La Fiancée de Dracula (2002) is a late career feature from legendary filmmaker Jean Rollin. As such, the film is replete with the filmmaker’s thematic concerns and aesthetic preoccupations. La Fiancée de Dracula features scantily clad women wrapped in a macabre ambience in old castles and on lonely beaches. La Fiancée de Dracula is everything one expects from the master of horror.
The film follows a professor (Bernard Musson) and his assistant Eric (Denis Tallaron) as they hunt for Dracula (Thomas Desfossé). To fulfill their mission they begin a search for Dracula’s Fiancée (Cyrille Gaudin) that takes them from Paris too distant shores. The duo must contend with the insane nuns of the Order Of The White Virgin, an Ogress (Magalie Madison) and a She-Wolf (Brigitte Lahaie) as they battle to keep Dracula a prisoner.
Of course, this being a film by Jean Rollin, the picture opens in a cemetery. There are a number of other signature touches as well. The nuns for instance are shown chomping on cigars and keep hentai figurines on their desks. Sexualized imagery abounds, even if only in the mise en scène.
But the lasting images of La Fiancée de Dracula are those that combine sex and death. The scenes where the She-Wolf makes out with the Vampire (Sandrine Thoquet) is an excellent example. The Vampire, mostly nude, kisses the She-Wolf with a mouth full of human blood. The kiss is recorded by Rollin in close up as he savors the morbid erotica. It’s in this synthesis that Rollin thrives. Everything else, even the plot, is secondary to such fantasies.
Rollin’s cinema is populated with such lurid images. Rollin’s gift was being able to mine the human subconscious of its darkest fantasies and then to fit them on the framework of a filmic narrative. Narratively Rollin’s films are completely simplistic. Plot is but a means to compose a visual poetry that is born out of the horror genre. Rollin’s entire career was spent perfecting this stratagem.
