The Living Dead Girl (1982)

 

Director: Jean Rollin

Screenplay: Jacques Ralf and Jean Rollin

Cast: Françoise Blanchard as Catherine Valmont; Marina Pierro as Hélène; Mike Marshall as Greg; Carina Barone as Barbara Simon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #252

 

You're gradually abandoning death.

Out of Jean Rollin's career, The Living Dead Girl comes off as one of the bleakest and melancholic. At first that may prove deceptive due to the establishing prologue. Two men, one drinking on the job to add insult to injury, are secretly storing dangerous chemical waste in a family crypt of the long gone Valmont family, whose manor is on sell. Deciding to add grave robbing to their sins, they unfortunately find themselves in the midst of an earth tremor, which leads to not only their demises but also a barrel to spill next to the tomb of Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard), the last of the family who passed, resurrecting her. The Living Dead Girl is gruesome when it needs to, as the younger of the grave robbers gets his eyes exploded by finger poke, but strained in a depressed sadness, and an extreme naturalism for the fantastique director, the film eventually becomes a sobering piece for the French auteur even if it is with this gruesome violence and nudity.,

It is instead a tale of friendship, of two girls in childhood who bonded and even had a blood pact. One was Catherine, a ghoul now slowly regaining her memories as she wanders her family home, the other Hélène (Marina Pierro), who learns something has transpired and comes to help Catherine. Even if it means getting sacrifices, women, to be mutilated and killed by Catherine to drink their blood, Hélène's love for her will mean helping in any way. This proves an issue as, regaining her mind and voice eventually, Catherine herself views her undead state as a personal hell she wishes to escape. With an American woman, on vacation, having spotted Catherine in the distance and become fascinated by her, the dramatic catalyst for tension to appear in the narrative, this is a film about this friendship, a very emotional plot thread, which will become heartbreaking.

It is a great film from Rollin. It is also distinct with a noticeable change for him in that, whilst he used very real French locations a lot in his films and made them part of his work's dream logic, this is stripped of his oneiric style which has a striking result. Entirely set in land, so with his trademark use of beaches no existent, baring the manor having a gothic aesthetic, alongside the family crypt underground, this is entirely grounded with a stark naturalism. Alongside the lack of music in the score either, this has a fascinating atmosphere especially when, in the world disconnected to Catherine's trauma and Hélène, the world of the nearby town is, even if dated fashions, insanely modern even decades later to see. A local town where you see a French outdoor market, and a musical concert at night as a set piece, Rollin documenting ordinary France even by accident is a very idiosyncratic change of pace, especially as this period for him had a lot of experimentation with his style - The Escapees (1981) was his attempt at a drama, whilst The Sidewalks of Bangkok (1984) was an attempt at an old pulp serial on a low budget, whilst he began the decade with The Night of the Hunted (1980), effectively (including the cold modernist aesthetic) when Jean Rollin tried a David Cronenberg movie in tone.

The mood is emphasised by how nasty the film gets, as Rollin's films introduced more violence as they went on, the red of the fake blood contrasting the stark aesthetic of normalcy or that, rather than the female vampires of earlier films, "ghoul" is apt for Catherine. Even if fake guts and offal are involved, her breaking open of victims, even biting their fingers off, to get to their blood like a feral animal whilst they die screaming slowly is absolutely horrifying. Far from pleasurable as gore scenes can be for viewers in horror movies, it is here painful, meant to force a viewer to experience what agonising mutilation this all is. The violence's extremity does not detract from the emotional core but arguably emphasises it as, with Catherine eventually viewing herself as a monster when she gains clarity again, this is a tragedy of her friend Hélène refusing to let her go again. Even if it may lead to something horrible, the greatest of tragedies which ends the narrative comes from Hélène's love and friendship.

It is a bleak narrative as a result to sit through, but with Rollin, who viewed himself less as a horror director based on the idiosyncrasies of his work, this is something absolutely admirable, as he was gaining more and more emotion to his work as he went alongside his pulp influenced storytelling. It is for him a brilliantly executed and beautiful piece.