Salvation Magazine Issue 1 - Magazine - Page 10
Jean Rollin
SEX, FANTASY
and the
VAMPIRE
David Flint looks into the ethereal and almost fairytale like
world of Jean Rollin’s vampire films.
It’s one of the tragedies of cinema that Jean Rollin’s remarkable early Seventies work remains, for the most
part, unknown or dismissed outside (and sometimes even inside) cult 昀椀lm circles. Sold as sexploitation horror 昀椀lms in France, the movies were relegated to the grindhouse circuit in America - if they played at all.
Most of Rollin’s work failed to make it to the international market despite the gothic trappings and extensive
nudity that ought to have been catnip to exploitation distributors. The fact that few of these 昀椀lms travelled
well is perhaps a clue that there was something beyond mere boobs and blood at work here.
rench horror cinema of the era is often an odd beast, sitting at the
crossroads between the exploitation cinema and arthouse experimentation - if you look at films like Morgane et ses nymphes or the
occult movies of Mario Mercier, you can see a strange, otherworldly universe in existence that is beyond that found in the films from
other countries - similarly, Jess Franco’s most poetic and dreamlike stories
tend to be those shot for French producers. Rollin’s work is interesting
because it becomes more than just the sum of its parts - on paper, these
films seem trashy, cliched and throwaway, bogged down with tacky titles
that were, like the levels of nudity of display, a contractual obligation from
producers like Sam Selsky who were willing to indulge Rollin’s fantastical
ideas as long as he included enough saleable elements.
Rollin’s best-known films are his vampire movies, all of which sound
like pure exploitation - The Rape of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire and
so on. For years, if genre critics (with the honourable exception of David
Pirie) mentioned Rollin at all, it was to dismiss him as a soft-porn director
who just happened to make vampire sex films, a dismissal that was rarely
based on actually having seen any of the films it would seem. That the only
one of his films to make it to UK VHS in the early 1980s was the entirely
untypical and disposable job for hire Zombie Lake hardly helped his reputation. It would take the sterling efforts of Nigel Wingrove’s Redemption
Films in the 1990s to bring his work to a new generation.
Rollin’s films - at least his films from the late 1960s until the mid-Seventies - are hardly exploitation cinema, at least not in a way that we might
easily recognise. They are barely horror films at all, in fact - many of them
have more in common with the strange, slightly scary, playful films of the
era that worked as fantasy explorations of female sexuality and rebellion,
like Jacques Rivette’s Julie and Celine Go Boating or Vera Chytilova’s Daisies - or if we want to be a little more on the nose, Valerie and Her Week
of Wonders and Lemora - A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural - than they
F
8/Salvation
have with Hammer’s Vampire Lovers, Joe Sarno’s Veil of Blood, The Devil’s Wedding Night or any other vaguely erotic vampire film of the period.
Some of the films have a dark melancholy about them and many are awash
with pop art and comic book sensibilities that feel more like underground
cinema than anything vaguely commercial.
ean Rollin’s debut feature appeared in 1968. Le Viol du Vampire
is a strange, often confusing affair that will probably leave most
viewers baff led if they come to it expecting a conventional narrative - or even a slightly weird vampire film. It does, however, offer
hints of where his remarkable career would go and has much to
fascinate within its confused whole. Originating as a short film designed
to play support to another feature, the film was eventually expanded to
feature-length, taking the form of a two-part story – though part two is
essentially a more or less direct continuation of part one, forming a single if rather disjointed narrative. The film is somewhat loosely plotted,
but initially tells the story of a psychoanalyst who visits a chateau where
four women live, believing themselves to be vampires. They’ve been convinced of this by superstitious local villagers, who then descend on the
chateau to stop the ‘vampires’ escaping.
This story of psychological gaslighting is interesting, but Rollin is perhaps less interested in exploring ideas of superstition and terrorism of
those who are different than he is in playing with trippy, hallucinogenic
imagery and fantasy. As the film progresses, it gets stranger and stranger, with what little coherent story there was falling away to a series of
dream-like moments involving real vampires. Characters frequently disappear and then reappear later with no real explanation, everyone seems
to be in a trance-like state and the film’s tenuous grasp on reality rapidly
falls away.
It sounds like a mess, and in many ways it is. But if you can adjust your
mind to accept Rollin’s free-form narrative and not worry about anything
J
