Daughters of Darkness
Daughters of Darkness is a 1971 film from France, West Germany, Belgium and the USA, directed by Harry Kümel, running 100 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1971 · 1970s films
- Country
- France · West Germany · Belgium · USA
- Runtime
- 100 min
- Director
- Harry Kümel
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (35/100)
- Also known as
- The Promise of Red Lips · Blood on the Lips · The Redness of the Lips
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.
The most elegant vampire film on this shelf. Countess Bathory, played by Delphine Seyrig as pure old-world glamour, checks into a deserted grand hotel on the Belgian coast in the off-season and takes an interest in a honeymooning couple. Almost nothing happens quickly.
It is art-house horror, all cold light, empty corridors and menace by implication, closer to Last Year at Marienbad than to Hammer. The violence, when it comes, is almost an afterthought to the mood.
Slow, gorgeous and seductive.
Trailer
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The cycle in depth
- Fantaterror: the Spanish horror boom, 1968 to 1976
Two cuts of every film, one for the censor in Madrid and one for the drive-in. Democracy killed the trick in two years.
On these lists
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The graduate course after the giallo: cobwebbed castles and a dead woman who will not stay buried, lit by Bava like nobody since.
Filed alongside
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Kill, Baby... Kill!
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I Vampiri
Freda walked off Italy's first sound horror; Bava finished it. The whole euro-gothic shelf starts here.
The House That Dripped Blood
Four Robert Bloch stories, Cushing and Lee on hand, and barely a drop of the title's blood.
The Grapes of Death
Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.
Alucarda
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The Whip and the Body
Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.
The Blood Spattered Bride
Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.