User:Andrzejbanas/DaughtersOfDarkness

Daughters of Darkness (in France, Les Lèvres rouges, and in Belgium, Le Rouge aux lèvres, both literally translated as The Red Lips) 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.

Plot summary
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. 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.

Production
After director Harry Kümel received a mixed commercial reception for his previous film Monsieur Hawarden, Kümel found himself lacking funding for the next film he wanted to make titled Malpertuis. Kümel wrote a contemporary story based on Elizabeth Báthory with co-producer Pierre Drouot and Jean Ferry. The initial production company for the film was Drouot's Showking Film, a company he set up to handle co-productions. Kümel decided against getting any funding from the state funding as way of showing that "I didn't need them".

After getting actress Delphine Seyrig cast, Showking Films managed to get other production companies involved: Cinevog, Maya Films, Gemini Pictures, Roxy Films and Mediterranea from Belgium, France, Germany and Italy respectively. The film began shooting Ostend and Bruges in May 1970. The film wa

Analysis
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."

Reception
Commerical film in Belgium in the late 1960s and early 1970s was considered to be poor as these film showcased "a lack of moral concern". Film that contained explicit sexuality such as Cash? Cash! (1967) and Take Me or Rape Me (1970) were looked negatively by film critics.