Dracula's Fiancée (2002)

 

Director: Jean Rollin

Screenplay: Jean Rollin

Cast: Cyrille Gaudin as Isabelle; Jacques Orth as Le Professeur; Thomas Smith as Triboulet; Sandrine Thoquet as La Vampire; Magalie Madison as L'ogresse / La Folle; Brigitte Lahaie as La Louve; Thomas Desfossé as Dracula

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #204/An Abstract List Candidate

 

Late era Rollin - the films after this such as The Mask of Medusa (2009) up to his death are far more difficult to see sadly. Thankfully, Dracula's Fiancée still feels of his oeuvre, immediately when we start in a graveyard and a pale skinned vampiress with striking red hair awakens, and a vampire hunter with great hypnotic powers (and his younger male assistant) watches her from afar. What continues from this is work fed off pulp and the "fantastique", which Rollin has been much closer to even if his career is mostly slotted into the horror genre as here.

His narratives are not driven in the sense their narratives are not psychologically complex. Rollin's cinema is far more interesting when viewed not as horror in the traditional sense, but that these films feel like the cinematic equivalent of serialised storytelling, which progresses in sequences with evocative moments than necessarily leading somewhere from a progression. In this case, that the hunters are tracking down "parallels", figures of a supernatural form that can help them find Dracula, who is to be married to a mortal woman named Isabelle (Cyrille Gaudin), ordained to and having been kept safe for him by nuns who are being contaminated by her prescience, going mad as a result.

Like pulp narratives, different chapters bring their own sequences which link together, picking up more characters as we go along. The pleasure of storytelling in itself is part of his obsessions. He has complete sympathy for the macabre, where in spite of being technically the heroes, the two male hunters are for less sympathetic even next to the Ogress, a beautiful tall woman living in a cave who eats babies. His love of the macabre is found in all the distinct figures here - the nuns, the dwarf actor (first seen in a jester's costume) not defined for who he is but as a character in love with the red haired vampiress, even minor figures like a female violinist who makes her appearance (with her instrument) out of a casket. In general, whilst his cinema has had a lot of female nudity, and he has made adult films, the women are usually the strongest figures, distinct in their prescience. None so much as when Brigitte Lahaie appears, a regular of his career who, starting in adult films, he brought over to his work and gave a chance to. Here, making an entrance on a horse as the She-Wolf, her small role is awesome as a tribute to her.

He has a lot to work with in this film, just from the nuns themselves. It feels neither blasphemous either to elaborate on them, but that they are a whole group of quirky figures who add a lot to this particular film. Even when it comes to them smoking continually - pipes, cigars, an electronic crucifix one on the table for the Mother Superior which lights up and plays music - or when two are possible gay. They actually prove the more dominant characters of the cast than you would presume; figures still actually on the side of God, just more loosened up in their behaviour, even one of them being allowed by the Mother Superior to use a pagan Gypsy ward against evil, a dance ritual with its own costume. Including a taxidermied tiger in one scene among the film's many elaborate props (the kind you would find in antique stores), I was thinking more of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and Dark Habits (1983), his film about eccentric nuns who take drugs, write erotic literature and keep a pet tiger.

The timelessness of his material really helps with Rollin's filmography; even when set in the modern day, and showing that period where he made a film, he usually tackled gothic material which existed with less concern of aging aesthetic. Whilst of the 2000s, this still feels of his own timeless era due to his aesthetic obsessions, particularly with his use of gothic architecture, from castles to caves here, to characters dressed without excessively dated fashion. He was always contemporary, but out of step of fads, so his work has aged better. Even his flirting with modern science fiction or modernised horror work turns into The Night of the Hunted (1980), which was cold and septic like a David Cronenberg movie.

In terms of what Dracula's Fiancée feels like, his work is glacial. Rarely does he move the camera or have any elaborate filmmaking techniques, a solid hand instead. It is onscreen where he constructs, and his work is striking and was able to create iconic images on low budgets. His trademarks are here and still striking - he is obsessed with the coast and beaches, as much as with nautical culture, with the film eventually leading to Isabelle being taken by boat to an island, a location where the nuns there willingly sacrifice themselves to Dracula, the corpses washing up shore and "turning into spiders". Or that he has an obsession with people climbing out or in grandfather clocks, a door to alternative realms which is an inspired surrealist touch.

The images for the this films specifically are just as memorable, such as skeletons of bishops playing chess, the pieces opening a secret passage, or funny little touches like a nun wearing a funnel for a hat even in the mist of the final confrontation on a beach. A horror director not actually that fond of gore at all, even when he breaks that rule here, one of his gorier works at moments, it has a scene such as a woman carrying her own severed heart in her hands, a sequence where he breaks his own trademark with goof cause. It is not necessarily a film to begin with his career for the uninitiated, but neither did he succumb to the lack of power to his work either, neither feeling like a throwback to his older work as an older statesman either. As melancholic as his early films, the ending is effectively a tragedy, with characters trapped on a ship, but it does at least offer as well a harmonious conclusion for others at the same time in a different location out of time, leaving this with its entirely distinct personality.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None