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Rape of the Vampire

A psychiatrist (Bernard Letrou) ventures to a remote castle to convince a broad of four vampire sisters that they are misguided, brainwashed by superstitious villagers, and not truly creatures of the Supernatural. The villagers (including director Jean Rollin) confuse and abuse the sisters, before finally storming their castle. The cast descends on a hospital run by a young doctor (Jean-Loup Philippe), charged by the Queen of the Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger) to discover a cure for vampirism. The bewildering action culminates in a "blood wedding" presided over by Sieger, in her regal hot pants, on the legendary stage of the now-defunct Theatre du Grand Guignol.

The Nude Vampire

Wealthy industrialist Georges Radamante (Maurice Lemaitre) has dreams of immortality. Not through his own achievements, but by finding a way to share the biochemistry of the mute, orphaned vampire woman (Caroline Cartier) who has been raised by hooded needle-stickers in isolation, deprived of exposure to human faces. Radamante's son Pierre (Olivier Martin, Rollin's real-life brother) innocently complicates matters while trying to infiltrate his father's private club. It is love at first sight and Pierre determines to liberate his beloved, a goal which attract the companionship of other vampires, who plan a torch-carrying siege of Radamante's palatial compound.

Shiver of the Vampires

The Shiver of the Vampires (Le frisson des vampires) is a most unorthodox vampire film; by turns, it is magical eccentric, poetical, erotic, philosophical and, whenever the vampire cousins are onscreen together, surprisingly funny. It is also unique among vampire films for offering some sort of backstory of warring paganism and Christianity that explains why a vampire would feel revulsion for the sight of a crucifix. Of all Rollin's films Shiver of the Vampires is also the most visually inventive, furnished with bizarre bric-a-brac and with each of the castle's rooms denoted by a different color, possibly in homage to Roger Corman's The Masque Of The Red Death.

Requiem for a Vampire

Requiem For A Vampire was Jean Rollin's favorite of all of his films. Because he dredged the scenario from his subconscious, and because it was rushed into its written form so quickly (Rollin claimed that he wrote the entire script in only two days), he felt it was his purest work. True to Rollin's roots in progress: two women in full clown makeup (Marie-Pierre Castel, Mirielle d'Argent), firing guns at a retaliating car behind them, as a handsome associate mans the steering wheel. This being a Rollin film, we quickly dispense with the man and get on with the general absence of story and the vital accumulation of fetish. Eluding their pursuers, our two clowns continue their never-explained flight on foot, journeying to a cemetery, then a chateau inhabited by "the last of the vampires."

All films include expansive special features.