A portrait on the surreal horror director Jean Rollin 

It certainly wasn’t the time to watch films during May 1968 in France – when the people were on the streets, protesting capitalism and imperialism. One of the few films that still managed to have a theatrical run during this turbulent period was a small independent horror feature called Le viol du vampire by a first-time director. 

Eyewitnesses to these screenings recall not understanding what the film was about because of the noise in the theater. Film-goers ripped out the theater’s seats from their stalls and threw whatever they could find to the screen. 

Yet, maybe it was the film’s idiosyncratic structure that fired up the chaos in the first place. What French filmgoers watched was a far-cry from the Hammer style of gothic horror. Quite the contrary, this was a film which subverted the subgenre and presented it within an unlikely mix of arthouse, exploitation and experimental film. 

During a certain screening, audiences went on to chase and attack one particular person in the theater: Jean Rollin, the director responsible for the film. 

Despite receiving similar harsh treatment in his home country throughout his career, over time, Rollin’s films have found an international cult audience due to their mixture of slow, atmospheric moods à la arthouse with the violence and nudity of exploitation films. The lavish, transgressive posters these films were marketed with definitely targeted the exploitation audience but the poetic tone and patient pacing they offered was sometimes too “artsy” for these film-goers. This unlikely relationship between two very different tastes in cinema has never been everyone’s cup of tea. 

But what made Jean Rollin’s films so weird? Why did his style exist on seemingly opposite ends? 

Cinéma fantastique

Rollin was one of the few among his countrymen to practice the cinéma fantastique: a term used to define films with fantastic elements of all sorts, therefore partially including horror. It wouldn’t be a stretch to credit the French for inventing this kind of cinema for it was Georges Méliès who first saw the charm of the imagination in his magical shorts and the famous A Trip to the Moon. Despite that, the production of cinéma fantastique in France slowly died out during and after the World Wars, and it was mostly through foreign exports that French audiences could meet with fantastic cinema. 

Rollin was one of the heads in the crowd when American serials were playing in France during the 40s and 50s. Serials did not function like popular cinema at the time, as they were fragmented into episodes and they offered spectacle over story. Each part of the serial would pick up where the previous one left off, continuing in the middle of the action, only to end with a cliffhanger again. Serials offered escapist adventures which seemed to go on forever, because of how each episode ended in the climax. It was the thrill and anticipation of what comes next. 

In fact, Rollin came to realize that the production of his first film, Le viol du vampire, was like a serial itself. He was given the task of shooting a 30-minute vampire film by a producer who wanted to patch it onto an already-existing 60-minute picture in order to market it as a feature-length. In a way, Jean was continuing from what was left off, like a serials protagonist. 

Impressed with what the young director had done with such a small budget, the producer commissioned Rollin to make another half of his film, so it could become its own individual product. So, he had to go again and revive the characters from the situation he left them in, in order to continue his story. The film therefore has the tagline: “A melodrama in two acts.” 

Nevertheless, Jean Rollin’s films often are more bizarre than confusing. The storylines are quite simplistic, but the presentation is always embedded with a certain atmosphere of dread that looms throughout the film. As the films move along, the mood becomes the heart of the narrative and the story is merely secondary. Yet, it is often the symbolic, surreal approach that makes his films so rewarding and memorable. 

Rollin was always public about how he learned from the godfather of surreal cinema, Luis Buñuel, how to craft his films in that dreamy realm where logic is dismissed in favor of free associations. It is no coincidence that his career-retrospective film, Dracula’s Fiancée, ends with a couple on a beach like Buñuel’s Un chien andalou does. 

The match between surrealism and fantastique is the rationale Rollin adopts in crafting his vampire stories. Often, they are not literal vampires, but are expressionistically portrayed as such – as is the case with the cult of women who feast on blood to cure their anemia in Fascination. 

His world is one where a vampire can teleport between dimensions through a huge clock, like in La vampire nue. The symbolism may appear estranging in a Brechtian sense to first-time viewers, but after seeing a couple of his films, once that suspension of disbelief occurs and you’ve surrendered to his fantasy, it feels organic. 

Indeed, the clock is crucial to his filmography given how much of his work deals with time – and naturally, memory. Often in the climaxes of his films, the characters inexplicably find themselves on a rocky beach that is always haunted by the violent waves hitting its shores. It is often where the secret passage in the Gothic castles leads to. The beach appears frozen in time, and fittingly enough is the place where eternity begins. It is the passage to another dimension in La Vampire Nue and the place where the protagonist of Lips of Blood finally achieves perpetual love. 

Nostalgia

A journey to this beach in Dieppe is a journey through time, as much as space. This is the beach of his childhood, and later on where he shot his first short film. Over time, Rollin revisited the beach so many times in his filmography that one can’t help but wonder if this was the way in which Rollin kept his imagination vibrant: by being in this place where no signifiers of time exist.

Sometimes Rollin’s work appears as if he’s reimagining the films he saw in his childhood. Classic archetypes manifest themselves as vampires, pirates, and thieves. Universal’s gothic sets are revived through his on-location shoots in abandoned castles. 

Nevertheless, nostalgia is not always a sweet escapism for his characters, as sometimes the past returns to harm, disfigure, and murder. His famous gore film The Living Dead Girl tells the story of a girl who’s resurrected from the dead but is unable to remember anything from her previous life. It is revealed that she has a thirst for blood now, and her childhood friend offers her human sacrifices in hopes of curing her. Nevertheless, the longing to bring back their relationship from the past results in gory carnage. 

Even though it is hard to say what exactly Rollin’s relationship with the past is in general, in terms of cinema, it is quite evident that he liked the oldies better. A certain portion of his experimental film Lost in New York is dedicated to the narrator name-dropping his favorite films, and aside from the ones that are his(!), they are all films made in the 40s and 50s. 

Maybe it was his style being retrospective, even back then in the late 60s and 70s, that created the sense that his films were impenetrable. The surreal atmosphere in his works makes them appear frozen in time, even though they are rooted in an older tradition of filmmaking conditioned by the exploitation market’s needs of its time. 

Almost 15 years after his passing, Rollin’s films are as timeless as ever, and they continue to weird out and fascinate viewers.