Daughters of Darkness

Daughters of Darkness is a 1971 erotic horror film co-written and directed by Harry Kümel and starring Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Andrea Rau, and Danielle Ouimet.

Plot

Stefan Chilton, the son of an aristocratic British family who was raised in the United States, is traveling with his new wife, Valerie, through Europe. The couple check into a grand hotel on the Ostend seafront in Belgium, intending to catch the cross-channel ferry to England, where Stefan’s mother lives. Valerie notices that Stefan is reluctant to phone his mother, who is unaware of the couple’s marriage. Because it is winter, the hotel is empty aside from Stefan and Valerie. At nightfall, a mysterious Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Báthory, arrives in a Bristol driven by her “secretary”, Ilona. Elizabeth requests the royal suite, but the hotel’s middle-aged concierge, Pierre, tells her it is occupied by the honeymooning couple. He also remarks having seen the countess at the same hotel when he was a child, and observes that she has not aged. 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.

While visiting Bruges the following day, Valerie and Stefan stumble upon a newly found crime scene of another murdered girl. Valerie is disturbed by Stefan’s fascination with the crime. Back at the hotel, Elizabeth and Ilona acquaint themselves with Stefan and Valerie in the hotel lobby. During their conversation, a police officer appears at the hotel, and makes vague reference to having known Elizabeth years prior. She remains evasive to him. Elizabeth subsequently explains that she is a descendant of Erzsébet Báthory, and was named for her. She recounts the various violent acts that Bathory committed, particularly the murder and mutilation of young girls, whose blood she bathed in. Valerie is revulsed by the conversation, but Stefan appears to be sexually aroused by it. Stefan eventually agrees to phone his mother, who turns out to be a middle-aged, effeminate man. “Mother” scolds Stefan for getting married, but expresses curiosity at the prospect of meeting Valerie.

Later, Stefan beats Valerie in their hotel room, culminating in sadistic rape. The next day, Ilona seduces Stefan when Valerie attempts to leave Ostend. Elizabeth stops Valerie from leaving, and the two women spend the evening together discussing Valerie and Stefan’s relationship. Elizabeth dissuades Valerie from remaining with Stefan, warning her that he will treat her as an inferior. Meanwhile, Stefan teases Ilona in the bathroom, and attempts to pull her into the shower. The two get into a tussle and slip and fall, causing Ilona to slash her hand on a razor before fatally falling on top of it. Valerie and Elizabeth return moments after, stumbling upon the scene. Elizabeth takes charge, ordering Valerie to clean up the blood while Stefan sits in shock, and the three subsequently drive into the country to dispose of Ilona’s corpse.

After burying Ilona’s body on the beach, the three return to the hotel at dawn. Valerie, under Elizabeth’s spell, refuses to leave with Stefan. A violent fight ensues, during which Stefan’s wrists are slashed by a broken bowl. As Stefan bleeds to death, Elizabeth and Valerie drink the blood pouring from his wounds. Just before dawn, they throw his corpse, wrapped in plastic, over a guardrail and onto a street below. Elizabeth gives his corpse one final kiss before they place it in Elizabeth’s car to dispose of outside of town. The women flee in Elizabeth’s car, Valerie driving at a high speed to cross over the border to France. Elizabeth insists that she not be caught in daylight. While speeding on a dense forest road, the women are blinded by sunlight, and Valerie loses control of the car, crashing. Elizabeth is thrown from the vehicle and impaled through the heart on a broken branch before her body is lit on fire by the car’s subsequent explosion.

Several months later, Valerie approaches a young couple playing tennis at a resort for new prey, her voice now that of Elizabeth’s.

Cast

Delphine Seyrig as Countess Elizabeth Báthory

John Karlen as Stefan Chilton

Danielle Ouimet as Valerie Chilton

Andrea Rau as Ilona

Paul Esser as Pierre

Georges Jamin as retired policeman

Joris Collet as butler

Fons Rademakers as mother

Production

Director Kumel, interviewed by Mark Gatiss for the BBC documentary Horror Europa said that he deliberately styled Delphine Seyrig’s character after Marlene Dietrich and Andrea Rau’s after Louise Brooks to deepen the intertextual resonance. Because the vampire character of Elizabeth Bathory is also a demagogue, Kumel dressed her in the Nazi colours of black, white and red. In commenting on both the film’s mordant sense of humour and the director’s painterly eye in the composition of several scenes, Gatiss drew forth the comment from Kumel that he considers the film very Belgian, especially due to the influence of Surrealism and Expressionism.

Extensive external shooting was done at the Royal Galleries of Ostend, a seaside neoclassical arcade on the beach at Ostend (especially at the luxury Grand Hotel des Thermes, which sits atop the central section of the arcade). The interior shooting was done at the Hotel Astoria, Brussels and other exteriors at the Tropical Gardens, Meise.

Interpretation

The critic Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae (1990) that Daughters of Darkness is a good example of a “classy genre of vampire film” that “follows a style I call psychological high Gothic.” Paglia sees this “abstract and ceremonious” style, which depicts evil as “hierarchical glamour” and deals with “eroticized western power”, as beginning in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ligeia”, and Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw.

According to the critic Geoffrey O’Brien:

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. At the film’s core, however, is a deeply unpleasant evocation of a war of nerves between Seyrig’s vampire and the bourgeois newlyweds into whose honeymoon she insinuates herself. Jaded age preys cunningly on narcissistic youth, and seductiveness and cruelty become indistinguishable as Seyrig forces the innocents to become aware of their own capacity for monstrous behavior. If Fassbinder had made a vampire movie it might have looked something like this.

Bryan White of the Bring Me The Axe! podcast writes:

Gender stands at the center of the movie. It’s the entire operating principle. Stefan, as the film’s lone male character of consequence, regards Valerie as a thing to be owned or mastered. Through the first half of the movie, the matter of Stefan’s mother looms heavily over everything. He is uncomfortable at the very mention of her. He bribes the man at the hotel’s desk to aid him in his avoidance of his mother. It’s inevitable that we meet her and the movie goes to great lengths to build her up as this massive antagonistic force. When Valerie and Stefan have sex, he puts a great deal of emphasis on her breasts. The character of his sexual performance is desperation. Suddenly leaping into marriage with a woman he hardly knows speaks to his insecurity around his own concept of male gender roles. Prior to the phone call to Mother, Seyrig’s Elizabeth Bathory and Stefan engage in a bizarre scene where she has him recount to Valerie the nature of the real Bathory’s crimes. Each one is a description of a penetrating attack and each description drives the pair deeper into frenzied arousal. When Stefan’s mother is finally introduced, we find out what all the fuss is about. She symbolically castrates him in a brief, minutes-long conversation that turns the entire movie on its head. Where it was perfectly reasonable to see Stefan’s taking of Valerie before as an act of owning her, it now seems that the ownership isn’t of a person but is the very ownership of femininity, itself. As this all plays out, Bathory puts her own machinery in motion to twist the knife when she sends her companion, Ilona, to seduce Stefan and Ilona denies him her breasts and symbolically takes the dominant position by being on top of him. Her accidental death following the sex scene ends up being the straw that breaks the camel’s back and he is rendered utterly useless to the surviving women. Throughout the film there are numerous tracking shots which linger on hands. They’re a powerful symbol for doing, for action. We take with our hands. We manipulate. Is it any wonder that when Stefan meets his final fate, the women drain him from the open wounds at his wrists?

Release

The film first opened in the United States in New York City, premiering on 28 May 1971.

Critical reception

In the early 2010s, Time Out conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films. Daughters of Darkness placed at number 90 on their top 100 list. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 82% based on 22 reviews, with an average rating of 6.9/10.

See also

List of cult films

Notes

References

External links

Daughters of Darkness at IMDb

Daughters of Darkness at Rotten Tomatoes

Daughters of Darkness at the TCM Movie Database

Daughters of Darkness trailer at Archive.org