The Rape of the Vampire

The Rape of the Vampire (1968)

Le Viol du vampire

After a psychoanalyst unsuccessfully tries to convince four sisters that they are not 200 year old vampires, the Queen of the Vampires promulgates the cause of the Undead.

Date of release
1968-05-27
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (48)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Horror
Director
Jean Rollin

Casting

Interesting facts

Le viol du vampire is a 1968 film directed by Jean Rollin. It was his directorial debut. The film consists of two parts: The Rape of the Vampire and The Vampire Woman/Queen of the Vampires. Originally, the film was only supposed to be a short, but a second part was filmed and added later so that it could be released as a feature film.

Production

In 1967, French retailer Jean Lavie, owner of a Paris network of small theatres including The Scarlett, Styx and Midi Minuit, commissioned a short film from Rollin on the theme of vampires. It was to serve as a prologue to an old American fantasy film of the 1940s, The Vampire, a Creature of the Devil, which he had bought the rights to and planned to rebroadcast.

Rollin could not bring in professional actors due to the low budget. Among the cast playing the four vampire sisters were Ursule Pauly, a model, and Nicole Romain, a stripper. Pradel, Letrou and Polho, who played the three heroes, had never acted in a movie before; nor had the rest of the cast. None had undergone training in drama except Ariane Sapriel.

The filming of Le Viol du Vampire began in 1967 and took place almost entirely around an old abandoned house which served as the home of the four vampire sisters. The surrounding woods and fields furnished the framework for the outdoor sequences.

This abandoned house, Château de Gressy, was located in the Paris suburbs at Gressy, Claye-Souilly. According to Rollin, this château was destroyed in a fire. Later, the city hall of Gressy was built on this location.

Only the death scene of Thomas and the vampire sister was not filmed in Île-de-France. Instead, Rollin chose Pourville-lès-Dieppe, a beach near Normandy which was dear to his heart since his teens and had already been used as a setting in 1958 for his first short film, Les Amours Jaunes (The Yellow Lovers). The beach was seen again on numerous occasions throughout the filming, and the same beach was used as a setting in his later films.

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