DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971)
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Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
9:30 PM
Friday 02 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
9:30 PM
Friday 09 May
Rating: M
Duration: 107 minutes
Country: Belgium
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Andrea Rau, Danielle Ouimet
Director: Harry Kümel
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
9:30 PM
Friday 02 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
9:30 PM
Friday 09 May
Rating: M
Duration: 107 minutes
Country: Belgium
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Andrea Rau, Danielle Ouimet
Director: Harry Kümel
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“Lesbian vampires made frequent incursions in the early 1970's — in movies ranging from hardcore pornographic to dreamily aesthetic — as the Gothic horror movie took to flaunting its psychosexual subtexts. Daughters of Darkness leans flamboyantly toward the artistic end of the spectrum, with Delphine Seyrig sporting Marienbad-like costumes and the Belgian director conjuring up images of luxurious decadence replete with feathers, mirrors, and long, winding hotel corridors. … If Fassbinder had made a vampire movie it might have looked something like this.” — Geoffrey O’Brien
Stefan Chilton is travelling with his new wife, Valerie, through Europe. The couple check into a grand hotel. Because it is winter, the hotel is empty aside from Stefan and Valerie. At nightfall, a mysterious Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig), arrives accompanied by her "secretary", Ilona. Elizabeth takes the adjoining suite, and appears fixated on the young couple. In their suite, Valerie reads a local newspaper article about a series of child murders in Bruges, each a girl whose throat was slashed…
Long a cult classic, the restoration of Daughters of Darkness by the Royal Belgian Cinémathèque has brought back the film to all its luminous colour glory. Delphine Seyrig has never looked more ravishing as she effortlessly channels Marlene Dietrich via Josef von Sternberg at their greatest.
Introduced by Stefan Solomon at Ritz Cinemas and by Janice Loreck at Lido Cinemas
“Lesbian vampires made frequent incursions in the early 1970's — in movies ranging from hardcore pornographic to dreamily aesthetic — as the Gothic horror movie took to flaunting its psychosexual subtexts. Daughters of Darkness leans flamboyantly toward the artistic end of the spectrum, with Delphine Seyrig sporting Marienbad-like costumes and the Belgian director conjuring up images of luxurious decadence replete with feathers, mirrors, and long, winding hotel corridors. … If Fassbinder had made a vampire movie it might have looked something like this.” — Geoffrey O’Brien
Stefan Chilton is travelling with his new wife, Valerie, through Europe. The couple check into a grand hotel. Because it is winter, the hotel is empty aside from Stefan and Valerie. At nightfall, a mysterious Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig), arrives accompanied by her "secretary", Ilona. Elizabeth takes the adjoining suite, and appears fixated on the young couple. In their suite, Valerie reads a local newspaper article about a series of child murders in Bruges, each a girl whose throat was slashed…
Long a cult classic, the restoration of Daughters of Darkness by the Royal Belgian Cinémathèque has brought back the film to all its luminous colour glory. Delphine Seyrig has never looked more ravishing as she effortlessly channels Marlene Dietrich via Josef von Sternberg at their greatest.
Introduced by Stefan Solomon at Ritz Cinemas and by Janice Loreck at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By Dylan Rowen
By Dylan Rowen
Dylan Rowen is a writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.
Edited by Anne Rutherford.
Edited by Anne Rutherford.
HARRY KÜMEL
Harry Kümel’s oeuvre is a very queer one indeed. Born in 1940 in Antwerp, Kümel started directing from a young age, producing short films, television dramas, documentaries, and later expanding his scope to include opera and theatre productions. His most well-known film, the genre-defying and strangely mesmeric Daughters of Darkness (1971), still consistently draws a midnight cult crowd. His feature debut, Monsieur Hawarden (1968), is an adaptation of Henri Pierre Faffin's 1932 novel of the same name, in turn inspired by a nineteenth-century diary about a woman who disguises herself as a man to escape a criminal conviction. Kümel’s boundary-crossing themes remained a consistent mainstay throughout his later features; he often took inspiration from and adapted a range of literary sources that explicitly deal with homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and the supernatural. In the same year as Daughters of Darkness, Kümel directed the fantasy horror film, Malpertuis (also known as The Legend of Doom House in the US), based on a Gothic horror novel by Jean Ray, about a labyrinthine mansion that entangles all those who enter. In Malpertuis, Orson Welles delivers a uniquely madcap performance as an eccentric eugenicist who traps figures from Greek mythology in his M.C. Escher-like mansion.
Kümel has almost in a way become a subject of his own myth, as he has appeared within a number of novels, including Nicholas Royle’s Antwerp (2004) and Hubert Lampo’s The Scent of Sandalwood (1976), and Lampo’s novel, The Coming of Joachim Stiller (1960), was adapted for the screen by Kümel in 1976. Kümel’s gift for adapting legends and strange events from history to High Modernist Gothic ends continued in his collaboration with Delphine Seyrig in the experimental vampire film, Daughters of Darkness.
Kümel has almost in a way become a subject of his own myth, as he has appeared within a number of novels, including Nicholas Royle’s Antwerp (2004) and Hubert Lampo’s The Scent of Sandalwood (1976), and Lampo’s novel, The Coming of Joachim Stiller (1960), was adapted for the screen by Kümel in 1976. Kümel’s gift for adapting legends and strange events from history to High Modernist Gothic ends continued in his collaboration with Delphine Seyrig in the experimental vampire film, Daughters of Darkness.
THE FILM
The cult classic, Daughters of Darkness (Les lèvres rouges), is a sensual arthouse Gothic Eurohorror starring the glamorous Delphine Seyrig as the vampire seductress, Countess Elizabeth Báthory, whose character is based on the real-life sixteenth-century Hungarian noblewoman, alleged serial killer and possible vampire (as Flemish folklore may have it). In Kümel’s narrative, Countess Báthory seemingly has lived on into the 1970s and is now preying on an unsuspecting newly-wed couple at an off-season seaside hotel in Ostend, Belgium. Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) and Stefan (John Karlen) are on a stop-over on their way back to England. Their heterosexuality and bourgeois security, however, are threatened by honeyed words and velvety stories from Báthory and her somnambulant lesbian lover, Ilona (Andrea Rau).
While initially a flop in Kümel’s home country, this unusual take on the vampire film did quite well on the New York film circuit and has now cemented itself as one of the most widely screened Belgian films to this day. With gowns designed by couture French designer Bernard Perris, sumptuous mise en scène by cinematographer Eduard van der Enden (who worked with Jacques Tati), and a melancholic score from François de Roubaix, Daughters of Darkness’ experimental arthouse flair has often raised comparisons to the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through Seyrig’s costuming and otherworldly screen presence, memories of her haunting performance in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) linger throughout Kümel’s film.
Thematically, Daughters of Darkness traces gendered and sexual power dynamics, how men exert control over women, and the limits and excesses of social class hierarchies. Stylistically, this film is doing something quite different from other in-vogue – often exploitative – lesbian vampire films that were produced or inspired by the Hammer Horror Production studio. Think, for instance of Vampyros Lesbos (1971) by Jesús Franco, Vampyres (1974) by José Ramón Larraz and The Velvet Vampire (1971) by Stephanie Rothman. In comparison, the undercurrents of Daughters of Darkness are quietly seditious, sometimes feminist and most often queer.
Daughters of Darkness opens on a train hurtling into an icy unknown, swathed in mauve, with Valerie and Stefan inside, consummating their marriage. On their layover on the way back to England, they arrive at a West Flanders oceanfront hotel: a spacious and grand resort at the epicenter of this story that stands in for the generically expected gothic castle that vampire films often have, replete with a creepy butler-cum-concierge. Kümel serves us up continental breakfasts, sweeping shots of Belgium, canals and frosty oceanic vistas reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s sprawling and atmospheric city scenes in Nosferatu the Vampyre, depopulated and out of time. Little does the hastily married young couple anticipate that the room they booked is the countess’ own special suite. This is one of the first instances of crossing a boundary, a violation of a threshold that the film teases us with.
A ghoulish wash of blood marks the end of each act: the fades to black are actually fades to red. There are no fangs, imageless mirrors, repellant garlic or sizzling crosses in this tale; instead Kümel probes deeper into the subconscious and psyche of the tortured couple at the retreat. In Sexual Personae, the feminist poststructuralist scholar, Camille Paglia, writes that Kümel’s film exists in a genealogy of what she terms a ‘psychological high Gothic.’ According to Paglia, Daughters of Darkness is indebted to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. High Gothic demands abstraction, impressionism and slightness, but it is always ceremonious. Paglia writes that, in this film, ‘evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history.’(1)
Seyrig is a thoroughly modern vampire. She is unencumbered by bestial impulses and slides into an under-the-skin eroticism. She is subtly vampiric, mostly human, radiant and almost too painfully beautiful to look at. Seyrig’s old Hollywood glamour, reminiscent of vampy Marlene Dietrich, is matched by her paramour Ilona’s Louise Brooks-inspired look, a visual homage that hints at some complex history between the two women. Looking at Seyrig is like looking at the sun. We become almost like a vampire ourselves – pulled into her orbit – a luminosity hurtful to gaze upon. She possesses a distinctly old-world charm and grace; her vampirism is, however, a far cry from F. W. Murnau’s creature of the night, Nosferatu. No one can escape her bright sequin lamé dress and shawl, as attested by the arresting final image the film leaves us with. Seyrig’s paramour attempts to leave her, but she is pulled toward fate, and so are we.
In Daughters of Darkness, there is no complete destruction of the vampire at the end, but rather her energy lives on, transmitted into a new body, with Stefan’s machismo depleted and drained of all its power. Samantha Broadhead notes that Kümel’s film subverts the traditional vampire film by inverting the patriarchal power structures and associated tropes which tend to be reinstated at the dénouement of the typical vampire genre film. With Stefan bleeding out, Báthory’s voice continues, infecting and hijacking the body of Valerie. This is what makes Daughters of Darkness quite a pleasurable film; we gain satisfaction from both the destruction of the perpetrator of masculine violence and in the luxuriously felt textures of Seyrig’s persona and fashion made immortal. As Broadhead argues, to view this extravagant and sensuous film on the big screen allows us to fully appreciate both the visual and haptic qualities of the film, especially in how Seyrig touches, pulls and traces her fingers across both the screen and her prey.(3) No one can escape her blood-red acrylics and ASMR-like tappings entrapping Valerie, who is encased in resin, somnambulant-like, forever. As Paglia writes: ‘Horror stories ending in the victory of good are no more numerous than those ending in the threat of evil's return. Nature, like the vampire, will not stay in its grave.’(4) Indeed, in the final haunting shot of the film, evil cannot die; it is but transformed into something sublimely horrifying.
Notes
1. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990: 268.
2. Samantha Broadhead, ‘Viewing Daughters of Darkness through the lens of Queer Fear.’ Senses of Cinema, no. 106, August 2023.
3. Broadhead, as above.
4. Paglia, as above.
While initially a flop in Kümel’s home country, this unusual take on the vampire film did quite well on the New York film circuit and has now cemented itself as one of the most widely screened Belgian films to this day. With gowns designed by couture French designer Bernard Perris, sumptuous mise en scène by cinematographer Eduard van der Enden (who worked with Jacques Tati), and a melancholic score from François de Roubaix, Daughters of Darkness’ experimental arthouse flair has often raised comparisons to the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through Seyrig’s costuming and otherworldly screen presence, memories of her haunting performance in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) linger throughout Kümel’s film.
Thematically, Daughters of Darkness traces gendered and sexual power dynamics, how men exert control over women, and the limits and excesses of social class hierarchies. Stylistically, this film is doing something quite different from other in-vogue – often exploitative – lesbian vampire films that were produced or inspired by the Hammer Horror Production studio. Think, for instance of Vampyros Lesbos (1971) by Jesús Franco, Vampyres (1974) by José Ramón Larraz and The Velvet Vampire (1971) by Stephanie Rothman. In comparison, the undercurrents of Daughters of Darkness are quietly seditious, sometimes feminist and most often queer.
Daughters of Darkness opens on a train hurtling into an icy unknown, swathed in mauve, with Valerie and Stefan inside, consummating their marriage. On their layover on the way back to England, they arrive at a West Flanders oceanfront hotel: a spacious and grand resort at the epicenter of this story that stands in for the generically expected gothic castle that vampire films often have, replete with a creepy butler-cum-concierge. Kümel serves us up continental breakfasts, sweeping shots of Belgium, canals and frosty oceanic vistas reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s sprawling and atmospheric city scenes in Nosferatu the Vampyre, depopulated and out of time. Little does the hastily married young couple anticipate that the room they booked is the countess’ own special suite. This is one of the first instances of crossing a boundary, a violation of a threshold that the film teases us with.
A ghoulish wash of blood marks the end of each act: the fades to black are actually fades to red. There are no fangs, imageless mirrors, repellant garlic or sizzling crosses in this tale; instead Kümel probes deeper into the subconscious and psyche of the tortured couple at the retreat. In Sexual Personae, the feminist poststructuralist scholar, Camille Paglia, writes that Kümel’s film exists in a genealogy of what she terms a ‘psychological high Gothic.’ According to Paglia, Daughters of Darkness is indebted to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. High Gothic demands abstraction, impressionism and slightness, but it is always ceremonious. Paglia writes that, in this film, ‘evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history.’(1)
Seyrig is a thoroughly modern vampire. She is unencumbered by bestial impulses and slides into an under-the-skin eroticism. She is subtly vampiric, mostly human, radiant and almost too painfully beautiful to look at. Seyrig’s old Hollywood glamour, reminiscent of vampy Marlene Dietrich, is matched by her paramour Ilona’s Louise Brooks-inspired look, a visual homage that hints at some complex history between the two women. Looking at Seyrig is like looking at the sun. We become almost like a vampire ourselves – pulled into her orbit – a luminosity hurtful to gaze upon. She possesses a distinctly old-world charm and grace; her vampirism is, however, a far cry from F. W. Murnau’s creature of the night, Nosferatu. No one can escape her bright sequin lamé dress and shawl, as attested by the arresting final image the film leaves us with. Seyrig’s paramour attempts to leave her, but she is pulled toward fate, and so are we.
In Daughters of Darkness, there is no complete destruction of the vampire at the end, but rather her energy lives on, transmitted into a new body, with Stefan’s machismo depleted and drained of all its power. Samantha Broadhead notes that Kümel’s film subverts the traditional vampire film by inverting the patriarchal power structures and associated tropes which tend to be reinstated at the dénouement of the typical vampire genre film. With Stefan bleeding out, Báthory’s voice continues, infecting and hijacking the body of Valerie. This is what makes Daughters of Darkness quite a pleasurable film; we gain satisfaction from both the destruction of the perpetrator of masculine violence and in the luxuriously felt textures of Seyrig’s persona and fashion made immortal. As Broadhead argues, to view this extravagant and sensuous film on the big screen allows us to fully appreciate both the visual and haptic qualities of the film, especially in how Seyrig touches, pulls and traces her fingers across both the screen and her prey.(3) No one can escape her blood-red acrylics and ASMR-like tappings entrapping Valerie, who is encased in resin, somnambulant-like, forever. As Paglia writes: ‘Horror stories ending in the victory of good are no more numerous than those ending in the threat of evil's return. Nature, like the vampire, will not stay in its grave.’(4) Indeed, in the final haunting shot of the film, evil cannot die; it is but transformed into something sublimely horrifying.
Notes
1. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990: 268.
2. Samantha Broadhead, ‘Viewing Daughters of Darkness through the lens of Queer Fear.’ Senses of Cinema, no. 106, August 2023.
3. Broadhead, as above.
4. Paglia, as above.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Harry Kümel
DCP Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium
Restored in 4K in 2020 by Blue Underground at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original image negative and the magnetic original mix. Grading supervised by Harry Kümel.
Director: Harry Kümel; Production Company: Showking Films, Maya Films, Roxy Film, Ciné Vog Films; Producer: Henry Lange, Paul Collet; Script: Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, Harry Kümel. English Dialogue by Joseph Amiel; Photography: Eduard van der Enden; Editor: Gust Verschueren, Dennis Bonan; Production Design: Françoise Hardy; Music: François de Roubaix;
Cast: Delphine Seyrig (Countess Elizabeth Báthory) John Karlen (Stefan Chilton), Danielle Ouimet (Valerie Chilton), Andrea Rau (Ilona), Paul Esser (Pierre), Georges Jamin (retired policeman), Joris Collet (butler), Fons Rademakers (Mother)
Belgium/France/West Germany | 1971 | 107 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | UC 18+
DCP Cinematek, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium
Restored in 4K in 2020 by Blue Underground at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original image negative and the magnetic original mix. Grading supervised by Harry Kümel.
Director: Harry Kümel; Production Company: Showking Films, Maya Films, Roxy Film, Ciné Vog Films; Producer: Henry Lange, Paul Collet; Script: Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, Harry Kümel. English Dialogue by Joseph Amiel; Photography: Eduard van der Enden; Editor: Gust Verschueren, Dennis Bonan; Production Design: Françoise Hardy; Music: François de Roubaix;
Cast: Delphine Seyrig (Countess Elizabeth Báthory) John Karlen (Stefan Chilton), Danielle Ouimet (Valerie Chilton), Andrea Rau (Ilona), Paul Esser (Pierre), Georges Jamin (retired policeman), Joris Collet (butler), Fons Rademakers (Mother)
Belgium/France/West Germany | 1971 | 107 Mins | 4K DCP | Colour | French with English subtitles | UC 18+