Fascination

Jean Rollin usually gets filed under beautiful and boring, all naked women drifting through cemeteries while nothing much happens. This is the one where the drifting has teeth. A thief on the run hides out in a chateau in 1905, finds it staffed by two servants far too calm about his intrusion, and slowly works out that the aristocratic women who gather there each night drink blood as a matter of habit. It builds to the image every Rollin admirer can describe from memory: Brigitte Lahaie, nude under a black cloak, working a farm scythe on the drawbridge. Slow, pretty, and quietly menacing once it gets going, and the closest Rollin came to a film that works as horror rather than reverie.