Daughters of Darkness

Part of the special series NACHTBLENDE

“What I loved so much about the film, what captivated me from the very first second: Delphine Seyrig (of course) and the music. Both feel like the film’s colors: dark violet, stormy sea blue, and of course bright red.”
Martina Genetti on Letterboxd

Harry Kümel’s elegant 1970s film is a dark yet stylish sexploitation gem, featuring the magnificent Delphine Seyrig as a bloodthirsty aristocrat who can easily hold her own against all the femme fatales in film history.

With a sex scene bathed in blue light on a European night train, we slip into a world foreign to us, one that holds us captive for 100 minutes. When the train unexpectedly comes to a halt, the newlywed couple Valerie and Stefan (Danielle Ouimet & John Karlen) are forced to take up residence in an old hotel in the Belgian seaside town of Ostend.

The subsequent arrival of the mysterious Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) makes the hotel page nervous. He remembers the countess well — except that at the time he was a very young man, and Bathory does not appear to have aged a single second since then. At the same time, brutal murders of young women are taking place in nearby Bruges. Could the sudden appearance of the countess, who should in fact be long dead, have something to do with it?