Lips of Blood

Part of the special series NACHTBLENDE

“Only drawback: the fact that the protagonist looks like the illegitimate child of Pierre Richard and Thomas Gottschalk somewhat broke the magical illusion.”
— Daniel Krunz on Letterboxd

In the cinema of 1970s Euro-horror, the French filmmaker Jean Rollin occupies a central place. His rich body of work blends horror with eroticism, fairy-tale elements with dark romanticism, and lets the boundaries between exploitation and art cinema blur. LIPS OF BLOOD counts among his best.

There is something ceremonial and reverent about this burial of the corpse wrapped in white cloth. And when the body, carried into the gothic vaults alongside a few others, suddenly begins to breathe — or had it been breathing all along? — a suspicion quickly arises about what one might be dealing with here. But instead of an explanation, there is a cut, as if into another world. A party, modern music, drinks. And a guest named Frédéric (Jean-Loup Philippe), who begins to contemplate almost hypnotically the photograph of an old castle hanging on the wall. Where has he seen it before? Images from his childhood, featuring a young woman in white dresses — who later in the film will introduce herself as Sylvia (Annie Bell) — surface before his inner eye.

Driven by these memories, he sets out on a search that leads him through a movie theater, a cemetery, and several hallucinations, drawing him deeper and deeper into a dark realm of eroticism and horror. Until he awakens the dead. And the dead, in Jean Rollin’s work, are usually young naked women with sharp fangs…