Jean Rollin's Le Viol du vampire (1968)

It was only by casually looking at the British Film Institute site that I discovered the name of the director Jean Rollin. He made many films, of which the first – conventionally enough – were shorts: his first short was Les Amours jaunes (1958), which is essentially some verses of Tristan Corbière's against a visual background of a seashore. Rollin intended to work with Marguerite Duras on 'L'Intinèraire marin', but it never came to fruition. His first full feature was Le Viol du vampire (1968).

Le Viol du vampire was a failure, probably mainly because the viewers were expecting a horror film but were served with an experimental, partly surrealist film which owes more to Buñuel than to Hammer horror, although the plot may suggest otherwise.

This film is low budget, so much so that the wounds of the victims look, well, like pathetic make-up, some of the acting leaves something to be desired, as do the props, but there's something here. OK, you have to wade through a hugely elaborate plot about four Vampire sisters who live on blood, are said to be 200 years old, and can't bear the sunlight. The nearby villagers are frightened of them, and psychoanalyst Thomas and his friends Marc and Brigitte go out to investigate, Thomas trying to convince them that they aren't what they think they are.

Thomas and friends destroy the crosses villagers have put up around the vampires' home, it is discovered that the lord of the manor has a strong hold over them, and Thomas seems to have amorously converted one of the sisters. But she turns out to be a real vampire and reluctantly turns Thomas into one, and much more continues.

Rollin filmed this as a result of putting two stories together, and although it's impossible to relate in a few words where the plot takes you, there's a queen of the vampires working from a clinic in Paris with Doctor Samsky to create vampires, although Samsky later defects and joins the 'goodies'. Samsky believes he can turn vampires back to normal, although he can't, with the result that the reluctant vampires Thomas and his rebel sister vampire lover have no future as real humans, and Marc, who has unwittingly killed his dead lover Brigitte (who was already dead but turned into a zombie) wanders around Paris with her body in his arms.

Rollin, between 1973 and 1983, became unable to survive economically with his off-centre vampire films alone, so made about twenty pornographic films – such as Hard Penetration (1977), Vibrations sexuelles (1977), Hyperpénétrations (1978), Sodomanie (1983) and Folies anales (1983). 

His last film, Le Masque de la Méduse, was made in 2010, the year of his death at the age of 72.