While Jean Rollin remains best known for his dreamy erotic vampire movies, he has explored other aspects of the horror genre in his own unique way. There’s a tendency amongst some to see Rollin’s work after the 1970s as compromised, confused and inferior, with the belief that his shift into hardcore porn production signalled a terminal decline that affected all his work – and certainly, Rollin found himself following trends with little success at the turn of the decade, with films like Zombie Lake and The Grapes of Death being uncomfortable attempts at the then-fashionable zombie film that had their moments but didn’t really feel like Rollin. Yet you could hardly write him off. His extraordinary reboot of the vampire film with Fascination, curiosities like Lost in New York and Killing Car and even the adult movie Le Parfum de Mathilde all showed that he was still a unique, creative artist who could transcend the financial and genre limitations that were imposed on him. And then there is The Living Dead Girl.
Jean Rollin’s 1982 film The Living Dead Girl (La Morte Vivante) is, on the surface, as far removed from his classic vampire movies as you can get. Another of the zombie films that he was making at the time, it seems on the surface to be something that you could easily dismiss. But this is actually one of his best films, even if it has none of the trippy surrealism and strange eroticism that made his earlier work so compelling. Instead, the film is a rather more visceral tale that is heavy on the gore, where the extensive nudity is less an integral part of the weird atmosphere and more a part of the film’s unfettered excess.
On that basis, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a lesser work. The truth is rather different. For while the film is certainly hampered by faults – not all of them down to the director – it remains a truly remarkable piece of cinema, as unique in its own way as Jean Rollin’s 1970s work. It’s also a movie of two seemingly incompatible contrasts. On the one hand, it is awash with ultra-graphic gore scenes and intense violence, as explicit as anything being made by the likes of Lucio Fulci in Italy. But this extreme gore is mixed with a strange, melancholic beauty that is very much what you might expect from the director of The Iron Rose. This clash of styles shouldn’t work – but for the most part, it does.
Francoise Blanchard is the titular character, Catherine, who wakes from the dead to kill a couple of men dumping industrial waste before making her way back to her childhood home, a now-empty chateau. When there, she kills a couple of other people, but when her childhood friend Helene (Marina Pierro, better known for her work in Walerian Borowczyk‘s films) arrives, the zombie girl starts to slowly regain her humanity. However, she has an insatiable thirst for flesh and blood, and the increasingly desperate and crazed Helene is determined to find it for her. As Catherine begins to realise the horror of her situation, she struggles to avoid killing, while Helene – who is the film’s true monster – is becoming more and more ruthless in her efforts to protect and feed her friend. The story slowly builds to an inevitable tragic ending, which is amongst the most devastatingly raw and emotional moments in cinematic history.
Blanchard is a genuinely tragic figure, beautiful yet blank until she begins to become aware of the true horror of her condition, while Pierro’s remarkable descent into psychotic madness is something to behold. Their platonic love affair is all too believable, and the tragedy of the story is made genuine thanks to their performances. Sadly, the rest of the cast is rather less convincing, especially the English-speaking couple crow-barred in by ‘American Version’ director Gregory Heller, who are both painfully awkward and who get far too much screen time. It’s to the film’s credit that it can overcome these handicaps, though I fear that some audiences might find the performances and some of the clunky dialogue laughable. A pity, if so – it’s worth looking beyond those moments and seeing the bigger picture. It’s perhaps the sense of tragedy at the heart of the film – the melancholy and the sense of despair as Catherine realises the sheer horror of what she needs to do to stay ‘alive’ and Helen’s blinkered desperation to help her, no matter what – that marks this out as a Jean Rollin film. His vampire movies often have a similar feeling of tragic awareness and a morbid obsession that you don’t find in the work of many other directors.
The Living Dead Girl is not the best Jean Rollin film – it’s tonally inconsistent and the bad performances by many members of the cast see to that. But it remains a unique vision, one of the few zombie films to be more a melancholic, doomed romance than an apocalyptic vision. Interestingly, Brian Yuzna’s equally magnificent Return of the Living Dead 3 from 1993 takes a similar direction, albeit wedded to a more conventional horror story – it seems unlikely that Yuzna would have been familiar with Jean Rollin back then, so let’s chalk this up to coincidence. Interestingly, the whole ‘zombies resurrected by toxic waste dumping ‘ plot would later be used in the relentlessly outrageous and trashy French film Revenge of the Living Dead Girls – and the director of that film, Pierre B. Reinhard, was certainly familiar with Rollin and his work…
Jean Rollin remains one of the most underrated film directors, even as his work has finally begun to get wider critical attention. His films are still too odd, too slow, too sexy or too arty for many horror fans. A pity. For me, he is one of the great directors of French cinema, a unique visionary who never got the breaks that he deserved. To judge him on his worst films, the ones he made because he had to make a living, is unfair. He has a remarkable body of work to explore and it’s worth leaving behind the expectations that you might have from a horror film and instead viewing his work as closer to works like Last Year in Marienbad and Celine and Julie Go Boating. The Living Dead Girl is not up to the standard of those films – I mean, what is? – but is nevertheless a work that stands alone as a remarkable cinematic and emotional experience.
DAVID FLINT
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