A Personal History of Horror Films in 101 Quirky Objects #26: Jennifer’s white string shawl in Lèvres de sang (Lips of Blood) (1975)
by Vince Stadon
“You had to remember me before I could appear to you.” – Jennifer
Making movies is arduous work, and sometimes filming is rough on everyone. Lèvres de sang was shot in three weeks, often guerrilla-style, as the film crew would just turn up without pre-planning or permits to, say, a Paris metro station, and roll cameras (you can often tell which bits these are because you get bemused people in the background looking directly at the camera). I have an acute anxiety disorder and a lifelong love of horror films, and sometimes it’s not the horror moments that cause me blood pressure-raising discomfort, but the production elements. I love Lèvres de sang—a low-budget, sexy and strange slice of ‘70s French arthouse erotica—but I get very anxious while watching it because it’s screamingly apparent that the poor actresses are absolutely freezing their naked arses off. I’m feeling anxious and cold just thinking about it.
Jean Rollin’s take on vampires is that they are exclusively sexy, naked French ladies, and I’m not going to disagree with him. Often, he would cast twins*—Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel—as his principal sexy, naked non-speaking French vampires (the pair’s best work being 1971’s awesome but baffling Requiem pour un vampire), though in Lèvres de sang he has them wear a few more layers than usual, including costuming them as psychiatric nurses, and the nudity is left instead to the other two actresses playing non-speaking vampires (Hélène Maguin and Anita Berglund), who wander around ruined castles or graveyards dressed only in diaphanous silks. Those silks are whipped up by freezing winds and sometimes cover their faces. It’s never clear to me if Rollin, a rather slapdash one-take director, is happy with those bits, or if, like me, he thinks diaphanous silks whipped up by freezing winds to cover the faces of sexy French vampire chicks just makes them look very silly and very cold. And these poor actors must walk up crumbling stone steps or “advance menacingly” through graveyards, both locations being major trip hazards, with barely any lighting. I feel for them. I’m meant to find them erotic and scary, but instead I just want to wrap blankets around them, make sure they’re okay, and make them cups of tea.
There are naked fruit bats that I’m concerned for, too. These cute bats are supposed to be scary vampires in coffins. I just want to cuddle them, and I very much hope they were treated with kindness during the shoot.
Also naked is Martine Grimaud as a sexy French photographer who ends up drained of blood in an Aquarium, and Béatrice Harnois as a horny and sexy French model who hits on everyone she meets. I’ve been to France, and it’s very lovely and cultured and romantic and I would happily live there. I didn’t meet naked photographers and models, though, so I’ve always found their inclusion in this film to be implausible to say the least, even for the liberated ‘70s. It was only when I discovered that Lèvres de sang was recut as a porn film called Suck me, vampire, with of course extra filming for the X-rated hardcore stuff by Rollin—who was no stranger to the adult film industry—that it began to make any sense.
The other naked people are the film’s two stars: Jean-Loup Philippe as Frédéric and Annie Belle as the enigmatic vampire Jennifer. Jean-Loup co-wrote the film with his director, which goes a long way to explain why his character is an implausible babe-magnet action hero. And fair play to the guy, in a film that employs no stunt performers, Jean-Loup does all the physical stuff himself, and a lot of it looks dangerous. In one especially anxiety-spiking scene, he climbs down a high steel railway bridge, at night, in the rain. I could only watch through finger blinds. I also must admire his script work, for the loose plotting and overall storytelling is easily the best of any Rollin film, and it’s worth retelling a précis:
Paris, 1975: At a party for the launch of a new perfume, Frédéric sees a photo of a crumbling castle, and long-repressed memories float to the surface. He remembers being at the ruined castle when he was twelve. It was night, and he was lost. A beautiful woman in white looked after him and he fell in love with her (do twelve-year-olds really fall in love?). And somehow, all this has to do with the mysterious death of his father. Frédéric recounts this memory to his mother (Natalie Perrey), at whom he shouts a lot. The woman in white begins popping up as an apparition all over Paris, as Frédéric tries to track down the location of the castle and mysterious forces try to stop him. After a trip to the cinema to watch, I kid you not, a Jean Rollin film about sexy naked French vampires, Frédéric inadvertently awakens four sexy naked French vampires (as you do), who then act as a kind of hit squad for anyone who wants to do our boy harm.
Eventually, Frédéric finds the castle, where his mother is waiting for him. She tells him that the woman in white is called Jennifer, and she once lived with Frédéric’s family before she became a vampire and killed Fred’s dad. Jennifer infected four sexy naked vampires before his mother tried and failed to destroy her. Families, eh? Always awkward. Mum and her team of vampire hunters destroy the four sexy naked vampires, but she leaves it up to Frédéric to bump off Jennifer. He can’t do it because he was in love with her as a twelve-year-old boy, and instead pretends that a dummy’s bonce is Jennifer’s decapitated head, and everyone goes along with it (I’m never sure if the unrealistic dummy’s head is supposed to be a realistic severed head and this production is so cheap and sloppy that the audience is supposed to just buy it, suspension-of-disbelief-style, or if we’re meant to go “Ah hah! That’s not a real severed head! Gosh, it must be from that dummy we saw earlier, conveniently positioned right next to Jennifer’s coffin!” Either way, I completely love it). Everyone goes home except Fred, who reunites with the now resurrected Jennifer. They become vampire lovers and live together on a deserted island.
Some of the plot makes sense; most of it doesn’t. That’s more than you can say for any other of Rollin’s films. There is a dream-like quality to the film: it feels like a drifting, melancholic reawakening of memory and an attuning of senses. It’s all very entertaining and often striking, particularly when Annie Belle is on screen as Jennifer, a mysterious, young, and beautiful vampire woman dressed in white who interacts with children and who is a clear nod to Lucy Westenra, “the Bloofer Lady” from Dracula. Annie Belle is an amazing presence, and she has a genuine chemistry with Jean-Loup Philippe. Jennifer’s backstory is terrific (essentially repositioning the vampires as the sympathetic characters and the vampire hunters as the bad guys… which retroactively goes somewhere to explaining why Frédéric couldn’t stop himself bellowing in his mum’s face), though there are some uncomfortable elements, such as Jennifer being permanently sixteen (ick!) and quite possibly Frédéric’s sister (double ick!).
The final scenes have Jean-Loup Philippe and Annie Belle completely naked on a wind-swept Normandy beach at night. It is so obviously bitingly freezing cold that poor Annie is visibly shaking. You can almost hear her teeth chatter above the raging sea and the whipping winds. Throughout the film she has only been wearing a white dress and, for warmth, a white string shawl. Now she doesn’t have a stitch on, and she looks to me like she’s going to become hypothermic at any moment. Jean-Loup is so cold that he understandably looks less than impressive in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, completely undermining his character’s reputation as being sexually irresistible. Both actors cling to each other for warmth as Jean Rollin, a man uncomfortable calling “Cut!”, gets as much footage as he can before, surely to God, the paramedics finally arrive to cart the poor bloody cast off to hospital before they get frostbite.
*Hammer would also cast twins—Playboy models Mary and Madeline Collinson, no less—as sexy vampires, in the wildly entertaining Twins of Evil (1971), the second film in their Carmilla Karnstein trilogy.
More obvious picks for an object to represent this film: the fake ‘head of Jennifer’; the “memory-triggering” photo of a ruined castle; twelve-year-old Frédéric’s toy boat; the movie poster for Jean Rollin’s La vampire nue (1970); the straight jacket Frédéric is put in
Lèvres de sang (1975); 87 mins; France
Directed by Jean Rollin; Written by Jean-Loup Philippe, Jean Rollin; Produced by Lionel Wallmann, Jean-Marie Ghanassia; Cinematography by Jean-François Robin; Music by Didier William Lepauw
Jean-Loup Philippe (Frédéric); Annie Belle** (Jennifer); Nathalie Perrey (La Mère de Frédéric); Catherine Castel (Jumelle Vampire); Marie-Pierre Castel (Jumelle Vampire); Claudine Beccarie (Claudine); Paul Bisciglia (Le Psychiatre); Willy Braque (Le Tueur); Serge Rollin (Frédéric enfant)
**(credited as Annie Briand)
