Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Ten Days of Terror!: Fascination

Film: Fascination
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

There are times when I get very interested in a movie without knowing a great deal about it more than the title and a picture or two. That’s certainly the case with Fascination. My curiosity about it came from a fairly iconic picture (shown above) and the fact that, try as I might, I couldn’t find a copy of it. Suddenly, Fascination is streaming on Prime, so it seemed like a good chance to indulge myself in watching a film that had eluded me for so long.

There are a lot of ways that Fascination can be described, or at least a lot of different descriptors can be used for it. It’s clearly folk horror, an erotic thriller, and possibly a vampire film, although this is less explicitly true and more simply implied. Also, rather daring for 1979, there are clearly a few bisexual characters and a scene or two of lesbianism. In short, this isn’t one to watch when your parents are in town or when the kids might walk into the room.

As often happens with a film like this, we’ll get a bit of a teaser at the start and then the story will rapidly change gears for a bit. Eventually the two stories will connect and everything will…not quite make sense, but will at least be related. We begin with a few fashionable Parisian women just past the turn of the previous century standing in a slaughterhouse. They have been prescribed ox blood to drink as a way to cure their anemia. Yes, that’s going to be relevant not to far into the film; I did say that this is at least horror-adjacent.

Suddenly, we’re dealing with a group of five thieves. Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire) and his four accomplices (Cyril Val, Myriam Watteau, Joe De Palmer, and Jacquel Sansoul, none of whom have character names) have successfully stolen a collection of gold coins and hope to run to London. Instead, Marc decides to double-cross them and runs off with the coins, ending up at an isolated chateau. The ancient building is the home of Elisabeth (Franca Maï) and Eva (Brigitte Lahaie), a bisexual couple who are chambermaids, preparing the house for the return of the woman who lives there.

Fascination is definitely a film that takes place in chapters, taking the three-act structure very seriously. A substantial portion of the middle of the film concerns what happens with Marc’s accomplices, who are desperate to catch up with him and get their gold back. They believe that they have him trapped in the chateau with a couple of helpless girls, and we’re going to spend a lot of time with them discovering that this is not the case. Then when the Marchioness (Fanny Magier) returns, we’re going to learn what really happens at the chateau at night and exactly why Eva and Elisabeth were so interested in keeping Marc around until nightfall. Meanwhile, there’s going to be plenty of humping—just about everyone is going to get into the act here, and the female members of the cast will spend time disrobing, wearing see-through, flimsy garments, and murdering people.

Fascination is very much a style-over-substance film, with a lot of that style being female nudity and flimsy clothing. There is an interesting story here, though. As the audience, we’re privy to a lot of what is going to happen, or what it looks like is going to happen before it finally dawns on Marc that he is in a considerable amount of danger. What is going to happen to him, at least in terms of the broadest strokes, is not a secret. It’s the details of that that keep us watching. Marc is very clearly doomed the moment he enters the chateau; it’s a question of how much excitement he’ll have before he gets there and exactly how it’s going to happen.

I’m not really the audience for erotic thrillers in general, but I can be a sucker for something that’s done with a lot of style, and Fascination is. While we know where it’s going to go in the main, the third act contains some real surprises that come out of nowhere, and the actual ending becomes a genuine surprise. That it does this despite us knowing exactly where the film wants to go is evidence of some skill behind the camera.

Was Fascination as good as I hoped? Probably not, but this is a film I’ve looked for since I first started looking at the They Shoot Zombies list. It probably couldn’t have lived up to the hype if it had included the missing footage from Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.

Why to watch Fascination: Honestly, not enough horror movies make use of a scythe as a murder weapon.
Why not to watch: With a different director, this is porn.

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