Le viol du vampire

A psychoanalyst and his wife go to a château in the country, which is inhabited by four vampire sisters. Rollin's first feature is distinguished by good photography and score, which manage to overcome the bizarreness of the plot and the deliberate pacing. An atmospheric horror classic, but decidedly not for all tastes.

Rape of the Vampire, The (1968)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

When one thinks of Jean Rollin there's no doubt that nudity, vampires and lesbian vampires come to mind. This film here was the first of a long running series featuring undead ladies usually doing their evil deeds while naked. The film starts off with a psychologist trying to convince four sisters that there really aren't vampires who have been walking the Earth for two hundred years. After the four of them are killed by the local villagers an evil Queen brings them back to life. The first thirty-minutes of this film, leading up to the sisters being killed, was originally a short film but when Rollin got the extra money he decided to add another hour and turn it into the feature that would become known as THE RAPE OF A VAMPIRE. Anyone familiar with the work of Rollin will agree that there's certainly more style than substance but this early picture contains very little of either one. I will admit that by the time the movie was over I really didn't understand what I had just watched. The first portion of the film is somewhat easy to follow but once we get everything dealing with the Queen then things just get so twisted that you feel as if you've fallen asleep for an hour only to then wake up and not know what you're seeing. I'm going to guess that this thing was shot extremely quickly and perhaps that's why everything feels so rushed. Or, perhaps director Rollin was just scrambling trying to get anything on film to turn this into a feature. Whatever the reasonings, the end result is that there's very little to enjoy in this thing. I thought the second half of the film looked extremely rushed and not a bit of it contained any real style. The earlier section isn't all that much better but I thought some of the cinematography was very good and this helped add a little atmosphere. While there's some nudity in the film it's certainly not as graphic as later films. The performances are all mixed but then again who comes to a Rollin film for performances? THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE will probably have Rollin fans wanting to view it just so they can see where it all started but those new to the director would be best served by checking out on of his later pictures.

I must begin this review by being honest. This film baffled me. Completely. I didn't understand it. At all. So why the devil am I writing this, you may ask? To urge you to see it. Rollin does for horror films what Suzuki Seijun does for the gangster film, or Leone for the Western - he blows it to pieces to create something otherworldly and new. Although not nearly as well - from what I can make out, Rollin's sensiblity is facile, reactionary, inane and exploitative. But he does have an eye. And what an eye.

I think the film's 'failure' to lucidly communicate is actually the point. I mean, under all the visual verbiage, there is a plot of sorts. Not that I even got this part right. There's this gorgeous French chateau. There are sisters, maybe two, maybe four, who are being controlled by this disembodied voice, who turns out to be an crusty old landowner with a foreign accent. They are being told they are vampires, and one of them keeps remembering the time she was raped by villagers. We are shown images of this event, although neither their temporal status nor reliability is signalled.

Three young, modern, attractive Parisian types arrive for no stated reason at the chateau, spouting psychobabble, convinced that the girls are delusional and mad, needing help. It turns out that the landowner is not in charge at all, but a lesbian vampire queen add her predictably nubile cohorts, and madness ensues as the forces of science and the modern do battle with the undead. The film may be a satire on de Gaullism, conservatism, radicalism, or feminism; or maybe it's just the visual ramblings of a very talented Poe-obsessed teenager. Who knows?

The whole thing is addled, pretentious nonsense. Fragments of this plot get lost in a mass of possibly meaningless symbolism (although I actually know someone who can make everything in TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME fit coherently, so I'll suspend judgement). But we must remember that horror films traditionally involve a force of meaning eventually triumphing and explaining the forces of evil who would destroy meaning. After PSYCHO, the validity of this was called into question, and the horrors of films like REPULSION and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD became terrifying precisely because it was not possible to explain them away.

This is presumably Rollin's intention, to destroy the arrogant assumptions of all systems of meaning. The inevitable result of this is chaos, but it's a chaos gorgeous to behold. Rollin has the cherishable flaw of wanting to stick his camera in the most awkward places just to astound us. And he does - there are images here no mainstream director would dare attempt.

The mixture of Gothic, Gallic atmosphere, and a sublime clarity of imagery is stunning. The climactic shoot out also shows how French gangster films, with their concentration on the disintegration of the individual, unlike their US counterparts, have their roots in horror, the mighty FANTOMAS.

Rollin divides his two part melodrama in the middle of the action. The whole film has the feel of a project taken away from its wayward director, and re-edited by blind minions. It is a silly, delirious, wonderful thing, a true 'melodrame' as the subtitle suggests, showing us in a hideous mirror the repetitious cycle of living death we are caught in our everyday lives.

After a psychoanalyst unsuccessfully tries to convince four sisters that they are not 200 year old vampires, the Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger) promulgates the cause of the Undead.

Having watched Jean Rollin's "Nude Vampire" before this, I can say one thing: Rollin works better in black and white. His stark composition recalls some of Roman Polanski's better films (such as "Repulsion") and is just beautiful to look at. While the second half is completely incoherent if we focus on plot (which we should not do with Rollin), the film as a whole has images to show us that cannot be put down.

A newspaper at the time of the film's release said "we can only remain puzzled by the intentions of the director, Jean Rollin." Even Rollin himself admitted that it was confusing. He would later say, "Le Viol was a terrible scandal... People were really mad when they saw it. In Pigalle, they threw things at the screen. The principal reason was that nobody could understand the story."

But perhaps this is alright? When Luis Bunuel or Salvador Dali release nonsense, it is a work of art... when Rollin does it, we call it "nonsense". Where does one end and the other begin?

First looking at Jean Rollin's debut feature Viol Du Vampire was not very impressing. It looked very cheap, and the editing seemed almost amateurish. After a while though I learned to appreciate the movie's very unique pacing and artistic approach. Its been long since I've seen a movie as pleasant to look at. I found an interesting saying by a user at the amazon page: "Its boring, but in a good way". Which of course doesn't make sense to most people, but try seeing this. Relaxing, yet exciting. The low-tempered experimental music really is nice.

You don't really have to understand what is going on though. Lots of nudity, blood, poetry, interesting characters... Yes, I really enjoyed this! If you like old art-house movies you should try it. Jean Rollins should be deemed as a great great artist.