The Blood-Spattered Bride (La Novia ensangrentada, SPAIN 1972)
AKA 'Til Death Do Us Part, Blood Castle, Bloody Fiancee
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Cover:
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Plot:
A newlywed couple return from their honeymoon to his
family estate. But she is repulsed by his sexual appetite. In
her dreams a beautiful woman appears to her, handing her
a dagger and urging her to kill the husband. She repeatedly
wakes up clutching the dagger, despite her husband?s attempts
to hide it from her. And then the husband finds the woman
from the dreams, Carmilla, naked on the beach and brings
her home. Carmilla proceeds to seduce the wife and drink
her blood and the husband comes to realize that Carmilla is
really his ancestor Mircalla Karnstein and a vampire.
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J. Sheridan Le Fanu?s Carmilla (1872) is a classic tale of lesbian
vampirism. But when it comes to adapting Carmilla, most film
versions have fatally misunderstood the story. The problem is
that most insist on an overtly sexual interpretation, throwing
in lots of heaving naked breasts and lesbian sexual encounters,
where in fact Le Fanu?s tale is one of classical understatement
whose eroticism all lies in subtle suggestion. Furthermore all
filmic adaptations have ended up bumping the title antagonist?s
age up into the mid-twenties and usually casting statuesque
blondes, whereas Carmilla appeared as a teenage girl in the
story. Blood Spattered is no different to any of these. At least
Alexandra Bastedo, formerly a British tv star with the superhero
series The Champions (1968), while blonde and statuesque,
plays with a cool icy aloofness, unlike the bovinely blank Yutte
Stensgaard?s Carmilla in Hammer?s Lust for a Vampire (1971)
or the ridiculously unyouthful Ingrid Pitt in Hammer?s The Vampire
Lovers (1970). More interestingly the film adds its own backstory
to Le Fanu - it puts the seduced woman?s age up a good ten
years, makes her a newlywed and gives her a story about her
cooling to her husband?s frequent sexual appetite. In so doing
the story takes on a considerable misogynistic undertow, one
that pits hot-blooded Euro male sexuality against man-hating
predatory lesbianism. The point is made overtly clear in one
dream scene where Carmilla encourages the wife to castrate
her husband with a knife. The final image of the two women dead
in their coffin holds an additional frisson, the sense that masculine
sexuality has been restored. Despite the overtones of masculine
supremacy, the film does hold a much more confident and liberal
sexuality that the giggly adolescence that permeated Hammer?s
Karnstein trilogy.
On a directorial level the film is perfunctorily made. Everything is
straightforward - there is little that works on any other level and
little subtlety. But it is not entirely without occasional moments of
interest. Director Vicente Aranda throws in intermittent images of
surrealistic appeal (something which brings him close to France?s
Jean Rollin who also blended eroticism, vampirism and surrealism)
a portrait with the face cut out which someone pokes their own
face through, momentarily resulting in the image of a portrait with
a living face; love-making in a cage filled with pigeons; and some
quite intriguing scenes flipping back and forth between dream with
Maribel Martin waking up to find herself holding a dagger that had
been previously hidden. The film?s one moment of surrealistic
grandeur is the scene where Simon Andreu discovers Bastedo
buried in the sand, uncovering first her face wearing a scuba
mask and then her ample naked chest. It is a scene that makes
no rational sense whatsoever - ie. to ask why she should so bury
herself - but amid the film?s relative crudeness does hold an outre
wildness.
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IMDB :
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0069029/
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