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 Continue reading 59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972)
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