The Rape of the Vampire (3 Stars)

This is Jean Rollin's first film, made in 1968. When it was first released it was met with hostility by cinema-goers. The vampires in the film have almost nothing in common with the vampires shown in American horror films.

"The Rape of the Vampire" begins like an exposé and ends like a dream; what initially appears to be a rational investigation into supposed vampirism gradually reveals itself as something far less easily dismissed.

The first part centres on four young women living in a secluded château under the guidance of an older guardian. When journalists and sceptics arrive, they assume they are dealing with a hoax, or at best a case of shared delusion. The women are pale, withdrawn and oddly ceremonial in their behaviour; they claim to be vampires who have lived for 400 years, yet show none of the expected traits. They do not hunt, they do not display supernatural strength, and they seem almost fragile, as if the slightest disturbance might shatter them.

It would be easy to read them as frauds or victims of manipulation. Rollin encourages this ambiguity by filtering their world through the intrusive, rational gaze of the investigators. The château becomes a stage on which belief and scepticism clash; the women are probed, questioned and ultimately violated, both psychologically and physically.

Yet the film quietly resists the sceptics' interpretation. The more the outsiders attempt to expose the women, the less convincing their explanations become. The women's detachment from ordinary life, their strange unity and their apparent disconnection from time and consequence all suggest that they are not merely pretending. Their vampirism is not expressed through conventional horror imagery, but through atmosphere and persistence; they exist according to a logic that does not align with the human world around them.

The act of violence implied by the title is crucial here. It is framed less as titillation than as an assertion of control, an attempt by the intruders to force the women into a recognisable, human framework. If they can be dominated, the logic goes, they can be explained. But the effect is the opposite. The brutality only deepens the sense that the women belong to another order of being; they may be physically vulnerable, but they are not reducible to the terms imposed on them.

By the time the film drifts into its more overtly surreal second half, the question of whether the women are real vampires has already been answered in everything but explicit statement. They are not frauds, nor are they simply mad. Instead, Rollin presents a form of vampirism stripped of its usual theatrical power; these are creatures defined by frailty, isolation and an almost mournful remove from the living. Their weakness does not negate their nature; it redefines it.

What remains is a haunting inversion of the vampire myth. Rather than predators, these women are survivors of an existence that offers neither release nor fulfilment. Their authenticity lies not in spectacle but in persistence; they endure, quietly and inexplicably, beyond the reach of those who would explain them away.