What these three movies have in common is an unconventional approach to the zombie movie sub-genre. They’re unconventional both thematically, emotionally and stylistically. The most radical thing about them is that they add an emotional dimension to the zombie movie.
The opening of The Living Dead Girl makes it plain that Rollin is treating zombies as a science fictional phenomenon rather than a supernatural one. Chemical waste is what turns the zombies into zombies. Which is interesting because Rollin had also treated vampirism as a science fictional phenomenon in some of his vampire films (especially The Nude Vampire).
What’s also interesting is that in The Living Dead Girl he makes no attempt to convince us that his science fictional explanation is plausible. We’re not going to have a scientist offering us huge amounts of techno-babble about how zombies are created. Rollin doesn’t care. All we need to know is that these zombies are not supernatural. What really interests Rollin is the consequences, and where his zombie movies become very unconventional is is his interest in the emotional consequences for the zombies. Having the zombies played by beautiful young women was obviously a sound commercial move but it also makes us instinctively sympathetic. We want to sympathise with beautiful young women.
The Living Dead Girl is as close as Rollin ever got (among his personal films) to making an out-and-out horror movie. It’s the only Rollin movie to feature significant amounts of gore gore (and it is a bit of a gore-fest at times). Rollin’s vampire movies are horror movies of a sort but mostly they’re exercises in surrealism and dream imagery. The Living Dead Girl is unequivocally a horror movie, although it's also much more than that.
Despite this it’s still recognisably a Rollin movie. A young woman in a long flowing white dress wandering through an empty chateau is very Rollin.
A spill of chemical waste in a crypt has an unexpected effect. It brings the corpse of Catherine Valmont back to life. Well, back to life in a way. She is re-animated as a zombie. She seems to have no identity and no awareness. She begins to kill, but instinctively and without any thought or emotion.
Her childhood friend Hélène discovers Catherine. She realises that Catherine has been on a killing spree but as children they made a vow to each other. Whatever Catherine has done Hélène will stand by her.
An American photographer, Barbara, also discovers Catherine’s existence.
The tantalising and tragic thing is that Catherine is not a mere zombie. She remembers a few things. A very few things, but she does remember things from the time when she was alive. She kills everyone she encounters, but not Hélène. She remembers Hélène. She remembers their friendship. She remembers the music box Hélène gave her as a gift. And, tragically, she begins to remember more and more. It’s tragic because she begins to understand that she is dead, that she is a living dead girl. And she begins to understand that she must kill to survive.
While Elysabeth in The Night of the Hunted is slowly losing her human-ness and her identity Catherine is slowly regaining hers. But that’s just as bad because Catherine knows she can never be human again, she can never really be alive again.
The relationship between the two girls slowly changes, in an extremely interesting and emotionally compelling way, but I can’t say any more because this is really the heart and soul of the movie and I’m not going to spoil it.
Is she a zombie or a vampire? There are certainly hints of vampirism. The truth is that she’s both and neither. She’s a one-off, the result of the bizarre effects of the chemical wastes to which her corpse was exposed. In some of Rollin’s vampire movies (especially Two Orphan Vampires and The Nude Vampire and in his novel Little Orphan Vampires) there is also considerable ambiguity - are they actually vampires?
Rollin’s zombie movies are, paradoxically, his most emotionally engaged movies. The zombie idea is used to explore identity, and what it is that makes us human, and the terror of losing our human-ness. In The Night of the Hunted the heroine is slowly losing her humanity and her identity. In The Living Dead Girl the heroine has already lost these things, but not completely. There’s still a shred of the woman she once was. In both movies there’s an overwhelming sense of loss. In both cases there’s the horror of existence without identity.
Françoise Blanchard is extraordinary as Catherine. She has very little dialogue, and none at all for most of the film. She has to convey her strange emotional states mostly wordlessly, and she does so. Marina Pierro is equally good as Hélène.
Rollin was famously obsessed with female doubles. Most of his movies feature two girls. They may be twins, they may be lesbians (but not always). There is always a mysterious and intense bond between the two girls. In this movie the bond is one of simple friendship, but it’s the kind of intense friendship that develops between girls of a certain age. As children Catherine and Hélène made a vow of eternal friendship, a perfectly normal thing. What’s abnormal is that for Hélène that vow of friendship is still as real as it was all those years ago. Her horror at Catherine’s killings cannot shake that bond.
It’s odd that despite all the gore this is Rollin’s most psychologically complex film, with characters who are not only complicated but they change in interesting and convincing ways.
The Living Dead Girl is vintage Rollin. Very highly recommended.
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