Succubus: Jess Franco’s 1968 Nightclub, and the Dream That Stops Being an Act

Adult viewers who look through BDSM film for power-exchange logic get a particular dizziness from the 1968 West German movie Succubus. The German title is Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden, “Necronomicon – Sinful Dreams.” This is Jesús (Jess) Franco’s first production that is fully outside Spain, after several Spanish films. He stitches Lisbon nightclub jazz, an LSD party, and surreal nightmares into one picture. Lorna Green is a performer whose act sells simulated SM murder. The act does not stay a sensation for the room. It seeps into her, until fantasy and killing are no longer separate. For an audience that wants art-horror rather than a bedroom manual, the film is about mind control and sexual appetite working together. It is not a set of instructions.

Lisbon to Berlin: a death that was rehearsed

The story starts in a Lisbon nightclub. Dancer Lorna Green, under her manager William, turns sadomasochistic violence into staged murder. The patrons want the shock and the charge. Lorna herself seems under the mental control of a mysterious man, Pierce. In a dream he treats her as a disciple of evil and wants his will carried out. Waking life splits. She and William come across a street funeral. The dead man has been stabbed through the eye, the same wound as Admiral Kapp in her dream. At an LSD party she goes into a trance while the guests crawl toward her like animals, and William tells the story of a countess who, under Satan’s influence, murdered the husband who built her a palace.

The dreams get worse. In another one Lorna takes her friend Bella to a ruined castle by the sea. In a room of mannequins she seduces Bella, hits her with a statue, and after Bella runs she finishes the killing with a knife as the mannequins come to life. She wakes to a move. She and William are relocating to Berlin. She does not know William and Pierce have been colluding. In the Berlin flat she reenacts the club piece in a trance, stabs a man, and kills a woman who begs for her life. William calls her name. The trance breaks. She flees upstairs into gunfire. William goes back to Lisbon alone. A nude Lorna is on the couch, asks for a kiss, and drives a knife into his neck. Pierce appears, drives her to the harbor, calls her Faustina, promises his power will bring her peace, and enters the castle with her. The nightclub SM act has closed its loop: rehearsal, then a real murder.

Money collapses, censors cross out the title

After several Spanish films, Franco went looking for German money to get out from under local production rules and censorship. Even with a Spanish crew, co-production money meant shooting in Spain. He said the censors took a red pen to this one and crossed everything out, including the title. The working title came from a book called Necronomicon that he found at Pier A. Caminnecci’s home. The story in it was only three pages, so he fused it with an earlier script. After finishing Lucky, the Inscrutable, he took an eight-page outline to production manager Karl-Heinz Mannchen. Model Janine Reynaud was cast after her husband, actor Michel Lemoine, introduced her to Franco. Lemoine plays Pierce. Friedrich Gulda wrote a jazz score. The shoot was in Lisbon and West Berlin. Halfway through, the German money collapsed. Producer Adrian Hoven contacted Caminnecci, who was interested in Reynaud and agreed to finance. An affair between Caminnecci and Reynaud followed. Franco said he wrote the screenplay and edited with Hoven. Jack Taylor plays William Francis Mulligan.

How it was received

Succubus opened in West Germany in April 1968 and made money. American International Pictures bought the U.S. rights and opened it in New York in April 1969 under the title Succubus. The promotion included a phone number for viewers who did not know what the word meant, which is exploitation marketing doing dictionary duty. Critics split. The New York Times said the film could not decide whether it was a bare-breasted exploitation movie or an erotic horror story, and called the result a drag. Roger Ebert ranked it among the year’s worst and said it had nothing of worth. Other notices granted the color photography and the optical effects, and found the technical quality hard to argue with.

Franco shoots Lisbon streets, funeral processions, and the seaside ruin as mood, not as a map. Guests crawling toward Lorna at the LSD party is the smell of the 1960s and also a picture of the audience in on the act. Reynaud’s Lorna is the star of the stage piece and a blank for Pierce’s will. William is manager, lover, and finally the victim. Later BDSM films often run like a procedure. Franco’s version stays inside dream logic. Negotiated power exchange and aftercare between living adults are not the same shelf as the occult recruitment in Pierce’s castle. For adult viewers the film is a dream about performance, desire, and control. It is not something to copy.