How’s this for an intriguing is slightly bemusing opening scene? As the first introductory credit appears in rich red lettering on a black background, the soundtrack is graced with gunshots and the shattering of glass. When the source of the gunfire is revealed, we’re not faced with the expected hardened criminals or cops, but a young woman named Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel), kitted out in the colourful costume and makeup of a French Pierrot, firing a pistol through the shattered rear window of a small car. As the vehicle pulls away, it is rapidly pursued by a second vehicle, with which Marie continues to exchange fire. Sitting in the front passenger seat and dressed and made up as a circus clown is Marie’s close friend Michelle (Mireille D'Argent), who is suddenly forced to grasp the steering wheel when the male driver (played by assistant director Jean-Noël Delamarre) is hit by a bullet and mortally wounded. Michelle somehow manages to steer the car down a woodland lane and give their pursuers the slip, and before he expires, the driver is able to say only three words, “The water tower…” After burning the car and the body of their friend, Marie and Michelle head off on foot, stopping only to wash off their facial make-up and change into less attention-grabbing clothing. On reaching the water tower to which they have been directed, they retrieve a motorcycle that has been stored within and use that to continue their journey. I can’t be the only one left wondering at this point what possible explanation there could be for what had just unfolded.

Exactly where the women are heading is never specified, but they do pause their journey so that Marie can flaunt herself before a randy vendor of a hopelessly located roadside snack van and lead him into the wood, leaving Michelle free to raid his vehicle for food. Eventually, the motorbike breaks down and the girls are forced to spend the night in a desolate cemetery, in which Michelle is almost buried alive by a distracted gravedigger the following morning. Now lost in the French countryside, they stumble across a ruined château, inside which they find a fully made bed on which they elect to rest, but they soon discover that the château and its dungeon are home to an ageing male vampire, his two female companions, and three male barbarians who do their bidding.

Let’s be honest, if you knew nothing about this film in advance and read the above synopsis, how quickly would you twig that it was written and directed by French master of vampire cinema, Jean Rollin? Those familiar with Rollin’s other genre works could probably guess that from the title alone, which perfectly captures the poetic blend of genre and arthouse elements that we’ve come to expect from a film by this distinctive and once criminally under-appreciated filmmaker. Even if you weren’t aware of the plot, Rollin’s fingerprints are all over the offbeat manner in which the story unfolds, kicking off as drama with surrealist overtones and developing into a vampire-themed work of fantastique with erotic overtones. Where it does stand apart from his three previous vampire tales – The Rape of the Vampire [Le viol du vampire], The Nude Vampire [La vampire nue] and The Shiver of the Vampires [Le frisson des vampires] – is in the almost complete lack of dialogue during the film’s first half, resulting in a work that initially plays almost as a silent movie, albeit one with an evocative sound effects track and a sometimes striking music score by Pierre Raph (who would work again with Rollin on the 1973 The Iron Rose [La rose de fer] and the 1974 The Demoniacs [Les démoniaques]).

On this very disc, Rollin admits that he wrote the entire script in one night and that it has an almost stream of consciousness structure, being constructed not with an overall synopsis in mind, but episodically in the manner of that literary game in which you take turns to come up with a new passage for an improvised story. It’s an approach that Rollin compares to the way a child would tell an invented tale, and he describes the finished work fondly as a “film naïve.” Such experimentation could easily have resulted in a simplistic and incoherent mess, but in Rollin’s hands the first half of Requiem for a Vampire proves beguiling, haunting, and quietly magical.

So much of what plays out does not play to genre convention or expectation. Take the opening scene, whose carnival-dressed females do not remotely fit the mould of gun-toting criminals. As they drive away, their point-of-view of the road ahead veers disconcertingly between the tarmac and the grass verge to the side, with cinematographer Renan Pollès’ camera seemingly viewing the escape not through the eyes of the driver, as would be the norm, but those of his front seat female companion. When the car is brought to a halt and the driver expires, things take a surreal turn in a fascinating two-shot from the dead man’s viewpoint of Marie and Michelle. Still in their carnival costumes and makeup, they look mournfully into the camera and lean forward in perfect unison to kiss him goodbye, getting so close to the lens that they momentarily blacken the screen, then return slowly to their original positions, but now with red tears painted beneath their eyes. A short while later, Rollin takes this experimentation a step further in a sequence that borders on the avant-garde. On discovering a pond, the girls stop to wash off their facial make-up, an action that takes place off-screen and is suggested only by a series of short jump-cuts of liquid dripping into the clear water of the pond and turning it white.

There’s a more playful tone to their hoodwinking of the snack van vendor, which then evolves into something more unsettling when they reach the isolated cemetery in which they elect to spend the night, making an improvised bed from their carnival costumes on a grave surrounded on all sides by an iron fence. There’s a narratively symbolic element to Michelle’s inadvertent burial and subsequent resurrection the following day, with her hand reaching out from the earth like one of the newly revived undead from the scariest scene in the previous year’s The Return of Count Yorga or the nightmare sequence in the Hammer’s 1966 The Plague of the Zombies. The ominous mood created by these scenes continues to slowly build as the girls lose their way in the woodland and are startled by a pair of bats, then find themselves at the entrance of the run-down stone château, but it’s after their rest on the bed they find within is disturbed that the gothic horror elements only previously hinted at are moved to the fore. When they descend into the dungeon to investigate, they discover a decaying human corpse hanging by its neck, a scene from which they flee in a panic, only to then hear the sound of an organ being played, which piques their curiosity and leads them down into an underground crypt. I’m not going to reveal her what they discover when they enter, but the build-up and the revelation that follows is without question one of my favourite sequences in the film. It’s also here that they encounter the first of the château’s unholy inhabitants in the shape of Erika (played by Rollin favourite, Dominique), a woman that both we and they are able to immediately identify as a vampire. How? Ah yes, about that…

Okay, I need to get this one out of the way before I move on, as while there many, many things to admire and even love about Requiem for a Vampire, the fangs sported by the film’s two vampires are not amongst them. Perhaps it’s just me, but the teeth sported by Erika (which aren't always the same distance apart) and the ageing male vampire that she serves (played by Michel Delesalle) – narrow fangs that protrude from the mouth even when closed and extend past the bottom lip – look less like the extended canines of legend and a little too much like Halloween costume accessories. It doesn’t help that some of the most convincing vampire canines I’ve ever seen in a film can be found in Rollin’s microbudget debut feature, The Rape of the Vampire, which suggests the ones on show here weren’t the result down to a lack of access to appropriate dental make-up but a conscious decision on Rollin’s part. But then again, what do I know? We’re talking about the dentures of a mythical creature, and who’s to say whether the fangs they use to puncture human flesh are elongated canines or additional teeth that protrude like the tusks of the prehistoric sabre-toothed tiger?

Rollin’s semi-improvisational approach does result in the odd narrative logic blip – on discovering a bed with clean fur covers within an otherwise decrepit château, the girls somehow do not see this as a sign that someone must be living there – but such moments have an almost innocent quality and are always used to economically move the story forward. The low budget also occasionally pops its head above the parapet, notably when footage of clearly live bats is cut together with movement-free artificial creatures, while the fact that the gravedigger seems to be looking directly into the grave into which Michelle has fallen as he – supposedly unknowingly – shovels earth onto her unconscious body we can put down to the fact that the gravedigger is played by, well, an actual gravedigger, and that Rollin rarely shot more than a couple of takes before moving on. It was also clearly impossible for Jean-Noël Delamarre to stay completely immobile when playing dead whilst Marie poured (fake) petrol over his face and body, although the small facial twitches that the HD restoration has made clear inadvertently give the whole scene a darker tone, suggesting that far from being cremated in his car, he was actually burned alive.

More troubling all round is a sequence in which the male Barbarians under the vampires’ control (Antoine Mosin, Olivier François and Dominique Toussaint) abuse and rape three naked women who are chained up in the red light soaked dungeon, a scene that runs for a discomfortingly overlong ten minutes. According to Rollin, this resulted from producer Sam Selsky once again stipulating that for commercial reasons there needed to be ten minutes of sexual material in the film, which Rollin elected to cram into a single scene, leaving him free to tell the rest of the story as he pleased without exploitation-enforced disruption. It remains the only sequence in that Rollin was not fully invested in, and the only one that will prove a bit of a slog for all but the most salacious or insensitive viewer. That said, nestled within this sequence are three intriguing moments that do contribute to the film’s retooling of established vampire mythology. The first occurs when Erika approaches one of the chained-up women, sensually strokes her, and then sinks her fangs not into her neck but her naked breast, a sexually motivated vampiric take on the term “breast feeding” if you will. The second comes when the unnamed male vampire bites Marie and Michelle, and instead of savouring their blood in the classical manner, he just delivers quick nips to their necks that prompt them to scream and immediately lose consciousness. This is apparently all that is required to initiate their slow transformation from human to vampire, a process that Louise has already begun and that Erika is now part way to completing. The scene also concludes on an image of striking surrealism that I learned from special features on this disc was drawn from a detail in the painting Mon tombeau by Clovis Trouille, and consists of a slow tilt down over the naked body of one of the chained-up women to reveal that a bat is effectively performing cunnilingus on her – whether the animal is meant to be an independent creature of the night or one of the vampires transformed is never confirmed.

As the film progresses, Rollin continues to redefine vampire genre norms, but in order to discuss them I’m going to have to move into serious spoiler territory, so hop to the final paragraph if you’ve not yet seen the film (or click here to do so automatically) and wish to avoid knowing how things play out in advance.

After being bitten, Marie and Michelle logically attempt to flee the château, but every direction in which they head leads them right back to the château gate, a neatly nightmarish concept that was recycled 27 years later by The Blair Witch Project. They respond by instead trying to kill the male vampire by driving a stake through his heart while he is resting in his coffin, a very neatly shot and cut sequence that is over in a matter of seconds when they are caught in the act and stopped by Erika. She favours feeding on them both, but the vampire has other plans for them, and instructs Louise to educate them in what to expect from their own impending transformation. She reveals that male vampire is the last surviving creature of his kind, that his powers are diminishing, and that his strongest hope of continuing his bloodline is through the two virginal young girls. With Louise and Erika already experiencing a slow transformation and becoming increasingly intolerant of sunlight, it will be down to Marie and Michelle to go out during the daylight hours and lure men to the château for the vampire to feed on. She also assures them that they are soon to be “initiated” by the vampire, as “you cannot be both virgin and vampire.” No prizes for guessing what that infers.

That the girls then willingly comply with this order to hunt for prey may feel like another of those small logic blips, but it also marks a point at which Marie and Michelle begin travelling down different paths. While Michelle cheerily tempts a horny cyclist (Paul Bisciglia) into chasing her to the château by stripping naked in front of him and becomes the first to taste human blood, Marie targets the handsome young Frédéric (Philippe Gasté), whom she leads to the château but then warns him not to enter, and later asks him to make love to her so that she is no longer a virgin, a move that throws a serious spanner into the male vampire’s plans. This divergence peaks when Marie is stripped naked and suspended by chains and Michelle is tasked with whipping her repeatedly to force her to reveal where Frédéric is hiding, a punishment that sees the tearful Michelle torn between her new duties and her love for her friend. It all seems to be building to a moment when the girls can no longer escape their fate and accept their new role as the next generation of vampires and become the new custodians of the château. Yet in one of the nicest and most unexpected sequences in the film, after realising that Marie’s virginity has already been taken, the male vampire quells his initial anger and instead takes her for a walk through the graveyard, a friendly arm around her shoulder, and confides that he has finally come to terms with his impending demise.

Rollin’s love of surrealism is evident throughout, from the Jean Cocteau-inspired candlestick held by a human arm projecting from a stone wall to the sequence in which Louise plays music on a grand piano at night in the middle of the graveyard at the foot of the château*. The one sex scene that has Rollin’s stamp on it is also not shot in the expected way, being focused instead solely on Marie’s face as she loses her virginity, and when she is shown lying naked with her lover, they are posed in such a way that you think you see more than you do, a triumph of eroticism over pure exploitation. This is taken a step further with the vampire’s defloration of Michelle, which is neither heard nor shown or even spoke of explicitly, and indicated only by the manner in which actress Mireille D'Argent walks from the crypt in which the dark deed was performed.

What opens as an offbeat and semi-surreal crime drama moves gradually into the world of the fantastique and Rollin’s own distinctive take on vampire lore, but ultimately becomes a sad and touchingly melancholic work. Rollin is aided considerably in realising his vision by cinematographer Renan Pollès, whose evocative compositions and use of coloured gels help give the film an increasingly disconcerting tone, which is amplified by an evocative use of sound and Pierre Raph’s score, which both compliments and contrasts the on-screen action to seductive effect. I’ll freely admit that on my first viewing it took a while for the effectiveness of these aspects to really register, thrown a little as I was by the episodic structure, the occasional low-budget tic, and the almost complete absence of dialogue in the first half, but as the film progressed, I became increasingly seduced by Rollin’s approach, and by the final scenes I was completely on board with the story and the dreamlike manner of its telling. Subsequent viewings have proved even more rewarding, and for my money the key final sequence may well be the most hauntingly moving in all of Rollin’s cinema.

In common with Indicator’s previous releases of Jean Rollin films, Requiem for a Vampire is being released on both Blu-ray and UHD, and the good people at Indicator have been kind enough to provide us with both to enable a direct comparison between the two. Inevitably, I spent the majority of my time with the UHD, but in terms of content the two discs are identical, with the same special features, the majority of which are presented in 1080p on both discs. Both 1.66:1 transfers have been sourced from a new 4K restoration from the original negative, and while the 1080p transfer on the Blu-ray is excellent, it won’t come as a huge surprise that the 2160p transfer on the UHD has the edge in every respect.

It’s worth noting up front that although the vast majority of Renan Pollès’ compositions are crisp, there’s a rough-and-ready feel to a small amount of the material here that results in a very slight drop in sharpness on some shots on both transfers, and I thus presume this was how the film looked on its original release. That said, the image is otherwise handsomely presented, particularly in the often crisp detail definition, the largely naturalistic colour of the daytime exteriors, and the gorgeous reproduction of the colour gelled lighting of that discomforting dungeon scene and the piano-in-the-graveyard night-time exteriors. There is some minor variance in the contrast, but at its best it's sublimely graded, only coarsening a little on some darker scenes. Black levels are spot on throughout.

Compare the two transfers side-by-side, however, and the superiority of the UHD image becomes clear. Detail is sharper (when scanning through I noticed this immediately on Marie’s colourful Pierrot costume and the texture of the château’s exterior brickwork), the colour feels even richer, and the Dolby Vision HDR expands the already finely graded contrast range and adds depth to key scenes, which includes widening the range of reds in the aforementioned dungeon scene. The film grain is clearly visible throughout, suggesting the use of a higher-speed stock, an aspect slightly more pronounced on the UHD, where it is even more crisply defined, and there are a couple of shots during the opening scene where it noticeably coarsens, usually the sign of a frame enlargement in post-production. Dust and any former traces of wear have been eliminated. Another superb restoration by Indicator.

The original mono soundtrack has been encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 on both discs, and for a mono track from 1972 with a restricted tonal range, it’s in impressive shape. The dialogue, when it appears, is always distinct, and the all-important sound effects and music have a fuller feel than I’d usually expect from a mono track of this vintage. There are next to no traces of any former wear or damage. Great job.

When you elect to play the film, you are offered the choice between Requiem pour un vampire with the original French soundtrack, and the English-dubbed Requiem for a Vampire. I have to admit that I was fully expecting the English language version to the one that was initially cut down by the BBFC, but as far as I’m aware both versions presented here are essentially the same cut (their running times are almost identical), with the only difference being that the actors have been dubbed in English and the title credits have English text on Requiem for a Vampire. Pleasingly, this version keeps Rollin’s amusing decision to credit his producer and money man as $am $elsky. As English dubs go, it’s neither that bad nor that great, and I’ll thus go with the original French every time.

Optional English subtitles are activated by default on Requiem pour un vampire, and optional English subtitles for the hearing impaired can be activated for Requiem for a Vampire.

Audio commentary with Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson
Film Historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson provide an a rapid-fire commentary on the film and its makers – indeed, Thompson’s delivery is so breathless in places that I found myself occasionally rewinding and relistening to catch exactly what he said. This does mean that a sizeable amount of ground is covered here in an engaging mix of factual information, opinion, personal experience and recollection. They provide some details on key cast and crew members; comment on the music score and the soundtrack album; question the notion of Rollin as a horror director and favour Rollin’s own assertation that his films fall under the umbrella of the fantastique; recall how they first discovered Rollin’s films and rightly suggest that those new to his cinema should watch his films in chronological order; point out that the only signature Rollin element missing from this film is his beloved Plage de Dieppe beach location; and devote considerable time to discussing Rollin’s many vampire themed films. I found myself in disagreement with Thompson in his negative assessments of The Return of Count Yorga and Rollin’s 1989 Lost in New York [Perdues dans New York], both of which I’m very fond of, and the filmmaking pedant in me always get twitchy when people use the term “pan” to describe camera movements that are not pans at all and that have their own perfectly good nomenclature  (you can’t “pan down” for instance – that’s called a tilt), but otherwise this is a richly enjoyable and passionately delivered commentary that makes for an excellent companion to the film.

Selected scenes audio commentary with Jean Rollin (21:03)
Recorded in 2005, this anonymously moderated commentary by Jean Rollin is restricted to a few selected scenes from the film, but proves invaluable for the information he provides on its making, some of which is not discussed elsewhere in the special features. He comments on the mystery created by the opening scene, regards the shot in which the two girls lean down towards the camera to say goodbye to the friend as the film’s first “poetic” sequence, and reveals that the fascinatingly jump-cut series of shots that infer that the girls are washing off their makeup was improvised on the spot, as was the shot that follows of them entering a fire-wrecked house. He talks about the cemetery scene and reveals that the gravediggers were played by actual gravediggers, and that Mireille D'Argent was understandably fearful when being buried for the sequence in which she slowly emerges from beneath the earth, and surprised me with the news that his two young lead actors hated each other.

Jean Rollin Introduces ‘Requiem for a Vampire’ (4:45)
Two more extracts from the interviews that have featured on each of the Indicator Blu-ray and UHD releases of Rollin films, the first of which has Rollin reclining with an unidentified figure sitting beside him wearing a featureless white mask and holding a skull, while the second has him seated on a sofa with that same white mask on the table to his side. Both were shot in 1998 and appear to be upscaled to HD from an SD original. Here, Rollin confirms that Requiem for a Vampire is one of his favourite films and reveals that he wrote the script in one night and how it was constructed, and confirms that the sex scenes were once again there at the producer’s insistence, and that the reason that sequence in dungeon goes on for so long was that he wanted to cram all of this material into a single scene and have it done with. Both interviews here are conducted in English.

Jean Rollin: In a Silent Way (7:46)
A newly edited archive interview with Jean Rollin, conducted in English and using what I’m guessing was the on-camera microphone, which result in less than ideal acoustics, though even with my alarm-bell tinnitus I was able to easily comprehend what was being said throughout. There is some overlap with the above-detailed interview when Rollin talks about the inception and writing of the film, but he goes into more detail about its lack of dialogue here, and recalls that audiences emerged from the cinema seemingly unaware that there were so few spoken lines.

Louise Dhour: Queen of the Underworld (8:22)
A newly edited archival interview with actor Louise Dhour, who plays authoritative vampire minion Louise in the film, conducted in French with removable English subtitles and with a decent microphone. She recalls that Rollin would do a minimal number of takes and never force the actors to do anything, talks about her time working nights in an American club-bar-disco-restaurant following a car accident that killed a man she loved, and freely admits to having a fondness for fantastique films. My favourite moment comes when she moves onto her experience playing a sex worker in Édouard Molinaro’s 1976 Dracula and Son [Dracula père et fils], when she comes within a hair’s breadth of using a word to insult actor Bernard Menez that she only delivers the first syllable of ( it’s “c” in the English translation, in case you were wondering) before she checks herself and suggests she shouldn’t swear on tape, which prompts a laugh from the unseen interviewer.

Paul Bisciglia: A Pastoral Dalliance (3:12)
A newly edited archival interview with actor Paul Bisciglia, who plays the cyclist who is teased into chasing Michelle into the old château, inside of which he pays the inevitable price. He opens with a seemingly dismissive assessment of Rollin’s cinema, claiming, “A friend of mine said, ‘You know, Rollin sometimes really turns out bullshit, but he takes really fantastic shots. He always has at least one brilliant shot in each film.’” He recalls shooting his chase of Michelle without a whiff of self-censorship, and how composer Pierre Raph’s “new kind of Pastoral Symphony” transformed the scene – which he believed he was playing straight – into one that is more comic in tone.

Les Frissons d’un requiem (39:05)
Another of the fine retrospective documentaries by Jean Rollin’s personal assistant, Daniel Gouyette, this one focussing on Requiem for a Vampire and built around interviews with key Rollin associates Jean-Noël Delamarre and Natalie Perrey (who were a couple at the time), and film expert Daniel Bird, an always engaging raconteur whom I also interviewed back in 2014 about the work of director Walerian Borowczyk. Perrey recalls that Rollin had a happy time making a film with people he regarded as his friends, that he liked his eroticism to be honest and poetic but was forced to bow down to commercial pressure from his producers, but also insists that regular producer Sam Selsky was an adorable man who loved Rollin and respected his talent. Delamare, who acted as the film’s assistant director and played the driver in the opening scene, reveals that both the organ in the crypt and the piano in the cemetery were shipped to the location from his father’s workshop. He details how Pierre Raph was brought on board to compose the film’s score, and has some interesting comments about the dungeon rape scene, noting that Rollin was not fond of this type of eroticism – if such an act can ever be so described – and that he was more interested in the beauty of bodies. Both contribute to the story of how the car used for the opening shoot-out ended up triggering an Interpol investigation, and they each recall taking care of the two bats used in the film and how the male one became sexually aroused when Perrey approached it. Daniel Bird, meanwhile, has an interesting story about his first encounter with the film and how distributor Redemption – to whom all UK-based Rollin fans owe a considerable debt – inadvertently released an uncut version of the film on VHS despite having made the trims insisted on by the BBFC. It’s also he who has the most insightful description of Rollin’s cinema, when he describes Rollin as an alchemist who creates original work from all of his favourite sources, and that watching one of his films for the first time is like entering a Max Ernst painting.

Virginie Sélavy: The Poetry of Strangeness (7:15)
Author and film historian Virginie Sélavy delivers an insightful critical appreciation of Requiem for a Vampire, outlining how it was written and providing details not just on the main location used (this is also mentioned elsewhere), but also where the film was originally planned to be shot and why Rollin was ultimately forced to look for an alternative. She comments on the increased confidence of Rollin’s handling of nudity and sex, the surrealist influence on his work, and confirms that the film’s memorable image of a bat on the crotch of a naked woman was drawn from the painting Mon tombeau by Clovis Trouille.

Jean Rollin: The Last Book (8:44)
Filmed in 2005 in the 4:3 ratio, here Rollin talks speaks about how he started writing during a time of serious illness in order to pass the time whilst hooked up to a dialysis machine, a pastime he continued professionally after receiving a kidney transplant, resulting in 20 published books to that date. He admits that one of the advantages that novel writing has over filmmaking is that he is able to examine the things that interest him in a different way and without any budgetary constraints on his imagination. He then gives us a flavour of his written work by reading a passage from his book, Le Dernier livre.

Alternative ‘Clothed’ Sequences
Alternative takes of three sequences for the film’s initial release in the UK in which actor nudity has been safely concealed under clothing in order to calm moral panic at the BBFC. Sequence #1 (0:21) features Marie and Michelle lying together on the bed they find in the château and hurriedly exiting the room when they hear what sounds like someone approaching; Sequence #2 (1:33) has Michelle luring the man with the bicycle into the château, which makes a lot less sense with her fully clothed; and Sequence #3 (1:09) is the one in which Michelle is forced to whip the chained-up Marie, who is now dressed in underwear, which frankly dates the film far more precisely than any of its unfiltered content. You can play each sequence individually or all in one sitting.

Theatrical Trailers
There are three theatrical trailers on offer here. First up is the French Theatrical Trailer (3:07), which kicks off with plenty of gunfire and then nails together clips that do at least give a flavour of some of the film’s content – including the nudity – although fails to give capture anything of its atmosphere or pacing. Almost all of the captions are presented in bright Hammer Studio title red, with that drippy horror font that was once the go-to for Halloween artwork and party invitations used for words like “Vampire” or “Monsters” (or rather “Monstres” as it is spelt in French). The English Theatrical Trailer (3:07) is exactly the same, but with the captions in English instead of French, although the use of fonts and red colouration of the French trailer is retained here. And then there’s the ‘Caged Virgins’ Theatrical Trailer (3:29), which I’m guessing was prepared by the film’s US distributor, where some bright spark elected to retitle the film Caged Virgins and make the nudity and sex a key component of the sell. To be honest, it’s a decently assembled trailer otherwise, though it does suggest that there is way more dialogue (which is dubbed in English for this release, of course) in the film then there is. This one also has a narrator, who seems less interested in selling the film on its sex and violence than philosophising on the fate of the two girls and the true meaning of the new title – “Although most prisons have bars,” he solemnly assures us, “they can also hold their captives by other means. Some cages exist solely in the mind. They are often the most escape-proof traps of all.” Now there’s some food for thought.

There are two Image Galleries, both of which are manually advanced using the remote control. Original Promotional Material has a generous 90 screens of promotional photos, newspaper ads, pressbook pages, VHS covers and posters. The most welcome Behind the Scenes features 36 screens of production imagery, which include photos of Rollin directing and show how some shots were filmed (who needs a dolly when you have a Triumph convertible?).

Limited edition exclusive 80-page book
I did not have access to this as I was finishing off this review but will update this section when I get my hands on a copy.

Indicator’s quest to showcase the films of Jean Rollin at the very best that most will likely have ever seen them look continues with his distinctive fourth vampire-themed feature, one whose episodic structure and often dialogue-free storytelling sets up a second half whose initial sinister overtones develop into a seductively original and elegiacal take on the traditional vampire tale. The 4K presentation on the UHD release is well up to the impeccably high standard that Indicator has repeatedly set with its Rollin releases, and the special features are once again collectively superb. Jean Rollin fans should need no encouragement, and while his distinctive style may not appeal to all genre fans, I have no problem highly recommending this excellent release. Keep ‘em coming.

* Quite why the music Louise Dhour is playing is not what we hear on the soundtrack is unclear. Dhour was an accomplished pianist and is clearly playing for real in the scene rather than just stabbing at keys, but the mismatch of the music with the movement of her hands over the keyboard is unavoidably obvious. Could there have been a copyright issue with the tune that she was playing? Answers on a blood-spattered postcard.