31 Days of Halloween, Day 18- Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
Directed By: Jess Franco
Top 8 Cast: Ewa Strömberg, Soledad Miranda, Dennis Price, Heiden Kussin, Andrea Montchal, Jesús Franco, Paul Müller, José Martinez Blanco
Plot: Linda Westinghouse is an expat German lawyer with the firm Simpson & Simpson. She lives in Istanbul with her milquetoast husband, Omar. But are the visions of the sexadelic Countess Carody that bewitch her dreams the awakening of a dormant queer desire or are they something far more sinister? The seductive lure of the vampire.
Response: These nosferatus aren’t afraid of the sun and surf! Poor longtime farmers of scorpions in swimming pools. Vibe out with me. This lady vamps got a thing for blondes. SPOILERS but I was bummed the lesbian vampires didn’t end up together.
Background: In my Day 15 post I referred to silent Swedish director Victor Sjöström as a heavy-hitter, well if by heavy hitter I meant someone with a sheer plethora of film-works than Jesús Franco (known originally by international artists as Jess) has him beat by over a hundred. Depending on which AI you ask or how you tally his IMDB creds Franco’s got somewhere between 173 and 203 feature film works. The vast majority of them sexploitation and.or B movies with a smattering of porn and experimentalism thrown in to round it all out.*
Of his many, many contributions to l’art du cinéma, the pictures he became best known for were his sexy vampire films, and of his many, many sexy vampire films, the one that he became best known for (if not the sexiest and/or most vampiric) was Vampyros Lesbos.
Analysis: Lesbos is arguably a jerk-off picture with titillation being its primary interest, yet it’s as oneiric as it is horny. Fully encapsulating the spirit of the late sixties, it rolls and oodles. The soundtrack itself is a thing of wonder, acid jazz meets astro lounge. Sinister spoken word just barely audible. Church organs colliding with sitars with sonic nods to everyone from Ravi Shankar to The Doors to The Beatles.
The look of the film is the same. We open with our main vamp in an extended, performance art, strip-burlesque number. Soon the camera is cutting to our enraptured lawyer lead but where she is in physical space related to the performance is unestablished. She’s clearly watching this but are they in the same room or other parts of the earth? This could be read as incompetent film technique but I believe it’s deliberate destabilizing to evoke the deeper dream-like power of this lust. The film is doing this often. Visually, it pulls out all the stops its limited budget allows, making great use of 1970’s Istanbul and relying on pure poetry. If it does so by obsessively returning to kites and scorpions we may forgive it. This feels, to me, like the same spirit of the times that informed other art-sleaze film-makers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, Tinto Brass and Dušan Makavejev.**
One of the more impressive aspects of the film is the way in which it’s able to retain the spirit of gothic romanticism within a sun-soaked, beach-party aesthetic. Not only do we have the name of Dracula, and some of the plot of Dracula, the dungeons of Otranto, and the hunchbacks of Hugo; but we have the mood of gothicism. Its tragedies and ecstasies. Its love affair with mortality. All caught up in a swinging, free-wheeling, free-associating, psychedelic Euro-sleaze package of pure style.
Second Opinions:
“Though elements of Franco's film are almost insultingly crude—he has been likened to Ed Wood on occasion—it also gave exploitation audiences something different, a mesmeric vibe that's perfectly in line with the Dracula myth, no matter how far astray the film takes it.” - Scott Tobias, The Dissolve
“This has got to be one of the most surreal films ever made. The film brilliantly combines weird art-house imagery with sexadelic soft-core to create a genuinly original film, full of strange gothic colours and futuristic, freefall visuals.” - db_simpson on IMDB
“While it’s hard to dispute Vampyros Lesbos as an object produced primarily for the titillation of the male gaze, there’s something thrilling about reclaiming a film so terrified and almost worshipful of the carnal power that queer women possess.” - Nadine Smith, Them
Score:
Autumn Vibes: 3/5
Scares & Chills: 2/5
Cultural & Cinematic Importance: 5/5
Monster Action: 3/5
