“Vampires don’t die.”
“Vampires don’t exist.”
Jean Rollin creates a vampire cosmology wholly his own. His work is melancholy, and his worlds are decrepit. Jess Franco, for all his similarities with Rollin, relishes modernity. His old world has totemic power that can be slipped and tumbled into, endlessly, a kaleidoscopic (yet minimalist?) cosmology that owes more to the literary, the theatrical, and comic books than cinema. Rollin’s sole published comic work—Saga de Xam (1967), a collaboration with Nicolas Devil—is essentially what if Barbarella crash-landed into an ancient civilization. A blue-skinned nude alien arrives to psychedelically have sex with the locals, but they terrorize and abuse her anyway. Rollin and Vadim had much in common, particularly aesthetically. Rollin was close friends with Metal Hurlant co-founder Philippe Druillet, who painted three of his film’s posters (The Rape of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire, and The Shiver of the Vampires). Druillet and Moebius’s artistic contrast mirrors Rollin and Franco’s, with both men being acid-head expressionists. But the former’s work always felt haunted and his worlds in antiquity, while the latter’s were textural, modern, and geometric. And probably hornier in a weirder way. They each made the other feel more iconic, more singular.
Rollin’s first feature, The Rape of the Vampire (1968), was clearly influenced by Georges Franju and Jean Cocteau, shot on a razor-thin budget, mostly in a rotting, dilapidated château. The framing is excellent, the writing and acting are amateurish, and the pacing follows his signature bizarre style. When the film sings, it has an elliptical power, but The Rape of the Vampire never holds that acid-head hypnotic grip on your throat. The idiosyncrasies that make Rollin’s ’70s films exciting feel nonsensical. The Nouvelle Vague love of genre situationism here feels like a director who didn’t know what he was doing. At all. Rollin became a laughingstock to the ultra-film-literate student movement in Paris. He has quite a lot in common with Jacques Rivette, particularly in their love of theater, distant romances, and women having emotionally incestuous friendships. Most of all, they share a grinding dedication to glacial pacing combined with labyrinthine plotting. One imagines a world where Rollin got to make a 13-hour film like Out 1, or Paris Belongs to Us was about vampires as well as paranoia and fascism (swoon). Rollin shows some amazing early artistic instincts that he never returns to—a scene in which two sisters fence to the death in the yard for the life of the male protagonist makes you wish he had a little more sword anime in his bones.
Rollin only had a script for the first half of The Rape of the Vampire (a dour, haunting affair concerning a cursed bloodline and four sisters plagued to live as vampires) before improvising a second act that goes apeshit involving a worldwide vampire conspiracy run by an ancient Black lesbian queen who rides around topless in a convertible (and people say puns aren’t art). One of the constant images Rollin’s climaxes return to is a rotting pier jutting out into nothing from a beachside cliff in Hautot-sur-Mer. This location first appears in Rollin’s debut student short, Les amours jaunes (1958), which includes a phrase that may be his aesthetic manifesto: “To die alone, or live by default.” With the exception of Fascination (1979), Rollin’s films starring male protagonists (The Nude Vampire and Lips of Blood) are less compelling. He wisely jettisons the man in The Rape of the Vampire trying to convince the four sisters that their vampirism isn’t real and is nothing more than hereditary superstition with a tossed-off death. The film’s second half, partially shot in the original Théâtre de Grand Guignol in Pigalle, Paris, barely makes sense but still establishes the idea that the vampires are somehow a culture with its own elites and sciences yet also practice black magic and symbolic acts of induction. Rollin’s work, like much of the Euro-sleaze of the time, has a large amount of sexual violence as an excuse to get sex into the movie. It rarely works in Rollin’s films because it’s so nakedly an excuse. Later, when we see this in Franco, whose work kind of centers on a Bataille-influenced cruelty and sadism (truly a French aesthetic for how vile it’s willing to be playful with rape, torture, etc.), it feels a little more germane. This is a stumbling block for modern audiences wanting to look into these two men’s substantial body of work.
Discussing each of Rollin’s films as a discrete unit undersells them as a whole; they hit a sweet spot where it feels like an artist’s entire interior world being released without a filter. That said, nearly all of his movies were developed under strict financial and commercial demands. Rollin often worked for producer Sam Selsky, crediting him as $am $elsky, a mild message of loving contempt. Rollin seems to take the French literary tradition and sees lesbian sex as a kind of fallen, abject sexuality. The tragic nature of the characters is meant to be illustrated by their lesbianism, and the fact that Selsky was demanding more sex scenes to sell the movies may have little to nothing to do with selling the movie. There is something haunting about the very idea that these girls are fucking. It’s beautiful and wrongheaded at the same moment.
Requiem for a Vampire begins with Michelle (Mireille d’Argent) and Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel), dressed as clowns and firing guns mid–car chase after some unseen heist before their getaway driver bleeds out. From there, Rollin follows the two women as they change out of their circus outfits and proceed on a romp where they rob random idiots, hide in a cemetery, and seemingly fall into a Jean Rollin movie. They enter a ruined castle, fool around with each other with a girlish sense of play, and stumble into a dungeon, where they are quickly turned into vampires. The real sophistication of Requiem for a Vampire is that it’s borderline a silent film, with the first conversation happening 40 minutes in, when an ethereal vampire, played by Dominique, sends the girls out to first lose their virginity, then bring male victims to sacrifice to the original vampire. There is also the implication that any sapphic sex is non-penetrative and doesn’t count.
The film has some shocking overhead shots that feel impossible—looking like crane or drone shots, when this low-budget 1971 porno had neither. During the rituals to turn the girls into full vampires, they meet their master, who says that he is dying, that his progeny are much more savage than he ever was, and that once he dies, they will cease to live like this.
Marie hides her sacrifice in the graveyard to keep him from being killed, leading to the iconic central image of Requiem for a Vampire—tears in her eyes, Michelle beats a naked Marie, begging her to reveal where the man is. She loves her far too much to do this but is compelled to as a vampire under a higher creature’s will. There’s a tragic inability for these women to be together yet a love too strong to allow them to hate each other. But not strong enough to stop them from hurting each other. Rollin would explore this territory on a much more vast emotional scale in The Living Dead Girl (1981).
Fascination begins with two women, Elizabeth and Eva (Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Mai), in an abattoir, drinking cow’s blood to fight anemia. Elizabeth wipes blood on her lips as lipstick, holding onto her disembodied and ferocious mouth. Set in 1905, Fascination follows Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire), a roguish prick on the run from fellow criminals he’s robbed, hiding in a château surrounded by a moat on all sides. In the castle, he finds Elizabeth and Eva naked in bed together. They claim to be servants fooling around in the abandoned castle while their master is away, but it plays out that not only are the women lying, they are scheming to keep Marc there until their coven arrives.
While nearly all of Fascination treats these women as slightly mad cultists, only the final scene reveals them as vampires (or at least blood cultists who behave like the vampires in Requiem for a Vampire), out for a sacrifice. Fascination is built from narrative chunks more obviously than most of Rollin’s work, but Lahaie is such a strong presence. The long shot of her topless in a cape, storming across a footbridge with a harvester to kill the men standing in her way, is Rollin at his most sleazy and most feminine rage. It is, for lack of any other suitable word, iconic. She just keeps moving toward the screen, the camera never cutting away until she’s Inland Empire–close, her eyes savage and terrifying. The final scene shows the two women tearing apart one of their own as she shrieks in pure terror. Fascination has a geographic inevitability that one might associate with Tarkovsky—there is no other place but here and no other moment than now; this is not a story because stories track events through time.
Fascination has an additional quality that none of his previous psych-tinged scores possessed: the otherworldly synth of Philippe d’Aram. It is immediately an electronic instrument, but it also sounds like nothing else—chorales of disembodied ghosts sing over a movie that is the most hypnotic of a famously mesmeric director. Fascination was my first Rollin, which I saw in a late-night screening on one of my first trips to NYC. I had never experienced a movie that feels like you are in a timeless moment that hangs, erotically charged, always threatening to devolve into violence or death.
One way to discuss Rollin’s aesthetic is in drug terms, and, surely, if any director is an acid director, it’s him. But you can also talk about Rollin in terms of Xanax—his non-vampire film about amnesiac mental patients, The Night of the Hunted (1980), being an extremely Xanned-out version of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. The sex scenes with Lahaie are some of Rollin’s finest, and there’s the strange repetition that only comes from obsessiveness behind the camera. It feels like real sex because it’s less cinematic. Lahaie begs the man she’s with to fuck her forever; unable to develop new memories, she wants to stay here inside this feeling. Rollin is telling on himself here. All his films feel like this, but this moment is an aleph; this part contains the whole.
The Living Dead Girl has a unique smeary emotional tone—rather than go into another in-depth assessment, I will link to my Guide entry for this site. While Rollin kept making films for decades, this is the culmination of his strongest period aesthetically, his Scary Monsters (also an ’80s summation of a volatile and successful ’70s aesthetic flush period). The way the characters relate feels so pure. In all his other vampire movies, it feels like he’s working in his own idiom with his own aesthetic; they all kind of bleed into each other, and even the ones that don’t start that way snap into it by their final reel. The Living Dead Girl is its own world. For me, the film has more in common with Wong Kar Wai and Andrzej Żuławski (his dramas), a broken and irreparable romance that happens to feature vampirism. It’s one of the most romantic movies I have ever seen, and it shreds my insides every single time.
Rollin and Spanish director/polymath Jesús Franco (frequently shortened to Jess in Western countries) are inextricable in many viewers’ minds, but Franco is a different beast who shared many of Rollin’s aesthetic principles and predilections. They filmed similar sex scenes. They returned often to the same subject matter. But Franco’s lesbian vampire work is only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre.
With two director credits already to his name, Franco worked as Orson Welles’s assistant director on his Shakespeare compendium (and arguably greatest movie) Chimes at Midnight (1965), only to be fired during filming for playing fast and loose trying to finance his own movie against the larger production’s budget. His life is heroic in the extremes an author could take, and tragic in what could have been. In a lot of ways, Franco undercut his career, devolving into self-parody late in life. Some of his best movies were edited without his input and released years after they were shot. Historian Stephen Thrower’s two encyclopedic FAB Press monographs on the director are written in production order, which fittingly makes them difficult to navigate or frankly use at all beyond dipping in and out for amazing little details and gorgeous production photos.
Franco appeared in his own films, often as a malignant creep who does something vile to a beautiful woman. He kind of understood his appearance (squat, bearded, bespectacled, with cruel eyes) as well as his general vibe. His work fixated on sadism, torture, mind control, women in prison, the Gothic, fascism, incest, oral sex, lesbianism, and, above all, leather boots. He pursued deviance. His major literary influences were the Marquis de Sade (whom he adapted frequently) and Georges Bataille, and his work focuses on a world of cruelty and its extremes. Where Rollin would be elided and poetic, Franco would be crude and vile. In retrospect, my first brush with the genre in Black Kiss (see previous entry) was most like Franco’s work—nuns, blow jobs, scheming perverts, and ancient vampires with inescapable sexual control over men.
With one of the most unique careers in cinema history, Franco made nearly 200 films between 1959 and 2013. Artists who produce this much have a kind of hypergraphia instead of an artistic urge—he was always shooting. By the end, he was filming movies in his living room. Another major element of his work is how much he seemed to love a sex scene—when Lina Romay in Female Vampire (1973) slips in and out of focus, it’s not that Franco’s uninterested but because you know he’s TOO interested. I understood then that I was watching someone who only truly connects with the woman he loves when he’s filming her.
It’s also important to point out that Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire are far and away Franco’s best movies. They are massive load-bearing structures in his oeuvre, uncompromised by budget or their position as pornography first or the director’s laziness as he grew older. Franco’s all-time bangers list consists of 10 or so titles, some of which have very little reputation because of just how many films he made. They aren’t even grouped together in a specific creative period like, say, Takashi Miike’s best films. Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy, Eugenie de Sade, Venus in Furs, Female Vampire, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, 99 Women, Barbed Wire Dolls, The Girl from Rio—these are barely 1 percent of his career output. He clearly loved the idea of filming more than the final product. There’s a lot of fun to be had in the rest of his output—for example, Franco did a shoddy non-sequel to Godard’s Alphaville (1965) with Eddie Constantine called Attack of the Robots a year after the original and an almost scene-for-scene remake of Female Vampire as Doriana Gray (1976). It is worth acknowledging that his work is largely unremarkable despite his clear natural talent. He was a pornographer in more ways than one—he was churning out to a very low standard, and many of his films seem to be hitting a checklist of sexual positions or situations. Daughter of Dracula (1973), the middle of Franco’s Dracula/Frankenstein trilogy, hints at Carmilla connections, but is kind of a damp squib in the face of the lesbian vampire movies he made on either side of it.
These two high-water marks of lesbian vampire greats (Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire) are defined by their stars, Soledad Miranda and Lina Romay. Miranda shot five films with Franco, beginning with his lackluster, faithful Stoker adaptation Count Dracula (1970), concluding with her death in a car crash during the making of an incomplete production of de Sade’s Juliette. Franco replaced her as his muse with Romay, whom he met in 1972 and married in 2008. They remained together until her death in 2012. Franco and Romay made over 100 movies together.
Franco’s Female Vampire was shot in an “erotic version” and a “horror version.” In the erotic, most accessible version, Countess Irina Von Karlstein (Romay) can only subsist on sexual juices instead of blood. The film has a bit of a nonsense plot but is littered with breathtaking moments—a dominatrix wipes blood from the countess’s face and says, “So silky, I dare not touch it.” Romay is a commanding presence, portraying the vampire as a mute, with the arcane rules and goals of the men in the movie ending up as so much dross, when all you want to do is watch her—bathing, stalking the forest at dawn, piercing the soul of anyone she makes eye contact with… all in thigh-high leather boots.
Franco claimed that the sex scenes in the 1976 Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses influenced the fetishistic boots, tits, blood, and writhing sex scenes, but they just feel like Jess Franco sex scenes. These are some of his finest (his best would be in She Killed in Ecstasy and Eugenie de Sade) because of the charge he seemed to derive from working with Romay at the start. Female Vampire was released under more than 20 titles, including The Bare Breasted Countess and Erotikill.
Franco worked all over Europe in all scales of budget and made the most iconic lesbian vampire movie Vampyros Lesbos for a German production company. The narrative hints at Dracula (following part of its structure) and Carmilla, but it’s also a refutation of nearly all the classic elements of the vampire story. Shot at a beach resort in Istanbul but set on the Portuguese islands of Madeira, the whole film unfolds during the day in warm sunlight. We are methodically disabused of nearly every vampire trope, bar the need for blood.
Miranda is a stark physical creature on-screen—it’s fitting that we first see her doing some gestural performance art on stage, which she carries through the entire picture. The way Miranda wears a scarf or turns her shoulder is so much of the film’s text. We constantly watch her dictate scenes with a head tilt, and with her arms as she lays on a bed, a scarf caressing her hand. Franco would never have such impeccable set direction—red candles, lush ’70s deco apartments, cascades of red fabric adorn the ceilings, every nightclub is pitch black, every pool is crystal clear.
Beginning with a burlesque striptease routine, in which Countess Nadine Carody (Miranda) foreshadows her urges and goals, she is intent on a lesbian seduction, but her love is equal parts performative and self-directed. Something that fiction does for lesbian relationships, particularly high femme for high femme ones, is provide a space to discuss homosexuality as narcissism and borderline personality behavior. The lesbian vampire movie so rarely reaches for these ideas, but to seek out a version of yourself is a kind of narcissistic urge, a borderline need to reflect oneself (this is lesbianism, not just lesbian vampires). At the same time, one that betrays an internal shakiness of a person who would seek themselves in the other. Nadine is one of the most assured and calm vampires we encounter in the genre as a whole. She doesn’t drink wine. “Do you want to go for a swim before we get down to business?” The seduction between Nadine and Linda (Ewa Strömberg) doesn’t quite feel like Linda wasn’t immediately down to sleep with the countess moments after they meet. Linda drinks a decanter of blood like she’s playing footsie under the table. These are willing and excited players, not predator and prey. There is a lot of Stoker-esque plot-heavy mishegoss—a lunatic doctor pursues the countess, she has a violent manservant named Morpho, and the real Count Dracula is discussed as turning Nadine and leaving her his vast fortune. This is more an excuse for the story, which centers on Linda’s relationship with the countess. At one point, Nadine says she hates men and how they have destroyed her, but women…
Vampyros Lesbos is perhaps now most famous for its psych soundtrack. Recorded by a one-off group, featuring Franco himself, billed as Vampires’ Sound Incorporation, the songs have popped up in Jackie Brown and The L Word. Quentin Tarantino said one of his areas of expertise when working at Video Archives in the ’80s was lesbian vampire movies, and while he’s never truly referenced any of these films, tiny nods litter his career.
The entire prime of the subgenre is forever about the semipermeable barrier between horror, erotica, and pornography. Franco lives here, dead center of the Venn diagram. His directing style is languorous. Where Rollin is mournful and melancholy, Franco is boring a hole into the wall with intensity. Both directors are hypnotic and repetitive, but the effect of the hypnosis is so different. Rollin is trancelike Terry Riley cinema. Franco is Spacemen 3 psychedelic drone, pummeling and slightly venal. Later, Nadja (1994) would introduce actual shoegaze muddying this metaphor—but Nadja truly is shoegaze cinema the way that Vampyros Lesbos is a 22-minute one-riff feedback solo. It’s a Spacemen 3 live bootleg.
Franco even made Christina, Princess of Eroticism (1973)—released theatrically as A Virgin Among the Living Dead—which highlights the difference between the two directors. It’s not wrong to see the mournful and hypnotic film as Franco doing Rollin. One scene in particular involves a seemingly hypnotized woman as another woman stabs her naked chest with a pair of scissors, turning to the camera, and saying to Christina—but really breaking the fourth wall—“Trust me, I swear it’s delicious,” cackling. This vibrational similarity is only complicated by Rollin himself being hired to direct some stray zombie shots for an equally dismal re-release. (In some markets, this was released as Zombie 4 on VHS.) Rollin later said, “I don’t think I ever saw Franco’s film.” These two artists, so entwined both in aesthetic and our public consciousness, really didn’t feel much affinity for one another.
Joseph W. Sarno’s full-on porno The Devil’s Plaything (1973) is essentially a speedrun of lesbian vampire tropes, which in itself is important. Like the Euro-spy genre and its relationship to the success of the James Bond series, these movies—particularly Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971) in all its beauty and power—had become a strong enough force to codify. The Devil’s Plaything is, in some ways, the Friday the 13th cash-in on the Halloweens and Black Christmases of real artists/perverts. A Swedish/Swiss co-production directed by an American, it features trace elements of Carmilla, Rollin, and Franco and slathers them on unadorned pornography. Euro-sleaze or Euro-porn has an air of sophistication or at least an attempt at it. Sarno is no Franco and certainly no Borowczyk. A lesbian coven living in a castle hosts the descendants of an ancient sacrificed vampire’s bloodline, and they wish to resurrect her. The most exciting element of The Devil’s Plaything is Marie Forså’s performance as Helga (descendant of the one who executed the baroness), a woman cursed to be in an ecstatic state of sexual pain/frenzy all the time, until the cult achieves its goal of resurrection. She’s fantastic in her role and arguably the only good thing in the entire film. She’s so good, she’s on the poster.
Much, much less sexy is José Ramón Larraz’s Vampyres (1974), the most British movie a Spanish man has ever directed. It also manages to make knife-play, blood-drinking, lesbian sex, and gaslighting men into thinking they are drunk and not slowly dying feel like a sexless, turgid slog. The two female vampires act out a similar swindle for random male motorists like that in Requiem for a Vampire, and the only real rich detail is that instead of biting their victims, these women have to slice and drain them. This lends some frisson when we see the women go overboard and drain a man to the point of giallo-level gore. It barely moves the needle, though. If you avoid just one movie mentioned in this course, make it Vampyres. 🩸
Next time: The French starlets arrive.
is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn.
FRESH BLOOD
In my earlier Bloodvine Guide entry on Jean Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl, I tried to sum up the narrative and visual tropes of the lesbian...
BY LAURA WYNNE | May 30, 2025
Jean Rollin’s debut, The Rape of the Vampire, was the only film to premiere in Paris during the May 1968 riots, and Rollin’s destiny as a director was irrevocably sealed.
BY LAURA WYNNE | February 15, 2025
It was Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) that inspired Stephanie Rothman to make movies. She studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California, became the first woman...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 12, 2024
RAVENOUS
This pre-Code offering packs a lot of story into its typically brisk running time, with several plot threads weaving together a (not always successful) tapestry of spooky and criminal doings.
READ MORE >
BY ANN OLSSON | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
READ MORE >
BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
READ MORE >
BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021