31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 9: Daughters of Darkness

Day 9: Daughters of Darkness (1971), dir. by Harry Kümel

Streaming Availability: Tubi

The Seventies are when the vampire gets weird. We saw how Hammer Horror tried to keep Count Dracula relevant after the cultural revolutions of the Sixties, and they failed. With Dracula fading, any number of new and strange vampires could take his place. This coming run of the next five movies will all be pushing the boundaries of this species of horror to new, transgressive, and maybe even more terrifying places.

We start with Daughters of Darkness, a return to the queerness of vampires. Now, we have seen vampire movies that teased lesbian themes before. Dracula’s Daughter can easily be read as a battle in a woman’s heart between sexualities. But those were themes, maybe not subtle subtext, however still hiding between the lines. Forty years later, explicit sexuality is far less taboo on screen. While homosexuality in 1971 was maybe not yet something you can talk to your grandma about at the dinner table, it was fully a Thing that was allowed to happen on screen. If your lady vampire wants to fuck other ladies, nobody needs to wink about it anymore. 

This is also the era of “classy” European erotic art films, so a sexy lesbian vampire fits right into a decadent horny strain of cinema. There was a whole subgenre of lesbo vampos in this decade including movies like Vampyres, Alucarda, and the wonderfully-titled Vampyros Lesbos. Sadly, I cannot cover all of them. I do not even know if I picked the best one, I just went for the one that looked the prettiest.

Daughters of Darkness is the least horror of all the movies we’ve covered so far. There are vampires in it, but it's more the a story of a beautiful young woman’s terrible honeymoon in Belgium at winter. This marriage is not gonna work, vampires or not. Our heroine is Valerie (Danielle Ouimet), who has married her aristocratic boyfriend, Stefan (John Karlen). They seem happy enough, fucking merrily on a train on their way to a seaside resort hotel. The problem is that Stefan has a recurring fascination with sadism. The bigger problem is that he refuses to tell his “mother” back in England that her little boy has tied the knot. 

Meanwhile, a mysterious older woman, Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) checks into the hotel with her young boyish “secretary”, Ilona (Andrea Rau). The movie then becomes a sexual chess match between Elizabeth and Stefan to win the heart of Valerie. Oh, the bellman immediately recognizes Elizabeth as an immortal who has not aged a day, and despite her protestations, she remembers his name. And, yeah, it is not a coincidence that she shares a name with one of the most notorious serial killers in history. That might just related to a few murders happening in nearby Bruges. Young women are getting drained of blood.

The movie is less interested in that than I'd like, frankly. There are only three actual death scenes, not one shot of fangs. Instead, most of Daughters of Darkness is more fascinated about a kind of wealthy class of people who have never done an honest day of work in their lives, and probably have never done a dishonest one either. Yeah, we could see murders, or we could see the empty luxuries and chic fashion in a lovely corner of Europe. The movie does look great for 1971, with none of the dull shabbiness I associate with Seventies fashion.

Stefan gets a striking look with his red leather jacket and metal-rimmed sunglasses. Ilona is killing it with a naughty schoolgirl outfit and possibly the only attractive bowl cut in human history. Báthory never gets a single iconic “look”, going from either a silver cocktail dress to a Cruella Deville veil to an ironic use of a Bela Lugosi cape. Yeah, she's fabulous, but I wish they had settled on one appearance as the most iconic so any one of them could be memorable. Yes, people are dying, but the camera is more interested in lounges, teal cocktails, and the elegant headlights on a classic Bristol.

Oh, the Countess tosses her drink into a flower pot. She doesn’t drink... grasshoppers.

We do get a few horrible moments. Probably the creepiest single one is when Báthory all but admits she’s the same woman from Hungarian legend that murdered hundreds of virgin girls. She joins with Stefan in an intense embrace, both enraptured by recounting the outrageous stories of torture and torment. (Which are probably massive exaggerations from the murky truth of what the real Báthory actually did, but don't let me spoil your fun, Daughters of Darkness.)

When it comes time for deaths, the movie uses strange, almost slapstick physics. Poor Ilona slips out of the shower with Stefan (possibly weakened by the vampire's allergy to running water, but that’s not clear). Then she grabs a straight razor in her hand, and somehow slips onto it, stabbing herself in the back. Is this the Countess’s dark arts creating Final Destination kills or... just clumsiness? The Countess dies in a car accident at the very end of the movie, by equally random circumstances. That kill at least is sick as shit, with the Countess impaled on a tree branch and set on fire.

There’s just a lot that’s left unexplained and unsatisfying here for me. Not ambiguous and intriguing, rather unfinished. Stefan’s domineering mother, the Lady Chilton, is revealed to us to actually be some older man (Fons Rademakers). So, is Stefan an imposter or some kind of boytoy to a rich nobleman or is this actually his mother who is a trans woman? This thread is never examined further. There’s a retired policeman character following the heroes who never reaches the main plot. Stefan begins beating Valerie with very little prompting. I can understand how his character got here, yet there’s definitely a beat or shot missing explaining his state of mind. He ceases to be a character and is just a figure representing the worst of all men.

The feminist statement is a bit muddled too. The Countess’s criticisms of Stefan, that he wants to make Valerie “a slave, a thing, an object of pleasure” is exactly what Báthory has done to Ilona and will do to her next victim. I guess just stay away from horny rich Europeans regardless of gender.

Is Daughters of Darkness scary? No. It is only rarely creepy or disturbing. We just do not learn enough about most of the characters, which is frustrating since the movie’s pace is also far too slow. It feels like a long movie but also one missing scenes. Is Daughters of Darkness a fashionable and legitimately sexy experience? Oh yes, it is extremely that. Everybody is one flavor or another of smoking hot from Báthory’s wicked Disney villain to Ilona’s debauched innocence. So, if you just want hot people being awful and horny in a gorgeous setting, Daughters of Darkness is a mixed but enjoyable experience.

Next Time: we've had far too many Whitulas, I want a Blacula.