Salvation Magazine Issue 1 - Magazine - Page 12
Jean Rollin
making conventional sense, then there is much to enjoy here. While
the black and white film betrays the technical inexperience of all involved – the focus is often off, for one thing – it offers up a series of
startlingly striking images, some haunting moments and an atmosphere
of such complete weirdness that it becomes oddly compulsive. The
entire thing is closer to a series of artistic vignettes than any sort of narrative story and is as close to the scattershot unpredictability of a dream
as any film you’ll see.
The crude English title translation The Rape of the Vampire (it is,
admittedly, a direct translation, but Le Viol du Vampire sounds so much
more elegant!), has probably not done much for the film’s reputation, or
Rollin’s either for that matter - critics and fans alike are quick to judge and
the idea of a sex film leering over rape is not going to impress many people. In truth, the film is not remotely exploitative or sexually violent – the
nudity, while frequent, is restricted to breasts and buttocks and is entirely
nonsexual, while the action scenes are a knowing pastiche of B-movies,
serials and horror clichés, twisted and deconstructed to the point where
they seem almost deliberately undramatic. This is hardly the Rollin film
to use to introduce new admirers, but for those already attuned to his
unique style, it will be a fascinating, trippy experience, and one that
shows his remarkable visuals could work just as well in monochrome as
they did in lurid colour. But the lurid colour definitely added something
to the mix and his next
movie is one of the most
delirious and surreal visual feasts that you could
hope to see.
La Vampire Nue (English: The Nude Vampire)
was made in 1970 and is
a wild, psychedelic tale
that takes full advantage
of the medium, keeping
the screen awash with
remarkable, wild visual
stimuli and vibrant colours that positively bleed
out of the screen in this remastered version. Whatever technical inexperience that Rollin had with
his previous film has now
been replaced with an assured weirdness - from this point onwards, Rollin’s films might still have eschewed traditional filmmaking styles but now
they were doing so deliberately. He was developing a style, one that is not
for everyone - his films are a mix of wild visuals and static stillness, cliched
vampire imagery, exotic sexuality, cartoonish visuals, dreamlike dialogue
and a strange sense of tragedy and bleakness. It’s a heady mix and if you
don’t immediately get it, you’re probably not going to be converted by extended viewing. The visual spectacle of his work is, to a large degree, a
replacement for a story, and that’s never more the case than in this film,
which is a tale of secret societies, sweaty old men seeking immortality, a
vampire cult and a remarkably hapless and inefficient hero, all of which
are little more than devices to hang fascinating imagery on.
The film offers up a mix of outrageous costumes more suited, perhaps, to Flash Gordon than vampire horror; bizarre and off-kilter
characters (in most circumstances, the one-dimensional, wooden performances on display here would be a distraction; but here, they simply add to the over-arching oddness of the atmosphere); and a furious
psych-prog soundtrack that propels things along at such a pace that
you quickly stop worrying about the plot holes and instead just begin to
absorb the whole experience, allowing the film to wash over you. There
are moments where the film slows to a crawl, admittedly – but even then,
there is always some arresting visual moment just around the corner.
It’s the product of a comic book imagination, where the imagery and
the excess are everything, and the resulting film is more like a fever
dream than anything. You can see hints of the mysteries of Last Year in
Marienbad, the work of Godard and more here. As a horror film, it barely works, and as a sex film, it’s even more unsuccessful – again, there’s
relatively little nudity and no sex at all. It’s perhaps understandable that
some people react so negatively to these films because they confound
expectations and that probably leaves a lot of viewers both confused and
Gothic trappings
and extensive
nudity that ought
to have been catnap to exploitation
distributors
10/Salvation
disappointed. If you watch a film called The Nude Vampire, you probably
have certain requirements in mind and this film is not really interested
in fulfilling them.
Rollin’s follow-up to La Vampire Nue was Le Frisson des Vampires,
which translates directly as Shiver of the Vampires - the title used on the
English-language editions today - but is perhaps more accurately interpreted as ‘ The Vampire’s Thrill’. Again, it’s a title that loses something in
translation. In any case, this 1971 film generally avoids the comic book
psychedelia of its predecessor in favour of a more conventional tale of
the supernatural, with an almost classical horror narrative in which a
honeymooning couple (Sandra Julien and JeanMarie Durand) find themselves staying at an old family castle. They are told that the wife’s cousins
have passed away, and are surprised to then see them, seemingly alive
and well. It soon becomes clear that they have become vampires, and are
determined to draw their remaining family members into the cult.
While this seems a less trippy experience than the previous films, let’s
not pretend that this is conventional cinema. As with most of Rollin’s
work, his sympathies lie with the alleged monsters as much as with the
victims and his story is a romanticised tale of vampirism, with our living
heroes being drawn into the vampire cult out of love, not malice. While
it is a more sedate story, it still wallows in a dreamlike atmosphere, with
the same remarkable visual tableaux that make his films so unique taking precedence over more traditional horror imagery. In a sign of the
changing times, the film is also considerably more openly erotic than its
predecessors – there are no real sex scenes, but there’s much more nudity and an aura of depraved sensuality pervades. If this is still a dream
narrative, it’s definitely more along the lines of a wet dream, albeit a
rather unsettling one.
There is a downside to this movie – it has rather too many lengthy dialogue scenes that somewhat lack pace and at their worst bring everything
grinding to a halt, suggesting that Rollin was more at home creating his
delirious visions of ecstasy rather than dealing with a (relatively) straightforward narrative. It was better to let the images do the talking – something he thankfully returned to in his next film, also made in 1971.
