Lips of Blood

What must be quite a personal film for Rollin. The hero has forgotten much of his childhood apart from the vision of a castle and a girl, and he goes on a quest to discover where this fragment of memory comes from. Such gothic images recur in Rollin films, but disappointingly there is little here that tries to delve into why they hold such a fascination for him. Instead, there's a sense that the hero's controlling mother is a barrier towards romantic (and Romantic) fulfillment – she at one point arranges her son to be kidnapped so that an evil doctor can administer shock therapy to rid him of his delusions.

The hero slips through the cluches of the secret vampire hunting society his mother is a part of, and is reunited with his long lost love at the end of the film. It appears to be a 'careful what you wish for' scenario, in that embracing these nightmare visions means rejecting the everyday world, your family, and life itself. But the film suggests that the couple aren't just transformed into bloodthirsty monsters. Rather they are stepping into a fairytale world. In climbing aboard their shared coffin and setting out to sea, the hero talks about living on an island of sand and luring rich sailors to their shores, as if they are becoming creatures of myth and legend. It's a retreat into childhood adventure rather than death. It's alluring rather than frightening, but then again Rollin has always been on the side of the vampires.

The Iron Rose

A captivating fairy tale from Jean Rollin, probably the finest one of his mood-builders I’ve seen. The plot is barely there – a couple meet at a wedding, loiter around on a first date, get lost in a cemetery, and then the girl goes a bit mad.

That first date sometimes feels like an encapsulation of a life-long relationship – youthful lust, soul-baring confessions, bitter fights and reconciliations (and the suggestion of children, either dead or estranged). But the cemetery also provides a specific focus on a kind of existential crisis. The boy in particular finds it a refuge from the dirt and noise of the town. There is something very adolescent about the young lovers feeling like the only people who are really alive in their boring, provincial society. The idea is brought out rather literally in their lovemaking scenes amidst the buried skeletons. Their passion is the only quickening force in an otherwise meaningless rotting world.

But the girl takes this all a bit too literally, beginning to prefer the company of the dead to the living. There’s an interesting gender dynamic going on in the film, whereby the boy is associated with mechanical things like trains, bicycles and watches, while the girl is associated with the natural world – sea, mist, foliage. While the boy seeks to escape, thinks logically, and tries to move forward, the girl increasingly becomes a manifestation of nature, engulfing the boy in her earthly tomb. The iron rose, which is cradled by the girl a bit like Gollum with the one ring, is straightforwardly a metaphor for their relationship – bringing together the artificial and natural. It is also an emblem of their doom, a warning against the alluring but dangerous power of the sacred feminine.

The Night of the Hunted

Made on a ridiculously low budget and to a very tight four-week schedule, Jean Rollin somehow manages to create something evocative and eerie. The plot is rudimentary: a radioactive leak turns people into zombies, so they are imprisoned in an imposing corporate tower block and killed when the final brain-cell switches off. As with other zombie films, a nefarious corporate presence lurks in the background. The difference here is that the undead are innocent victims who are exploited and killed like sheep. This being Rollin, they are also beautiful and frequently unclothed, but you can read that in a reflexive direction if you want – the machine reducing people to attractive mindless bodies.

It ends up being a rather sweet film. The hero who is sucked into this nighttime conspiracy by the stunning Brigitte Lahaie is smitten, and joins her in becoming zombified. Perhaps love can't overcome all obstacles, but it's worth clinging on to nonetheless.

Fascination

Jean Rollin made low-budget exploitation films invariably featuring alluring female vampires writhing their way into the lives of unsuspecting male protagonists. Sounds like trash, but they are sought after, partly because Rollin imbibed the methodology of the surrealists and did care quite a bit about the images he was putting together. Fascination opens on a gramophone on a stone bridge, the shot slowly moving out to show two women dancing alongside it. That visual was what sparked the idea for the film, and Rollin liked it so much he held the shot for the whole of the opening credits, to the point where it becomes a bit tedious. It gets better from there though. Some of his long takes build mood marvelously well – most notably the shot revealing the coven of bloodthirsty mademoiselles to the cocksure thief Mark, fanning out like bat wings behind their leader Helen.

Mark is a lovable rascal who refuses to be blindsided or intimidated by the mysterious aristocratic ladies he falls in with. Helen's uppity attitude riles him up – he always wants to be in control. The prototypical link between sex and death inherent in the vampire myth is ever-present in the film. Fascination, bewitchment, is a mortal threat. But this is true also for the vampires themselves. One of them, Elizabeth, falls in love with Mark, and kills her lover Eva to be with him. But the aura of Helen draws her back to the coven. Elizabeth's motives are shambolic, and it's probably best not to try too hard to reconcile them. Throughout, Rollin is more interested in the way these images of beautiful, domineering women can entrap even the most free-spirited soul.