From Lesbian Vampires To Zombies: Your Ultimate Guide To Jean Rollin

After double-crossing a gang of thieves, loner-criminal Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire) seeks refuge in a seemingly empty chateau where he encounters a pair of beguiling women, Eva (Brigitte Lahaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Maï). Equal parts coquettish and threatening, the two conspire to allow Marc to believe he’s holding them hostage and keep him under their spell until nightfall, when their friends, a coven of beautiful bourgeois women, plan to join them for what promises to be a killer good time. 

Harmonizing tensions of sexuality, class, race, and gender using his usual motifs of doubles, chateaus, conspiracies, and women at odds with the world, Fascination is widely considered Rollin’s greatest and most realized work: an encapsulation of all the films that came before it, even as it remains entirely distinct.

To this point, it represents a point of culmination for the director, demonstrating a certain clarity and maturation of vision (or perhaps just funding) on Rollin’s part as he strikes at the mangled heart of horror. The thesis is that we are very frequently attracted to what destroys us. The Void does not always appear as something repulsive. It sings, beckons, allures…right before it swallows you whole.

Quintessential Rollin! The Shiver of the Vampires (alongside Lips of Blood and Fascination) tends to be the entry point for new viewers, and with good reason. It’s a true cinematic delight, featuring a score as uniquely defining as Suspiria, and an irresistible color palette of soft pastels and jewel tones set against dungeon grays and midnight blues. It helps that there’s no shortage of gorgeous nightgown-clad women clutching candelabras in this entry. 

It also features a classic gothic horror setup. Newlyweds Isle (Sandra Julien) and Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) plan to honeymoon at Isle’s cousins’ chateau but when they arrive, nothing is quite as it seems or goes at all as they planned.

With its lesbian vampires and deeper exploration of the tensions implicit in marriage and family ties, it’s a film deeply evocative of James Whale’s The Old Dark House while still feeling 100% like Rollin. Indeed, 1971 was thee year for lesbian vampire productions and still, The Shiver of the Vampire feels entirely distinct from Vampyros Lesbos, Twins of Evil, Daughters of Darkness, and The Velvet Vampire, which were all released that same year. 

Requiem For A Vampire is my personal favorite Rollin movie, but consider yourself warned: it’s not necessarily a film for the faint of heart. Rollin’s fourth feature is led by Michelle (Mireille D’Argent) and Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel), bestie-lovers who we meet in the middle of a shootout and car chase. On the run for reasons unknown, they also happen to be dressed as the most fashionable clowns you’ve ever seen (think more Bowie, less Art). At least until they shed their costumes and cozy up in a cemetery for the night. 

Rollin employs a kind of dream logic in this film, much like what viewers would expect from David Lynch, wielding this system of symbols and archetypes intentionally and with great clarity. He presents Michelle and Marie simultaneously as prey items in a feral world of drooling men and cruel, calculated women, and at the same time, as astute, self-possessed individuals with agency.

These tensions reverberate throughout the film, the body of which is set in the moody, lonely castle they soon come upon, which also happens to be home to a coven of vampires with big plans for the pair and their future. 

At heart, Requiem For A Vampire is about the terror of becoming an adult, which is another way of saying the future, which is another way of saying death. It’s also about friendship, transformation, and what it means to respect the sovereignty of another as an act of love. 

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“So dear, so patient, so innocent, so gentle” are the words Sister Marthe (Natalie Perrey) uses to describe Louise (Alexandra Pic) and Henriette (Isabelle Teboul), the two blind “little angels” under her care. Little does she know, the two can see but only at night.

They live a bifurcated existence. By day, they are two orphan girls: beautiful, gentle, and tragic. At night, two orphan vampires who have lived a thousand lives and returned from a thousand deaths; ancient blood gods worshipped by the Aztecs and Incas. Still beautiful and tragic, but insatiable and free. 

Two Orphan Vampires began as a novel that Rollin adapted into one of his last films. But in the context of his broader body of work, it was also something of a return to form for the director. As in Requiem For A Vampire, the fantastical, symbolic nature of his storytelling manages to capture devastating truths and monstrous delights about the experience of femininity: its hungers, devotions, and obfuscations, the predatory nature of feigned innocence, and the ways innocence inspires predation.

It’s a film possessed of profound reverence for just how bloodthirsty girlhood can be. 

The Iron Rose was Rollin’s fifth feature and notably, his first foray away from vampires. Seemingly unfinished with the subject of young coupledom after The Shiver of the Vampires, Rollin casts Françoise Pascal and Hugues Quester as an unnamed man and woman on their first date. What begins as a picnic in a lush cemetery spirals into madness when they get lost and are unable to find their way out. 

Rollin’s wider mission of exploring the tensions between devotion and violence, eroticism and death, is imagined and rendered most literally in this film. Like ensnared snakes, the lover-antagonists struggle between treating the grave as a place of death or a place of becoming.

To this point, it feels mighty relevant to note that Rollin was the stepson of Georges Bataille, the French philosopher who quite literally wrote the book on the matter. It also happens to feature one of the most haunting screams in horror history. 

While at a party, Frederic (Jean-Loup Philippe) comes across a photo of a long-abandoned chateau that triggers the resurrection of a buried childhood memory. He recalls having come upon that same chateau late one night in his youth and meeting a young girl named Jennifer (Annie Belle) there. Older but seemingly not by much, she comforts and cares for him until he leaves to return home.

Closing the gate behind him, he disregards her plea to open it for her but promises he’ll come back to release her. The memory hits Frederic like the realization of a critical but forgotten task. He becomes determined to find the chateau and the girl, despite the years between them. What he uncovers is a conspiracy and, of course, a castle full of vampires. 

Lips of Blood is home to some of Rollin’s most iconic images and, like Fascination, The Grapes of Death, and The Living Dead Girl, is one of his more straightforward films and also one of his most sincerely romantic. If relief and catharsis from the Bad Things is something you’re seeking, this may be the entry for you. 

Behold, Rollin’s goriest film! Like The Grapes of Death, The Living Dead Girl trades vampires for the ravenous undead, but despite the difference in approach, Rollin still indulges his general preoccupation with the axis between romance and horror, soulfulness and soullessness. 

A pair of workers tasked with dumping toxic chemical waste double as graverobbers. When an earthquake causes the chemical to spill out into the crypt, they unintentionally unleash the animated corpse of a woman who had died years prior (though, of course, you wouldn’t know it by looking at her).

She’s Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard), heir to the Valmont family castle and after making her way home, is received by her beloved childhood best friend, Hélène (Marina Pierro). Having made a blood pact in their youth —as girls often do —the pair are preternaturally drawn to one another across planes of life and death. But what does it mean for them to meet in the middle? What does their devotion to one another lead them to become? 

The Nude Vampire is Rollin’s second feature after 1968’s much maligned, The Rape of the Vampire. Perhaps even more than his first, The Nude Vampire is emblematic of Rollin’s singular vision and enduring obsession with themes of conspiracy, worship, eroticism, sacrifice, and devotion, to which he remained dedicated his entire career. 

After witnessing a group of men in masks shoot and abduct a mysterious nightgown-clad woman (Caroline Cartier) on the street, Pierre (Olivier Rolin) becomes desperate to discover her identity and his father’s connection to the strange goings-on. What he uncovers beneath the veil of secrecy is a medical experiment and a death cult.

Certain settings, the density of its mood and the paranoid nature of its atmosphere all encapsulate classic Rollin, as are the deeper, spiritual-ethical questions around scientific experimentation that was present in The Rape of the Vampire and evolves into an enduring fixation for the director, also explored in later films like The Night of the Hunted. 

Rollin trades vampires, gothic castles, and cemeteries for zombies and French wine country with Les raisins de la morte, or The Grapes of Death. It’s an interesting film from Rollin, not solely because it represents his first major departure from his signature motifs, but also because it’s his first overtly political work.

While his other projects undoubtedly suggest his perspectives on certain matters, they also possess an air of otherworldly suspension, as though they take place between places. The Grapes of Death is explicitly concerned with the problems of this world. 

It opens with a group of laborers on a vineyard in Roubles, as they spray the crop with pesticides. Before the task is through, one of the workers becomes ill only for his symptoms to be dismissed by the owner. This choice, as we come to see, comes with catastrophic results.

The majority of the film revolves around Elisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), who we meet on the train to Roubles and follow as she travels from village to village, trying to survive encounters with the living dead long enough to reunite with her fiancé. It also marks the first appearance of Brigitte Lahaie, who goes on to become one of Rollin’s favorite muses. 

If ever there was a contestant for American Cinematheque’s Bleak Week, this is it. Again departing from his signature motifs, Rollin takes a different approach to some of his core preoccupations with Night of the Hunted. Brigitte Lahaie again stars as Elysabeth, a mysterious woman with a curious case of memory loss who encounters Robert (Alain Duclos) while attempting to flee a “black tower” residential asylum. 

It’s unique amongst Rollin’s body of work for the realism of its horror. While his earlier work also featured themes of paranoia and conspiracy, those anxieties were largely expressed through cults.

In a throwback to The Nude Vampire, The Night of the Hunted draws equivalencies between these anxieties by encapsulating them in industrialized medical research: the experiments and choices made by doctors, scientists, and corporate entities in the name of a greater good (it’s worth keeping in mind that Rollin’s early childhood occurred during the German occupation of France and so he came of age quite literally in the shadow of WW2 and its associated atrocities).

As a result, it also encapsulates the existential dread of memory loss and the philosophical, legal, and material question of what it means to be human. 

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend The Rape of the Vampire as a point of entry, if only because it’s a bit roughshod in terms of production, it holds special significance as one of the very first depictions of a Black vampire on screen. Jacqueline Sieger stars in the second half as the Queen of Vampires in a truly striking choice on Rollin’s part. Bloodthirsty and seductive, Sieger owns every scene she’s in, and though she and Rollin didn’t work together again, for me, her presence haunts his broader body of work.