Requiem pour un vampire, AKA Vierges et Vampires, Caged Virgins

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“[M]ore than thirty years later, Requiem remains one of my favorite films. In my view, it’s a real naïve film, written naively without thought, almost automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstituted imagination. It’s a real ‘B’ movie with all that that involves. No intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism. Nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about.” —Jean Rollin, “The Making of Requiem for a Vampire” (2005)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: Marie-Pierre Castel, Mareille Dargent, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle

PLOT: Two teenage delinquents disguised as clowns escape unknown pursuers in a car; their getaway driver is gunned down in the chase. After escaping they remove their harlequin makeup and make their way across the countryside. They are eventually bitten by bats and wind up trapped in the medieval castle lair of a dying vampire and his minions.

BACKGROUND:

• Rollin’s script for his fourth film, written in two days in a stream of consciousness, evolved out of two scenes: the car chase through the countryside and the piano concert in the cemetery.
• The first half of the film is nearly silent. Inspired by the pioneering adventure serials of Louis Feuillade, Rollin chose to emphasize the action sequences by keeping them mostly dialogue-free.
• The art direction was inspired by surrealist painters Clovis Trouille and Paul Delvaux.
• The dungeon scenes were filmed in the twelfth century Château de la Roche-Guyon, after the crew was evicted from their first choice of castle when the owner caught sight of the film’s nudity. Edmée, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld never saw the script; she agreed to rent her chateau for filming under the impression the story was, in Rollin’s words, “a sort of fairytale.”
• The dungeon torture scene is ten minutes long, the minimum length of sleaze sales agent Lionel Wallman required in order to sell the film on the international grindhouse circuit. Wallman also donated the getaway car that gets shot to pieces and set on fire.
• Interpol briefly investigated the film’s production after local gendarmes discovered the shot-up car with Belgian plates in a secluded patch of forest and assumed it belonged to foreign drug traffickers.
• The cemetery scenes were filmed in a burial ground for medieval plague victims in Crèvecoeur-en-Auge, a small village in Normandy, believed by locals to be cursed.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many fantastic scenes in Requiem haunt the mind (the vampire Erika playing the organ in a chapel to an audience of skeleton monks, the crimson torture chamber, the master vampire’s coffin in a green-glowing crypt), but the two main characters dressed as stock clowns stand out whenever they appear, whether in a golden field, a collapsing barn, or a cemetery at dusk.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Clown car getaway; vagina bat

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A car chase gunfight along a winding country road; a solitary food truck in the middle of nowhere; a motorcycle in an abandoned water tower; a chapel doorway glowing crimson in the dead of night. Requiem for a Vampire transitions from scene to scene with the abrupt illogical shifts of a dream, as the intrepid heroines traverse a deserted landscape freighted with mystery. Mysterious themselves, the girls transform from clowns to teenage outlaws with handguns in their miniskirts. It remains unknown quite how they’ve ended up here, who was chasing them, and even where “here” is.

Trailer for Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

COMMENTS: Disregard for normal narrative conventions (establishing the setting, introducing the characters) give Rollin’s films a mythic feel. His twinned protagonists seem archetypal. Atmosphere sums up his storytelling style, and he has no use for traditional plot structure. As soon as the hazy dreamlike events, the droning psychedelic music, and the absence of dialogue or any coherent narrative become monotonous, a sudden surreal flourish revives our interest.

Requiem subverts all expectations of the Gothic horror subgenre. It features a dying vampire whose supernatural powers have faded with time, but he only shows up in the second half of the film, in a last gasp attempt at preserving his lineage with virgin blood before stoically resigning himself to fate. The unlikely agents of his resurrection, the two girls who accidentally crash his decaying castle while fleeing from the law in clown costumes, turn out not to be such easy prey.

After being shot, their getaway driver directs the girls to a water tower with his dying breath. They solemnly torch their car and his body before removing their disguises. A magical close-up shot of a pond shows the water stained red while the pastoral music becomes ominously discordant; it’s natural to fear the girls have been mortally wounded, but then the water clouds over with white—they have only been washing off their clown makeup. After retrieving a motorcycle from its hiding place, they seduce a food truck cashier, steal some french fries, and hightail it down the highway. Unfortunately for them, the motorcycle breaks down and they’re forced to take shelter in a cemetery for the night.

The enigmatic story progresses through episodic moments, in homage to the adventure serials Rollin watched in his youth. When the girls attempt to hide from a pair of gravediggers in a cemetery, Michéle accidentally falls into an open grave and, landing on the coffin within, is knocked unconscious. The gravediggers, preoccupied with cigarettes and wine, fail to notice her and proceed to fill in the grave. Marie watches in suspense as they bury her partner in crime alive. Luckily for the girls, the gravediggers are too lazy to complete their work. Spooked by the onset of dusk, they leave the cemetery. Michéle’s hand emerges zombie-like from the soil and after an agonizing struggle, Marie manages to free her from the grave.

Rollin may not have put much conscious thought into the symbolism, but these early scenes are suggestive all the same. Michéle’s burial foreshadows what’s to become of her, as do the specific clown costumes of each girl. Marie wears the attributes of Pierrot, trickster and icon of the protelariat in France; he’s also unlucky in love. Michéle wears the costume of Auguste, a foolish character who plays second fiddle, always eager to please. The costumes provide insight into their personalities, otherwise undeveloped since they have very few spoken lines. The rapport between the girls is established through pantomime; they move in unison like mirror images, conveying a relationship so close they don’t need to communicate with words.

Rollin worked with a shoestring budget, with only a month in which to shoot. He overcomes his limitations with simple but eye-catching props, adding striking details to the mise-en-scene along with creative use of color in costumes and setting. Sinister skulls crammed into every nook and cranny of the castle ominously stare down upon the protagonists; disembodied arms thrust themselves through windows in the stone walls. Red filters light the dungeon where the vampires keep their captives, and an otherworldly green pervades the crypt where the master sleeps in his coffin.

In a surprisingly effective scene, Marie and Michéle emerge from a forest with stunned glassy eyes, bats draped across their throats like eerie fur stoles. Because the initial attack occurs offscreen, their transition to vampire prey happens with another sudden dreamlike shift. Inside the castle they find a bedroom and decide to make themselves at home in the fur-covered bed.

Already notorious for his images of lesbian eroticism,  Rollin had discovered the paintings of Belgian artist Paul Delvaux by the time he made Requiem and been inspired by the painter’s “naked and hieratic women shown in unexpected places. . . I liked this strange addition to his notion of Surrealism. Now I was claiming that such images were not elements of sensual arousal, but more an integral part of my cinema.”

The vampire’s servant Louise drags the girls down into the dungeon drenched in blood-red light, forcing them to watch as young female prisoners chained to the walls provide sustenance for the vampires and playthings for their henchmen. The vampire Erika feeds upon one of the prisoners. The obligatory ten minutes of rape and molestation for the raincoat crowd, set to a lilting druggy tune, follows. The scene ends with another slow pan down the length of a nude female body. The camera stops on the girl’s crotch where a bat hovers between her legs. Part of the visual vocabulary of Clovis Trouille, the motif appears in his painting My Tomb; Rollin brandishes it to thumb his nose at the purveyors of gratuitous titillation.

Many of the erotic scenes in Requiem serve a purpose beyond the sensual, including moments of irreverent humor (Marie leading the french fry vendor on a merry chase; Michéle taunting a hapless passerby). The dungeon’s highly stylized aesthetic creates a moody and groovy vibe, despite the raunchiness of the simulated sex. When Marie has Frederic make love to her in order to save herself from the vampire’s influence, Rollin chastens the impulse to ogle at the sight of a girl losing her virginity with the camera’s fixed viewpoint on her upside-down face. The framing cuts Frederic out of the picture, and though Marie’s breasts fill the screen, the focus remains on her expression of determination.

An erotic film that isn’t exactly sexy, a vampire film in which the blood-sucking predators are actually mortal and quite harmless; these qualities make Requiem for a Vampire the weird cousin among the plethora of Carmilla adaptations released in the early 1970s. Unlike the derivative works of his contemporaries, Rollin crafts his own idiosyncratic variations on the vampire mythos. In Requiem, the undead may still be relics of a decayed and decadent aristocracy, but the will of the living ultimately subordinates these threatened creatures. In Rollin’s world of obscure and tantalizing symbols, vampires and their would-be victims are more alike than different, and mysterious destinies await them all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of Rollin’s best, and by that I mean one of his weirdest, craziest, most beautifully dreamlike movies.”–Sean Axmaker, “Stream on Demand” (VOD)

“This sleazy dream-like fairy tale lesbian vampire flick was favorably received by fans of French director Jean Rollin (‘Two Orphan Vampires’/’Fascination’/’The Nude Vampire‘) as one of his better cult films. If this is one of his better films, I’d hate to see his lesser ones.”–Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

IMDB LINK: Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 – Jean Rollin’s foreword to this 2004 book of essays references Requiem and provides a concise introduction to his artistic philosophy

Requiem for a Dreamer: Jean Rollin’s Vierges et vampires – Ethan Spigland connects Rollin’s film making practices to the French New Wave (from “Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #6: Sex and the French”)

Jean Rollin: the most commercially successful director of French cinefantastique discusses the genre’s special problems – 1973 interview with Rollin in Cinefantastique magazine

Your Daily Dracula – Michel Delesalle, Requiem pour un Vampire – short write-up of the film with plentiful screenshots from author and film critic Kim Newman

Virgins and Vampires: The Expansion of Gothic Subversion in Jean Rollin’s Female Transgressors – Virginie Sélavy’s academic study of female sexuality in Rollin’s films places them within the history of Gothic literature

LIST CANDIDATE: REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE – This site’s original List Candidate review

HOME VIDEO INFO:

Indicator released a new restoration of Requiem on Blu-ray (US and UK versions) and region-free 4K UHD, both in regular and special limited editions, in 2024 (buy). The Indicator discs feature newly translated English subtitles and the special features from the older (and cheaper) Redemption DVD-only release (buy), plus additional interviews with Rollin and cast and crew members, alternate scenes, and a short documentary where Virginie Sélavy discusses Rollin’s artistic influences. The limited edition booklet includes an excerpt (in English translation) from Rollin’s novel The Last Book. The film is also available for streaming on the Kino Film Collection site (subscription required).

Where to watch Requiem for a Vampire