cinema history class: requiem for a vampire (1971)

The session: Odds and Sods
Four oddball Halloween-appropriate movies from different countries

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Requiem for a Vampire (1971)
Directed by Jean Rollin

My Level of Prior Knowledge
Never heard of it.

Plot:
Two teenage girls on the run after a botched robbery find themselves lost in the French countryside and stumble into an old château inhabited by a vampire clan. Seduced and terrorized in equal measure, they become trapped in a strange mix of gothic horror and erotic surrealism. As the night unfolds, the girls must confront the castle’s master, who wants to make them part of his undead lineage.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Requiem for a Vampire might be the least talkative movie I’ve ever seen that still has a story you can actually follow. The two girls at the center of it barely speak to each other, which creates this weird sense of emotional distance—but somehow the plot is still clear. The silence ends up giving the whole thing a dreamlike, drifting quality, like they’re wandering through someone else’s half-remembered nightmare.

The movie kept reminding me of El Topo, and that’s not a comparison I make lightly. I didn’t like El Topo—that one felt like a fever-dream that forgot to include the plot part. Requiem shares that surreal, symbolic tone, but at least here I always knew what was happening. Even when things got strange (and they often do), the movie never fully dissolved into nonsense.

What it does dissolve into is imagery. This thing feels like an experiment Rollin decided to conduct with costumes, shadows, masks, ruins, and the French countryside. And honestly, it works better than it probably has any right to. The visuals are great—atmospheric, moody, and occasionally beautiful—but the trade-off is that the movie sometimes feels more like an art project than a complete story. I didn’t mind watching it, but it left me a little unfulfilled, like it was a sketch for a bigger, richer gothic film he never quite made.

If you squint, you can read it as a kind of fairy tale about transformation—innocence turning into experience, humans becoming monsters, girls becoming something new altogether. It’s not spelled out, but the vibe is there.

Anyway, fun to look at, interesting as an experiment, not entirely satisfying as a narrative… but definitely memorable.

And for the record: Joe would’ve slammed this one the moment it reminded him of El Topo, but he’d still give it a higher score than El Topo, because he recognizes when a fever-dream at least remembers it’s supposed to have a plot.