From their "Hammer's House of Horror" screenings to their 21-movie Mario Bava spotlight, New York's Quad Cinema has been an essential source for celebrating the horror genre's past, and they will continue to do just that this October with a massive retrospective series celebrating filmmaker Jean Rollin, as well as a complementary set of screenings highlighting some of horror's most memorable female vampires.
Read on for full details on Quad Cinema's Jean Rollin Retrospective (kicking off on October 18th) and "A Woman's Bite: Cinema’s Sapphic Vampires" (beginning October 26th) and be sure to visit their official website for more information!
"Jean Rollin Retrospective + Sapphic Vampires
October 18-November 1
This October the Quad salutes the lurid eroticism of Jean Rollin with a retrospective including Fascination, Requiem for a Vampire, and Lips of BloodPlus a survey of sapphic vampire films indebted to his aesthetic with titles including The Hunger, Lust for a Vampire, Daughters of Darkness and more!
Très Outré: The Sinister Visions of Jean Rollin
October 18 – 23
French film history has more than its share of filmmaking mavericks, but it has a special place for those few who worked in the realm of le cinéma fantastique. While Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju defined and dominated this realm, their poetics never fully succumbed to the horror genre’s call of the wild—and it fell to Jean Rollin, their rightful but underrecognized heir, to take the next step. His taste for graphic novels and graphic content led him to create a dark, oneiric oeuvre that went through the looking glass and never looked back. Women were at the center of Rollin’s cinematic universe, anchoring deliriously gothic scenarios of lust and bloodlust couched in a lush and disturbing visual style. The director had the good fortune to break into features in the late 1960s and early 1970s when French censorship was easing, giving him free rein to work through his sex-and-death obsessions with unprecedented explicitness. He imbued his images with a gorgeous eroticism that can lull—at least until teeth are bared, whether metaphorically or literally. If some of his scenes evoke frissons of déjà vu, that’s because his dreamlike, seductive visuals remain potent and his haunting tableaux have surely influenced subsequent filmmakers who favor horror that’s as serious as it is sensual. Just in time for Halloween, the Quad showcases a dozen of Rollin’s unique excursions into the surreal and uncanny; we will also be screening, in an accompanying series this month, movies that share and acknowledge his aesthetic.The Demoniacs
Jean Rollin, 1974, France/Belgium, 77m, DCPFascination
Jean Rollin, 1979, France, 80m, DCPThe Grapes of Death
Jean Rollin, 1978, France, 85m, DCPThe Iron Rose
Jean Rollin, 1973, France, 86m, DCPLips of Blood
Jean Rollin, 1975, France, 88m, DCPThe Living Dead Girl
Jean Rollin, 1982, France, 86m, DCPThe Night of the Hunted
Jean Rollin, 1980, France, 87m, DCPThe Nude Vampire
Jean Rollin, 1970, France, 90m, DCPThe Rape of the Vampire
Jean Rollin, 1968, France, 95m, DCPRequiem for a Vampire (Caged Virgins)
Jean Rollin, 1971, France, 95m, DCPThe Shiver of the Vampires
Jean Rollin, 1971, France, 95m, DCPA Woman’s Bite: Cinema’s Sapphic Vampires
October 26 – November 1
The Quad’s Jean Rollin Halloween parade is complemented with a bonus bevy of badass female vampires. Although the titillating concept of lady bloodsuckers had long captured the imagination of authors, it took the movies a couple of decades to catch on to what should have been an early-and-often component of the horror genre; in the U.S., female vampires were generally relegated to subsidiary appearances (if at all) in support of male overlords. It fell to European helmers to finally recognize the storytelling potential—and scour the historical and literary archives—for women driving their own narratives as princesses of darkness. And since male vampires had preyed on their share of male victims onscreen it stood to reason that same-sex distaff encounters would be exponentially more compelling. Quickly making up for lost time, throughout the 1970s and beyond genre moviemakers exploited both prurient and suspenseful dramatic interest in just how these lesbian couplings would play out. The resultant films showcased actresses on both sides of the vamp/prey divide, fascinating audiences of all genders and sexual orientations—and in the process became landmark depictions of sapphic desire and sexuality onscreen.Blood and Roses (…Et mourir de plaisir)
Roger Vadim, 1960, France/Italy, 87m, 35mmThe Blood-Spattered Bride
Vicente Aranda, 1972, Spain, 100m, 35mmDaughters of Darkness
Harry Kümel, 1971, Belgium/France/West Germany, 87m, 35mmDracula’s Daughter
Lambert Hillyer, 1936, U.S., 71m, DCPThe Hunger
Tony Scott, 1983, UK/U.S., 97m, DCPLust for a Vampire
Jimmy Sangster, 1971, UK, 95m, 35mm (original UK version)Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary
Juan López Moctezuma, 1975, Mexico, 101m, 35mmNadja
Michael Almereyda, 1994, U.S., 93m, 35mmVampire Ecstasy (The Devil’s Plaything)
Joseph W. Sarno, 1973, Sweden/Switzerland/West Germany, 103m, DCPThe Vampire Lovers
Roy Ward Baker, 1970, UK/U.S., 91m, 35mmVampyres
Joseph Larraz, 1974, UK/Spain, 87m, 35mmVampyros Lesbos
Franco Manera (Jess Franco), 1971, West Germany/Spain, 89m, 4K DCP"
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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