Jean Rollin, Poet of the Fantastique

Though there is a variety of sexual content depicted in the film, there is an innocent, fairy-tale-like quality to the story. This is another enduring element of Rollin’s work and can also be found in his films that focus on heterosexual romance, like The Nude Vampire and Lips of Blood. The latter follows Frédéric (Jean-Loup Philippe), who has hazy visions of visiting a castle by the sea when he was a child, where he met a beautiful girl (Annie Bell). He begins to believe these are not fantasies but suppressed memories. Frédéric becomes obsessed with finding the girl, a dangerous quest that draws him closer to dark secrets about his own family and into a nest of female vampires.

Frédéric is strongly motivated by nostalgia and fantasy, and his dreams of the vampire woman come to consume his life as he drifts further away from the human world. Folklorist Maria Tatar writes that the protagonist of a fairy tale is often a “traveler between two worlds” and journeys from a disappointing, ordinary life to find “strange, new realms.” This applies to Frédéric, and to many of Rollin’s other protagonists, who often embody a sense of innocence and wonder.

Jennifer, the vampire Frédéric is longing to reunite with, typifies Rollin’s unorthodox conception of vampires. In foundational stories like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), vampires are little more than seductive, bestial predators who prey on humans to drink their blood. But for Rollin, vampires represent a romantic yearning for another way of life, and are possibly even an allegory for queerness: many of the female vampire characters in his films are implied to be bisexual. In this sense, Rollin was part of an emerging trend in vampire cinema in the early ’70s, when many European and some American directors presented female vampires as the lesbian seducers of young women, often newly married wives. Living death offered their mortal companions a chance at an entirely different society apart from the constraints of heterosexuality and bourgeois institutions. Other films that explore this trope include The Vampire Lovers (1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Daughters of Darkness (1971), The Velvet Vampire (1971), and The Blood Spattered Bride (1972).

Rollin adapted this formula most directly with The Shiver of the Vampires, about a newly married couple visiting the bride’s relatives—vampire hunters who were recently transformed into the undead—at their family castle. The Shiver of the Vampires has an iconic sequence where the main female vampire, dressed like a contemporary hippie, unexpectedly emerges from a grandfather clock in the bride’s bedroom on her wedding night. This is an important example of how Rollin uses coffins, or other oblong boxes, as portals or gateways, transporting characters through time and space, sometimes figuratively but often literally. Often these characters are deposited on the beach in Dieppe, in the north of France, which appears in many of Rollin’s films and where he spent his summers as a child. A young woman inside or on top of a coffin is also a recurring visual motif. In Lips of Blood, the coffin takes on a more symbolic function: Frédéric and Jennifer climb into one and drift slowly out to sea, to an uncertain future.

Even when this trend waned later in the decade, Rollin continued to explore female vampires as figures of romantic and sexual liberation, the physical incarnation of a freedom that surpasses even death. He would also begin to experiment with the limits of vampirism. In Fascination, a group of women form a secret society where they lure victims to drink their blood, sheerly for the pleasure of it. These voraciously sexual women are queer libertines of a sort; some of them appear to be wealthy and powerful, and they commit violence with impunity. It remains unclear whether this ritual blood-drinking has brought them immortality or supernatural power, though they seem to be only human.

Starting in the mid-’70s, Rollin’s struggles to find funding for his films worsened, and he was increasingly forced to take guidance from producers. He began making soft- and hardcore sex films under pseudonyms, though the best of these, like the gorgeous The Seduction of Amy (1975), are still in the gothic horror subgenre. He would also take on work-for-hire projects and movie assignments in popular subgenres, like the zombie films The Grapes of Death (1978) and Zombie Lake (1981), which are no less dreamy or surreal than his vampire films.

The haunting Living Dead Girl, made to fulfill a producer’s request for another zombie movie, focuses on two women, Catherine (Françoise Blanchard) and Hélène (Marina Pierro), who have been devoted friends since childhood. Catherine died tragically young and was buried in the crypt at her family’s country estate, but after toxic waste is spilled on her remains, she rises from her tomb with a lust for human flesh. Her sense of self gradually returns, thanks to persistent care from Hélène, though this requires Hélène to procure victims for her.

A hybrid of elements of the French fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty,” vampire folklore, and zombie-film tropes, The Living Dead Girl refigures the romanticized childhood longing of Lips of Blood into something more tragic, melancholic, and graphically violent. Though their friendship is rooted in youthful devotion and nostalgia, it begins to take a turn toward something more romantic; Hélène’s love for Catherine is palpable, as is her desperation not to lose Catherine again. But Hélène’s attempts to keep Catherine alive become increasingly sadistic and bloodthirsty. While Hélène is content to kidnap victims and even kill for Catherine, Catherine becomes consumed with horror at the monstrosity of her existence and cannot bear to remain alive.

Several of Rollin’s films depict the agony of lost innocence and the idealization of childhood rituals and fantasies as a way to cope with the banality of adult existence. For much of The Living Dead Girl, Catherine remembers only her childhood with Hélène and flashes back to memories of the ritual they performed to become blood sisters. Other films like The Escapees, Lost in New York, and Two Orphan Vampires also focus on a pair of female friends united in their love of fairy tales and fantasy stories, sometimes even down to a specific book, which they regard as a kind of bible. Rollin seems to suggest that it is impossible to live in conventional society, and the only escape is through shared fantasies or death—or transformation into the undead. As this sense of fatalism increased throughout his work, so did the scope of his fantasy worlds, far beyond the small communities of vampires shown in his first movies.

Later films like Two Orphan Vampires, Dracula’s Fiancée (2002), and The Mask of Medusa (2009) depict entire underworld societies made up of a variety of creatures and often ruled by women. Rollin considered himself as much a writer as a filmmaker—above all, he should be considered a poetic storyteller—and he used his prolific fiction writing to flesh out these fantastical worlds. Many of these novels revolve around pairs of female protagonists who find themselves in underworld societies.

Lost in New York is a key example of Rollin’s escape into fantasy later in his career and is his most experimental film along with The Iron Rose (1973), about a couple who meet in a cemetery for a tryst, only to find they cannot escape. But unlike many of his later films, Lost in New York is ultimately hopeful. Cut together from an abandoned TV project and largely improvised, it follows the characters of Michelle and Marie, who meet in a village graveyard as children and tell each other stories about a Moon Goddess who can take them on magical adventures. As Michelle says, “We were on a journey that can only be undertaken on the other side of the mirror.” They are transported to New York City as teenagers, where they are separated and have perilous adventures involving vampires. The pair are finally reunited on the beach at Dieppe decades later as old women, with the help of the Moon Goddess.

Lost in New York has more in common with Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) than it does with most of Rollin’s vampire films. The girls’ adventure is constrained not by time or space, but by their own imaginations and their longing to be together. Through the film, Rollin interrogates the nature of reality and questions which version of the women exists in the present: the children in the graveyard, the young women in New York, or the old women on the beach. Ultimately, Lost in New York is a vital illustration of how Rollin, throughout his career, used horror and fantasy to posit that memory and imagination are as solid as reality—even preferable to it—and are important tools to transcend the mundane world.