Hellfire Video Club: Suckers!
This month Hellfire video Club are celebrating one of the key spooky guys in the horror canon - the vampire. Here's a trio of blood-sucking films from the underground without a single Dracula in sight
SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRE
Jean Rollin, 1971, France
Jean Rollin is a legendary French director in cult film circles, similar in many key ways to Jess Franco: They both had highly idiosyncratic filmmaking styles that lead to output that was highly alienating to ordinary film watchers, both doggedly kept churning films out into their later years, and both paid the bills by resorting to making a bunch of sex films.
"Shiver..." is possibly Rollin's masterwork, featuring all his key traits: Old French castles, garish colour-tinged lighting, nudity, glacial pacing, and his ability to conjure a hypnotised/somnambulist vibe from all his actors. The plot concerns a honeymooning couple staying in an old castle that turns out to be the home of an ancient vampire cult... but Rollin's films are not watched for their story or coherence - you stick this on for the vibes! Confounding brain-fog and dream-logic squat unrelentingly over all his films, making the end results very difficult to accurately recall the next day, but very comfortable to soak in at the time. Killer psych rock soundtrack too.
MARTIN
George A. Romero, 1977, USA
Romero is best known for his incredibly influential zombie films, but this low-budget vampire effort was made in between them and deserves a lot more accolades than it gets. Martin is a young man with some peculiar ideas about being a vampire, we follow him as he tries to settle into a new town, whilst having memories (or delusions?) of being persecuted by a pitchfork-waving mob, and possibly committing a series of murders to satiate his unquenchable thirst for blood. During much of the film it is difficult to pin-down if anything we are seeing is real, and how much of a reliable narrator Martin is. Scuzzy and atmospheric cinematography mixed with a beautifully plaintive score really lift this film above other similar low-budget efforts.
SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING
Nick Millard, 1976, USA
Mark heads to his hometown to investigate the apparent suicide of his sister, only to find she may actually have joined a satanic cult and become a vampire! Nick Millard made A LOT of hardcore pornography in the 70's, but also made a handful of extremely odd genre films. This film is short (61 minutes run time?? yes please!), weird, and punctuated with day-glo blood, beautiful 70's American backdrops (filmed around Monterey), and highly strange acting choices. We've almost certainly described things as being "fever dreams" in these Noods editorials before... this is another one of them. Seek it out.
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