Sanguine Seascapes, Lost Souls, & The Damage Done

Guest contributor Heather Drain curates a wee film festival for ‘The Summer of Rollin’ with three distinctive films that would fit in perfectly in any Rollin film festival showing anywhere on this mortal plane.

By Heather Drain

Explore the shadow side of genre cinema and you explore the various nooks, crannies, scars, and still mottled open wounds of our nature. It takes an extraordinary vision and creator to nail all of this while retaining the vibrant and lush eye of a painter and the dreamy lyricalness of a poet. Luckily for the world and the type of art lover who possesses that pull toward melancholic atmosphere, macabre beauty, and pure heart, Jean Rollin existed and did all of this and so much more.

Rollin was beyond a horror filmmaker. While  there is absolutely zero shame in being the latter, it’s simply a descriptor that does not a accurately capture his creative world. He often described his work as the cinema of the fantastic, which is fitting, since going into any of his key films is allowing yourself to be ushered into the penumbra of the imagination, where magic, mood, and blood-splattered elysian fields rule supreme. Many directors try to force the hand of being an auteur, but their attempts are pale and illusory. Artists like Rollin do not try, but simply just do and create, whether or not critics or moneymen “get” it. (Spoiler, they usually didn’t and still rarely do. Same as it ever was.)

Now, with all of this in mind, how do you even try to pair the works of Rollin with other filmmakers?

 Excellent question and in lesser hands, I would fear for the uninitiated being led astray, but I have it on good authority from the best hostess that ever greeted everyone from spittle-cheeked tykes to greasy-palmed-men-of-false-gods at a long-defunct Shoney’s diner in Nowheresville, USA, that a rich combination of skill, soul, and gut intuition went into this film festival featuring some of the spiritual kin of Jean Rollin.

Planning any proper film festival is not unlike orchestrating a successful party. Some shindigs are easier to set up than others and if you accidentally let in that one bad apple, then you and your morale are at high risk for the most toxic kind of social media hoedown….well, until the next D-list celebrity and/or politician does something brain-splatteringly stupid, morally heinous, or simultaneously stupid AND heinous. (So, give it about two days or two seconds.) Setting up a film festival operates on the same principle. The individuals do not necessarily have to be exactly alike and frankly, it’s more interesting if they are not, but there must be some harmonious chemistry there to keep the air electric and the mood compelling.

Fewer films wear that atmospheric gown better than Emilio Vieyra’s 1967 noir-horror-psycho-sexual film, Placer Sangriento.

Released in the United States as Feast of Flesh and originally put on an inexplicable double bill with the Rene Cardona bizarro, crimson-stained paws of the rapey-apey man, Night of the Bloody Apes (1969), Placer Sangriento is one moody film filled with beauty, sullen sensuality that never quite blossoms, and an Argentinian seascape that is beautifully shot in black & white. It’s a locale that pairs well with that iconic Dieppe seaside that is all but a reoccurring character in the Rollin universe. Placer Sangriento is extremely underrated and is just begging for proper restoration and re-evaluation.

In 1976, director Jonas Middleton made one of the most evocative films to combine horror, eros, and familial trauma with Through the Looking Glass.

This is a work that goes from reality to dream and ultimately, to nightmare in a way that, like tears and blood seeping through silk, is a stained beauty. Starring the aristocratic blonde, Catherine Burgess, who should have done more movies, and the eternally unforgettable Jamie Gillis as one of cinema’s most terrifying screen fathers, Through the Looking Glass, is a bold and expertly made film experience that will rattle around in your nervous system long after the initial viewing.

            Three years prior, Dick Blackburn directed his, to this date, sole feature film with Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural.

This visually sumptuous film stars the late ethereal actress and musician Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith as young Lila Lee in a performance radiant with sensitivity and guilelessness. Running away from her adopted home with a local preacher to see her wounded gangster father, Lila ends up being taken in by the mysterious Lemora (Leslie Glib, in pitch-perfect performance) and her gang of semi-feral vampire children. Lemora the film is an unsung masterpiece that paints a world full of predators, both of the fantastical and all too real and human kind, surrounding the beautiful and pure-natured innocent. Plus, Hy Pyke has an appearance in it, so that right there is sheer gold.

So, when the world of Jean Rollin, with all of its oil paint beauty, languid eroticism,  omnipresent ache of the spirit, and continual presence of the phantasmagoric leaves you wanting different yet similar shores, you now have a small but steadfast map to rely on. These are films that are not for everyone, but then again, anything mass made is not worth your curiosity and vision. There are tourists and there are travelers and this is a hundred percent pure grade cinema for the truly adventurous soul.

            Life and time are far too precious for anything lesser, so light a candle and sally forth.