Dracula's Fiancee (2002)

Dracula's Fiancee (La fiancée de Dracula) was one of Jean Rollin’s last films, made at a time when serious health problems meant that there were long gaps between his movies. These late movies don’t get as much attention as his earlier vampire and zombie movies and this is a pity. These late movies represent a distinctive phase in his career which in its own way is every bit as interesting as the earlier phases.

Two men, an elderly professor and his much younger assistant Eric, are trying to track down the Master. In a conventional vampire movie we would assume that these are the good guys and that the Professor is a Van Helsing analogue. In a Rollin vampire film we should be very careful about jumping to such conclusions. The Professor believes that the key to finding the Master is a woman named Isabelle. Isabelle (Cyrille Gaudin) is a madwoman confined in a convent. Her madness has infected the nuns and they’re all quite insane.

The Master is in fact Dracula.

The Professor is told that the Parallels have the answer. The Parallels represent a new element in Rollin’s ever-shifting vampire mythology. The Parallels are monsters. There’s the dwarf court jester Triboulet, the Vampire, the Ogress, the She-Wolf (played by the always wonderful Brigitte Lahaie) and others. The Parallels have their own reasons for seeking the Master.

Others are looking for the Master.

Isabelle is destined to be Dracula’s bride. Whether Dracula survives, whether he currently exists in our reality, whether he exists in another universe entirely or whether he exists only in an imaginary universe remains unclear. What will happen if the marriage between Dracula and Isabelle goes ahead? We eventually get the answer but it’s not the kind of straightforward answer most people would like.

Most vampire movies draw their inspiration, directly or indirectly, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novel Carmilla or from Stoker’s Dracula but not Rollin. In his vampire movies he creates whole new vampire mythologies. And he created several totally distinct vampire mythologies. The vampire mythology of The Nude Vampire is radically different from the vampire mythology of Requiem for a Vampire or Fascination.

When he returned to the vampire film with his superb 1997 Two Orphan Vampires he did it again, with a mythology based on the pop culture of the past that he loved so much. The two blind orphan vampire girls inhabit a world created out of adventure fiction, 19th century French serial fiction, comics, children’s books and old movie serials. Whether they simply inhabit this world or whether they themselves have created it is an open question. The two girls understand nothing of what the rest of us think of as reality.

Amazingly with Dracula's Fiancee, so late in his career, he does it yet again. Even though there’s a Dracula in the story the movie has no connection with Stoker’s Dracula (in fact the the use of the name Dracula may have been forced on Rollin by distributors for commercial reasons). This is the strange world of the Parallels. As with all of Rollin’s mythologies you will have to decide just how imaginary this world might be and whether it has any connection with reality.

We might be dealing with a parallel universe or with the world of the imagination, or perhaps the world of madness. Or is it the world of art and literature? Is this universe more real or less real than the reality most of us take for granted.

Two Orphan Vampires deals with similar themes but in a different way, as does Rollin’s very underrated and very neglected Lost in New York. Rollin had played with such themes many times but always with interesting variations. If a theme interested him he would look for different ways to approach it.

Like Two Orphan Vampires this movie showcases Rollin’s fascination with fairy tales and the gothic.

Rollin is often misunderstood by those who expect vampire movies to be horror movies. Rollin only ever made two movies that can truly be described as horror movies (The Grapes of Death and The Living Dead Girl) and even those two films are hardly conventional horror films. Rollin’s movies belong to the genre the French call the fantastique which combines science fiction, fantasy, horror, gothic and thriller elements with healthy doses of the surreal and the world of fairy tales in an intoxicating and playful (and very French) way and also combines artiness with pop culture.

There are no twinned girls in this movie but there are plenty of other classic Rollin elements. There is a clown (a jester being a species of clown). There are girls in filmy see-through nightdresses, almost naked and yet not naked. There is an obsession with clocks. There is his famous beach at Dieppe. There are ruins. There are vampires, but each Rollin vampire movies offers a different type of vampire. Some really are vampires. Some might be actual vampires. As always Rollin provides us with more questions than answers.

I’m learning to like Rollin’s late movies very much indeed. In some ways he was returning to his surrealist roots but it’s not quite the surrealism of his early movies. These late movies have a kind of magical vibe. At times they resemble the Latin American literary genre magic realism. There’s no attempt to explain the magical elements. And the line between dream and reality becomes steadily more blurred. Dracula's Fiancee is highly recommended.

Redemption have released this movie on Blu-Ray. The transfer is excellent. And as an extra they have included the absolutely wonderful Lost in New York making this Blu-Ray a must-buy.