A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Christina Reiner (Christina Von Blanc) receives a letter informing her of the death of her father (whom she has never met) and inviting her to his mansion in the British Honduras for a reading of the will.

The innkeeper informs her that Monserrat Castle is deserted, though the appearance of a (mute) servant, Basilio (Jesus Franco), to take her there appears to contradict this.

Arriving at the mansion, Christina meets its inhabitants and things start to get weirder. Her stepmother dies but no one seems to be bothered. A series of extraordinarily vivid nightmares – and daymares – follow, culminating in the appearance of her dead father…

Like most Jesus Franco films Virgin Among the Living Dead can best be described as an acquired taste. Its auteur has a definite and distinctive style, though whether his work can be described as that of a madman, a genius or a charlatan is debatable.

The film is cheap, sleazy and exploitative, with plentiful (female) nudity, kinky lesbian S&M games and so forth. But this goes with the territory. To criticise a Franco film for what it is gets us nowhere.

The question, then, is whether the film works as an example of its type, the European fantastique. And here the answer is a qualified yes.

While there are several passages of the film where the director appears lacking in inspiration, resulting in the usual zooms in on random details, these are redeemed by some genuinely poetic and dreamlike sequences, most notably the encounters between Christina and her dead father.

It's these moments that show the film for what it is. There is an internal logic and coherence to what is going on, only not the one that English-speaking audiences, weaned on a diet of Hammer horrors and psychological thrillers in the Hitchccockian mode, would expect.

The deployment of Old Dark House and Agatha Christie motifs leads one to expect that someone bad wants to drive Christina insane in order that they might claim her inheritance. Eventually, following this roadmap, their plot would be uncovered and all the seemingly supernatural goings on would be determined to have some mundane basis. (For a good example, dating from around the same time, see the 1969 Hammer film Crescendo.)

That the living dead just are, can be seen by Christina if no one else, and merely want to claim her as one of their own (her true inheritance) simply have to be taken as givens.

Away from Franco's contribution, Bruno Nicolai's score, with is combination of sleazy listening and ominous noise-making is a definite plus, providing an ideal accompaniment to the visuals, while Christina Von Blanc makes an appealing doe-eyed innocent.

But, above all the film is Franco's. For all his faults, cinema needs filmmakers like him. They present us with an alternate vision of what the medium could be, a road less travelled that could point the way for future development…