Blood Symbol (1992)

College student Tracy (Micheline Richard) is having a bit of a bad time. As if being plagued by nightmares about robed figures and sacrifice, and being the girlfriend of the incredibly boring Steve (co-director Maurice Devereaux) weren’t bad enough, there’s also a creepy guy (Richard Labelle) in black who looks a lot like a giallo killer stalking her, disappearing mysteriously whenever she tries to point him out to anyone. Let’s not even talk about the disembodied voices speaking or shouting her name, the invisible powers drawn to her for poltergeist-style shenanigans or the fact that there’s already one girl from her school missing, and we the audience know the disappearing girl has been ritually sacrificed.

Eventually, Tracy will figure out that all of this has to do with something called the Cult of the Blood Symbol, a century old cult looking for “chosen ones” born with an invisible mark of Satan to sacrifice so they can gain immortality by drinking their blood. The cult is supposed to be long gone, but one member does indeed remain – immortality can be pretty useful there - and she’s clearly one of the chosen.

Shot over the course of more than half a decade, losing its lead actress to the old artistic differences after half of the film was in the can so that she had to be replaced by a stand-in that was only shot from afar, and being awkwardly dubbed with barely synched voices, this film by pretty wonderful indie director Michael Devereaux and Tony Morello should by all rights not work at all. In practice, it’s as great a film as could possibly have been made under these circumstances, finding the French-Canadian version of that spot of stylish irrationality and irreality the supernatural arm of the giallo and other European horror films from the 70s and the 80s (and yes, some American films too) liked to inhabit. Though there’s also time for some visual homages to Carpenter’s Halloween - which in its turn is unthinkable without the giallo even if its visual stylisation was of a different kind from the Italian school.

Of course, given the production situation, some of the film is awkward. The dialogue is stiff enough as it is without the non-performances in the pretty horrible dubbing (which is the sort of thing that can happen when you have to shoot without sound) but for every moment of awkwardness, there are three of wonderful visual imagination, from self-made dolly shots to surreal dream sequences in black and white, editing (also by Devereaux) that slips between montage and pure, controlled weirdness, and a camera that races and glides whenever possible. The directors have a great eye for the creepy side moment, too: my particular favourite are the swings on a playground starting to asynchronously swing by themselves when Tracy passes by, our heroine seeing but ignoring them. All of this may be derivative, but it’s derivative of a specific aesthetic and mood of – mostly – European horror filmmaking instead of being a commercial rip-off, and as such more like a love letter to style of horror filmmaking than an attempt to cash-in on one’s budgetary betters.

Which works wonderfully on me as someone who loves 70s European horror and its predecessors and successors; Blood Symbol’s rough edges and its near absence of a traditional narrative really seem to be unimportant or even simply beside the point. The point is to recreate an aesthetic and the moods that come with it through whatever methods the filmmakers can come up with, and as such, the film’s a complete success.