Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Ten Days of Terror!: Le viol du vapire

Film: Le viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I go into every movie that I watch with hope. There are some movies that I know are going to hurt me (see: Martyrs, Salo, L’Interieur), but there is always hope that I will emerge on the other side having gotten something from the viewing. That happens often enough that I continue to push myself in what I view. So, when I get something like Le viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire in English), I can’t help but be disappointed in the complete mess that is on the screen. This isn’t about being hurt because the movie takes the audience to awful and disturbing places, but being hurt because the movie is a nonsensical mess.

I also try to write these reviews based on my own experience viewing, but in the case of Le viol du vampire, I have to look at the notes that I have available to me. I watched this on Kanopy, and the synopsis is fascinating. I’m going to quote from it, because it will give you a solid idea of exactly how clown shoes this movie is: “Everyone on the crew was making their first film. All copies of the script managed to get lost within two days...The resulting film...is a glorious puzzlement.” This is very charitable. The resulting film is actually a confused mess of unfinished concepts and tits.

I’m also going to hit up the Wikipedia page for the film to get director Jean Rollin’s commentary on the release of this mess. Obviously translated from the French, he said, “"Le Viol was a terrible scandal here in Paris. People were really mad when they saw it. In Pigalle, they threw things at the screen. The principal reason was that nobody could understand the story.”

And so, it’s not just me who found this to be a ridiculous disarray of half-formed ideas. The film comes in two parts. The first part, called “The Rape of the Vampire” gives us the presence of a quartet of sisters living in an ancient château. They believe themselves to be vampires—the react to crucifixes, one is terrified of sunlight, and one has a sort of hysterical blindness and claims to have been sexually assaulted by the local villagers about 60 years previous. An old man who frequently gropes the girls warns them about some newcomers who will try to “cure” them of their vampirism.

The newcomers arrive from Paris, convinced that the girls are actually under a serious delusion. They start to work with the vampire girls, and when it appears they are making some headway, the old man causes her sisters to attack the newcomers. He also gets the local peasants into the fray, and they kill off all of the women they can find, including the woman in the Paris trio. One of the men—Thomas—convinces one of the vampire women to bite him to demonstrate her delusion. Turns out she’s actually a vampire, and she and Thomas are both gunned down by the third member of the Parisian group.

Now we move into the second part of the film, Queen of the Vampires. This involves a vampire queen who wants the bodies of the slain lovers on the beach rendered impossible to revive, but this doesn’t happen. Thomas and his vampire lover come back, and he eventually learns that the woman from Paris (named Brigitte, I think) is still alive. Lots of nudity ensues as some of the vampires rebel against the queen, and Thomas and his vampire lover decide that they don’t like being vampires, so they wall themselves into a crypt. The end.

Honestly, this is a confused mess. Frequently, when I feel like I might have missed something or think I need to catch some nuance, I’ll rewind and watch a part of a film a second time. I honestly couldn’t be bothered with Le viol du vampire. Would it have helped me understand anything that was happening? Possibly, but also possibly not. I already feel like I wasted about 95 minutes watching this nonsense; spending more time with it only to continue to be confused felt like indulging in the sunk cost fallacy. At some point, you have to cut your losses.

There’s a lot of nudity in this movie. A lot. If that’s something you enjoy, there’s a mountain of black-and-white flesh for you. That is literally the only thing about this movie that is even mildly interesting—plenty o’ boobs ‘n’ butts. Honestly, though, you can find that in plenty of other places where the story doesn’t feel like it was made up on the fly...because it was. Find your nudity elsewhere; give this one a miss.

Why to watch Le viol du vampire: Mountains of gratuitous nudity, if that’s your thing.
Why not to watch: It’s a muddle.

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