Review: Le Frisson des Vampires )70) - very long
Iain Mclachlan
(Fr 1970)
Alternate Titles: SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES; SEX AND THE VAMPIRE; STRANGE
THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT; THRILL OF THE VAMPIRES; VAMPIRE THRILLS; TERROR OF
THE VAMPIRES.
EastmanColour
RT: 90mins
Pro Co: Les Films Modernes/Les Films ABC
Dir: Jean Rollin;
Pro: Monique Natan;
Wrs: Jean Rollin, Monique Natan.
Phot: Jean-Jacques Renon;
Film Ed: Olivier Gregoire;
Mus: Gorupe Acanthus;
Art Dir: Michel Delesalles.
Sound Ed: Jean-Philippe Delamarre.
Cast: Sandra Julien. Jean-Marie Durand, Jacques Robiolles, Michel Delahaye,
Marie-Pierre, Kuelon Herce, Nicole Nancel, Dominique.
INTRODUCTION
Together with fellow maverick Alain Jessua (Traitement de Choc 73), Jean
Rollin was effectively the only French director regularly contributing to
the fantastic genre during the 1970s and into the 1980s. While Jessua
tended to work in the science fiction genre (often featuring elements of
satire and parody), Rollin made a niche for himself in erotic horror. Le
Frisson des Vampires was his third official feature, the second in colour
after what is considered his breakthrough film La Vampire Nue (69). The
work reviewed here shows him developing the style and obsessions that would
become familiar throughout his oeuvre.
SYNOPSIS
In the graveyard of a chateau in a remote part of France, a funeral cortege
places two coffins in a tomb sealed by a wrought iron gate. Attending the
funeral appears to be a widow along with two young female servants. Later
the two servants sit pensively at a table in one of the many room within the
chateau. They then make the decision to venture into another part of the
chateau and eventually come to a tower where the sounds of someone in great
pain are heard. There they discover their two employers wrapped in chains
and attempting to stake themselves through the heart. In order that the two
retainers' souls along with their masters' souls be saved, they implore that
the two women remove the stakes from the two men's bodies and destroy
unidentified individuals in the chateau's burial chamber. However, they are
told that if they fail at this task, then they must swear total obedience to
these individuals, as accomplices will be needed to them with victims. The
two men then kill themselves by exposing their bodies to direct sunlight.
The women remove the stakes and go about their task. Later that night they
enter the graveyard and make for the tomb. As they unlock the gate a woman
emerges from a grave from behind them and confronts the pair. The next
morning a newly married couple are driving through the countryside on their
way to Italy. They intend to visit the bride's cousins, whom she has not
seen since her childhood and whom she considered quite strange at the time,
at their nearby castle. They arrive in a village overshadowed by the
building seen at the start of the movie. The husband goes and asks for
directions and meets the woman seen at the funeral. She informs him that
the bride's cousins had died the previous day and that their home is now
empty except for the two servants. She then makes make references to
strange occurrences since the cousins died before urging him to leave. The
husband gives the bad news regarding the death of her relatives to his wife,
with her being understandably shocked. They decide to go to the castle
anyway. There they are impressed by the building and its bizarrely
furnished interior. They are surprised to be greeted by the two servants
who were expecting them and show them to their room. There the bride tells
her husband that she must go and pay her respects to her cousins at their
tomb. He agrees. She then ventures in to the graveyard and makes her way
to the tomb and prays. The mourner seen at the funeral appears and makes
obscure comments about being married to both cousins at the same time. Back
in her bedroom the wife asks to sleep alone that night as she is deeply
distraught. The husband reluctantly concurs and leaves. Later when she is
preparing for bed, a grandfather clock in the room strikes midnight and the
young woman is astonished yet mesmerised to see a woman to emerge from the
pendulum chamber with in the clock. The is the woman seen to emerge from
the grave earlier on. She begins to seduce the bride.
REVIEW
Within horror movie fandom Jean Rollin is often mentioned in the same breath
as another maverick director, Spanish-born Jess Franco (Les Avaleuses 73).
Both have to toil with impossibly low budgets and choose to work mainly in
the area of erotic horror. Within this sub-genre a common recurring
(especially during the 1970s) theme is that of a naīve younger woman
becoming enthralled by a lesbian or bisexual female supernatural entity,
often a vampire, with whom the woman may be linked in some way, in certain
cases her alter-ego.
Another notable feature of these filmmakers output, and possibly the most
irritating for the uninitiated, is the general lack of linear narrative or
plot development. Champions for Franco compare much of his output,
especially from the start of the 1970s and into the early 1980s to the style
of a free-form jazz composition. Rollin, on the other hand, tends to use a
loose structure to forma sensual, dream-like world, where he can display his
own particular themes and fixations.
Although only the third completed feature film from Jean Rollin, Le Frisson
des Vampire already shows many of the motifs that would be come familiar
throughout his career. Among the most obvious are the presence of the pair
of mysterious females (usually twins in later productions) her played by
Marie-Pierre (Levres de Sang 75) and oriental actress Kueron Herce, exotic
graveyards featuring elaborately carved gravestones and sepulchres and a
large, imposing mansion or castle. Other visual cues recurring throughout
Rollin's career include the desolate beach at Dieppe, elaborate candelabras
and railway lines. Surprisingly another fetish of the filmmaker's, clowns,
do not appear.
Like Franco, Rollin is also a serious film buff. The influences on show in
Le Frisson des Vampires are impressively wide-ranging and date at least as
far back as Louis Feuillade's epic serial Les Vampires (15), notably in the
appearance of the female vampire played by Dominque. The way the chateau in
which most of the action takes place is presented by Rollin implies that it
may in fact be alive which either controls those occupying it, or responds
to the emotional psychological states of those under its roof, echoes many
of the properties seen in the Roger Corman Edgar Alan Poe adaptations of the
1960s, especially The Fall of the House of Usher (60), as well as Robert
Wise's The Haunting (63). The impression that the house may be organic is
underlined in a number of scenes such as where the sceptical husband
(Jean-Marie Durand) is attacked by the contents of the chateau's private
library and the exterior of the building taking on different aspects
depending on whether it is day or night.
Other cinematic influences that become apparent are the general theme of a
couple facing some sort of supernatural menace seen in the likes of Don
Sharp's Kiss of the Vampire (63) and especially the Halperin Brothers White
Zombie (32), while the possibility that some sort of border has been crossed
into a chaotic alternate world echoes a similar situation in James Whale's
The Old Dark House (32). Meanwhile the climax in which a vampire cannot
return to its coffin as it has been torched is reworked from Robert Siodmak'
s Son of Dracula (43).
Stylistically Le Frisson des Vampires additionally borrows from other works
like Alain Resnais' L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad (61) with the vampirised
cousins' highly elliptical dialogue while the various characters'
overlapping dialogue suggests that Rollin was an admirer of Orson Welles.
Some scenes also have a marked theatrical quality about them. This is most
noticeable whenever there is a lengthy dialogue exchange between the
vampirised cousins and the newlyweds in which the cousins appear to be
performing to the audience of an imaginary auditorium, even bidding a
dramatic adieu (along with a bow) at the end of these performances. They
also tend to make their entrance from behind a curtain to add to the
theatrical atmosphere. The female vampire also on occasion makes her
entrance from behind a curtain and when she murders the cousins' lover
Isabelle (Nicole Nancel) she completes the act with a very melodramatic
flourish. Another notable sequence, sometimes dismissed as a continuity
gaffe, is where the husband's advances are spurned by his bride, and he
apparently leaves the room. However, a mirror hanging from a wall reveals
that he is merely sitting in the wings. While this could be interpreted as
an error, it does seem deliberate and adds to the film's bizarre air. With
its air of improvisation and strange situations, some viewers may be
reminded of the "Theatre of the Absurd" movement that dated back to the
1920s but really flourished in the 1950s and 1960s and represented by the
likes of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
Rollin's penchant for flamboyant surrealism throughout his career is very
evident in Le Frisson des Vampires. Among the most striking imagery on show
are Dominique, the vampire queen, emerging from within the case of a
grandfather clock, descending down a chimney in slow motion and appearing
from within the blue smoke spiralling out of a well. Another striking
visual has a dove lying bleeding onto the lid of a very ornate coffin seen
lying in the grounds of the chateau in broad daylight. The air of
surrealism is heightened by the inclusion of what would normally be
considered a wildly inappropriate progressive rock score by short-live
student band Groupe Acanthe. Here it proves to be an inspired choice, being
absurdist in a highly theatrical manner.
Special mention should be made of the art direction by Michel Desalles whose
ornamentation and decoration owe a lot to French and Belgian surrealist
artists. Skulls features heavily in the décor, peering from the top of a
four poster bed and from within fishtanks. Assorted grotesque and bizarre
figures (some mechanical) also litter the rooms in the castle, apparently
meant to represent the deities of some arcane and ancient religion.
Cinematically, Le Frisson des Vampires is a visual tour-de-force. While
Jess Franco, at this point in his career, was relying heavily on crash zooms
and hand-held cameras for effect, Rollin was adopting a different approach
entirely. Here one of the movie's most notable features was cinematographer
Jean-Jacques Renon's use of camera movement, in which Renon (Les Demoniaques
73) goes to extraordinary lengths to follow the performers around rooms or
through the labyrinthine chateau, often employing 360 degree pans to achieve
this. Renon also makes use of lengthy tracking shots and extreme camera
positions, especially during conversation pieces.
Rollin additionally makes quite stunning use of colour, from the purple
chiffon worn by the servants to the use of coloured spotlights that give the
chateau a unique, almost organic quality, while the use of primary coloured
lighting provides the graveyard and the chateau's chapel, where a
significant amount of action takes place, a weird, otherworldly quality,
again underlining the bizarre nature of the entire film.
While noted for the surrealist nature of his work, Jean Rollin is equally
well-known for his use of eroticism, and like many of his contemporaries
moved into hard-core in the mid-1970s., although he has always expressed a
preference for soft-core erotica. As with a number of producers at this
time, producer Monique Natan later added additional, "harder" scenes to the
existing footage contained in Le Frisson des Vampires, primarily for
overseas consumption. Some of this material was shot by Rollin himself, but
reportedly much was shot by others, with the director merely acting as an
observer. A grey-market DVD of the alternative version of the film is said
to contain more graphic Sapphic sex between the two servants, a lengthier
rape scene involving Dominique and the two cousins along with some
sado-masochistic footage. The official French theatrical release reviewed
here, is considered by Rollin to be the definitive version of Le Frisson des
Vampires.
In this version, instead of graphic coupling between the performers, Rollin
relies on erotic imagery for effect. This includes shots of Sandra Julien
positioned, nude, against a grandfather clock, the servants writhing naked
under a fur blanket and the decidedly fetishistic fashions worn by
Dominique. The most overtly sexual scene is that where the bride is first
seduced by the female vampire, although this is somewhat compromised by
Julien's attempts to stifle a giggling fit.
Sandra Julien was in fact a real find for Rollin. The striking red-head, an
ex-model, easily dominates a large portion of the film, and became a
superstar of French soft-core cinema as well as a major cult figure in the
Far East, especially Japan where she made at least two movies. Former
exotic dancer Dominique (Requiem pour Vampire 73) is remarkable mainly
because of her ability to radically change her appearance from scene to
scene. Against the sensual charge created by the female actors, the male
performers tend to pale into insignificance, although this may be more
attributed to Rollin's tradition of employing crew members, friends and film
critics to act for him.
While it is fascinating to chart recurring themes and elements in this and
other Jean Rollin works, Le Frisson des Vampires features some intriguing
concepts of its own.
Although the plot for this production is generally considered absurd, it
does make sense in a broad fashion. On one level it concerns itself with
the efforts of a husband to rescue his new bride from her recently
vampirised relatives and a predatory female vampire. However, things are
actually more complicated than this description would suggest.
Essentially what Le Frisson des Vampires concerns itself with is the
conflict between the rational and irrational world. The husband, an
electronics engineer (and the owner of a revolver), and to a lesser extent
the cousins' former lover (Nancel), represent the rational while the cousins
and the female vampire represent a sensual, chaotic universe in which space,
and especially time and its perception, wax and wane.
It appears that Sandra Julien's character is in the process of making a very
profound decision about whether she should leave the chateau with her
husband or stay in the world inhabited by the likes of her cousin. The
details of the actual choices to be made are somewhat vague (deliberately
so) but it may whether she succumbs to madness, or even death, since at
times her wedding dress looks disturbingly like a funeral shroud.
A variation on the madness theory is that since the three female characters
share very similar names (based on the long-form name Isabel) Julien has to
make a choice between adopting the personality of Nancel or that of
Dominique. Since the latter eventually murders the former, thus severing an
important link to the rational world for both the cousins and by extension
Julien.
Some of Rollin's work alludes to science fiction elements as part of their
plotlines, notably the last acto of La Vampire Nue, and influences from that
genre should not be precluded when discussing this movie. It is entirely
possible that the chateau where much of the action takes place may be
conduit where a number of parallel universes collide and where Julien,
Dominique and Nancel represent the same character in different planes of
existence. The fact that time is so elastic in this environment adds to
this impression as does the presence of the bizarre animal and other
unidentified noises heard on the soundtrack which suggests other worlds
exist just outside of the characters' perception.
Yet another explanation for the events depicted in the film is that the
house literally is alive and has taken on the form of Dominique to
manipulate those who occupy it.
Like the majority of Jean Rollin's canon, Le Frisson des Vampires ends
bleakly with the husband failing in his attempt to rescue his bride,
although he does succeed in having Dominique's character destroyed with the
aid of the servants. As dawn breaks on the beach at Dieppe, the cousins and
his bride disappear, either into madness, a parallel world or oblivion. The
husband then descends into his own insanity, running screaming along the
shorefront, blindly firing his pistol. The entropy encountered in the
chateau has invaded the real world.
ŠIain McLachlan 2003
Dr Walpurgis
> LE FRISSON DES VAMPIRES
Superb review. Reminds me, can anyone be bothered to post a few lines on
the best versions of the various Rollins on DVD?
--
"Right! Bring in the perverts!" - Ispettore Morosini (Enrico Salerno)
L'UCCELLO DALLE PIUME DI CRISTALLO