Requiem For A Vampire

Unturned We Stand

Requiem For A Vampire
aka Requiem Pour Un Vampire
aka Caged Virgins
France 1972
Directed by Jean Rollin  
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Vampiric spoilers being
whipped up in the dungeons of this review.

Requiem For A Vampire is the fourth of Jean Rollin’s personal feature length films (aka non-porno and mostly vampire themed) following on from The Rape Of The Vampire (reviewed here), The Nude Vampire (reviewed here) and Shiver Of The Vampires (reviewed here). Although it’s not my favourite of his movies, it’s probably the one with my favourite opening sequence because it’s like a bizarre, non-sequitur of a back story fill in and, I appreciate the strange juxtaposition of elements presented in this imagery. It’s also one of his more problematic films for the British Board Of Film Censors as it’s always cut to ribbons over here by at least six minutes, due to the sexual violence and dungeon molestation scenes so... yeah... if you’ve not seen this and want to watch it, make sure you definitely ‘don’t buy British’ in this case. Get a nice American or French version.

Okay... so that opening sequence. Shots are being fired as two cars speed down a country lane, one in pursuit of the other. The front car is being driven by a guy with two female companions who are dressed and made up as clowns. One of the two women... and of course it’s two women because two female companions is one of Rollin’s main obsessions in his movies... is firing out the back of the car window. They manage to give their aggressive pursuers the slip by turning down a back lane but it’s too late for the driver... he has taken too many bullets. So the girls drive the car to the middle of a field, cover it and the driver in gasoline and catch it alight. Once again, Rollin gives us a strong, slightly surreal, visual image of a car burning in a field. We cut to the opening credits which picture the girls walking through the countryside as Pierre Raph’s passable score kicks in.

Various small things happen which take up the first half an hour. The two girls, Marie (played by Marie-Pierre Castel, from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Michelle (played by Mireille Dargent, who would appear in a few of the director’s next films), find a barn and change out of their clown attire and make up. They then find a motorcycle in a tower which, I think, the driver pointed them to prior to his death (if I am joining the dots correctly), before using sexual allure to distract a hot dog stand vendor so they can steal his money but then, one of them gets accidentally buried alive by an inattentive grave digger (don’t ask). However, she is rescued before the two stumble onto a river, with some blood dripping in it and come face to face with some bats in a forest which compel them to find their way to a castle. The rest of the movie is pretty simple too and here’s a quick summary...

In the castle they find a vampire cult lead by the half vampire Erica (played by Dominique, the pointy breast stabbing woman from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Louise (played by Louise Dhour). They also have some barbaric male companions who do lots of raping and molestation of both Marie and Michelle, plus a load of chained, naked girls in the dungeon, in scenes which do go on a bit, it has to be said. These vampire guys also all manage to sound like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver as they make piratey ‘Arrrr’ noises as their only form of communication, it seems to me. Then there’s the one they all worship, the old vampire (played by Michel Delesalle) who has bitten them all... they are supposedly all turning into vampires and Erica even has fangs now.  

Then there’s lots of shenanigans where the two girls find that they can’t escape the grounds of the castle and the nearby cemetery (which looks familiar, it may be the one from The Iron Rose, reviewed here) as they always end back up at the castle. Their new job now is to entice nearby, local men into the castle for food. The double pigtailed Michelle takes her chores seriously... well, I say seriously. She finds a local, takes her clothes off and then the two of them chase each other laughing through the castle during many extended scenes as silly, comedy music plays. These scenes are nice to look at but, alas, they genuinely give a Carry On feel to the whole sequence, which is at odds with the rest of the movie.

These scenes are crosscut to Marie having sex with a guy but she hides him from the vampire cult. This gets her in trouble but the old vampire, in a candid moment with Marie, tells her that the others won’t properly turn into vampires and he really is the last of his breed. This makes no sense in some ways because, in the protracted dungeon rape scene, one of the barbaric males turns into a bat and hangs from a woman’s hair covered vulva in a nicely surreal, typical piece of Rollin image making. So, yeah, never sacrifice a good image for the details of the plot is probably the order of the day here (much like Argento, who admits to having the same disregard of the plot mechanics when it comes to being faced with a striking visual). But then, Michelle chains naked Marie up in a tower and whips her, in order to find out where her lover is. Marie won’t tell but Michelle then escapes with her because Erica was going to stab her eye out. Then the head vampire sacrifices his and Erica’s life by being sealed in a guarded tomb by his followers and the camera ‘irises in’ as the screen shrinks to a circle surrounded by orange.

So yeah, the story is simple and a lot of the acting is... questionable. But it’s Rollin so you come to expect that. As it’s Rollin, though, you also get a film filled with memorable and haunting images and a lot of beautifully composed frames. Once again, the director's use of colour is astonishing and, like in Shiver Of The Vampires, he sometimes pitches different colours like reds and blues together, colour coding different depths of the set to separate foreground and background in contrasting hues.

He’s also not shy of occasionally shocking the viewer with the juxtaposition of colours between transitions. For example, the shot of the vampire bat drinking the blood direct from a chained woman’s genitalia is all lit in red and held in the shot for a while. Then we get an edit to the old vampire in his coffin and... it’s a all lit in a bright, fluorescent green reminiscent of the greens that Mario Bava used to use in similar ways in his movies. It’s a shock to the senses, in the best way and looks fantastic, of course (well, Rollin’s cinema always looks fantastic).

Another thing he does a lot of here is take shots looking at different levels to add depth. So he’ll have an opening in a part of the screen with people framed in that opening to highlight the contrasting depths. Or he’ll take a shot from up on the ramparts looking down at several different landscape levels with the action going on in the bottom level. And, conversely, he’ll do a shot looking up from the bottom of a tower at a naked lady at the top, for instance. I notice he really makes use of the height and horizontal lengths of various locations here, probably more than he did in the previous film because this castle lends itself to that kind of frame design.

Also, in this film, some of the night scenes give a completely pitch black screen where nothing can be seen except the shapes or areas he chooses to highlight with his coloured lighting. So, for example, a tomb in the grave yard taking up about an eighth of the screen near the middle of a shot is the only thing the eye has to latch on to... and he does this several times throughout the movie with different objects such as grave yard markers or crypt entrances. The final shot of the movie where the camera becomes just a circle on the screen surrounded by orange further enhances the shot where that kind of dark and light visibility was already going on in the frame... which is a nice moment, even though it’s the end.

The film, like a few of Rollin’s movies, doesn’t end well for the vampires but, at least in this one, the two main female leads survive and escape their vampiric fate which, well, I don’t remember Rollin’s films always ending this optimistically... although, if your sympathies are for the vampire and his hopeful cult, then I guess it possibly doesn’t. Like all of Rollin’s films, Requiem For A Vampire is, if nothing else, an absolutely beautiful, rich visual compendium of surreal and sexy, gothic hued imagery which, frankly, should be of interest to any cinephile worth their salt. Not one of my favourites but still a key work and certainly brilliant enough that I could watch it fairly regularly (I must have seen this one at least five times by now). And, to date (although there’s a beautiful Encore DVD set of this film which is also worth having, for just the packaging alone if nothing else), the US Redemption Blu Ray version is the best transfer available... so maybe give that one a go if you have a multizone machine.