Harry Kümel | Daughters of Darkness / 1971

the inevitable demise of the virgin bride

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, Harry Kümel, Manfred R. Köhler, and Joseph Amiel (screenplay), Harry Kümel (director) Daughters of Darkness / 1971

 

The fascinating, quite elegant, and intelligent horror film Daughters of Darkness has long been established as a lesbian vampire movie, which it most certainly is. But oddly enough, and perhaps predictably, it has not been perceived by either critics nor its audiences as being what it fully is, a camp vision of the evils of homosexuality in general, male gay sex as well as lesbianism, played out as a general attack of the heteronormative majority represented here by the poor clueless, fairly unintelligent, and quite passive new Swedish bride, Valerie Chilton (Danielle Quimet).

      Valerie’s husband, Stefan (John Karlen), instead, generally has been perceived as a typical misogynistic heterosexual or even bisexual male who like so many macho husbands occasionally and without warning beats his wife into a rape-like submission, forcing the shocked bride, in this instance, to leave and eventually seek the empowerment that comes with the seemingly feminist powers that the lesbian vampire Countess Elizabeth Báthory (played by the always memorable Delphine Seyrig) and her lover Ilona (Andrea Rau) embrace.

      The film encourages us to side with the lesbian vampire figure simply because she has the power to free herself and Valerie from the entrapment of heterosexual marriage and to offer her seemingly sexual equality. But, in fact, the Countess is far more hierarchical than even the sexist Stefan, willing to give up her slave-lover Ilona, ordering her to seduce Stefan in order to cause Valerie to realize the sexual promiscuity of her husband.

     Although the film almost comically plays out Ilona’s death through a series of accidental slippages and wrong movements (the Wikipedia description recounts the literal series of events: “Stefan teases Ilona in the bathroom, and attempts to pull her into the shower. The two get into a tussle and slip and fall, causing Ilona to slash her hand on a razor before fatally falling on top of it.”) one cannot discount—nor should we ignore the mesmeric powers of the Countess, who just one night earlier had totally hypnotized Stefan with her tales of her female ancestor torturing dozens of females, a subject about which, apparently, Stefan is utterly engaged.

      In short, the Countess is perfectly willing to give up one slave for the possibility of gaining another, in this case Valerie. And, of course, once she has gained control of Valerie, the Countess must surely get rid of Stefan as well. His death is played out once again rather comically, representing several awkward movements as its cause (Wikipedia: “Valerie, under Elizabeth's spell, refuses to leave with Stefan. A violent fight ensues, during which Stefan's wrists are slashed by a broken bowl. As Stefan bleeds to death, Elizabeth and Valerie drink the blood pouring from his wounds.”)

     Somehow most critics have failed to imagine that the Countess who appears in some instances to travel large distances in a matter of seconds, is not directly involved or at least has no magical abilities, which is contrary to the tale in general. But, in this case, it is Valerie who attacks Stefan, along with the Countess attempting to smother him with the bowl just before it breaks. We don’t even need hypnotic powers to explain that they killed him purposely. And once again, the Countess knows precisely where and how to quickly get rid of a corpse.

       What follows, a mad rush by the two of them to escape the country before the sun rises, which ends in both of the deaths, Valerie seemingly being reborn into new life, but with the voice and mannerisms of the Countess, suggesting that the Countess still reigns within, Valerie providing only a body with which to entice other such women as herself.

    But let us go back to the other side of the film which generally is brushed over with hasty explanations by the critics, who obviously display some discomfort in exploring Stefan and his past.

       Stefan, who has just married Valerie as the movie opens, begins early in the film by admitting that he does not truly love her. She, passive of always, agreeing that perhaps she does not truly love him either, although her actions belie the truth that she is madly in love with the handsome young man. Nonetheless, both rather gamely argue that in not loving one another, they have the perfect relationship, obviously never having to be jealous of one another’s behavior. Yet, of course, jealousy is immediately what Valerie displays, particularly as in the empty bar of the grand hotel on the Ostend, Belgium seafront where they are staying before the supposed visit to Stefan’s mother in England, the Countess, the only other guest in the winter-time hotel, seduces her husband her gory tales.

      Previously, on a quick day trip to Bruges, Valerie has been equally confused and troubled by the interest Stefan has taken in the death of a young girl, one of several recently drained of blood, obviously the work of the Countess and her “secretary” Ilona.

      Stefan has told her that, although his aristocratic British mother remains in England, he has been living for most of his youth in the US, having met Valerie on his travels through Europe. She is quite apparently, given her obviously plebian roots, terrified of meeting his notoriously disapproving mater, and begs him to call her explaining his visit or even travel without her to his mother to tell her of their marriage before she joins him on a visit. Stefan seems to be reticent to do so.

      When he does finally call his mother, at Valerie’s insistence, we discover, in one of the most humorous moments in the film, the person at the other end of phone is a totally effeminate, elderly gay man, hardly able to imagine what “they” might do with a female bride were her son to bother to bring her “home.”

      Many who write about this film do not even mention this crucial piece of information, and those who do write of it generally ascribe it to one of the reasons why Stefan, who they perceive as bisexual, is so confused and conflicted about his sexual desires and perhaps even drawn to his interest in female torture, seemingly arguing for a current lover relationship between Stefan and the elderly queen.

      Critic Cait Kennedy, for example, observes: “Valerie’s new husband Stefan is perhaps grappling with misogyny and self-loathing of his own. It is revealed in the film that the elusive “mother-in-law” that Stefan does not want Valerie to meet is actually a flamboyant (coded as gay) man. While the details of their relationship are somewhat concealed, it is very clear that Valerie presents a threat to an arrangement enjoyed by Stefan. In many ways, his relationship with “Mother” mirrors the relationship between Bathory and the women she surrounds herself with. In Stefan, this manifests in sadism and physical abuse and assault directed at Valerie and later at Bathory’s secretary.”

     While this reviewer is quite correct in observing the extremes of Stefan’s behavior, the movie doesn’t fully support the idea that Stefan has a current sexual relationship with “Mother.” If Stefan has been away for all these years in the US, presuming he is not simply lying to Valerie, then perhaps as in most “aristocratic” families he has simply been sent away at an early age by his “mother” to get an education, and has recently been touring the continent before his return home.

      Let us imagine that this “mother” played that actual role to a young boy who was raised from a babe, possibly as a young sexual plaything by a homosexual queen. Mightn’t he have learned to be suspicious and even hateful toward woman, even being told the stories of the Countess’ earlier ancestor, while later discovering his own heterosexual tendencies? In short, might that not better explain the confused and conflicted adult we perceive Stefan to be?

      Valerie, in short, is a victim of Stefan’s confused desires as much as she is of the Countess’ equally mixed desires (she wants not only Valerie’s body but her life-blood; he wants a sense of normality that given his childhood experiences he knows is impossible which results in alternating love and hate of the female sex), providing a sort of absurdist double attack on the bourgeoise notions of sexuality symbolized by the virgin bride.

      But this is not real horror film. We know from the beginning that the Marlene Dietrich-like Countess and her Louise Brooks look-alike lover Ilona (the film’s director Kümel openly admits he made up his central characters to resemble the movie stars) are vampires and have been busy only recently in nearby Bruges. And knowing this, we are hardly surprised that the vampire gets her new lover and does away with the male who might stand in her way. As in most vampire myths, we also suspect—even though in this case in the car crash the Countess is thrown from the car and impaled through the heart by a nearby tree branch—that she, or in this case Valerie as a kind of front, will return to life. And despite all the serious posturing, screams, shouts of horror, and seeming bizarre situations of the film, we must recognize this work as more of a gestural spoof of the genre than an attempt to truly frighten its audience.

      Six years earlier Ronald Tavel had already begun describing his plays and some of the films he was doing with Andy Warhol as representing a “theatre of the ridiculous,” and by the time Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness was released, Charles Ludlam had already begun his own notion of the Theatre of the Ridiculous on New York City stages.

       This film seems to work far more effectively as seen functioning as a “ridiculous theater,” a work which like Ludlam’s plays that is highly referential to other films, not only in its vampire themes and the lookalike Dietrich and Brooks figures, but through the performance of actor Delphine Seyrig herself, bringing up the issues from Seyrig’s character in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad of memory and reality through not only the Countess’ remembrances of her own bloodthirsty ancestor, but by this hotel clerk’s (Paul Esser) recognition of the Countess as having arrived at the very same hotel when he was still a young bellboy decades earlier, looking precisely as she does today.

      The references to Brooks are very much part of Resnais’ 1961 film, in which we observe Seyrig as a kind of Brooks-like beauty, positioning herself in various divans and beds; that earlier film, moreover, itself calls us various literary works and film figures, one critic, Thomas Beltzer, comparing it with Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, a fiction, published in 1940, that was itself influenced by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. In The Invention of Morel, a fugitive entrapped on an island, falls in love with a woman, Faustine, controlled, it appears by a tennis player, Morel. As in Robbe-Grillet’s script of Last Year in Marienbad, when the fugitive attempts to speak to Faustine, she does not react, and the many other tourists around him seem not to notice him. Ultimately, he discovers that the figures he is seeing are holograms created from the original beings, now destroyed, trapped in an eternal mechanical reality that is repeated again and again.

     Bioy Casares has, in turn, admitted that his character Faustine was based on the actress Louise Brooks, who, as he put it, “vanished too early from the movies.”

     By seeing the 1971 film through this lens instead of that of the all-too common lesbian vampire franchise, we can truly recognize the comedy of Daughters of Darkness and comprehend its undermining of its heterosexual tropes as the truly gay Stefan and the wholly lesbian vampire Countess close in on the traditionally minded straight virgin. If the Countess would not have completely killed her off, certainly Stefan’s queenly mother would have found a shelf on which to store her corpse. In this film, heterosexuality doesn’t have a chance.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).