‘The Shiver of the Vampires’ aka ‘Les Frisson de Vampires’ (1971) - Jean Rollin.

‘The Shiver of the Vampires’ aka ‘Les Frisson de Vampires’ (1971) is a divinely delirious divertissement, remaining one of the most nakedly psychedelic, dastardly camp works in mercurial movie fantasist, Jean Rollin’s fervidly phantasmagorical oeuvre! Very few filmmakers, then, much less now, are so voluptuously replete with such a vividly individualistic sense of style, granted, a divisive modus operandi that inspires ardent adoration and vociferous disdain in equal measure, and this exceptionally vivid foray into mood-master Rollin’s esoteric erotica may either transfix you with its mesmerically off-beat, super-sensual cinematic beauty or leave you colder than the blackened bones drearily despoiling this morosely inhospitable chateau! With, Jean Rollin, alongside fellow fabulist, Jesus Franco, you are, quite frankly, either resolutely with them or against them, since both of their divisively decadent approaches to cinematic exotica is anything but facile! While oft said, the estimable, Jean Rollin was an especially dark dreamer, and his uniquely flamboyant storytelling frequently employed a morbidly nebulous vernacular that sinisterly suggested the eerie encroachment of impending spectral doom rather than crudely showing it. 

When the newly wedded, unconsummated couple, Isa (Sandra Julien) and, Antoine (Jean-Marie Durand) blithely arrive at, Isa’s ancestral, symbolically decrepit chateau it becomes readily apparent that all is decidedly not well, not least Isa’s distinctly liverish-looking, theatrically-attired uncles, both being played with bravura, boggle-eyed eccentricity by a wispily-thatched, Michel Delahaye and an aristocratic, raven-tressed Jacques Robiolles. Uxorious, Antoine’s palpable anxiety increasing after he is ignominiously banished from his nubile wife’s bedchamber, and in his petulant absence, it is not long until the gaunt, deathly pale, rapaciously Sapphic vampire, Isode (Dominique) manifests herself in an appropriately grand manner from a midnight-chiming grandfather clock, wickedly wending her invidious way into the bountiful bosom of the exquisitely edible, Isa! 

Partly an absurd, negligee-dropping bedroom farce, part outré psychedelic fever dream, Gallic iconoclast, Jean Rollin’s hypnotic, grisly-Gothic, sublimely strange, tantalizingly transgressive, darkly decayed delirium, ‘Les Frisson de Vampires’ is quite unlike anything you may have experienced before! This immersive sense of crimson-hued, preternaturally perverse, mystically macabre otherness is pleasurably increased by the omnipresent interstellar-overdriven psyched-out doom rock of the almighty ‘Acanthus’, their mind-altering grind ominously tweaking each sepulchral scene to drugged-out perfection! Beady-eyed, Euro-cult fans will have previously seen the perfectly pulchritudinous, blissfully exposed physiognomy of, Sandra Julien, in soft-core Maven, Max Pécas’s sinfully sublime, ‘Je suis une nymphomane’ (1971) and his equally fleshy follow up, ‘Je suis frigide... pourquoi?’