Jean Rollin | La morte vivante (The Living Dead Girl) / 1982

 cannibal feast

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Rollin and Jacques Rolf (screenplay, with US dialogue by Gregory K. Heller), Jean Rollin (director) La morte vivante (The Living Dead Girl) / 1982

 

I came to cult filmmaker Jean Rollin’s work from the opposite end of his oeuvre, after he had made several stylish lesbian vampire films, churned out a number of heterosexual pornographic films just in order to survive, and rejuvenated the zombie movie genre begun by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968).

       His producers demanded that his 1982 film The Living Dead Girl would also be a zombie film, but this time Rollin balked, returning somewhat to his vampire tradition in creating the character  of Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard), the daughter of a wealthy family, whose corpse magically (the film hardly even tries to link her resurrection to a barrels of toxic waste three petty robbers have dumped in the Valmont vaults under the mansion) comes to life in the form of what Rollin suggested is “a sort of vampire woman who devours the blood of humans,” but who isn’t destroyed by the light, forced to bite everyone she meets, or return to her crypt each morning. At moments, unlike the vampire films, Catherine is perfectly happy to chomp away on human flesh like a zombie, and her walk—at least in the early part of this movie—is the slow, hulking march of someone just roused from a two-year nap.

     She quickly sends off the nasty duo of toxic delivery boys and would-be petty crypt thieves by jabbing her long-grown fingernails into their eyes and hearts; the third dies of the chemical spill when, quite inexplicably, a temblor shakes up this rural part of France. But she’s hardly interested at all in their blood, immediately wandering across the lawn and back into the house where she grew up.

     Just passing by are two argumentative Americans, Barbara Simon (Carina Barone) and her boyfriend Greg (Mike Marshall). Barbara is a photographer who insists she’s really an actress. And Greg’s career doesn’t really seem to matter, except, if we are to believe Barbara, he always gets his way and demeans Barbara’s activities. The photographer matters to the story only in that she snaps a picture of Catherine making her way in her white, blood-stained funeral attire back to the manor house and stirs up fears in the nearby town that something strange is going on out at the old Valmont mansion.

      In the house upstairs, meanwhile, a female real estate agent is showing the house to an elderly American couple who seem vaguely interested but remain uncommitted. None of them even notice that Catherine has slipped back into her ancestral rooms, the only evidence being a wooden rocking horse which the real estate agent imagines must have set into motion by the wind. When the US couple leave without making a commitment, the agent invites her boyfriend over for a night of sex in splendor.

     This time in the middle of their love-making she really does hear a noise in the other room, forcing her boyfriend to check it out. He comes back, after being finger-jabbed in the neck, an already half-white corpse, spewing blood everywhere. It’s clearly the blood of women, however,

that Catherine prefers, soon after gouging the neck of the agent and drinking her blood. These scenes and later ones make The Living Dead Girl one of the goriest movies ever put to screen, a consolation that the director, who hated the gore of most horror-films, must have made to his producers.

     But if one has remained through the film this long, nothing that follows with regard to bloody body parts will shock you until the very last scene.

     While all this is happening, meanwhile, Catherine’s childhood friend Hélène (Marina Pierro) has returned from somewhere after a long stay, unaware perhaps that Catherine’s mother has even  died, since she makes a call to the mansion, and hearing the piano and the sound of the music box she has given Catherine as a special gift, wonders if the mother might not be on the phone before finally realizing that it is Catherine herself. How could that be, she wonders, having heard of her death.

     What’s a girl still in love to do but rush right over to see if it might really be her childhood crush. And it is at the point that Rollin’s film suddenly transforms from a loosely-structured, somewhat cheesy horror film, into a queasy surreal tale of woman’s tortured romance with a haunted past.

     We learn in an early scene as Catherine wanders about, that the gift of the music box occasioned Hélène’s insistence that the girls show their love for one another, as childhood males and females often do, by becoming blood sisters, exchanging fluids and vowing, in this case, that if one were to die, the other would immediately follow her, a kind of vague future suicide-pact that neither can imagine that will happen so very soon after. But clearly, Hélène feels a strong sense of guilt for not having lived up to her part of the bargain and is clearly relieved that Catherine may be still be among the living.

      Although no critic I have read discusses this aspect of the film, it explains why soon after Hélène is not only willing to cover up for her friend’s many murders, the bodies of which she discovers strewn throughout house upon her arrival; but why she is willing to believe that Catherine may still be saved in order to relieve her own passionate conscience.

      Indeed, the real perversity of this film does not lie in Catherine’s lust for blood. That is simply a matter of fact, a condition that she discovers herself in for having awakened from two years of being buried. She would far prefer to eat the pigeon Hélène serves up, or even sip more daintily upon the blood Hélène proffers through a small cut in her arm. But she’s starving, going mad with an unquenchable thirst that forces her lover to do all sorts of things she might never have imagined, such as luring an innocent traveler to the house—whose body Catherine drains in no time at all—and later even kidnapping a young girl whose father strictly keeps her away from the local boys.

      In between meals, the two relive their special love, recalling moments and recommitting their vows to one another, this time with Hélène simply trying to imagine ways to bring her friend back into full consciousness, freeing her, perhaps, from her awful habits.

      Rollin takes us with his camera through the ancient mansion as if he were a tour-guide to the girls’ lost idylls, Hélène undressing and redressing her play doll, washing the blood away from her body, combing her long blonde hair, and imagining a world to which they might escape the horrors of present. But the past is long gone and the future, alas, as Catherine quickly realizes, can never become.

      The more Hélène attempts to keep her alive and the more Catherine is brought back into ordinary human consciousness, the further she suffers, realizing what a horrific charnel house her childhood home has become. Moreover, she perceives that she has destroyed her lover’s life. She would be happily permit herself to die all over again if only Hélène didn’t so desperately struggle to keep the two of them alive.

      That summarizes the true “heart” of this story, a word I use with caution because we know it is also the sorrowful source of Catherine’s insufferable living death.

       Just for the rhythm of this “dirge for a dead princess,” however, and perhaps to poke just a little fun at Americans, Rollin switches the scene to the photographer Barbara, who during the midst of Hélène’s comings and goings, has traipsed back to the manse determined to find out more about the woman in white who everyone says is dead, but who she’s seen with her very own eyes. She not only finds Catherine alone, but snaps further photos a proof, the young girl trying to warn her away before Hélène returns to serve her as further finger fodder.

       But these Americans, as most French perceive such tourists, are so dumb that even after the second visit with its unpleasant exit scene, Barbara is insistent upon returning with Greg this time to convince him that she isn’t simply imagining things. She intrudes upon another “almost” bloody episode, soon after Hélène has carried off the young village virgin and made cuts into her belly in order to entice Catherine to slurp it up and finish the job.

       This time, the increasingly “humanized” zombie refuses, setting the girl free and telling her to warn the village of what is happening at Mansion Valmont. Infuriated with Barbara and Greg’s further intrusion, the real monster Hélène has now become sets Barbara on fire and bonks Greg over the head with a Medieval mace.

       There is no further hope of saving her beloved, and Hélène, now slinking down into mad submission gives up her own body for consummation, her blood and flesh being eaten alive by the lover who in the battle between her bodily needs and spiritual desires has completely lost any semblance of sanity, the camera focusing for a seemingly endless time on her screeches as she disembowels her lover while munching on her fingers. The camera slowly pulls away, but cannot quite let go of the cannibal dinner that is being played out before its lens.

       The scene was evidently so convincing that both director and his crew feared for the actresses’ mental health.

 

Los Angeles, March 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).