white corridors of the chateau; the Castel twins lying nude upon the floor like sleeping cats, in a circular chamber with a burning brazier in its center and painted, fetishistically-arranged baby dolls posed upon a table. It’s apparent to any viewer that you don’t need to decipher every moment; it’s a purely sensory experience. The languid tone – another Rollin trademark – is not to every taste, but that goes for everything Rollin; and anyway, the absurd dialogue is always diverting. This is a transitional film, but hallucinatory and gloriously weird. Having gained some traction here, Rollin’s next effort would be truly inspired.

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Rape of the Vampire (1968)

Jean Rollin (1938-2010) did not direct films; he directed dreams. And they were no one’s dreams but his. Prolific from the 60’s until his death, he was also an obsessively personal filmmaker, and a smotheringly intense fetishist, like Luis Buñuel – though far less polished, and certainly presenting nothing that interested the majority of film critics during his lifetime. He made bona fide cult films: for a select few, and untranslatable to the masses. The mystery of Rollin is that his films were both lyrical and exploitative. He put on the screen what interested him, with no filter. He accepted offers to make hardcore pornography because it helped finance his more personal films, though these were just slightly less sexual (regardless, it hasn’t helped endear him to those who won’t consider him a “serious” filmmaker). The same images recur in his filmography, like a poetic refrain: girls in diaphanous gowns carrying candles; a beach near Normandy, covered with stones, chilly and desolate; a curtained theater as a portal to another world; and, of course, vampirism – bats, fangs, buckets of blood, the works. His films are too slow-moving for many horror fans, and too exploitation-y for the art house – but his images and ideas stick with you. Those who are curious enough to return, to trace the patterns in his mythology and begin to appreciate the art behind them, can be considered marked by Rollin’s bite.

The Statue of Traybas, which commands the four vampire sisters.

He began his career with short films and documentaries, but his first fully-realized project is Le Viol du Vampire (Rape of the Vampire, 1968), a surrealistic, overwhelming 100 minutes crammed full with characters and plot, and yet excruciatingly difficult to follow. The initial public and critical reaction to the film was perhaps understandably hostile. The viewer is plunged into a complex tale in what seems to be in medias res, inspired by the cliffhanger serials Rollin loved as a child. Only a few of the characters are given names, and you don’t learn those names right away. There’s quite a lot of dialogue and exposition, and you struggle to keep up. Then things get really weird. Characters die and are resurrected. New characters are introduced abruptly. The story turns at right angles, and throws one surrealistic image after another at you. And yet, clearly, there is a plot, there is a purpose, and there is an intended emotional impact; so the question becomes, how much of this do you try to work out?

A skewered bat, from a dizzying historical flashback.

What’s clear is that there are four sisters who believe themselves to be immortal vampires. In their personal and possibly imagined histories, one was raped by vampire hunters, and another was blinded by them; a third sister cannot tolerate sunlight; a fourth diets on bird blood. They live together now in a decrepit chateau where they receive commands from an occult statue – although, in an absurd reveal, we see there’s a man who crouches behind it barking orders. Three young people – Marc, Thomas, and Brigitte – arrive at the chateau and attempt to cure them; Thomas, a psychoanalyst, believes they aren’t immortals, but are suffering from a shared psychosis. Rioting villagers with pitchforks – straight out of a Universal Studios monster movie, except they wear fake mustaches and there are only about five of them – storm the chateau. Brigitte is killed. The woman who believed she was blind is now truly blinded when a spear is flung into her face. Thomas, who has fallen in love with one of the sisters, asks her to bite him on the neck; then they stumble to a beach, where they collapse and die. This is the end of part one; or, more befittingly, Episode One.

The Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger) arrives in semi-splendor.

In Episode Two (“The Vampire Women”), we learn that the four sisters were vampires after all. Thomas and his lover thus come back to (undead) life, naked and drenched by a stream of blood on the beach. The Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger) arrives and punishes her servant, the old man who stood behind the statue. She and her underlings depart for a secret clinic run by vampires, who are actually working behind the Queen’s back to discover a cure for vampirism. Marc chases the Queen’s funeral carriage (which is led by a Satanically upside-down cross) through the cemetery to retrieve Brigitte. Brigitte is transformed into a vampire. The Queen attempts to stage a vampire wedding in a theater, but is interrupted by a raid led by Marc, who opens fire upon the vampires with a machine gun. Ultimately, the antidote for vampirism is a success, but it also kills those who take it – including Brigitte and the Queen. Thomas becomes entombed with his lover, and in grief Marc walks through city streets carrying the body of Brigitte. I may have gotten some of the specifics wrong, but it’s always difficult to recall the details of last night’s dream. Rollin leaves you adrift in this world, and you make of it what you will. Much of this is inscrutable, but certain images draw blood.

The Queen prepares to bite one of her patients.

It’s always difficult to defend Rollin, because his flaws can be obvious. He typically worked with unprofessional actors; if he needed extras, those would inevitably be the film crew. He shot on miniscule budgets, stealing shots where he could, and some of these sets seem held together by Scotch tape. But his location shooting – in eerie estates, in empty fields or on vacated suburban roads, and, of course, that stony beach – provided some fine special effects. He had two other weapons in his arsenal: Gothic plots with fairy tale archetypes, and nudity. A lot of nudity. In one of the opening shots, an actress’s top is pulled down and she’s groped for no good reason. The Queen of the Vampires wears an outfit with holes cut out for the breasts. But sometimes his use of nudes can create an indelible image, such as when the blind vampiress stumbles naked through the lapping waves of the beach, lost in the currents; or when Thomas and his lover cling to one another upon the rocks, covered in blood, as two vampire newborns. His films are unquestionably erotic, but he will sometimes cross the line between art and exploitation; it’s a blurry line, but it’s there. This is the Rollin conundrum. It might be that the best way to appreciate his deeply-felt films is to simply set aside those critical reservations, in the same way that you might (as I recommend) not worry so much about grasping every plot detail; just let his sensual, violent, and surrealistic images wash over you. It makes for ideal midnight viewing.

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The Legend of Hell House (1973)

“Welcome to my house. I’m delighted you could come. I’m certain you will find your stay here most illuminating. Think of me as your unseen host, and believe that during your stay here I will be with you in spirit. May you find the answer that you seek. It is here, I promise you. And now, auf Wiedersehen.” – Emeric Belasco, The Legend of Hell House

Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House borrowed elements of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, as well as its film adaptation The Haunting (1963), but with more explicit sex and violence, and more sinister ghosts; it’s a harrowing read, and one which Stephen King has cited as a major influence. A film adaptation quickly followed, directed by John Hough (Twins of Evil), with Matheson writing the screenplay. A more faithful adaptation would warrant an R, but Hough somehow turned in one of the most sexualized PG films ever made. Pay close attention to the active soundtrack and you’ll notice that Hell House is having (female) orgasms for the entire film. Likewise, the central characters are wrestling with psychic, emotional, or sexual repression, and sometimes all three. The house – which, late in the film, is referred to as a psychic battery – charges its occupants with desire, hatred, and insanity. They try to seduce one another; they mistrust one another; they share theories about the haunting, and argue, and drink, and when the table shakes and the cutlery flies lethally through the air, they blame one another for causing it. Like the best haunted house tales, this is less about the house’s ghosts than the psychic baggage borne by the guests. They’re doomed, but they were doomed anyway; the ghosts only hurry their fates.

Approaching Belasco House: (L-R) Gayle Hunnicutt, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Pamela Franklin

The cast is small enough to support a chamber drama, spare enough to simplify the story and draw attention to its themes. Roddy McDowall, whom Hough would next use in Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), is Ben Fischer, a “physical medium” who was a young phenom when he first came here, to the Belasco House, in 1953; his fellow psychic investigators were killed or crippled during the investigation. Pamela Franklin (The Innocents, The Nanny) is Florence Tanner, a young and devoutly Christian mental medium. Clive Revill (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes) plays Dr. Lionel Barrett, a physicist who believes that Belasco House isn’t haunted, just suffused with a psychic energy that awaits validation through science. Regretfully, he decides to bring along his wife, Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt); in the novel we’re made aware of her severe separation anxiety, which provides a better explanation of why she’s come. All of them gather at the house on the invitation of a millionaire who purchased the home from the bankrupt Belasco family; he is giving them five days in the “Mount Everest of haunted houses” to prove there is life after death, with a healthy financial reward awaiting their return. The dark and cavernous house was built by one Emeric Belasco to harbor his decadent, Satanic parties. The windows are bricked up. Erotic art lines every room. There is a blasphemous chapel in one section of the house, giving off such bad psychic vibrations that Florence Tanner can’t bring herself to enter it. A black cat stalks the premises – redundantly.

Florence Tanner (Franklin) summons ectoplasm during a psychic sitting.

It doesn’t take long before the authenticity of the hauntings makes itself clear. A phonograph player turns itself on, playing an ominous recording of the late Emeric Belasco welcoming guests to his home. During a psychic sitting, Florence summons a spirit, which warns them to get out of the house, or it will have to hurt them. After this spirit later visits her room, flinging a bedsheet onto her head, she becomes convinced it’s Emeric’s son, whom she calls Daniel; she comes to believe that freeing Daniel’s spirit is key to exorcising the house. Later, during a second sitting, she summons streams of white ectoplasm from her fingertips (in the nineteenth century, some mediums claimed to have this ability), but when Dr. Barrett asks her to leave a sample in a beaker, she shatters it. Over dinner, she throws a tantrum at the doctor, and simultaneously a telepathic pandemonium is unleashed, nearly killing Barrett, and only reinforcing his theory that the house isn’t haunted, but simply choked with a powerful psychic energy that she can tap into. For his part, Fischer remains noncommittal. He warns that the house will try to manipulate them; but he also keeps himself closed psychically to the house’s influence. He would rather remain on the defensive until the week is out and he can collect his money. But Florence’s insistence on recovering Daniel’s body and freeing his spirit sets off a chain of events which prove catastrophic, and Fischer witnesses the events of 1953 re-enacted once more, until finally he decides to open up, remove those thick glasses, and confront Emeric Belasco himself.

Ann (Hunnicutt), possessed by Belasco House, attempts to seduce Fischer.

The Legend of Hell House is cleverly designed by Matheson to be a mystery which cannot be solved until all sides, with their competing theories, come together. Dr. Barrett, Tanner, and Fischer are each partially correct about what is behind the Hell House hauntings, but only once the body count begins does the answer begin to come clear. Ultimately – and, again, this is slightly clearer in the book – Hell House is as much about impotence and human frailty as it is untethered sexuality. For all its jolts and invisible terrors, this horror story winds its way toward a recognizably human conclusion. Hough does a remarkable job ratcheting up the intensity of his PG-rated film, showcasing his actors with sweaty close-ups and carefully considered lighting, often surrounding them with pitch-black shadows. Those shadows sometimes move, as in one indelible scene in which Ann, lying in bed next to her husband, witnesses the two embracing bodies of an erotic statuette come to writhing life. But the real star is the sound design. An innovative score, throbbing like the heartbeat of a machine, was composed by Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire of the prog/electronic group Electrophon. (In the 60’s, Derbyshire had helped realize Ron Grainer’s iconically otherworldly theme music for Doctor Who.) Just as with The Haunting and, later, The Shining (1980), every moment in this haunted house is filled with unease thanks to an active soundtrack. I can’t imagine getting a good night’s sleep in this house. Apart from the persistent orgasmic moaning, restless noises drift from down the corridors and beyond the walls; the psychic ability of Florence Tanner is effectively reproduced with half-heard whispers in her bedroom, which she interprets to be the voice of Daniel Belasco. All of this works in the way a haunted house movie ought to, playing upon the viewer’s fears of dark cellars and corridors, and strange noises in the middle of the night. Since the windows are bricked up, it’s always the middle of the night in Hell House.

Belasco - Emeric, or Daniel? - uses the body of Florence Tanner to warn the guests to leave.

So, as much as one could wish the film had been rated R, for a low budget AIP picture of the early 70’s, this is pretty well done. Its influence can be felt from The Shining to Edgar Wright’s loving homage in “Don’t!” (for Grindhouse). The ending has always felt a bit anticlimactic to me, though over multiple viewings I’ve come to appreciate it (or perhaps grown used to it). McDowall’s neurotic style of performance wouldn’t be showcased as well until 1985’s Fright Night; that would make for a fine double feature. Here, he’s well matched by both Revill and Franklin, as the three duel for authority in Belasco House. Horror fans will smile at an unexpected cameo by the veteran British actor Michael Gough. The Region 1 DVD, released in 1999 by 20th Century Fox, is ill-considered from the cover (which contains a major spoiler) to the extras (a trailer for the Adam West Batman film, for no reason); however, where it counts – in the presentation of the film – the disc is superb and in no need of an upgrade. Watched on a large-screen TV, you can see the skin blemishes of the actors in Hough’s extreme close-ups; the colors pop and the shadows are a deep black. All this just makes it easy to become absorbed by Hell House again.

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