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From their "Hammer's House of Horror" screenings to their 21-movie Mario Bava spotlight, New York's Quad Cinema has been an essential source for celebrating the horror genre's past, and they will continue to do just that this October with a massive retrospective series celebrating filmmaker Jean Rollin, as well as a complementary set of screenings highlighting some of horror's most memorable female vampires.

Read on for full details on Quad Cinema's Jean Rollin Retrospective (kicking off on October 18th) and "A Woman's Bite: Cinema’s Sapphic Vampires" (beginning October 26th) and be sure to visit their official website for more information!

"Jean Rollin Retrospective + Sapphic Vampires

October 18-November 1

This October the Quad salutes the lurid eroticism of Jean Rollin with a retrospective including Fascination, Requiem for a Vampire, and Lips of Blood

Plus a survey of sapphic vampire films indebted to his aesthetic with titles including The Hunger, Lust for a Vampire,...

The era of cinema referred to as Eurohorror is defined by its eroticism, over-the-top violence, and psychedelic supernatural approaches to storytelling. It’s a rabbit hole of movie culture. There are twisting avenues and bizarre subsections that seem endless, but few filmmakers created a library as compulsively watchable and weirdly hypnotizing as Jean Rollin’s. This man’s filmography is massive, a good amount of them representing his work-for-hire hardcore movies and the cheesier selection of horror films. One gets what one might expect: waif-like young women seducing men, seducing each other, and drinking gallons of bright red blood.

Yet something sets Rollin’s films apart from similar offerings: they’re literate. Rollin draws many of his plots from classic Gothic romances. He must have adapted Carmilla in one form or another a dozen times. Sheridan Le Fanu’s story, about an innocent girl seduced by a lonely but evil companion,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Feb. 18, 2014

Price: DVD $59.95, Blu-ray $89.95

Studio: Kino Lorber

Jean Rollin's Requiem for a Vampire

Kino Lorber is bundling four of French filmmaker’s Jean Rollin sexy vampire flicks together in the inevitably entitled box set Jean Rollin: The Vampire Films.

As the constraints of censorship began to see in the late 1960′s and early ’70′s, visionary French filmmaker Rollin created a series of mesmerizing horror-thrillers that injected the Gothic vampire film with a more contemporary strain of eroticism. (He took what Hammer had done in the previous decade and turned it up a kinkily erotic notch.) Fluctuating between visual allure and shocking violence, Rollin’s films have come to be recognized as vital entries in the vampire genre.

The four films—The Rape of the Vampire (1968), The Nude Vampire (1970), The Shiver of the Vampires (1971) and Requiem for a Vampire (1973)—are mastered in HD from the original 35mm negatives.

Above: The Iron Rose

The early films by Jean Rollin are different pockets of the same world. The stretch of beach near Dieppe acts as a portal connecting these pockets, which are populated by vampires, clowns, wide-eyed innocents, and the generally inexplicable. Watching them, we’re caught in the midst of waking dreams, all springing from the same mind. When mention is made of a “Jean Rollin film,” these early films are the ones that people think of first. The creations of a dreamer who is wrapped in a reverie, letting ideas and images affix themselves to celluloid as they wish. Like many films, they reflect their maker; someone intoxicated by mystery, surreality, and the bizarre. Unlike other filmmakers, who are able to simply (or, more likely, not so simply) spin out variation after variation of their established prototype, Rollin had to rise from his slumber. The films he made...

One of the best things about working at a record store for a good portion of my young adult life was that I was turned onto so much music that I otherwise would've never heard. Before I got to tackle fixing the "horror" section in video at Tower Records or creating the foam core art displays that dressed the store, I was assigned the "world" section. I knew nothing about World Music, but it was in the Jazz room, which also harbored some of the weirder more obscure stuff sold on CD. One October, I stumbled upon a promo CD for an album titled "Music Of The Vampires" which featured 8 original songs composed, arranged and performed by a musician named Matt Fink. This was around 1994 that this CD came into circulation and although Fink would long be associated with horror themed music, at the time I was unfamiliar with his work.

Requiem For A Vampire

Stars: Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent, Philippe Gaste | Written and Directed by Jean Rollin

Requiem for a Vampire is also known as Caged Virgins, Virgins and Vampires and Sex Vampires. Does that catch your interest? I’m sure it will do. I prefer Requiem for a Vampire as the name though; it pulls the movie back from sounding too sleazy.

The movie follows Marie and Michelle, two young girls who find an old seemingly deserted castle and decide to hide out there. Unlucky for them the castle is in fact populated with what at first appear to be vampires, but are in fact people attempting to become vampires aided by the last vampire who lives in the graveyard nearby. The two girls are held captive in the castle by the vampire and his minions in the aim of transforming the girls from the “virgins” they are to vampires.

Okay, the titles Caged Virgins, The Nude Vampire, Two Orphan Vampires, and The Grapes Of Death might not be familiar to the casual movie fan, but followers of 70′s Eurosleaze are certainly familiar with the works of French horror director Jean Rollin who passed away yesterday at age 72. Many of Rollin’s films are available of the Redemption DVD label and without Rollin’s unique output, the history of the erotic vampire film would have huge gaps. Somewhere right now there’s a naked lesbian vampire weeping.

From the Fangoria Website:

Fangoria has learned of the passing of beloved French erotic-horror filmmaker Jean Rollin. The director died last night, after a long illness. He was 72.Fans of European genre films, especially those coming out of the free-thinking 1970s, are no doubt aware of the work of Rollin.a talented, gentle poet of sensual horror, a man who made personal, lush...

There were rumblings of Jean Rollins' passing yesterday, now Fangoria has confirmed the filmmaker has died at the age of 72. Mixing blood, sex and sleaze, Rollin has had a long directing career giving us The Nude Vampire , Living Dead Girl , Caged Virgins and more. Fango editor Chris Alexander, one of the biggest Rollin fans I know, spoke to the filmmaker's son, Serge, who said: "Jean was surrounded by his friends and was looking at the photos of his two granddaughters when he died."...

Put briefly, the 42Nd Street Forever DVDs have become the best and most consistently entertaining series out there. I’ve never been disappointed by the trailers on view, and with Synapse Films teamed on the latest edition with Austin, TX’s now widely known Alamo Drafthouse and its owner Tim League and programmers Lars Nilsen and Zack Carlson, I knew I was in good hands.

If you’re unacquainted with the Drafthouse, it’s a kind of haven for cinephiles, specializing in running vintage prints and previews for films that make our collective geek heads explode. This makes its proprietors and the 42Nd Street Forever franchise a perfect combo, like Jack and Coke. There are 40 coming attractions included in this edition, with a few highly amusing PSAs thrown in for good measure. For instance, the opening bit features a tennis-playing Charlton Heston explaining film ratings, as if midgame he remembered...

Curious to know what frightful films and devilish discs will be available to view in the privacy of your own digital dungeon this week? Fango's got you covered.

Below the jump you'll find the full list of titles arriving in-stores this Tuesday, September 29, 2009 in our weekly version of the famous Fangoria Chopping List. There's a good bounty to be had, so start making your own chopping list now!

Note: Clickable links lead to Amazon.com

42Nd Street Forever Volume 5: The Alamo Drafthouse Edition (special edition): Synapse

Welcome To The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the most awesome post-modern hot spot for exploitation movie revival, deep in the heart of Texas! Home to world-famous events such as The Quentin Tarantino Film Fest, Fantastic Fest and Butt-Numb-A-Thon, the Alamo is one of the last places on earth where you can still see grindhouse classics such as The Devil Within Her and Mad Monkey Kung Fu.