Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Daughters of Darkness

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lam. Today it's going to be, we're going to be revisiting an episode that originally published 516, 2025. It is 1971's Daughters of Darkness. Such a stylish, beautiful and haunting vampire story. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lam. And this is Joe McCormick. And we're back with, yes, another classic erotic vampire movie. I know it wasn't that long ago that we covered 1983's The Hunger. But despite some thematic similarities, today's film, 1971's Daughters of Darkness, is an entirely different cinematic experience. Like The Hunger, it does paint with erotic cues while also pursuing its own high-minded ideas. It'd be easy to dismiss this one. Certainly, if you just watch the trailers or maybe just look at a few posters as being more in the exploitation zone. But this is a beautiful and haunting film that is composed with deliberate style and intention. Yeah, I would agree with that. Despite its main themes being sort of love, sex, and romance in the context of murder and a vampire story, it's not a very romantic film, actually. It's like it shows a quite bleak side of love, but is psychologically fascinating. Yes, it is very, very fascinating on the psychological front. Now, other ways that it ties in with past episodes of Weird House, I think we could consider this another off-season European holiday horror film. Okay. Similar in ways to Footprints on the Moon. Hmm, all right. I think it is our first Belgian movie, though this was an international co-production. So ultimately, this was a multinational effort to make Daughters of Darkness. We'll get into some of the details of that as we go. There was a lot of seemingly random correlation between accents and where characters are supposed to be from. Yes. Also, note this is our second Lady Bathory, Lady Batorie film. This is a character that pops up, of course, has historical origins, but often pops up in far from historically accurate horror and horror-related media. So you hear her name pronounced in various ways, from Bathory to Batorie. We get, I think, the much more convincing Batorie in this picture. But a version of this character last popped up on Weird House Cinema in the Paul Nassie film Night of the Werewolf from 1980. Oh, okay. I vaguely recall that. Did we ever talk about how there's a metal band that I've actually never listened to, Camp Vouch from Don't Know if They're Any Good, but a metal band called Bathory seems like right kind of theme, you know, murder, bathing in blood, that kind of thing, some kind of metal band. But they've got one of those calligraphy fonts on their name and it looks like it says Bat Lord. Well, that couldn't help. I think the already confused issue of the pronunciation there. Oh, right. Yes. You say Batorie, I say Bat Lord. Yeah. And Bat Lord, you know, it does, you know, that's, I think that's the confusing thing about it. Lady, the stories of Lady Batorie are often associated with a bath of blood. Yeah. It's, she's associated to some degree with vampires and therefore vampires and bats. So, you know, things can get out of whack pretty quickly. There's actually a scene in Daughters of Darkness where she puts her cape up like a bat, even though she never transforms into a bat in the movie. We get no animal transformations at all in the film, but she's like standing up on a big sand dune in the nighttime and we see the kind of purple-blue sky behind her and she just like puts up the bat wings. It's great. Such a beautiful shot. Yeah. Yeah. Classic. This is a film that has a very strong cult following at this point. It's been popping up on lists for me over the years whenever I look up interesting vampire films, you know, certainly from the 1970s. And this one also came highly recommended from the folks at Videodrome here in Atlanta, who I believe hosted a screening of it just last year, but I don't think I was in town at the time, so I did not go. Am I right that you ended up picking this because you were asking them for French films and this is as close as you could get to a French movie you wanted? They have a lot of French films and there are a lot of French horror films. I've found it challenging over the years here to pick one, pick a French Weird House film that is also the sort of film that would be fun for us to talk about. Like there's some really hard hitting French horror films and they're not necessarily my cup of tea or necessarily what we'd want to talk about on the show. I don't know and some others just didn't feel like the right pick at the right time. So I'm always open to listener suggestions on this front. I've got a few on my list. Maybe we'll get around to them. But again, what you said earlier, daughters of darkness, despite being an international production is mostly Belgian in origin and it takes place within Belgium as well. It takes place at a seaside town or a seaside city on the Belgian coast called Ostain or I think depending on whether you have the Dutch pronunciation or the French, you might be Ostend as well. But it's this deserted seaside community which is one of the bleakest types of settings there is, I've realized. Like being next to the ocean but there being nobody on the beach, that's a thing that gives me chills when I see it. I didn't realize that really until this movie. Yeah, yeah. I mean this film is very well shot. A lot of intense selection went into the various scenes that we have in the picture. And so they really lean into this idea of the desolate seaside town of the coast being kind of like the edge of civilization and time and so forth. Yeah, it definitely an off-season vacation movie. Though I'm to understand they didn't necessarily shoot everything off-season like some of this stuff was shot in July. Wow. To refine what I said a little bit actually, I think it's specifically the fact that it's like a beach made to be full of people. So you see chairs and little changing houses and everything. It's usually populated. I guess it would have less of this kind of impact if it were more of a beach in a wilderness. But it's not that it's a beach right in the right world the hotels let out. So it should be full of tourists and it's not. Yeah, even when they go to Bruges, there's very few people around. Like everything feels a little bit like a ghost town for our characters here. Almost like they're in a different world. Yes, yeah. The only local attraction in Bruges is the murder victim. Get your tickets to see the hand to pop out of the gurney one more time. Yeah, you guys didn't go to the museums? What's up? Oh, they do ride, what's it called? They ride one of those little boats in the canals. Yeah, is it a gondola if it's in Bruges? I don't know technically. They do ride one. With the dude wearing the UFO Elvis sunglasses. They're crazy. Yes. We will have a lot to say I'm sure about the fashion choices throughout the film because this movie is extremely invested in style. Yeah, yeah, because it's not only a film full of dismal landscapes, but also just dazzling splashes of color. Generally red and green, sometimes white, pure light even, and of course darkness. And often all of these elements seem to be like speaking in a code. Like why is this actor wearing red right now? And what does that mean when suddenly they're wearing white and this one's wearing red? It doesn't feel random. It feels very intentional, but like it's blinking a code to me that I'm supposed to decipher. The character Valerie is very coded as white and gold, whereas the character of the Countess is very black, white, and red, which has some unsavory associations. Even if you don't make the connection consciously, I feel like you can sense it there. This looks like a flag I've seen before. Yeah, yeah. I was watching some extras. I think I was listening to the commentary track with the director and one of the screenwriters, Harry Camel. He said, these are the colors of dictatorship and they're reflected throughout the film and also in this character. But then also sometimes she's a mirror ball. That's true. Yeah, the full sequin dress. Yeah, she's the disco ball. Yeah. Some fabulous gowns, fabulous gowns. But like some other romantically themed vampire movies, this movie also, I think, is very concerned with the kind of subtleties of power and domination within romantic relationships. Yeah, as many have pointed out over the years and will become obvious in our discussion, but also in any of your individual viewings of the picture, it's a film deeply concerned with the patriarchal control. And we might very roughly see Stephen, our lead male character, as paradoxically an individual who exists on both sides of this control, directly subjugated by patriarchal control and also exerting increasingly violent patriarchal control over his new bride and any women who venture too close. But again, all of this often feels like it is presented in at least a semi-cryptic fashion. So it's not too on the nose with, well, a lot of these points, sometimes it's a little on the nose, but it gives you a lot to think about. There's a lot to contemplate concerning the psychology of the picture. I liked what you said about it feeling like it takes place in another world. That's really sinking in for me now. I don't think I put it in those words myself. But yes, this movie does feel like it is a place where the characters have kind of ventured outside of reality and outside of normal life into these otherwise deserted playplaces. I think it's significant that most of the film takes place in luxury environments, environments where people go for recreation to have a good time, a fancy expensive hotel or these beachside resorts and tour buses and train compartments and, you know, like a luxury train compartment, private compartment. They're all like places where rich people play and our characters come into these places where rich people play, but they're deserted of all the other people. It's like they were set up as some kind of experiment, like just to have these characters in particular kind of clash together and interact. There's something that feels intentionally kind of surreal and artificial about it, like that it is supposed to feel that way, that like we're kind of dolls being played with. Does that make any sense? Yeah, yeah, it does. And to the dreamlike aspect of things, the non-reality aspects of things, I think there was a, at one point in one of the extras I was watching or listening to, the director said films are not reality, they are dreams, which I think is something that certainly resonates throughout this picture. That makes sense. Having seen this movie, yeah, that spirit is running through it. There is a dreamlike quality where, you know, actions aren't always fully explained, they're not always logical, but they also make a kind of symbolic sense. It feels like they mean something, even if you couldn't say what it is. Yeah. And this is, of course, intensified by so many of the different visual choices that are made. There are these frequent redout transitions that I really liked in the picture, which of course, you know, feels very appropriate for a vampire film, a film concerned with blood. But it also just adds to this feeling that like everything is some sort of a fever dream, you know, and we're just sort of, you know, redding out from one scene into the next as the blood is surging to our head or something. Yeah, that's interesting. There's another thing I was thinking about the transitions in the movie. Did you notice a kind of weird pattern where a scene will kind of like escalate to negativity where characters like at the end of a scene are in maximal conflict, and then it'll cut, and that'll be the end of the scene. And then the next time we see the characters again, they are behaving cooperatively or even happily together. And do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, there's several key examples of this. And they, yeah, it does sort of add to this kind of dreamlike quality, but also in a way that, I mean, it doesn't, in the sense that the dream we see here is a reflection of real life. So it's not like the characters are behaving like unrealistically, but we're getting that kind of like kaleidoscope vision of their lives. I'm thinking specifically of the kind of like horrible awkwardness while they're on the bus returning from Bruges, while Valerie and Stefan, they have this kind of argument about something that really should be a major red flag about Stefan, like this guy is, oops, I married a serial killer, like this guy is not good. And then it gets even weirder from there. And then we cut away after that. And the next time we see them, they're coming in the door from out of the rain, like laughing and just, you know, having a great time. Yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe they're kind of faking it a little bit there. I don't know. But we don't see the resolutions from those moments where the terror or the awkwardness is just left hanging. Yeah, which I think kind of works in a major way, because since we don't see resolution, we don't see them patching it up. For us, it feels all the more unresolved. You know, we don't see the tender moment that allows them to move on to the next few hours. So we're like, what are you guys doing here? This is not working. This is a this is a doomed romance, even without vampires involved. Okay. So normally, we would do some trailer audio about the film. But Rob, you understand that you checked out the trailers and they're no good. Oh, they're terrible. Like, I'm so glad I watched this movie without having seen a trailer for it, because this is one of those cases where the trailers either misrepresent things about the film or outright spoil things and certainly visually spoil a lot of the key moments. So I would advise against the trailers. Just just pick up the film if you want to see it. And if you want to see it, you're in luck because this one's presently available to stream, at least in the States, on a number of platforms, including Shutter and Tubi. So like, there are options at all, you know, budget levels. And there's an excellent Blu-ray of it out from Blue Underground from several years back. And that's what I watched it on. I rented it from Videodrome. And it has a great array of extras and commentary tracks. I just had to stream this one. But yeah, I would say more than most of the movies we watched. This is one where I really want to know more about the process. So I would be interested in in those extras. I want to know what the creators were thinking. Yeah, it's fascinating. I didn't have time to even explore all of the extras and because they're like three different commentary tracks, you know, like multiple hours worth of content. And it seems like there's a lot of interesting behind the scenes stories. And I'll pass on some of those. But this is a film that people have been talking about and ensuring their experience is making it for decades at this point. And so, you know, there's a lot of lore out there. All right, let's talk about the people who made the picture starting at the top with Harry Kouma, the director and one of the screenwriters. Born 1940, Belgian film director, best known for this film, certainly internationally, which achieved cult status throughout Europe and the United States, and is now considered a classic of its genre. He was active as a director from around 1953 through 2003. And while Daughters of Darkness was his big cold hit, his most critically successful film was The Follow-Up. It also came out in 1971, The Legend of Doom House, or it's also known as Malpatry. That one stars Orson Welles and Susan Hampshire. I've had this one on the list for a bit, but I've never seen it. Of course, it's 70s Orson Welles, which I'm here for that. And it just looked like it was, it looked suitably weird. So, I've been wanting to check it out for a bit. Yeah, it's supposed to be great. Another picture of his of note is 1969's Monsieur Howarden, which also has something of a following concerning the tale of a 19th century French female cross dresser whose two male lovers fight a duel over her, apparently based on an historic person, but I don't know the full story there. But as far as Daughters of Darkness goes, splendid work here. And the interview extras that I've watched and listened to, he comes off as very detail oriented. And I know that others have also talked about him being very detail oriented and a bit weird. But he points out that with Daughters of Darkness, they really wanted to make a film that was not only artistically solid, but also fun, giving its genre trappings. And I would say that I agree with that. It's not an explosion every minute or anything like that. A lot of people have pointed out that it has maybe kind of a slow burn build in some respects, certainly for a genre picture. But yeah, I feel like it was pretty fun throughout. There are certainly some times when it gets very dark, but it's a very attention gripping picture. It is easy to stick with, at least in my experience. All right. Moving on to some of the other writers, Pierre Drew born in 1943, was also associate producer. He was also a director in his own right. In the extras on the blue underground discs, he reminisces on the three weeks he spent writing the script with Harry before the director, who's also present in this extra with him, reminds him that it was actually three days. They were somewhat older at this point. It had been a long time. That sounds like Roger Corman and Charles Griffith. Yeah. It's different recollections on how this came together. But came together it did. Drew's other credits as a writer include 1987's Mascara starring Charlotte Rampley. Let's see. Then also Jean Ferry, 1906 through 1974, also credit on the screenplay. French writer who also contributed to Malpatry that we referenced earlier. There are a couple of other names that are also cited for work on the screenplay. I believe Cuman and Drew also mentioned an American who did something. I believe that Cuman and Drew are considered the main writers on this picture. But at the center of this movie, you've got a bathory or a vampire, let's say. Who is our vampire countess? It is Delphine Serig, who lived 1932 through 1990. Oh my goodness, she is amazing in this. This is just a breathtaking performance. This is one of those performances where anytime she is on the screen, and thankfully she's on the screen a lot, you're just totally captivated by every little choice she's making with her body language, with her voice. I mean, her voice alone is just amazing. What are her eyes doing? Everything. It's just such a complete and total performance. Yes. The way she embodies a kind of violent glamour, this kind of passive, aggressive predation, the way she's always saying, like, be nice to me. Oh, man, it's so evil and it's so good. So playing our Hungarian countess, we have Lebanese-born French actress Delphine Serig here, a star of stage and screen, also a film director in her own right, a major European star in her day, as well as a prominent French feminist. She rose to stardom with 1961's Last Year at Marion Bed, which was based on the novel by Alan Rowe Grilet, an author that I've read quite a bit of, but I've never watched any of his films. This was an adaptation of his films, and then he directed a number of films, but I have not seen any of his film work. The picture in question last year at Marion Bed was directed by Francis Allen René, who subsequently cast Serig in 1963's Meryl, and subsequent films of note for her include 1969's Mr. Freedom, 1970's Donkey Skin, 72's The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1973's The Day of the Jackal, and 1974's The Black Wind Mill. Donkey Skin, multiply recommended to us that that's been on the weird house list for a bit. Well, if she's in it, all the more reason to see it, because I had not seen her in anything before, but yeah, she was at the time a big star, and the only actor that they actively tried to get for this picture, and then were kind of shocked that they were able to get her attached to the film. And some of the commentary tracks, they point out that apparently she was paid in cash, so she has like a purse just full of like a whole bunch of European cash. I don't know what that means, but I like it. It sounds like it means something. Yeah, so basically I'm to understand, so again, this was a multinational production here, and she was the only person who was intentionally cast for the picture. Everyone else was provided, I believe Harry Kuml's words were sight unseen by the various international producers. So Canada sent somebody, the US sent somebody, Germany sent a couple of people, and then it had to come together. I believe it's the, I believe John Carlin who plays Stefan in the commentary track with him, he pointed out that the cast here was kind of an accident, but then again, it works, and he made a great point. He said like any good movie is kind of an accident. Like if it comes together and works, there's so many forces just completely out of anybody's control. That's true. A film is pretty much always a collaboration, so there's more chaos in how it comes together, and also I'd say because of that a little bit more magic than something that the Snort project created by just one person. Yeah, yeah. Now, as far as I can tell, everyone was excited to work with Serig on this, and everyone just had really nice things to say about working with her. By all accounts, she brought not only her own sheer talent and effortless charisma to the production, but she was one of those actors that helped elevate everyone's craft. Like people she had scenes with, she would go out of her way to improve their performance and make them feel at ease, and then she would even improve upon the direction that was given her in ways where the director was like, well, that was obviously the right choice because you made it work. There are so many things about her performance that really work very well, but one of them, again, that I have to emphasize is the way that she is so flawlessly threatening in a subtle way. There's a subtext of threat in the way that she is overtly passive. She will make a little plea or a bid. She says multiple times to a character, be nice to me, or says please about something in a way that has this undercurrent of violence running through it. Yes, absolutely. All right, so we'll have more to say about this performance as we roll on through the episode, but you can't have a vampire without a vampire thrall. And the contestant's thrall is in the form of Ilona, played by Andrea Rao, born 1947, German actress and former ballerina and model. Prior to this, she'd mostly acted, I believe, in comedies and some like sexy comedies in Germany, but this was one of a couple of 1971 films that saw her branch out into more serious work. Subsequent films included 1975's The Net, which felt- Not the one with Sandra Bolton. No, no, this is the one that had Klaus Kinskin. It's a different net. I think it's metaphorical. I don't think it involves the internet or an actual rope net. A couple of notes from interviews that I watched with her. She points out that she ended up really liking her hair. So she kept this hairstyle and has kept it for the rest of her life. It's kind of a strange haircut, but it looks cool. It's like a sloped bob. I don't know what you call that. Her performance here is very physical and I can see where her dance background probably became useful. But at the same time, she was one of the greener performers here. So there's kind of an awkwardness to her performance, but I don't know. I feel like it kind of works well because this is kind of a- I mean, she's a vampire's thrall. She's in a very unnatural place in her life and therefore I feel like a certain amount of the unnatural to the performance is fitting. She's a very sad and pitiable character, especially not just in the fact that she is enslaved to a vampire queen, but that the vampire queen insists on kind of treating her like a little friend. The way that that makes it so much more cruel. And so in these little moments where she has these great moments of posture in her performance that diminish her in various ways and render her more pitiable, there's a way that she kind of hugs up against walls and furniture the way a kid does when they're ashamed. Yeah. I think she mentioned that the director told her to be a spider in some of these scenes. And so she's trying to be kind of like spidery, clinging to the walls and all. Oh yeah. I can see that. But also she's quite scary in one moment where she surprises Valerie out on the balcony and we just see a flash of her and she's naked with her arms raised, almost like a vampire kind of claw hands, but also like a ballet pose. Yeah. And also, I don't know, it feels like it's something out of a silent German expressionist film as well. It has that kind of severity to it. Yeah. All right. So that's our vampire queen in her vampiric thrall. But we also have to have our doomed honeymoon couple. And that's so let's get into them a bit here. They've got their own issues before the vampire even gets there. Yeah. As others have pointed out, like even if the vampires never showed up, this was not going to end well. And it could have easily still been a very dramatic horror picture in its own right. Okay. But this couple is Valerie and Stefan. Yeah. Let's start with Valerie. Valerie is played by Danielle Weymet, born in 1947. Canadian actress who got her start in a pair of notable Canadian erotic films from 69 and 70. And then she also did some mainstream television work in Quebec before filming this, which I believe turned out to be her most iconic role. She continued to work through the 1970s and then returned to acting in the early 2000s. Other credits of note include 1972's The Possession of Virginia. Never seen it. No, this is the only thing I've seen her in. She's done a lot of interviews over the years and has spoken very highly of the film itself and certainly of her work with Cereig. But I believe her onset relationship with the director was not great. Her performance here is certainly greener. I mean, it's unfair to even compare to someone like Cereig, who was a seasoned actress of the stage and the screen. But again, I think it ends up largely working here because it ends up, we end up with this, there's a strong sense of naivety about Valerie. She is being controlled and manipulated to varying degrees by two different characters in the picture before arguably truly coming into her own. Yeah. I think I alluded to this earlier in our intro, but the movie is to a large extent about different pathological ways that anxiety can present in romantic relationships. And so the character we're about to talk about in a minute, Stefan, he has a kind of externalizing anxiety which turns into violence and rage and fascination with violence and all that. Meanwhile, Valerie's anxiety manifests as a kind of passivity and insecurity that she's always trying to reconnect with the man that she loves and trying to find ways of making the connection stronger even as he gives her just more and more reason to doubt that he's really worthy of her at all. Yeah. And I mean, I think as viewers are watching this, we're saying, girl, you need to get out of this relationship. You've known this guy like two days. I don't think you should have married him. But no, you're absolutely correct. Yeah. The red flags really stack up with Stefan. But the way Valerie comes through, I think, is quite real. I mean, this is a way sometimes people can deal with stress and anxiety in relationships is just to be increasingly kind of placating and increasingly trying to make amends when it wasn't your fault to begin with. Yeah. Now, playing Stefan, we have John Carlin who lived 1933 through 2020. American actor best known for his American TV roles. He played Harvey Lacey on Cagney and Lacey in the 1980s. That would be the husband of one of the title characters. Not a show I've ever watched, but I believe it was a big hit during its day. And he also played a number of different roles on Dark Shadows. I think initially and mainly a character named Willie Loomis, who I think is kind of like a con man who is involved with accidentally bringing or maybe intentionally bringing Barnabas Collins back from the grave, Barnabas Collins being a vampire, if anyone out there is not aware. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, Barnabas Collins. I mean, I watched maybe one or two episodes of Dark Shadows back in the day when it was aired on like sci-fi channel, but gothic horror as a soap opera as a concept. I'm totally on board with that. Yeah, I'm here for that. I've never seen it though. They did a couple of movies and he's in those as well. So maybe we can come back to some Barnabas Collins in the future. Okay. Carlin also did a number of other TV credits going back to the late 1950s. He pops up on Night Gallery. He's in 75's Trilogy of Terror. He's in Super Train. Even then later, Mad About You, Murder, she wrote. He was also in the 1993 movie Surf Ninjas. Now, it's easy to confuse that with a couple of other things. Surf Ninjas is neither surf Nazis must die, nor is it the three ninjas of the 90s. It is a separate thing. Yeah, and I don't think there's a shared universe here. Okay. I checked out a couple of interviews with him as well, part of his commentary track. And like everyone else had nothing but praise for Cereg. Had a lot of great things to say about the finished product of the film and various interesting stories about its production. Though he does point out that like he did have to deal with the fact that the director was obviously disappointed that he was older than he looked in his head shots. So, and this is something I didn't even think about. But like he's, I think the character is supposed to be in his 20s and the actor was in his late 30s. Really? Yeah. And so, there was some tension there, at least initially, where the director is like, they sent me this older guy and I bet he's too old for the part. But I don't know. I'd always felt it seemed to work for me as a viewer. So, I don't know that there was really an issue here. That's interesting. Yeah. I wouldn't, I would not have complained about this, about the movie. But now that you say it, he does look a bit older than the part seems to be written. Like it is written as like a role for a young man. I'm imagining like that, Stefan is supposed to be, I don't know, 23 or so. But yeah, he is a good bit older than that. But I wouldn't have, I don't know if I would have called that out without knowing that fact. I mean, part of it is that films do tend to condition us to not question the male in a, in a relay on-screen relationship being significantly older than a female counterpart. But also, we'll get into some of the details we learn about Stefan. And I don't know, it felt kind of in keeping that maybe he was a little older, you know, while sort of being locked into this younger phase of life, you know, like he's, he's older than someone should be to suddenly go off and marry somebody on the fly. That's on vacation. Yeah. But now that you mentioned that it was written younger yet would make sense of Stefan was supposed to be like a guy in his early 20s who's traveling continental Europe. He's a young rich guy who's just out on holiday. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we'll get into more about this character. But on the whole, I really liked his performance. I thought it's pretty strong here. Because again, this is not just your typical oh, honeymooning couple, but they're doomed because of some external force. They're like double doomed the external force, but also a lot of a lot of red flags in the relationship and some, you know, some, some, some deep trauma and an anxiety that's going on in both of them. So those are all the beautiful people in the picture. I do want to mention just there aren't very many humans in this, not counting some of the like extras in the background, but there's a hotel clerk at the hotel. Pierre. Yeah. And he is played by Paul Essar, who lived 1913 through 1988, German actor of stage and screen, who also acted in the original Swedish, West German, Pippi Longstocking TV series. I've not seen it. I feel like the Pippi Longstocking I can, I consumed was maybe like, like later work, like the US or British production. But it's been a long time since I've watched any Pippi Longstocking. Same here. I don't know the provenance of my Pippi. According to the director on this picture, he's supposed to play, you know, an old man who's been at the hotel for a long time. And Harry asked him to, if he would wear gray hair for it. And he like flatly refused, perhaps out of vanity, I don't know, but he insisted, no, I will play gray. And, you know, he does. He plays old and tired very well. Yeah. There's also a retired policeman who shows up. And this is a Belgian actor by the name of George M. Who lived 1906 through 1971. It's a minor part, but nice, very sweaty monologue, as I recall. I think he's supposed to be soaked with rain. Oh yeah, it's supposed to be rain, but he looks sweaty. He's leaning over, say, Reg, with just like wetness pouring down his face. It looks gross, but he is supposed to have come out of the rain. Yeah. Retired policeman who's still working cases. In a kind of unsavory way. Yeah. And then he has a really ignominious end. But we'll explain that later. All right. The director of photography on this, because I mean, look at the picture is so great. We have to call him out. Edward Vonderendon, who lived 1928 through 2011. Dutch cinematographer whose other credits include Lifespan and 1982's Fake Out. He also worked in some capacity on 1993's Gettysburg, I believe, credited with additional photography. Oh, and we don't always mention costuming, but Bernard Peres is called out. Who lived 1936 through 2010. His credit is costumer Miss Sereg's gowns. Again, the gowns in this picture are amazing. Each more stylish and eye-catching than the last, until you were almost literally blinded by them. Peres was apparently a notable name in French fashion back in the day. And then finally, the music. The music here was by composer Francois de Roby, who lived 1939 through 1975. French musician and composer really splendid score on this one that is fortunately widely available on digital and physical formats, including I learned a vinyl edition that came out via Music on Vinyl. They put out only 666 copies. So, you know, that's fun. But anyway, it's a bleak, eerie score that resonates with like antique European flair, like a little bit of folk music, 70s weirdness, elements of jazz and synthesizer. Just amazing stuff. I was listening to this one on its own a bit while working on notes. Yeah, a good score. And it does the music incorporates the themes. Like it sounds like luxury. It sounds like the idol rich and it sounds like danger. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, yeah, it's like the decadence on top, but turning the sludge underneath, turning it like melting into unsavory sludge at like the base level. Yeah. Yeah, so great work. This guy died way too young, but his work is notable for its synthesis of jazz, synth and folk elements. And I was reading that he sometimes held up as a forerunner of French electronic music. And his, the score was apparently sampled by Lil Wayne on a track called President Carter. I haven't listened to any of Lil Wayne's music that I know of, but, you know, I always appreciate a good sample. All right, you ready to talk about the plot? Yeah, let's get into it. So the action opens on a landscape after sunset with a deep blue twilight sky and a black tree limb hanging in the foreground. We can hear dogs barking and a train approaching in the distance. And then the train overtakes the camera and it becomes very loud as it passes by. We cut inside the train to a private passenger compartment where we see close-ups of objects that set the scene. You've got white flowers with drooping petals, cream colored silk sheets, champagne flutes half full and no longer bubbling. You've got the champagne bottle dunked in the silver ice bucket, a white leather purse bathed in red light from the window, and then kind of some lace garments heaped on the floor. So you get an idea of the room. We can hear the train rattling on the tracks and the wine glasses clinking against one another on a table beside the bed. We hear a woman's voice say, Stephen, and a man's voice say, Valerie. So here are our main characters, Stephen and Valerie. They are newlyweds. They're here on their honeymoon, I think about three hours after they got married, they say, and they're having sex in the dark in their train compartment. And I would say a combination of kind of the sharp and ominous music and some staging in the sex scene immediately makes Stephen maybe come off as a little bit aggressive and perhaps dangerous. Yeah, there's kind of a feral, almost lupine quality to him here. Yeah. Now, there's some interesting things about the colors in the scene. Robin, I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. A few times in the movie, I would say, especially here in the train car, the air somehow feels purple, not smoky. Sometimes air looks purple if there's smoke in it. It doesn't look like there's any smoke. It's like the air is thick with purple-ness itself, and the purple-ness kind of envelops the naked bodies of Stephen and Valerie here. Yeah, it almost gives it a kind of, I don't know, it feels more voyeuristic in a way. Like, I'm somehow seeing things through some sort of a purple lens, you know? I don't know. It's an interesting color choice for this sequence. But at the same time, a lot of the little items we see, like on the table beside the bed here, have these color themes of white, gold, and pink that are kind of associated with Valerie throughout the movie. Yeah, and I think some of these are like, they're flowers and so forth here. Yeah. Now, later we see Stephen and Valerie lying in bed half asleep, and their first dialogue exchange, apart from saying each other's names, goes like this. Valerie says, Stephen, tell me, do you love me? And he kind of lazily mumbles, don't you know? But she pleads with him to say it, and he takes a moment, and then he says, no. Then he asks her, do you love me? And she says, in a more playful tone, what me? Of course I don't. And then Stephen says, that's good, you don't love me, I don't love you, we were made for each other. And I think this is such an interesting, complex little moment, especially given what we learn about the characters as the story progresses. We get a little glimpse here of this subsurface drama about power and dominance between them. And what I mean by that is, when she says she doesn't love him, it's clear in her voice that she's just joking. Like she says it in a kind of sing songy voice, like she's playing around. But is he only joking when he says he doesn't love her? I'm not sure. And Valerie does not laugh or even smile when he says no, he doesn't love her. Her expression is totally blank. It feels to me, especially watching it the second time, like he might be denying he loves her, maybe not because he doesn't love her, I'm not sure what it means for him to love her, but denying he loves her as an expression of subtle sadism hidden behind a mask of irony. Like he says it in part to undermine her confidence and to make himself feel powerful. But of course, it's plausible that he's just kidding. She says it back and she's obviously kidding. And he could retreat to that explanation if pressed on it. And then this even greater feeling of dominance seems to accrue to him because Valerie's anxiety forces her to interpret it as a joke and respond in kind. Like she doesn't have the confidence to kind of get serious and press him on what he means. And yet this is all while they're in this dreamy, half awake, blissful state, a very weird mood. And I think this is illustrative of the kind of psychological drama that continues throughout the movie that you can kind of zero in on these little exchanges like this and then end up reading a lot into them. Yeah, yeah, especially on second viewing. This is also, I went back and rewatched this part of the film as well. And yeah, I think the first time through, I was more sort of like, I wasn't sure that this was going to be a film where this stuff mattered because the doomed couple on a honeymoon is so much a cliche in the horror genre. I wasn't really sure that their relationship mattered in a meaningful sense, but it is very central to the plot of the film. Like it's not just window dressing for the horrors to come. It is interwoven with the horrors to come. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the train stops unexpectedly while they're here in the compartment. And they haven't gone far. They say they're only a few hours from their departure in Switzerland. And Stefan gets up to go find out what's happening. Now, when he flips on the light, we suddenly exit the purple twilight world and we come into the world of harsh electric light. And when the light comes on, we see Valerie physically recoil like when it falls over her, which I thought was nice because nobody's a vampire yet. But she almost kind of hisses. She puts her hand up to shield herself. But Stefan takes a look outside the train window and he sees a flat muddy field lined with skeletal trees and half-melted drifts of snow. And this might be another good place. We alluded to this earlier, but I just want to emphasize again that the exterior landscape shots in this movie are generally not beautiful. They are bleak, cold, dark, unlovely, drained of color. And that's interesting because Daughters of Darkness is not a movie unconcerned with beauty. It is highly concerned with beauty, but not much with natural beauty. It's like beauty that doesn't feel good the way that outdoor settings and landscapes do. The beauty in this movie is all things that die in decay. It's all human bodies, of course. There are beautiful people in the movie, but also decadent old-world luxury items made by humans. Fancy clothes and jewelry and furniture and cocktails and expensive hotel rooms and lobbies. And the outside world or the natural world here is just a place of darkness and cold wind where dead bodies are dumped. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, so Stefan, he leaves the train, the compartment, and he gets the scoop. He finds out that a train has gone off the tracks up ahead and they are stuck behind it. And this means they are going to miss the boat that they were going to take to England where Stefan's family lives. And the backstory as we gather is that Stefan is the son of a wealthy aristocratic family. I think they're supposed to be Americans, but living in England, they're the Chiltons of Chilton Manor. And Rob, did you interpret it the same way that Stefan met Valerie while traveling and they had a very brief romance and then got married in Switzerland basically right after they met? Yeah, that's what I got here. In a way, this is kind of like a sequel to a non-existent romcom. Yes, that's good. Oh, you often don't get to see what happens after the romcom. After the meat, cute wears off and then you really got to actually get to know each other. Yeah, when you really start figuring out what each other's sense of humor is or isn't, and then the red flags become more apparent. Now, Stefan has promised to take Valerie back to England to meet his family, primarily his mother, whom is repeatedly mentioned in a kind of ominous tone. But they have missed the boat because of the delay on the rail. And so Stefan suggests that they stay in a hotel in Ostain, which is a coastal city in Belgium, until they can catch another boat. And indeed, the exterior locations that we see, and certainly concerning the hotel itself, is in fact in Osten. And this place is a legit seaside vacation destination during summer months. The interiors of the hotel that we see, though, are the Hotel Astoria in Brussels. Now, here on the train, Stefan and Valerie have a conversation. It's clear that Stefan has not yet broken the news about Valerie to his mother. And there is an understanding that his mother would not approve either of the speed of their courtship or implicitly of who Valerie is. On first watch, I was wondering, is there something unsavory about Valerie? But I don't think so. I think the understanding is that Stefan is rich, and he's supposed to marry some wealthy heiress or something, keep to his class, and Valerie is just a regular person. Yeah, you get the impression that he's marrying for fun here, and he shouldn't just be marrying based on fun or love or something like that. It should be some sort of proper connection. Valerie is uncomfortable that Stefan's mother doesn't know about her. She gently presses him to break the news to his mother, but Stefan keeps making excuses. It's not the right time to call. She has a heart condition. The surprise could kill her. And it seems like missing the boat to England was a great relief to Stefan. Yeah. Valerie says to him, you'll have to tell her eventually. And he says in reply, quote, every year she's been telling me, Stefan, we are different. That is God's gift to us. We must never debase it. The implication being that Valerie is not worthy of Stefan, and she will reduce the precious metal within him, clipping the silver, so to speak. So at the end of the conversation, she asks Stefan if he is truly afraid of his mother, and he seems to be genuinely a little threatened by the accusation that he is afraid. So he promises to call his mother on the telephone when they reach Ostan. The arrival here in the city is marked by an establishing shot of the shore. I talked about this earlier, but it's horrifyingly bleak. It's off season. The beach is empty. The water washing up on the sand is just gray on gray. Shadows and beige building facades and dark window glass. Yeah. Yeah. Frequent shots that really drive home this kind of low tide off season vibe. And it leaves us to, they show us enough of it, and they show it to us frequently enough that we are left to ruminate on the meaning of these beautiful dreary shots, like seasonal isolation, seasonal withdrawal of life from a region, that sort of thing. So they arrive at their seaside luxury hotel, and so the hotel is completely empty apart from them. And they enter in style. They're kind of dressed like celebrities. He's wearing this cool leather trench coat, and he has the fashionably shaggy hairs, 1971, and Valerie's all dressed in white with a long coat lined with pale fur, and her face is kind of hidden behind big movie star sunglasses. And Stefan even picks her up to carry her across the threshold into the lobby. This is one of those scenes where like the last time we saw them, there was like, there was some strain now, and now they're just like happily coming over the threshold. Yeah, they push through it somehow. But yeah, they look quite fetching here. They're very mod, very fashionable. At check-in, we meet an interesting character, the hotel concierge Pierre. He is a large soft-spoken man, and in late middle age, I think this is the character that the director was expecting to be somebody even older, but he's like, I will play Gray. And so he does play Gray. I would say Pierre has an interesting sadness about him, almost as if it's kind of connected to his role here at the hotel. He sees the careless rich come and go every season, year after year, but he's always here. And in fact, we learn that he has worked at the same hotel since he was a boy. Yeah, yeah, there is an inherent sadness to him. It's like he almost like he haunts this place. Totally, yeah. So while they're checking in, Pierre mentions that the hotel is mostly empty. Actually, he says the quote is, it is dead due to the season. But Valerie smiles, and she, in her kind of agreeable way, she says, actually, she loves the seaside in winter. And Pierre says, Madame is quite right. It is much quieter. With probably some amount of back pain, Pierre lifts their luggage up and begins to carry it up to the room. No, so no bell hop, no cart. It is all raw Pierre muscle at this hotel. He's got like five suitcases. Yeah. And we see the stairs right there. I mean, this location is tremendous, and the stairway is very dramatic. At least if you're fashionably walking down those stairs and not lugging all of this luggage up those stairs. I don't think there's an elevator in this hotel, or is there? I don't know. We don't see it, do we? Anyway, while Pierre has taken the bags up, Valerie reminds Stefan that he promised to phone his mother when they arrived. Stefan first tries to make an excuse, but then he reluctantly agrees. So he chases down Pierre, who's in the middle of going up the staircase with the bags, and he interrupts him while he's holding all of this weight. And here's Stefan pulls a trick. He writes on a piece of paper and hands it to Pierre, and he asks him to call this number and put him through at the room. But the slip of paper, we can see it, and it actually says, say there is no reply, and he hands Pierre some money with it. So there are kind of two levels of drama here. Like the main one is between Stefan and Valerie. We're seeing Stefan pull a trick to deceive the woman he just got married to, and we're wondering why is he lying, what's going to happen, if Valerie finds out. But the second level of drama is more subtle. It's that you've got this creaky old concierge carrying like five suitcases at once. He's going up the stairs for the millionth time in his life. And the young, strong Stefan is just carelessly making him stop in the middle of this climb, holding his bags to enlist him against his will in a plot to deceive his wife. This was many years before the White Lotus, but I feel some thematic kinship here. That sort of theme, I guess, is more top level or primary in White Lotus, kind of a subtext here. But I don't know, I was getting some overlap. No, no, that's a good call. In their room, Stefan gets the call and he feigns surprise. What do you mean you can't connect? Well, keep trying. He orders Pierre to keep it up. And then later we see Valerie and Stefan having supper in an otherwise deserted white tablecloth dining room. And despite the luxury, I'm sure this is supposed to be like a Michelin star kitchen, something is just rather cursed in this room. I would hate to be in this room. It's awful. Now, this dining room, I believe, is one of, if not the only, interior location that is at the hotel in Auxetaint. But it has beautiful windows. But yeah, it is very depopulated. And so there is an inherent kind of sadness to it. Maybe that's it. It's just that it's empty. And I don't know, something about the emptiness and the combination of colors and the lighting. I don't know. It's like they've come to stay at the Overlook Hotel during the office. Yes. Yeah. Food somehow never looks good in European movies from the 70s. I don't know exactly why this is. No matter how good it must have looked in real life, this film grain or something just makes it look like wretched mush. And there is a scene later where Valerie is, she's cutting up a roll or a bun of some kind in bed. And I despise this bun. It looks hard and dense and awful. Just some kind of disgusting pretzel brick as big as a fist. Yeah, I could never really make out what they're eating. Even in this scene, it's like they're entering into a fish. And I'm not sure of its breakfast or dinner. And then the scene in bed, I feel like a bowl of shrimp. And I was like, are they having shrimp for breakfast? I don't know what's going on here. We definitely see some gray lobsters later. It's just, no, it doesn't look good. But yeah, the foods on the platters are nicely covered by these crystal domes. I'm sure that keeps it real nice and warm. Remember that. Oh, also at the dinner scene, more questions about Chilton Manor. Valerie's like, don't you think it's odd that no one's answering the phone at your house? And he's like, taste my gray fish. He holds the fish up. He's living in the moment in the least healthy way possible. Yeah, it's all time. Yeah. So Stefan says, I don't see why you make such a fuss about my mother's opinion. The fact is she already hates you without knowing you exist. And eventually, Valerie gets him to promise that he's going to go ahead of her to England to prepare his mother to meet her. And he's going to leave tomorrow, or maybe the day after, or maybe the day after that, but soon. Also sounds problematic. Sounds a little bit like I'm going to leave you. But of course, into their life, a storm is about to blow because here we get to the arrival of Countess Bathory. She arrives at speed driven in this old fashioned European luxury sedan. Rob, I don't know if you know anything about cars or what kind of car this is, but it seems like a kind of fancy old style car. Like it's from a different age. Yeah, it looks sporty. It's being driven by a young woman named Ilona, whom the Countess calls her assistant or secretary. We first see the Countess as a dark silhouette in the car. And then as she's getting out, we see we see just these gleaming strips of polished black leather. That's her tall boots. And she's climbing out of the car one leg at a time. We pan up across her body. She's dressed mostly in black with furs, leather, I think some feathers in there too. And then when we get to her face, we don't see her eyes at all. It's just pale skin and cherry red lips behind a black mesh veil. And it's just a mouth. The top half of her face is hidden in shadow. There's just the red mouth. Yeah, what a presentation. I think towards the end of this shot, we see like the glistening of her eyes and they almost look black. Yeah, both the filmmakers and Cereg here apparently took inspiration like direct homage to German and American actress and icon Marlene Dietrich. So that's interwoven throughout the picture. Very overt shades of Marlene Dietrich here. Ilona is also, by the way, pale and dressed in black, but with an energy of perpetual anxiety, she's got a kind of learned helplessness. And the first thing she says is something kind of desperate about how she hopes this place will prove acceptable so they can stop traveling. And the countess is exactly the opposite. She just oozes confidence and domination. She tells Ilona to unpack their luggage and she goes inside. And then once she's inside the hotel, we really get a good look at her where she's like hidden behind this mesh veil. And she looks at people with this little smile like she could just like disassemble them and make make furniture out of their organs. It is just such a like a pitch perfect, you know, iconic femme fatale presentation here. I mean, the look but also her performance of this character is just so pitch perfect. Yeah. So she meets Pierre the concierge and asks him for the royal suite. It's the best the best suite in the place. Unfortunately, he has already rented it out to the only other couple in the hotel, pointing them out in the dining room. And when the countess looks in through the glass at Stefan and Valerie, they're while they're I think they're biting pieces of fruit. That's some garden of Eden imagery or not. Oh, he has the green apple. Yes. Yes. But the countess's eyes like turn into laser beams. Like she sees what she wants. But is it Valerie or is it Stefan? We'll have to learn later. But the countess says to Pierre like, Oh, no matter that I can't have the royal suite, I just want the suite adjoining theirs. And I'm gonna have to say that is bad manners. But as we're about to learn, she gets what she wants here. That is true. I think there's similar rules about like bathroom stalls and urinals and stuff like you don't if there are a bunch of empty ones, you don't go to the one right next to the occupied one. Yeah, we can space things out a little bit sweet wise in this place. Yeah. Also, Pierre is shaken in this scene. He because he says he remembers the countess. He says he's seen her before. She stayed at the hotel once many years ago when he was a boy. But that doesn't make any sense because he was a boy then and now he is old and she looks the same as she did when he first saw her. But she is unmoved. She says my mother perhaps Pierre is freaked out. Yeah. And I thought it was a very convincing free cap. Like there's a, he seems to be not only confronting the supernatural in this, but confronting his own mortality. You know, like it's really, I mean, he's really shaken here. Yeah. Now later, Ilona comes in with their bags and the countess points out the couple to her. She says, look how perfect they are. And then Valerie looks up and catches the two creeps just staring straight at her. But later that night, Valerie and Stefan talk to Pierre. They learn the countess's name. Why does the countess Elizabeth Battori and Stefan seems to make something of this. Now we do get a scene of the countess and Ilona together in their room. Ilona is staring out the window at Stefan and Valerie is there. They're actually outside walking on the beach in the dark down below. And Ilona says she can't wait another day. She is in need right now in need for what we, I think we're going to assume blood. But the countess says no, they will wait. And then she keeps talking about how perfect Valerie is. She's maybe not interested in Stefan quite as much as Valerie. And Ilona is jealous. And again, mirroring the kind of, the flashes of sadism we saw in Stefan earlier with like enjoying the situations of power he could create over Valerie. There seems to be something similar going on with the countess here. I detect that the countess is taking pleasure in Ilona's jealousy. That's like making her happy. And then Ilona says, I wish I could die. And the countess just replied, does not address this. And just says the light, the light hurts my eyes. So Ilona takes her off her red scarf from her neck and droops it over the lamp, tinting the room red. Beautiful. So there are curious emerging symmetries in these two relationships. Yeah, absolutely. But both are very unhealthy relationships in very similar mirroring ways. Absolutely. So I was thinking maybe this is a good place. This is sort of the end of Act One here. Maybe this is a good place to break and now recount things in a little bit less chronological scene by scene detail and instead give a broader summary of the rest of the plot. And then maybe we can come back and talk about individual scenes that stand out. Yeah, absolutely. So from here, while Valerie and Stefan continue their stay at the hotel, the countess and Ilona insinuate themselves into Valerie and Stefan's lives. There's a scene where they have a long conversation in the hotel lobby that we can come back and revisit. But they talk while enjoying some bizarre looking cocktails, some green stuff, and I don't know what all this is. But the countess explains that she is the descendant of the blood countess, Erzschibet Baturi of the 16th century, Erzsch, I think I was saying that right, Erzschibet meaning the same as Elizabeth, just happens to have the exact same name as her descendant here, who was famous for kidnapping and murdering young girls in a bizarre ritual that involved torture, mutilation, and bathing in her victim's blood. Valerie is more than a little distressed that Stefan is visibly sexually excited by this conversation about murder and mutilation. And then also that he and the countess start, I don't know, they're doing some kind of like murder lore foreplay right in front of everybody in the middle of the lobby. In a very like physically believable and yet outrageous way. The countess is basically like, let me touch your nipples whilst I tell you about the many crimes of my ancestor, aka myself. And Stefan is like, he is having an out-of-body experience. Yeah, and Valerie is understandably creeped out by this. Yeah. So after this, Valerie convinces Stefan to call his mother on the phone for real, but the call does not go very well. And there is a big twist, a big revelation here. The person that Stefan calls is in fact an older man lounging in this lavish conservatory in Chilton Manor, it's this place filled with plants, who kind of reacts with a raised eyebrow at the news that Stefan is married and sort of mocks him for it. I believe a lot has been made of this scene with the phone call, and there are questions about how to interpret it. Rob, I wonder if you read it the same way I did. Did you take it that this character is actually not supposed to be Stefan's parent in any way, but is being called a mother, but is actually Stefan's former lover and financial benefactor? Yes, I believe that's the interpretation that most have made, and that's what I read here. It's just one scene, and the character, we don't even know what this character's actual name is, the just codenamed mother is played by the male actor Fons Rademakers, who lived 1920 through 2007. Notable Dutch actor and director, as an actor, his other credits include 1975's Lifespan with Klaus Kinski, which I think I referenced earlier. And as a director, his most notable achievement was 1986's The Assault, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. His performance is quite interesting, not only because of this twist, but because even though I think there's supposed to be nothing at all supernatural about this character, he also kind of has vampire energy? Yes, absolutely. I believe it was, yeah, I was reading about this in the book V for Vampire by David J. Skull, and he describes this character as an androgynous amalgam of Oscar Wilde and Bella Legosi. Yeah, I'd say that's about right. Though to be clear, this character is not and is not implied to be a vampire. Right, right. Interestingly, this whole scene with the reveal of who Mother is, is just a phone call. This character shares no actual physical scenes with any other actor in the film. And John Carlin has pointed out that the director intentionally didn't want him to know the identity of Mother and kept it from him. But one of the producers got in touch with Carlin and told him because he's like, you know, because like, A, you're an actor, you need to know like your actual role. But also he's like, he didn't want it there to be any like any like weird feelings like after the fact that the movie comes out and then he finds out the twist. So he actually played this scene knowing what the twist was. Oh, okay. Well, so I think this scene is very open to interpretation and there are a lot of unanswered questions about it. Maybe we can address that a little bit more in a few minutes. But it's clear that it does, it's a source of kind of like unresolved anxiety and pain for the character of Stephen. Like he is not happy with this conversation. Yeah, you definitely get the feeling that everything that he is doing right now is in response to problems with his relationship with this individual with the person we're referring to his mother. And but Stefan, he does not deal with this pain well. Instead, he has some kind of emotional episode, which turns into rage and then violence directed toward Valerie and he beats and rapes her. The rape happens off screen, but it's he turns violent toward her. After the scene, Valerie wakes up while Stefan is still sleeping and tries to leave town by herself to escape the situation. But the Countess then intervenes, meets her at the train station and prevents her from leaving. She's trying to talk her into staying, not into staying with Stefan, but into staying maybe with her. Yeah. And they spend time together at some kind of spa or mineral spring, where they discuss Valerie's relationship with Stefan and the many dangers he presents. But it's increasingly clear over time that the Countess wants Valerie for herself. Meanwhile at the hotel, Ilona on the Countess's instruction, she's been told to do this, goes to Stefan and seduces him. And after this, they're in the bathroom and they're sort of messing around. And Stefan sort of he thinks he's being playful. But once again, there's this blurred line between kind of flirtation and aggression with him where he's like being playful, but he's actually being violent. And he's trying to put Ilona in the shower and he's laughing while he's doing it. And she's screaming no, seemingly in this case, because the shower water actually might harm her. They mentioned earlier that vampires shrink from clear running water. Yeah, yeah, Rhea, running moving water is sometimes like a deeper cut of a vampire weakness that isn't always employed because I don't think storytellers often know what to do with it or it seems like too potent of a weakness. But it's nicely used here. But in the struggle, Ilona falls on his shaving razor and she is killed. The Countess and Valerie arrive back at the hotel room just in time to see this, to see the body. This seems to be going almost exactly as the Countess planned. Yeah, I mean, I kind of I was thinking about this. You can easily imagine that they were supposed to walk in on the two of them, like in bed together or showering together or something. But Ope's surprise, she's managed to get herself killed by him. And the Countess is probably like, well, this is even better. This has worked out even better than I planned. So now the Countess takes control. She takes control of the situation. We get the sense that she's probably disposed of a body or two before. I think so. And she instructs Valerie and Stefan in how to clean up the crime scene and how to get Ilona's body into her car. And then they drive out to this desolate beach far from town. Again, all the locations that should be beautiful are actually just horrible and bleak. This is one of them. They go out to this horrible beach and they bury her body in the sand. By the way, here they're being watched by this older detective character we mentioned earlier, who is he shows up in the scene where they're having the conversation in the lobby also. Maybe we can talk about that. But he's sort of been on the case of the Countess we are led to believe. And then on the way back from this, the Countess just like runs him down with her car while he's on a bicycle. Yeah, yeah, there's no nobody's coming to save them. The beach, you mentioned like the desolate beach sequence here. I mean, tremendous in many ways. I love like you see the big concrete reinforcements of the beach. So even the beach here is like reinforced by domination and manmade violence. And then the burying of the body is just really perfectly executed, like the harshness of her body being thrown in on top of Stefan. It almost seems that for a moment there that they're intending to bury him alive with her. I think they're considering it. They kind of back away. But I don't know, I think they'll get there eventually. So the three of them go back to the Countess's room after this. Actually, first, I think Stefan and Valerie go back to their room. But Valerie is beginning to fall under the sway of the Countess. And I think there are interesting questions. Rob, I don't know if this is a good place to talk about it. Might as well. To what extent do you think Valerie's submission to the Countess is supposed to be like magical vampire hypnotism in nature? Or what part of it is just a kind of like a kind of helplessness and expression, further expression of what she's already shown, but from her personality, but taken to the extreme? Yeah, there's a lot of ambiguity to this. Like, is this just further domination? Is it to some degree liberation? I mean, liberation, yes, from Stefan, who she needs liberating from, but also it seems to be putting her under the control of a new oppressor. Right. And we've already seen the end result of the oppression by the Countess. Like she has clearly disposed of many thralls over the years, and they eventually just become tools and not darlings to her. But anyway, so Valerie is in this state where she's becoming increasingly enthralled to the Countess. She and Stefan in some way also, they're both seemingly having their wills kind of reduced. And Stefan wants to reassert control over Valerie and commands her to leave with him, but she won't go. So they end up in the Countess's room having another horrible hotel room service dinner, and a fight erupts. And Stefan is killed after the two women smash a crystal bowl on his face and cut him up with the shards. And then they just both drink the blood from his wounds. This sequence here, the killing slash sacrificing of Stefan, it's a scene that is both ridiculous. Like when it happened, I think my jaw dropped and I kind of laughed a little because yeah, they push it down on his face. And even the crystal plate cover cleanly snaps in two. The two snapped sides flip around and land on his wrists, slicing them open, and then they both begin to feed. But it's so perfect in its execution too. It feels like a sacred symbol. It feels like there's a structural completeness to it that I really liked. A very similar thing happened when Ilona fell on the razor in the earlier scene. There was a kind of almost a magical hand guiding it through the scene. It just like perfectly happens that it slices her wrists, and then she falls on it in this kind of implausible way. But it's all kind of done in a slow motion with these short close-up shots. Yeah, a similar thing going on. Yeah, and these possibly implausible deaths are not through. And when they do occur, they do feel like destiny. I thought it was interesting, the absolutely unceremonious dumping of Stefan's corpse where they just throw him over a wall under the road. Yeah, they're just done with him. Yeah. So after this, Valerie and the Countess escaped the scene of the crime in the Countess's car with Valerie driving. And the Countess is becoming desperate that they've got to get to safety before daylight, but they don't make it. And so here we get to the ending where I think as the sun is rising and coming through the trees, they're like driving along a road that's lined by trees. And as the sun comes in, Valerie is blinded and wrecks the car. Questionable whether she meant to wreck the car or not, I couldn't quite tell. I don't know if you have thoughts about that. I interpreted it as accidental, but I think this is an unacceptable read as well. Yeah, either way, Valerie is, I think she was wearing her seatbelt, and she is okay, but the Countess is thrown through the windshield and impaled through the heart on a branch from a fallen tree. And then she catches fire and explodes. Yeah, it's pretty stunning. And again, improbable in one sense, but also it feels like destiny. And there are some dialogue lines from the Countess earlier that kind of alluded to this. She talks about death following her, like death is always coming for her. And this is a scene where death catches up and claims her. And so she seems like a little shocked, but also realizing as well that this was always going to happen, and here it is. She's been living on credit from the balance of death for centuries now, and it's finally come to collect. But for Valerie though, it goes on. That's right. Yes, there is also a coda where Valerie has now become a vampire queen. And we see her essentially repeating what the Countess did to them. We see her making friends with a young man and a young woman at a luxury resort, these nice hot people dressed up in tennis clothes, the tennis rackets, and she is recruiting them, it seems, like she's the new Bathory. Yeah, yeah. And it leaves us, and this is the end of the picture, and it leaves us to contemplate so many things. But one thing I kept wondering about is what did the Countess see as her mission, and what is Valerie seeing as her mission here when she sees two young people? Is she identifying like a woman that she wants to free from a dominating relationship? Is it like an unending war against patriarchy? But is it or is it something else? It's just like here is just there is who's an attractive person that I want to dominate with my will. Like, you know, where is the domination? Where is the liberation? How does it all come together in this picture? Good question. I think that is somewhat left open. Because you bought your robot vacuum on your Barclay card, you got 0% interest for up to 24 months, which makes watching it hypnotically sweeping up your crumbs even more satisfying. Oh, Mr. Bit, what you buy is your business. Helping you pay less interest is ours. Barclay card backing your future. Subject to financial status, new customers only. Representative example, 24.9% APR representative variable, 24.9% purchase rate per annum based on £1,200 credit limit, TZC's apply. To talk about a few individual scenes, I wanted to dwell for just a moment on the trip to Bruges. So there's this time when they read some articles in the newspaper about, ooh, there have been horrible murders in Bruges, girls getting their throat slashed. And then what do you know? It's time to do a little day trip. Let's go to Bruges. So they go there, they do a boat ride on the canals, and then they just stop to look at a murder scene, like the police are around a house and a body is being brought out. And Stefan is just obsessed. He's insatiably curious to get up close and see the flesh of the corpse. There's this older man there who's telling him the details of the crimes. And it turns out this is the inspector guy who's been on the trail of the countess. Are we to understand, I think, that the countess is responsible for these murders? I believe so. Yeah, there's some illusion later on to the fact that she has been in Bruges recently and was clearly feasting. So Stefan is, he gets really absorbed as the girl's body is taken by under a sheet, though her hand keeps falling out and then they keep stuffing it back under the sheet. But he's so wrapped up that he like freaks out and he hits Valerie when she interferes with him. And so when they're on the bus on the way back, Valerie says to him, Stefan, I'm frightened. And he says, of what? She says, of you. And he's dismissive. He says, don't be ridiculous. I was just looking like everyone else. And Valerie says, don't lie to yourself. You were pleased. It gave you pleasure. You actually enjoyed to see that dead girl's body. And Stefan says, and you enjoyed telling me, we're getting to know each other. Which is interesting because it's this dark dynamic where I think he's sort of right there. There's something that she's getting fulfillment out of like recognizing this about him in some way. And then after this conversation, she kind of leans into him and then starts trying to get frisky on the bus, I think. But Stefan like pushes her hand away. And this is one of those scenes where there's like, it cuts there. And then the next time we see them, they're like coming in out of the rain and they're like laughing and everything's good again. But the next scene, by the way, we should also mention because this is the meeting in the lobby where the Countess and our young couple first get to know each other. And the Countess, when we first meet her here, she's sitting in a red velvet chair and she's knitting. She has two yarn balls with knitting needles. She's going to town. Yeah, I love the implied. I mean, in a way, they're like two vampire fangs, I guess, right? Oh, I didn't think about that. Yeah. Now, is this also refresh my memory? Is this also the scene with the bright green drink? Yes. Okay. Yes, we're not there yet. So like at first, she has a little exchange with Alona. Alona comes out and she's like, you know, I'm trying to leave you, Countess. I'm going to leave you and I'm going to go away. She says, let me go away. And the Countess says, I never would and you never could. And Alona's like, but you can have them, the new ones, the beautiful ones, but them, you don't need me anymore. And the Countess says, without me, you'd have no life. And Alona says, you call this a life. But the Countess again, is just kind of cold to her, unfeeling to her needs. And the Countess meets Stefan and Valerie as they come in from Bruges and invites them for drinks in the lounge. I like the part where she kind of fusses over them being wet from the rain. She's like, oh, no, no, you must go up and get yourselves dry clothes. If you came down with the slightest bit of a cold, I'd never be able to forgive myself. She also demands that Pierre bring them hot rum. Yes, yes. So they get hot rum. And yeah, she gets this bright green drink that I think a lot of you would recognize as a grasshopper. But in one of the extras, they were talking about this, they referred to it as an Alexander. And I was looking it up and they're different like Alexander drinks, not all of which are green, summer green. And I get the impression it's essentially the same as a grasshopper. I don't know, once that much cream de menthe is in something, I think all these drinks are the same. Equally undrinkable by humans or vampires. I considered trying to make myself one of these this week. But I was not, I didn't have time to go out to the store and get the ingredients needed. No shame on anyone who enjoys a good grasshopper. But it's never been my beverage of choice. I don't know what I would do with the rest of the bottle of a creme de menthe. It would outlive you. That's the tragedy of getting a bottle of creme de menthe. It's like you know that this will have to be passed on to another generation. And it's like seeing an ancient vampire queen walk into your parlor. It's like having a vampire lover. They'll be around when you're gone. Yeah. But I also love how she never drinks this beverage and then eventually just hands it to Alona who just dumps it into a pot of plant. Even worse, right? Because like other drinks you can dump into a plant and it's like, okay, that plant probably doesn't need a gin and tonic, but very well. But this is like a bright green clumpy beverage. It's made with heavy cream. Yeah. Yeah. So they have this whole conversation and it goes to a bunch of different places. She's so kind of coy and coquettish in a way. Like she's talking about how, you know, oh, I have to say whatever I'm thinking. I just can't keep it to myself. You know, the Archduke said to me, Elizabeth, you are an innocent. And yeah, she also talks about how she hates it when there's no one around. It's so lonely. She's the opposite of Pierre. But let's see. Oh, this scene eventually works it up to the spot where Valerie storms out while like the Countess and Stefan are going wild about the mutilation stories. But this also leads up to that moment I mentioned earlier that is such a good hormone moment where Valerie goes back to her room alone because, you know, her husband's like getting busy with the Countess about talking about getting cutting people's fingers off. And she goes up to her room alone and suddenly Alona comes in at the balcony, I think wanting to drink her blood. But she's like naked and doing this weird ballerina pose. And we hear Valerie scream. But then when we come to her later, she's like in bed. And you don't know what happened in between. Also, when we see Alona later, she's like leaning naked over a toilet and vomiting, I think. So it's like what happened while they were off screen? It's not quite clear. It seems like something happened. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe Alona's just sick from not feeding something to that in that regard. But then, yeah, the Countess comes in, chastises her, and tells her like, oh, you couldn't wait, could you? And so forth. Let's see. Anything. Oh, we said we were going to say a little bit more about the call with quote, mother, this character. One thing I had to say about this scene is not at all about the themes. I was curious how the phone call was going to work. Is the Butler brings the telephone out to the conservatory on a platter? Oh, it's not plugged into anything. It's not plugged into anything. And I was like, where's the cord? I was like, this is unrealistic. But then it all came around. Because the Butler kneels down, gives the phone, hands the phone over, and then plugs the phone into a jack in the floor. I was like, oh, that's how they do it. They're just jacks everywhere. You plug it in wherever you bring it. That's smart. Yeah, it took so much work to have a phone call in those days. Yeah. But anyway, seriously, when the conversation begins, the surprise is it shows this older, middle-aged man who's like, you know, he's in a hammock in the conservatory surrounded by beautiful plants and flowers. And he's like on a pink and purple pillow. And he's wearing a scarf. And he says on the phone, he's like, Stefan, I hope you didn't do anything foolish in Switzerland. And Stefan breaks the news that he got married and there is kind of derision and cruel amusement in the response. It's just kind of like, oh, what a nice surprise. What you did wasn't foolish. It was merely unrealistic. What in the world would we do with her? And he, you know, he says, he says, like, when she hears about us, oh, I hate to think about that, kind of seemingly threatening him or something. But it's never made fully explicit what he means here. You just have to kind of read the scene and make your own interpretation. But he ends saying, be sure to tell that young woman that mother sins regards. And then after the call, of course, this is when we see Stefan first turn really violent with Valerie. And it's interesting, like before the violence actually starts, you see these kind of two waves come over him that I think are interesting in the performance. Like you see him by turns internalize his feelings, and then a change happens, and then he externalizes them. And then that's when he becomes violent. Yeah, yeah. I think it's very interesting here that, again, mother is portrayed as a male character. And yet the actors were originally not told this detail. In fact, we're left to infer that it was a female character, perhaps the character's mother that he actual mother that he was on the phone with. So, you know, it's an interesting exercise to try and figure out like, why did they make this choice? And my read on this is that part of it might be, it might come back again to this theme of victimization and patriarchal rule. So, you know, we have our character Stefan here who is seemingly like both a perpetrator and a victim of patriarchal power. Like there is this older man in his life that he is, he at least feels controlled by and is rebelling against and has gone out into the world and sort of like found someone that maybe on some level, you know, on some level definitely felt liberating and freeing to be around. But then it comes back around to how can I control this person and in doing so feel free from how I was being controlled. Yeah. And I guess like in like clearly the gender divide is was important to this film's vision with the Countess being kind of like this female force of liberation or another form of domination. And therefore they thought it was important to have the figure that it was controlling Stefan to be, you know, equally a male force. And therefore, you know, beating into this idea, you know, that it is patriarchal oppression that is, you know, that is, you know, weaving its roots through everything. But at the same time, it's definitely worth noting that there are, there definitely do seem to be some homophobic tropes wound up in this mother Stefan relationship that we're presented with. And, you know, these, this could have quite possibly been, you know, incorporated indirectly for a number of reasons. But David J. Skull does call it out in V for vampire. The late David J. Skull was himself openly gay and often wrote about the intersect of homophobia, gay culture and vampire media with observations based on everything from homo eroticism in mainstream Dracula films to its overt treatment in counterculture, art house, or even pornographic films that had vampire characters in them. And he describes Daughters of Darkness by saying that quote, the politics are ambiguous, you have suspiciously homophobic, but the film contains a sufficient number of stylish set pieces to have earned it the reputation of a minor classic. So again, I do tend to agree with Skull here. I think there are some homophobic tropes wound up in the portrayal of this character. I don't know how much of it was itself directly intentional or kind of a byproduct of other things the film was trying to say, and maybe just incorporating tropes that were just present everywhere anyway, in the early 1970s and a lot of films and storytelling. I think it would have been, it's interesting to try to imagine different versions of this film where the reveal here of mother was a little different. Like what if the scene had him talking to an older woman that was his actual mother or an older woman, or even a woman his own age that seems to be a past romantic partner who is domineering and he's trying to escape from. Like what would it have changed that much? Would it have had that much of an impact? Or what if regardless, what if there was like some element of tenderness to the relationship implied as well? Because what we see here is just a relationship of domination. Yeah. I mean, you could imagine a version of the scene where he makes the call and the character is the same, but the character is like angered, is like showing like real, like a sense of having been betrayed or something that Stefan went and married somebody else. But you don't get that. There's just kind of a confident dismissal of him. Just kind of like, this is silly. I'm disappointed in you. You'll be back under my thumb soon. Yeah. Things like this have happened before. This may be more severe, but I'm not surprised. Yeah. You'll be back next week. And in fact, it's kind of like the exchange with Alona and the Countess. Yes. When Alona, I mean, there are multiple things like that, like when she threatens to leave and the Countess almost completely ignores her. It's just like, yeah, yeah, no, you need me. You're not going anywhere. Or in the scene where she says, I want to die and the Countess just says the light's hurting my eyes. Yeah. There's so many ways that the relationships that these characters have mirror each other, the living and the undead. Another kind of interesting mirroring that's worth talking about is how Valery's romance in a way with the Countess, though it seems to be a kind of maybe magically controlled romance. Because when the Countess is first like trying to seduce Valery, the Countess says what she says many times, she says, you must be nice to me. Soon you will love me as I love you now. And Valery says, I despise you. You're disgusting. Now, maybe you could think Valery is, I don't know, maybe covering up her feelings. Maybe that's not really how she feels. But I don't know. I take it as that there is some amount of magical coercion of some kind going on as she falls for the Countess after this. But there's like a similar arc to how she seems to fall for Stefan in the first place. And then there's a similarity when, like by the end of the movie, Valery first becomes the Countess's new Ilona, and then she kills the Countess and becomes the new Countess herself. So, yeah, it's kind of a Sith Lord thing, right? There are always two, and then one kills the other. It makes you wonder how many times this has happened as well. We sense that the Countess has killed many Ilonas, but was the Countess once some other Countess is Ilona? Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. And the magical coercion, I do want to come back to that scene where they end up finally killing and feasting on Stefan. Again, we have the crystal glass that they press over his face. But also, this is the sequence, I believe, where she's wearing that just magnificent sequined gown. It's like a disco ball. And the light, like the way they lift this scene, like the light is just bouncing off of her. And you really get the sense that she is like this bewildering lamp. She is like a lighthouse that has completely ensorcelled the both of them. But also, the movie is packed with mirrors. Almost every scene or every other scene has a mirror, and it's constantly characters looking in mirrors or being across from mirrors. And in this final scene here with the three of them, the Countess becomes a mirror. It's like her body is a disco ball mirror from top to bottom. It's reflecting all of the light, and it's reflecting them. And it's kind of that she shows them what they are in a way. It's fabulous. Yeah, it is a great movie to read and reread. It has so many, like I say, it feels like it's speaking to you in some sort of a code, and you're left to decipher it in your subsequent viewings and reviewings. Also, I got to throw it out there. The shot where they show after her body gets thrown out of the car in the wreck, and she's just hanging on that branch, it looks amazing. Yeah. Yeah, as does that shot that we alluded to much earlier in the episode, where she finally raises up her cape there on the beach. Oh, yes. And it's like she has bat wings, revealing her vampiric nature, at least to us, the viewer. And it's just so splendid. And you had to be clear, she's one of the villains of the piece. Yeah. But you can't help but love her style. Is everybody a villain by the end? I think Valerie seems to be up to no good by the end. So the characters that don't start off villains become villains. Everyone, all four of our main characters have killed or tried to kill somebody. So yeah, there's nobody's completely squeaky clean here, are they? Just Pierre. Pierre. Poor Pierre. Oh, yeah. I like Pierre. Okay, well, I guess that's Daughters of Darkness. All right, we're going to go and close it out here. But we'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this picture. If you have a story about your history with Daughters of Darkness, if you have thoughts on some of the themes we've discussed here, write in, we would love to hear from you. Let's see, just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. As an experiment right now, we are also running Weird House Cinema as its own playlist, which means it will come up as if it's its own podcast on whatever platform you get your podcasts at. Wherever that is, that means you can rate, review and subscribe to it there and just get Weird House Cinema. So we're trying that out. So try it out. Tell us what you think, what your thoughts are on it. Also, if you want to follow us on Letterboxed, our username is Weird House. Follow us there. Take a look at all the films we've covered over the years and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes next. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.