Newlyweds Isle (Sandra Julien) and Antoine (Jean-Marie Durond) arrive at a haunted castle hoping to reunite with her aristocratic cousins. By night a pair of bewitchingly lovely girls, one blonde (Marie-Pierre Castel), one dark-haired (Kuelan Herce) roam the castle grounds as supernatural servants to Isle’s effete hippie relatives (Jacques Robiolles and Michel Delahaye), who were once vampire hunters but are now in thrall to enigmatic vampire queen Isolde (Dominique). At the stroke of midnight, Isolde emerges from a grandfather clock (a truly striking image) to seduce Isle into the vampire fold.
Le frissons des vampires was distributed under an array of English guises, including Shiver of the Vampires, the more salacious re-title Sex and the Vampires (whose cut runs twenty minutes shorter), Thrill of the Vampires (which includes additional S&M footage) and Strange Things Happen At Night. It was the third film from the great French poet of erotic vampire movies, Jean Rollin and his slickest, most assured outing to that date, thanks to a sadly short-lived partnership with producer Monique Natan, who perished in a car crash whilst planning her next collaboration with Rollin and star Sandra Julien, to be called Doctor Vampire. Having taken control of her late husband’s film company, Madame Natan was interested in producing something geared towards a young audience but, after modest success with Alain Jessua’s Jeu de massacre (1967), rejected obvious Nouvelle Vague idols François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol in favour of the then-critically-despised Jean Rollin.
Natan’s resources enabled Rollin to move beyond the endearing do-it-yourself aesthetic of his early avant-garde influenced efforts and show what he could really do with evocative lighting, sumptuous décor and charmingly primitive special effects that hark back to the silent serials he loved in his youth. The result was his first mainstream hit though he still dwells on reoccurring obsessions and visual motifs: melancholy vampires, doomed romance on the beach, blonde and brunette paired magical nymphets - including Marie-Pierre Castel who graduated to Rollin’s next masterwork, Requiem for a Vampire - and eerily beautiful haunted graveyards. Nobody photographs cemeteries or abandoned castles quite like Jean Rollin. As the sepia toned intro segues into comic book colour, Rollin sets the mood with a fog-shrouded graveyard while the soundtrack blares acid rock from the short-lived band Acanthus.
The plot unfolds with fairytale simplicity but it’s more about mood than story, the feelings Rollin arouses in us with his dreamy images: Isle’s iconic embrace with Isolde, the library that comes alive and assaults Antoine with books, the blood of a dead dove flowing inside the vampire’s coffin, a naked Castel perched impudently atop the castle ruin like some bacchanalian free spirit, and her joyous climactic dance through the graveyard, hand-in-hand with Herce. Rollin indulges literary games naming each heroine as a variation on the Egyptian god Isis, but is not as pretentious as he is commonly thought to be. He includes plenty of wry humour as when Isle’s cousins deliver a lecture on the history of occult worship, Isolde disdains them as “bourgeois vampires” and Castel and Herce mischievously make love in bed beside the obliviously sleeping Antoine.
The performers move as if in a trance, spouting Rollin’s florid yet beguilingly poetic dialogue (“I belong to the world of darkness whose eternal joys will be yours”), but somehow it all works while beautiful Sandra Julien skilfully segues from repressed newlywed to naked sexpot. In contrast to the staunchly bourgeois morality of Hammer movies, Isle seems genuinely beguiled by the benevolent vampire world which leaves her final fate liberating as much as tragic.
A lifelong film fan, French director Jean Rollin worked consistently since the 1950s, but it was his horror films that would bring him most attention, starting with Le viol du vampire in 1968, a work that caused a minor riot on its initial showings. This showed Rollin the way to further dreamlike entertainments, often with a strong sexual element. Other films included Le vampire nue, Le frisson de vampires, Les Raisins de la mort, Fascination (often regarded as his masterpiece), The Living Dead Girl, Zombie Lake and a number of hardcore porn features. He was working up until his death, with his latest Le Masque de la Meduse released the year of his demise.
