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DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS
(La Rouge aux Levres)
Rating:  ½
Belgium/France/West Germany. 1971.
Director – Harry Kumel, Screenplay – Pierre Druot, Jean Ferry & Harry Kumel, Producers – Paul Collett & Henry Lange, Photography – Eduard van der Enden, Music – Francois de Robaix, Special Effects – Thierry Hallard & Eugene Hendrick, Art Direction – Francoise Hardy. Production Company – Snow King Films/Maya Films/Roxy Films/Cine Vog Films.
Cast:
Delphine Seyrig (Countess Elizabeth Bathory), John Karlen (Stefan Chilton), Danielle Ouimet (Valerie Chilton), Andrea Rau (Ilona Harczy), Paul Esser (Pierre), Georges Jamin (The Man)
Plot: Britisher Stefan Chilton has just married a Swiss girl, Valerie. They stop over in a deserted hotel in Ostend. Stefan keeps putting off the return to England, afraid of telling his mother about Valerie. They are joined by fellow guests Countess Elizabeth Bathory and her female lover Ilona. The desk clerk insists the Countess was there forty years earlier and has not aged since. Elizabeth sets her sights on seducing Valerie, who is finding Stefan’s sexual appetite off-putting, while Ilona sets out to tempt Stefan.
Belgium’s Harry Kumel is one of the great unsung directors of the genre. Daughters of Darkness is a considered classic. Kumel also made the excellent Malpertuis (1972), which is an even better film than Daughters of Darkness. Both were made when Kumel was only in his early thirties and are the only two of his films to be known internationally. Harry Kumel has made a number of films since – including includes Monsieur Hawarden (1968), a true story about a woman who disguised herself as a man to flee a murder; an adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin (1973); the Magical Realist The Coming of Joachim Stiller (1976); Paradise Lost (1978), which is unrelated to Milton but a satire of smalltown politics; The Secrets of Love (1986), an anthology of erotic tales; and the period drama Eline Vere (1991) – but none are known very well known outside of Benelux countries.
Kumel’s films are lit with the most gorgeous colour palettes. Daughters of Darkness has a predominant colour scheme of red – the Countess’s sports car, her red dress, lipstick and nail polish and John Karlen’s red robe, as well as the slow fades to orange between scenes. Harry Kumel also has a visual love of architecture – Malpertuis is filled with decaying buildings and exquisitely lush interiors. Daughters of Darkness takes place in a deserted out-of-season hotel where the ornate rooms and desolate beach fronts echo with a haunting emptiness. Amidst this the dashes of red act like a tease – they represent blood, perhaps passion, and are always something vibrant and alive in the empty landscape.
Daughters was made during the early 1970s vampire movie revival. Here vampire cinema suddenly discovered sexual liberation and was filled with a deluge of all sorts of sex vampires, predominantly of the lesbian variety, with the films of Jean Rollin and Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy beginning with The Vampire Lovers (1970), as well as the likes of Vampyros Lesbos (1970), The Velvet Vampire (1971), The Blood Spattered Bride (1972) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1973). There was even a whole subset of these – Countess Dracula (1970), Immoral Tales (1974), two of Paul Nashy’s Waldemar Daninsky werewolf films – that featured the historical Countess Elizabeth Bathory, whose real-life blood-bathing exploits were one of the inspirations of vampirism, as this does. Daughters of Darkness is the most elegantly sophisticated of these and has become somewhat of a cult classic.
Harry Kumel’s trump card is the great Delphine Seyrig who gives a marvellously arch performance. She is like a sleek, elegant cat curled up on a sofa. Asked the secret of her longevity, she drolly replies: “It’s a very simple and very strict diet. Lots of sleep.” The film is so elegantly coiled that the word vampire is not even mentioned once – indeed almost right up until the end there is no clear certainty that the countess is a vampire and not say just a rich, bored seductress.
The downside of the film is that Harry Kumel and Delphine Seyrig create such a lush, dreamy sense of old world elegance that you are never really aware that not much at all happens until the latter third. At this point Harry Kumel throws in some more traditional horror elements – Andrea Rau improbably tripping on a razor in the bath and a scene where John Karlen is nearly buried at the beach. But these scenes jar and seem out of place in contrast to the slow, somnolent pace of the rest of the film. There is an abrupt ending that seems forced on from lack of knowing how to end the film.
Countess Bathory’s other appearances on film include the Canadian erotic film Eternal (2004) and even as a character in a videogame in Stay Alive (2006).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2000
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