Succubus
Succubus is a 1968 film from West Germany, directed by Jesús Franco, running 84 minutes. reelscum files it under euro-gothic.
- Year
- 1968 · 1960s films
- Country
- West Germany
- Runtime
- 84 min
- Director
- Jesús Franco
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (41/100)
- Also known as
- Succubus
Defined in the glossary: Euro-gothic
Franco's arthouse credentials, such as they are. Fritz Lang liked it.
Franco's art-house calling card, such as it is, and the film that got him taken seriously by people who normally would not. A nightclub performer whose sadomasochistic stage act blurs into real violence loses her grip on what is performance and what is murder, and the film unfolds as fractured, surreal psychodrama.
It is pretentious and strange in roughly equal measure, and Fritz Lang, of all people, reportedly admired it. Janine Reynaud drifts through it in a haze of eroticism and dread. Coherence is not the goal.
Early, ambitious Franco, and a key to understanding his stranger instincts.
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Written about
- 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.
Filed alongside
The Shiver of the Vampires
Rollin with a fuzz-guitar band and a vampire who lives in the clock. His most fun.
Baron Blood
A resurrected torturer stalks his own castle. Bava on more commercial autopilot, still gorgeous.
Maciste in Hell
A muscleman drops into a full gothic hell. Peplum crossbred with a haunted-castle picture, and it looks it.
A Virgin Among the Living Dead
Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.
Lisa and the Devil
Bava's most personal film, and his strangest. Telly Savalas as the devil, holding a lollipop.
Kill, Baby... Kill!
A ghost child with a white ball. Fellini and Scorsese both stole from it.
99 Women
Franco doing the formula early, with Mercedes McCambridge as the warden.
Alucarda
The most hysterical nunsploitation film ever made. A convent, two possessed girls, and constant screaming.
The Blood Spattered Bride
Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.
The Grapes of Death
Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock
Barbara Steele married to a necrophile surgeon, and Freda smuggling it past the 1962 censors on innuendo alone.
Vampyres
Two women lure travellers to a country house and drain them. British, bloody, erotic.