Daughters of Darkness (1971) dir. Harry Kümel
Do you ever wonder why vampires have been so energetic lately? For creatures who spend most of their time sleeping in coffins and whose diet consists entirely of blood they’re just so damned spry and superhuman. With all that super-strength and those super-senses it’s no wonder people think vampires are sexy.
Well, if you’re tired of Olympic athlete vampires who jump over tall buildings and smash walls with their fists while performing gymnastic stunts then the pale languid cribbage-playing vampires of Daughters of Darkness are your new friends.
Daughters of Darkness is like the Last Year at Marienbad of vampire movies. That might or might not be a compliment, I’m not sure. Suffice it to say that at one point we find the Countess Erzabet (or Elizabeth) Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) sitting in the lobby of an empty hotel in Ostend knitting. Are you ready to become a member of the undead yet? You too can knit a sweater in Belgium during the off-season!
Any comparisons with Last Year at Marienbad are especially apt given that Delphine Seyrig is in that film as well. Go ahead, make some comparisons. They'll be apt...and so will you.
Daughters of Darkness is loosely based on the character of the notorious “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins for one of those traditional reasons given for depraved acts like that. The Bathory name and legend are in fact more of a background that lends some Eastern European depth to the story, or lack thereof and it’s notable that the character of Stefan (John Karlen) may be a reference to Stefan Bathory, another notorious historical Bathory.
The mysterious background of our male lead, Stefan, is another element that makes this film more interesting than I thought it would be. Frustrating, but interesting. He is apparently sure that “Mother” will not approve of his newly minted marriage to Valerie (Daniele Ouimet). Valerie insists on making Stefan call “Mother” to let her know that he’s got a surprise daughter-in-law who’s dying to meet her and to check out the ancestral manse. Here’s the spoiler: Stefan calls “Mother” and “Mother” turns out to be a creepy older lisping gay man (Fons Rademakers) who is reclining in his tropical solarium). That’s all we get on that front. We are led to imagine that Stefan and Mother will end up offing poor Valerie or something terrible like that but we don’t know and never find out. How mysterious!
Stefan is played by John Karlen, who you might remember from Dark Shadows if you’re the kind of person who remembers Dark Shadows. I didn’t really recognize him until I heard him on the commentary track and realized he was the guy who played Tyne Daly’s husband on Cagney and Lacey. Stefan is a misogynist and a bit of a sadist, or the other way around. Of course, given his undefined relationship with “Mother” it’s no wonder he has some screwed up relations with the opposite sex and for that matter with sex. By the time he meets his accidental end I was rooting for Valerie to be free of him.
Speaking of accidental ends, most of the key deaths are accidental. Stefan meets his end by slipping and slashing his wrists on some broken glass, prompting a hurried finishing of the job as Valerie and the Countess drain him of his remaining blood. The Countess herself dies at the end in a car crash with Valerie that sends the fated Bathory flying through the windshield and incidentally impaled on a stake by the side of the road. And then there’s Ilona (Andrea Rau), the world’s most boring (but mostly naked) vampiric minion. She’s not as pale as the Countess Bathory (in fact, I think she may have had tan lines) but she certainly has the same bored languid attitude. Early on she says “I wish I could die” and after a few more scenes of her I wished she would get her wish. Seeing her vomit blood while hunched over the Countess’s toilet naked did not improve my opinion of poor Ilona. But when it comes to spectacularly improbably deaths, she takes the cake. It all starts when Stefan tries to get her to join him in the shower after they’ve spent a chunk of time in bed doing things that one might do when one is either a sadist or a bored vampire minion. (Not knitting, I have to say.)
The key piece of vampire lore here is that vampires are apparently afraid of running water, so Ilona really doesn’t want to get in the shower. (This lack of showering might explain Ilona’s death wish. I wouldn’t want to smell the resulting combination of centuries of drinking blood and not bathing.) Anyhow, Stefan, being a sadist (and a bit of a misogynist, or the other way around) decides it would be fun to drag the screaming Ilona forcibly into the shower. The improbable result of this act of dubious moral conduct is that Ilona tries to get away, grabs a straight razor, slips and falls (on her back, mind you) onto the straight razor which kills her immediately (presumably by severing her spinal cord given the placement of the razor) and yet without showing a drop of blood. The resulting full frontal nudity is of the distinctly weird and un-sexy variety (I was so puzzled by the bizarre mechanics of the death that I was still wondering what the heck just happened) and is fortunately cut short by the timely appearance of Valerie and the Countess to catch Stefan in flagrante bizarro. Boy, nothing ruins a honeymoon more than when your new bride comes back to the hotel room with an older woman and catches you with a naked dead girl in the bathroom.
I should backtrack a second here and mention that the whole reason Ilona got some alone time with Stefan was because he had spent the night before whipping Valerie with his belt so that she decided to leave him and this prompted the Countess to go to the train station and try to get her to stay (not so much with Stefan, but with her). Catching Stefan in the bathroom with the dead naked Ilona was the nail in the vampiric coffin of his doomed relationship with Valerie and drives her into the awaiting (and unsurprised) arms of the Countess Bathory.
Disposing of Ilona’s body is a farcical venture, as the 3 newly minted amigos drive to the beach and bury her in a shallow sand dune grave. This farce is repeated at the end when Valerie and the Countess dispose of Stefan in the same way. Another recurring motif is the Countess Bathory’s sentimental attachment to young couples in love. That’s what drives her interest in Stefan and Valerie and the motif is repeated in the end when Valerie and a new young couple leave a café together to do…well, we have no idea what Valerie will do with them, because it might be better left to the imagination than turned into another languid vampire movie. But I have to say that there’s something really great about the empowerment of Valerie’s character at the end of the film. Granted, she is empowered into becoming a vampire, but it’s so much better than being strung along in an abusive relationship with Stefan (and perhaps also “Mother”) that seeing her at the end free of that relationship and not beholden to the Countess (whose death seems almost like a sacrifice for Valerie’s liberty) that it makes the whole thing almost redeeming.
So, why bother with Daughters of Darkness?
1. There’s the design/directing attention to detail. For instance, the color red shows up all around the Countess in subtle ways. It took me a second viewing to notice that her car was red all along, because the color wasn’t visible in the dark scenes until almost the end of the film. That was actually clever.
2. Then there are the two amusing supporting Belgians: the Hotel clerk (Paul Esser) and the retired police detective (Georges Jamin). The Hotel clerk is an older man who remembers seeing the Countess in the same hotel when he was a boy (and she looks the same age!) and the Belgian detective who remembers a series of killings in Ostend from the same time and who sees the pattern repeated in Bruges and Ostend now that the Countess is back and who is then dispatched (presumably killed) when the Countess hits his bicycle with her car on the way back from burying Ilona. (Not quite accidental death, but close.) The two Belgian men have delightfully expressive faces and they’re worth seeing.
3. Then there’s Delphine Seyrig who is just perfect as the washed out vampire version of a faded movie star. Her voice is delicate and reassuring and she plays the boredom of undead immortality perfectly whether she’s knitting or pretending to drink a blue grasshopper in the lobby. Ms. Seyrig was a superb actor and if you’re going to see her in a languid European movie then you should skip Last Year at Marienbad and see her in Daughters of Darkness. Her sentimentality is strange but believable and the whole déjà vu effect of the film hangs on her performance. You can really see why the old hotel clerk would remember her for all those years. She can have that kind of mesmerizing effect.
4. Oh, come on, you know you want to see what “Mother” looks like.
5. Ostend and Bruges (where Valerie and Stefan take a daytrip) are very visually appealing and the empty hotel and city make a very opulent ghost town.
6. You learn the important lesson that while it may sound awesome to have an entire hotel in Belgium to yourselves on your honeymoon, it’s actually quite dull and increases your odds of running into bored vampires who will get you involved in their shenanigans.
7. And there’s the corollary lesson that you should always ask to see the family pictures before you marry someone, lest “Mother” turn out to be some aging queen or a vampire or both.
In the end, Daughters of Darkness is more thoughtful than the Eurotrash erotic horror sleazefest that it seems like it would be at first sight, though it certainly includes many exploitable elements of the erotic vampire oeuvre. But if you’re worn out watching supervampires leaping all over the place chasing werewolves and shooting each other with ultraviolet light-bullets, then bored European vampires might be a decent change of pace.
Special Feature:
Commentary with David Del Valle & John Karlen
The commentary track is worth a listen if you’re so bored to death by the long silences of the film on its own. David Del Valle (a film historian and specialist in horror films) is there to provide and prompt the traditional commentary factoids. (e.g. The Astoria Hotel was apparently Gestapo headquarters during WW II—a claim that every grand hotel in Europe seems to make.) And he makes a great straight man for John Karlen’s more…colorful…commentary which makes watching the film a much more lively experience.
Among the things we learn is that Delphine Seyrig was paid in cash because she didn’t trust the independent production, Daniele Ouimet apparently had some junk in her trunk, the actor who plays the detective was quite a gourmet and that John Karlen is a dirty old man.
Here are some choice examples of Karlen’s turns of phrase:
“I always wanted to be on the Orient Express with a big Belgian woman.”
And now, for the low price of 750 euros John Karlen’s dream can become your reality.
“She [Delphine Seyrig] was mostly concerned about being paid in cash.”
Now that’s an acting method that I can get on board with.
“Everything is perverse. We’re all perverse.”
Now bring me a melon and an ear of corn and we can make this a real honeymoon.
“Beautiful Bruges which smelled badly…”
Apparently Belgium in the summer during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s smelled like tuna and ass, heavy on the ass.
“As in all European hotels the beds stink.”
Apparently the Gestapo was also afraid of running water and Europeans think it’s unlucky to get new mattresses.
“It had to be maidens’ blood because hookers’ blood wouldn’t do.”
I have nothing to add to this statement.
And this description of “Mother”: “Overweight sissified Bela Lugosi with a Castilian lisp.”
Sounds like sitcom gold to me. Somebody call Ray Romano quick.
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