Film, Go To

GO TO: Daughters of Darkness (1971) dir. Harry Kümel

SCREENS 2/1 @ HFA

by

Daughters of Darkness is a suave, spiffy, and cryptic vampiric romance-horror anchored by the central antagonist’s undying poise. Following honeymooners Stefan Chilton (John Karlen), son of esteemed English aristocrat, and ordinary girl Valerie Chilton (Danielle Ouimet) as they take time in winter-isolated Ostend, Belgium. As tensions build from Stefan’s reluctance to reveal his marriage to his big-wig mother, an esteemed Hungarian countess named Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) and her much younger supposed secretary Ilona (Andrea Rau), who fixates on Stefan and Valerie partly because they’re the only other visitors there. The concierge, Pierre (Paul Essen), quickly pleads to have seen Báthory at the same age 40 years prior in his young bell boy years, and from then on things only get stranger: Stefan becomes increasingly sadistic and death-fascinated and Valerie’s fright towards him rises, and Elizabeth keeps intervening. She and Ilona seduce the central lovebirds in hopes of luring them into a vague sacred ritual that Ilona apparently needs to live on. With nothing but stories of nearby murder strings, a cryptic message from an old local, and Elizabeth’s fear for sunlight, Stefan and Valerie must uncover the countess’s true intentions—before they’re killed or worse, seduced to bloodsucking madness.

Daughters of Darkness, though sometimes technically and narratively clunky, beats hearts with scintillating cinematography, a killer Seyrig performance, and heavy implications over direct revelations. For starters, it’s never clearly stated that Elizabeth or Ilona are vampires; the blood-red screen fades, retelling of old legends of blood-bathing crazies, and evocative camera work—literally look at Seyrig posed as a bat in the trailer thumbnail below—imply enough. Seyrig mesmerizingly balances between mysterious, desperate, manipulative and giving, ensuring she’s always forcing viewers to second guess. Karlsen is a perfect creep, especially as relations become more hostilely intimate. Sex and death seem indiscernible, as all around hormones rage in the most innocuous circumstances. Evil is disguised in jewelry and lust, especially for the film’s freakishly sadistic male stars—so that the women can live their (never ending) lives to the fullest: “Every woman would sell her soul to be young,” Elizabeth implores in admiring Valerie’s youth. High-class, gothic vampirism comes with the prestige and infinite lifespan anyone—though women are more superficially pressured that way—would sell their souls for. In this way, Darkness is a venture through the psyches of different people faced with immortality at a grave cost, where sex, sexuality, and identity wash away.

While Darkness does hold plenty of bite, it’s also overbearing and flat in some respects. Ouimet as Valerie is Darkness’s shallowest aspect. While everyone else is layered in their creepiness and seductivity, Ouimet is very flat-faced and -feeling. When emotion is warranted, she’s over the top, floundering about screaming “no!!!” like in a soap opera. There are also too many abandoned subplots, like Stefan’s mother. Once her identity is fully revealed—no spoilers!—she’s abandoned right after. Half the movie builds up to some larger familial tension away from the in-film scenery, only for it to be forgotten just as it turns intriguing. These issues, along with disruptively random—but nonetheless chilling—cutaways and wide shots that have little to do with their surrounding scenes, significantly hinders Darkness’s ethical explorations. Nonetheless, for gothic film fans, vampire film fans, European film fans or Seyrig fans, Daughters of Darkness is charmingly morose enough to sink your teeth in for an hour and a half.

Daughters of Darkness
1971
dir. Harry Kümel
96 min.

Screens Saturday, 2/1, 9:00 pm @ Harvard Film Archive
Part of the ongoing repertory series: The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License(unless otherwise indicated) © 2019