Thoughts
on the film by José Ramón Larraz
Putting together a short comment
for MUBI, I wrote the following: "With its atmospheric locations,
painterly shot compositions and use of natural lighting, Vampyres is a
grindhouse film that succeeds in dipping a toe or two into the esoteric world
of the arthouse movie. Despite its minimal plotting, the story sustains
interest and has a few surprising developments, but it can't compete with certain
similar films by the great Jean Rollin, who could have injected this particular
brand of exploitation with something more dreamlike, hypnotic and surreal."
I drafted the above almost
automatically. At the time it seemed a good enough means of expressing (within
the minimum character limit available) the film's strengths and weaknesses. I
was content to leave it there and move on to something else when I started to
question the film's deeper merits. I was thinking about how, from a surface
perspective, the "vampiric" characters of Vampyres (1974) seemed to
lack a political or sociological component. What was the subtext? Was the film
simply a work of empty exploitation designed to shock and titillate the
undiscerning viewer, or was it an opportunity - like with many other horror
films before and since - to explore more interesting themes?
In many gothic horror
films, the presentation of the "monster" - be it werewolf, vampire or
something else - is often a figurative stand-in for something more theoretical,
or subtextual. For instance, in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) by
F.
W. Murnau, the vampire sweeps across the landscape like a literal plague. It
becomes in the process a kind of harbinger of sickness; a physical black death.
In the later remake by Werner Hezog, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), this
"plague" becomes a possible invocation of the encroaching darkness
that would infect the German psyche in the early to middle parts of the
Twentieth Century. For Herzog, the vampire is almost a portent of the Weimar
Republic; that period of decadence and ruin that led directly (or indirectly)
to the rise of National Socialism, and later fascism and war.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of
Horror [F. W. Murnau, 1922]:
Nosferatu the Vampyre
[Werner Herzog, 1979]:
In these films the vampire
is symbolic; a personification of something greater than its single form. Later
vampire films, such as The Hunger (1983), Interview With the Vampire (1994) and
The Addiction (1995), would use vampirism as a metaphor for AIDS, homosexuality
and drug addiction respectively, while a more recent vampire film, Byzantium
(2012), found parallels between its vampiric protagonists and the experience of
asylum seekers forced to flee their native homes and live nomadically in
foreign countries.
Thinking more about this
particular film by José Ramón Larraz, I started to wonder if I'd sold the movie
short. While I think it's easy to be blindsided by the sleazier aspects of the
film - its low-budget nature, wooden performances, perfunctory dialogue, etc -
there is something about Vampyres that seems to connect, albeit in retrospect,
to a more interesting interpretation. It's a reading of the film that seems analogous
to that of the aforementioned Interview With the Vampire (both the film version
by Neil Jordan and the original 1976 novel by Anne Rice) in which the
relationship between the two vampire characters could be seen as a metaphor for
a homosexual relationship in the times before same-sex partnerships were more widely
accepted.
Interview with the Vampire
[Neil Jordan, 1994]:
In Vampyres, the lesbian
lovers at the centre of the film are forced to remain hidden; living a
nocturnal existence away from the conventional society. In the opening scene of
the film, the couple, during an act of love, are punished and destroyed for
their natural, consensual desires, by the literal shadow of puritanical virtue.
In the decades, if not centuries that follow, they are forced to feed off
various men in a mockery of heterosexual sex.
Vampyres [José Ramón
Larraz, 1974]:
Like Interview with the
Vampire, the subtext of the conventional vampiric existence is as such one of
longing and repression; about two characters bound-together in partnership,
sharing time and space, but not legally recognised as part of a
"Holy" union. Further to this, the subplot involving the young couple
who arrive at the film's manor house location with their caravan in tow (and with
it an image of conventional domesticity in miniature) becomes endemic of the
threat of the "straight", the conservative conformity of the "normal",
or the everyday. In this context, it adds an element of colour to the
interpretation, exaggerating the tedium of the heterosexual couple with the
transgressions of the central characters. As does the ending, and the necessity
of the two supernatural figures to once more take flight into the uncaring
wilderness, lost within the margins of society.
In Vampyres, the scenes of
heterosexual sex are fittingly grotesque. This grotesquery may have been
coincidental - a result of having bad actors floundering into awkward love
scenes without the guidance of an intimacy coordinator and literally fumbling
their way through - but I think it's intentional. The wild pawing of flesh, the
slobbering lips and tongues penetrating open-mouthed encounters, are the
antitheses of eroticism. It fits in with the idea of characters forced to
engage with a kind of sexuality that isn't felt, but instead becomes a cruel
necessity for survival.
Vampyres is the first of
two films I've seen by Larraz. While it's interesting enough to spend some time
with, I found his subsequent work, The Coming of Sin (1978), to be on the whole
a lot more interesting and much more successful in its combination of
exploitation elements and art-house mind-games. Nonetheless, Vampyres makes an
interesting companion-piece to that later film, with another story about female
courtship and female desire under threat from the almost supernatural
harbingers of conservative masculinity, guilt and emotional repression.
