Vampyros Lesbos

Vampyros Lesbos (1971) follows a young lawyer who travels to Istanbul to settle an inheritance and becomes entranced by a mysterious, alluring woman who reveals herself to be a vampire. Drawn into a world of erotic dreams and supernatural seduction, she struggles to distinguish fantasy from reality as her sanity begins to slip. This erotic horror blends surreal imagery and hypnotic atmosphere in a hallucinatory vision of seduction, identity, and decay.

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  Seeing the clips of Vampyros Lesbos where Jess was basically restaging with Soledad Miranda and Ewa Stroemberg the scene in Dracula where Bela Lugosi offers Dwight Frye wine with his dinner, but with sunlight instead of moonlight and fishing nets everywhere instead of cobwebs, I made the connection that, here, he was reinventing everything, as a director, in the same way that Christina von Blanc’s character would reinvent everything that she sees in A Virgin Among the Living Dead, as a schizophrenic mental patient—seeing the mental hospital where she is kept as a hotel, and the doctors as hotel staff. It’s an opportunity for the filmmaker to use whatever they have at their disposal to tell any story they care to tell, and for the viewer, it’s an opportunity to see differently.