| Daughters of Darkness | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Harry Kümel |
| Produced by | Paul Coilet Alain C. Guilleaume |
| Written by | Harry Kümel J.J. Amiel Pierre Drouot |
| Starring | Delphine Seyrig Danielle Ouimet John Karlen Andrea Rau |
| Music by | François de Roubaix |
| Cinematography | Eduard van der Enden |
| Editing by | Denis Bonan Gust Verschueren |
| Release date(s) | 1971 |
| Running time | 87 min. |
| Country | Belgium France Germany |
| Language | English |
Daughters of Darkness (in France, Les Lèvres rouges, and in Belgium, Le Rouge aux lèvres) is a 1971 Belgian horror film (with dialogue in English), directed by Harry Kümel. It is an erotic vampire film, following a style Camille Paglia calls psychological high Gothic.
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A recently married young couple, Stefan (John Karlen) and Valerie (Danielle Ouimet), are on their honeymoon. They check into a grand hotel on the Ostend seafront in Belgium, intending to catch the cross-channel ferry to England, though Stefan seems oddly unenthused at the prospect of introducing his new bride to his mother. It is off-season, so the couple are alone in the hotel. Alone, that is, until the sun sets and a mysterious Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) arrives in a vintage Bristol driven by her 'secretary' Ilona (Andrea Rau). The middle-aged concierge at the hotel swears that he saw the Countess at the same hotel when he was a little boy - but concludes he must be mistaken, since she doesn't look a day older than she did back then. The countess quickly becomes obsessed with the newlyweds, and the resulting interaction of the four people leads to sadism and murder. Ilona, Stefan, then the Countess all die, leaving Valerie, now transformed into a creature similar to the Countess, stalking new victims.
Camille Paglia writes that, "A classy genre of vampire film follows a style I call psychological high Gothic. It begins in Coleridge's medieval Christabel and its descendants, Poe's Ligeia and James's The Turn of the Screw. A good example is Daughters of Darkness, starring Delphine Seyrig as an elegant lesbian vampire. High gothic is abstract and ceremonious. Evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history."[1]