Some Scattered Thoughts on Jean Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampire (1973)

Because frankly, Rollin’s films do often lend themselves to scattered thoughts more than stringent analysis or a simple recounting of their plots. Though, to be fair, Frisson (known as Shiver of the Vampires in most English speaking markets), is actually one of the man’s more plot-heavy films, with an at least half-clear throughline and even some recognizable character motivations.

This is also the Rollin movie that show clearest that this strange low budget Romantic had a sense of humour. To wit, he provides us with two male vampires who are as goofy as they are weird, letting them give a couple long, word-play heavy double-monologues that connect vampirism to Isis as well as to the Black Madonna (it’s not as if “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” had invented this stuff) while Rollin uses the camera and the actors’ somewhat dubious performances in comically grotesque ways that not just lighten this heady (in the early 70s meaning of the word) business up considerably but also add to the Weird mood of the film instead of detracting from it.

This does of course fit nicely into one of Rollin’s greatest strengths, his ability to turn what should be his film’s greatest weaknesses into their greatest strengths. So, if not all of his actors and actresses can really act but absolutely have faces for the sort of things he’s doing he’s getting them to consciously increase their somewhat dazed and stiff demeanour until they act as if they were sleep-walking, which always seem to be an appropriate way to go through Rollin’s gothic dreamy and dream-like world of nude vampirism and (in this case) early 70s hipster vampires. Characters in Rollin’s films – certainly our male lead here – are so often not clear if they are dreaming or not, reacting in manners to the world Rollin creates that seem perfectly appropriate and downright realistic in context.


Which to me seems to be one of Rollin’s great achievements, making the borders between dream and reality inside of the particular dream world of his films so porous, diffuse and liminal, even a strict term like “realistic” can shift its meaning.