Lesbian Vampires 101: Part 1

Like many of the “erotic” cinema subgenres, the lesbian vampire movie was first introduced to the world by Roger Vadim, in a movie starring someone he was married to at the time. It’s hard to overstate how much cinema gained from Vadim’s aesthetic, always placing sexuality at the core of every character and story. It’s such a strong lodestone of his entire filmography, and it’s difficult to find a comparable contemporary director or even artist. David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven work from the same sexuality-first space, but they are both more fetishistic than Vadim and are men now in their 80s. Vadim directed Barbarella, And God Created Woman, Vice and Virtue, Don Juan (or If Don Juan Were a Woman), Pretty Maids All in a Row, La ronde, Dangerous Liaisons, and the incestual part of Spirits of the Dead—each spawning its own lineage, its own galaxy of fetish cinema. 

In Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007), we are introduced to Sydney Tamiia Poitier’s character perched on a couch under a massive poster of Vadim’s The Night Heaven Fell. Sitting with her legs up on the desk. Feet first. Which acknowledges that much, much of his career (and particularly this grindhouse tribute) is in the footsteps of a master. 

Transposing Le Fanu’s novella from Styria to modern Italy, Vadim focused on Georgia (Elsa Martinelli) and Carmilla (Annette Vadim) and the adaptation preserves the plot—Carmilla is haunted by the spirit of her ancestor, her resemblance to the painting of the dead Millarca. Although later in the film, she claims that Carmilla has been deceased since she first stepped out of the ruins weeks earlier. Carmilla’s personality changes, and she has her sights set on Georgia from the beginning. Le Fanu incorporated his dreams into his work, and Vadim follows suit not only with the surrealistic dream sequence but many of the film’s images. Millarca was famous for killing the brides of the Karnsteins 200 years hence, and Carmilla dresses as her for the masquerade. 

Roger Vadim brings a graphic sensibility to not only this material but to the idea of how to shoot Gothic horror in color. The costume party takes place outdoors, against a perfectly mirrored swimming pool. Carmilla also established that the location of these films is often modern and moves the characters away from that milieu by spending time in ruins. The old world has to intrude on the characters’ lives. Carmilla steps out of the ruins into cascades of exploding light, the crosses and gravestones backlit by an eerie pink-white haze. She finally makes her (romantic? sapphic? deadly?) move on Georgia in a greenhouse, both soaking wet. Mircalla’s crypt has raised fingers reaching out to her. Carmilla is reflected inside Leopoldo’s chest via a century-old magic trick, Pepper’s Ghost. We see Annette Vadim in a white gown, a bell shape slowly passing through enormous, Arnold Bocklin–esque landscapes of the estate. Shots where the lighting makes Carmilla pale and George warm, particularly one that Werner Herzog stole wholesale for Nosferatu the Vampyr (1979). Carmilla slowly stalks a young housemaid, her shadow eclipsing the girl’s face in the twilight. The genre-defining dream sequence is still breathtaking. Equal parts post-processing and in camera visual editing, a shot of a surgery where everything is painted shades of white and doctors wear plastic faces. Carmilla bleeds from her heart in Technicolor animation, the dead girl swims up to the window (later echoed in Salem’s Lot), flashes of color are embedded into black-and-white shots. Georgia walks through an endless hallway of (dead?) beautiful women while wearing her husband’s clothes. Nurses drag her into a Freudian operating room where every glove is neon red vinyl. 

The most striking image is the simplest effect, of Carmilla staring at herself in a mirror, seeing her dress covered in blood, tearing it open and seeing her breast soaked red, seemingly pouring out of her heart without a wound. She has a premonition of her death. 

Vadim’s greatest influence here seems to be Jean Cocteau, particularly his more fantastical works Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. The other might be Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The sense of a castle haunted not by a ghost but a specific tragedy feels one-to-one. Also, Joan Fontaine and Annette Vadim (née Strøyberg) have a similar sense of power in their distance on-screen. 

It’s odd because the references one would reach for were contemporary releases. Vadim was not influenced by Fellini, Buñuel, Antonioni, or even Bava, because he was their peer. In many ways, he pioneered the spaces where those first two would spend their strongest period. Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard arrives three years later. Maybe Max Ophuls? You arrive at the idea that Vadim’s work is so seismic because it is emerging fully formed. He is influenced by literature, art, and his own playboy intellectual life (Vadim’s autobiography was titled Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda after each of his iconic loves). 

Blood and Roses opens with fireworks and ends on a terrifying psychedelic nightmare where only the blood is in color. Vadim gave birth to this style. An Italian-French co-production, the film has some stilted performances due to the language barriers of the global cast. Vadim was obsessed with beautiful women, but so is every male director; instead, he was so aware of bodies in space. The shot of Carmilla inches away from Georgia, going in to kiss her for the first time at a perpendicular angle, is most associated with Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, but this was filmed nearly a decade earlier. In a lot of ways, it feels like Vampire Persona anyway. Red, yellow and green strobes dance over the actors’ bodies—was Vadim aware of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s abandoned L’enfer footage or Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome? There are similarities, but he may have also independently arrived at a similar place. 

Blood and Roses has a Psycho-esque explainer scene in which a man of reason gives a psychological read of the character, but this is the rarest inversion of that scene, where the movie immediately shows he is wrong. Vadim forever sides with the romantic, the haunted, the inexplicable. The film’s final shot is of Carmilla/Millarca dead on barbed wire, killed by the army detonating unexploded mines near the ruins. The image hangs vertiginously over the next scene, bringing to mind Holocaust imagery and poisoning the reassertion of heterosexuality as the norm in Georgia and her fiancé Leopoldo together on a plane. We watch as the rose in Georgia’s hands tenderly falls apart.