Damned If You Do

The obvious touchstone for Xan Casavettes's 60s vampire pastiche, Kiss of the Damned (2012) is Jean Rollin, who made vampire movies and other horror movies that straddle the art house and the grindhouse, and most of the writing I've seen about the film makes that connection early and often. What's perhaps under-perceived is the debt this film owes to the surrealists and the symbolists. The roots of the Euro-vampire film, whether lowbrow trash like Jess Franco's Vampyros Lesbos or upscale trash like Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses are not found in Hammer films or Murnau, but are rather derived from Cocteau (particularly L'enfants Terribles, his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Melville), Franju, and Alain Resnais, whose Last Year at Marienbad contains the same kind of dream logic and vaguely erotic ennui that permeates its more sanguinary descendants. Marienbad provides the art-vampire film with one of it's signature performers in Delphine Seyrig, who would later star in Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness in a performance that is intended to invoke her work for Resnais. Kiss of the Damned is (self-)aware of this tradition, and isn't coy about cluing the audience into it. In an early scene, for instance, it conflates Viridiana with a vampire movie on late-night television. In another, its heroine meets the object of her desire in a late-night video store that still has VHS tapes on the shelf. It's a funny wink and a nod, though the film is generally deadly serious. This is a film out of its time and it knows it, and its great misfortune is to appear after decades of tragic neurasthenic vampires have crowded the marketplace. But then again, Anne Rice was influenced by Jean Rollin, too.

Read more below the fold >>