Films That Witness Madness

review

THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE

This is an odd little film. It feels like a Hammer film but is more delirious and sexy. It is ostensibly a vampire film but I'd be reluctant to even call it one. The narrative is slow and confused with no clear line of focus. There are simply too many plot elements that don't mesh and feel at odds with one another to call THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE a well-made film but I feel compelled to do so. The cumulative effect of all these various threads and ideas is more than satisfying. It's strange to say it but THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE is a joy to watch precisely because it is, in many ways, a weird and utter mess.

A husband takes his new wife back to his home, a moody old Gothic mansion deep in the Spanish countryside. He spends a good amount of time having sex with her - sometimes seemingly against her will - and is slightly bemused by the fact that she has taken a strange interest in his family's history. Asked why all the paintings of the family patriarchs are featured in the hall but all the portraits of the matriarchs are not, the husband - he is never named or, if he is, I missed it - explains why. One of his ancestors was nearly killed by his wife. Her portrait has been defaced - literally; the face has been cut out of the painting - but the name plate remains, the year of her death curiously missing. Her name is Mircalla.

The husband's young wife, Susan, starts having nightmares of a beautiful woman. In her dreams, the woman instructs her to kill her husband. Susan begins to grow distant from her husband. A strange dagger - the same one Mircalla is clutching in her portrait - begins to show up everywhere. One day, while burying the dagger on the beach, the husband discovers a naked woman buried in the sand. He digs her up and takes her home. The woman's name is Carmilla. Carmilla and Susan begin to meet each other after midnight, venturing far outside the mansion's walls. Susan grows more and more distant and, more worryingly violent and her husband, having already noticed the strange bite marks on his young wife's neck, begins to suspect that Carmilla is no ordinary woman.

That's the gist of the story but I watered it down quite a bit. For a relatively short film, THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE feels laden with narrative. It's not, really, but the way the film carries itself makes it appear very top heavy. With little in the way of action, this first half of the film feels slow and tired but it's a necessary sacrifice to establish not only the mood of the piece but the underlying themes of the film. This is a rather misogynistic piece. The husband is more concerned with satisfying his own lusts than with having anything close to a loving marriage. The sequestering of all the female family portraits to the basement is perhaps the most obvious example of this. So when Carmilla makes her appearance, writer / director Vicente Aranda treats her not as a standard vampire villain but as something he believes to be more insidious: a female empowerment figure. The idea of lesbianism as a threat to male dominance is palpable throughout the film.

These gender politics drive the action of the film towards it's inevitable climax. And what a climax it is. Restraining itself for damned near an hour and a half, the final act of THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE is blood spattered indeed. Actually, "blood soaked" would be the better term. While we expect a certain level of bloodletting in a vampire film, Aranda goes all out in the film's finale. Virtually every character is killed off in one horrible way or another. This sudden shift into splatter territory is a bit startling but ultimately gratifying. Though Aranda leaves the most outrageous act offscreen - the film's final shot reveals what it is in a newspaper clipping - the violence contained in that final scene is graphic and a bit unsettling. While I wanted the film to end much differently, I can appreciate Aranda's approach. The first three quarters of the film were so restrained and slow going that the gruesomeness of the finale is actually enhanced.

For all it's pacing problems and questionable plot developments, THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE is a success. While not the best adaptation of Sheridan LeFanu's immortal tale "Carmilla", it is nonetheless a satisfying film and one I would recommend to both vampire and Eurotrash fans alike.

Recommended.

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