The Blood Spattered Bride

A Spanish adaptation of the Carmilla story with an unusually pointed anger about marriage running underneath the vampirism. A young bride, disturbed by her new husband's expectations, falls under the influence of a mysterious woman who rises from the beach, and the film reads the lesbian-vampire formula as a revolt against patriarchy.

Vicente Aranda gives it real style and a genuine argument, and the imagery, the woman buried in the sand but for her snorkel, the bloody marriage bed, is striking. It is smarter and angrier than the exploitation packaging suggests.

One of the more thematically loaded entries in the vampire cycle.