In short: The Grapes of Death (1978)

Original title: Les raisins de la mort

Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is on her way by – a nearly empty - train to reunite with her fiancée, who is working in a vineyard in the country. When she’s nearly there, she is attacked by a somewhat unhealthily and a bit rotten looking gentleman, who kills her best friend.

Élisabeth manages to escape the train and makes her way through a French countryside that has turned into a bit of a madhouse. People are infected with some sort of illness that turns them homicidally mad while their bodies slowly appear to decay. Well, that goes for the men at least, women seem to rot slower and go crazy in more interesting ways, because this is a Jean Rollin movie. Later, Élisabeth will learn that it’s all on account of a pesticide her own fiancée used on his grapes, but before she gets there, she will have various, often somewhat surreal and nightmarish, encounters with the mad, the sick and their victims.

Quite a few people seem to see The Grapes of Death as one of the films the great Jean Rollin made exclusively to get money for his more personal projects, but to my eyes, this is certainly no Zombie Lake nor like one of Rollin’s porn movies but the work of a director genuinely attempting to infuse the budding zombie apocalypse genre with his own sensibilities. For me, at least, Rollin does so quite successfully as well. In a couple of scenes, he’s grazing the more direct socio-political concerns you’d find in a Romero movie – and at least the bit with the infected wine is a satirical masterstroke – but mostly, he’s interested in what Rollin’s films are always interested in: Gothically romantic shots of landscape and buildings in decay he here finds in empty fields and a half-destroyed village and in some incredibly shots of the vineyard, where it always seems to be early November; violence that is broken and framed through a sense of the surreal; actresses with particularly expressive eyes, though you can’t always be sure what they express; an idea of madness that’s taken half from the literature of the macabre and half from what feels like a very personal place to me; and of course doomed (or undead) love.

In Grapes, Rollin fits all of this into a slowly – Élisabeth is on foot, after all – evolving picaresque of the macabre, a couple of moments of light gore, and at least one sequence (the burning village and a truly crazy Brigitte Lahaie performance) that feels like an authentic, if peculiar, nightmare, shooting everything with the eye of a painter of dream landscapes.