Daughters of Darkness

Review by Mike Finkelstein

Dracula is a character that is well represented in horror cinema. He’s the most famous, most popular vampire in pop culture, fueled in no small part because he’s been in the public domain for some time. A writer could make their own master vampire character or they could shorthand years of history, literature, and fan knowledge just by naming a vampire “Dracula” and expecting everyone to follow along. With a famous vampire at the helm, you can trust people will turn up curious to see what the monster is up to.

But he’s not the only famous, evil, vampiric noble from history. Erzsébet Báthory is another of those monsters that people seem to find interesting. Of course, again, being a real, historical person means people can write about her, call her a vampire, and there’s no need to worry about copyright. Her actions when she was alive were so deplorable that many called her a vampire back then, just as they do now. She’s a name that, at least in vampire circles, has weight. She’s a draw, in a sense.

Except there isn’t nearly as much cinema about her as there is Dracula. You could lifetimes trying to track down every work that mentions Dracula, that has him as the antagonist or the protagonist, or just a side character that hangs around and flashes his fangs once in a while. But Báthory has maybe twenty-five films to her name, give or take, and a small handful of video games and television shows that reference her. She’s never caught on in wider media the way Dracula has, and that means it’s much harder to track down and cover the works she has appeared in since many of them are no longer available or in print.

It was by pure happenstance that I even stumbled across Daughters of Darkness, a 1971 erotic horror film (that’s both light on the erotic and the horror, I should note). I was doing a deep dive of Shudder, looking for some horror to watch, and I have to assume the app has learned way too much about my viewing habits in the short time I’ve had it and it was like, “here’s a vampire movie no one else wants to watch. Why not give it a try?” Well, the reason is because it’s bad, but that has never really stopped me before, so on the movie went and I then spent an hour-forty being utterly and absolutely bored.

The film focuses on young newlyweds, Stefan Chilton (John Karlen) and his new bride Valerie (Danielle Ouimet). The couple are on a train ride across Europe to head to his home in England, but an accident on the tracks stops their train, and they’re forced to disembark early. Stuck in the seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, the couple has missed their boat ride by a few hours and has to decide what to do instead. Valerie still wants to go to England so she can meet Stefan’s mother (Fons Rademakers) but Stefan seems weirdly uninterested in it, as if he’s ashamed of Valerie and afraid to disappoint his mother.

Their discussion is interrupted, though, by the arrival of Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) and her assistant, Ilona (Andrea Rau). Years before a Countess Báthory stayed at the same hotel, a fact that the bellhop (Paul Esser) distinctly remembers. But there’s simply no way she could be the same countess as she hasn’t aged a day. And yet everyone seems drawn to her, including the newlyweds, her beauty and power too strong to ignore. It sets Stefan on edge, while Valerie is both drawn in and revolted by Elizabeth. They’re all caught in her game, and if she has her way, the newlyweds will be two more added to her collection before their honeymoon is over.

To reiterate, Daughters of Darkness is boring. It doesn’t really work as an erotic film (which maybe that was the goal, maybe not) but it also doesn’t work as horror. While the opening scene of the movie has a moderate amount of nudity (leading to that “erotic” descriptor) the film doesn’t even rise to the level of softcore porn (let alone hardcore porn, such as the ever amusing SexculaA Canadian porn film from 1974 with a name far better than the content within. A silly lark with a nonsensical plot, this one is really just for vampire fans that have to see everything.). It drifts and meanders and never really finds itself or its plot. And then, at a certain point, Elizabeth is half-heartedly revealed to be an actual vampire (as in, “let go drink blood” vampire) and by then the audience is already zoned out.

Directed by Harry Kümel, and written by several screenwriters (Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry, director Harry Kümel, and then Joseph Amiel), the film doesn’t really understand how to make effective horror. This movie came out in 1971, during the big horror boom that Hammer helped to usher in, and as such there were plenty of examples for the film to draw from, not the least of which was Hammer’s own Countess DraculaThe classic horror film from Hammer's vampire heyday, this film features Ingrid Pitt, one of their most popular actresses, in her second vampire role., which came out the same year and did the Báthory story much better with ever actually having to use her name. Daughters of Darkness, though, fails on every level.

For starters, the film is set to such a slow burn that it hardly feels like it’s warming up at all. It takes forty minutes for anything remotely tense to happen. This is a scene where Báthory and Stefan discuss the Báthory family history, its famous Countess who killed and tortured young girls so she could bathe in their blood. The film has the two characters recount much detail about the old countess’s actions, with both getting visibly turned on as they discuss her, and that was a moment that actually worked well. However, this comes nearly halfway into the film, and is the only time the film even approaches actual horror.

You have to chalk some of this up to the budget, with the film getting made for only three-quarters of a Mil. That probably complicated things, requiring a small cast, a reduced number of sets, and a lot of compromise. But it also meant there wasn’t much money for monster effects, makeup, or gore. It’s hard to have an effective monster movie without a visibly scary monster, and while that’s not an impossible feat, per se, it seemingly proved a harder task than director Kümel could handle.

That or he really wanted to make something arty and failed in that regard. The film has that lazy 1970s artfulness to it, with bright colors contrasted by fuzzy shooting. Several sequences are meant to feel strange or surreal, making you think about how the vampires feel and what their victims are going through. At least, I assume that’s the intent. It doesn’t work, mind you, but I think the director was trying for something and simply didn’t succeed. He clearly wanted a more thoughtful study of lesbian vampires and the couple they stalk, but the end result is slow-paced and languid in ways I’m sure weren’t intentional.

Sure, you can delve into the layers of the script and pick out the themes the writers were reaching for. The abuses of the rich, between how the Countess treats Ilona contrasted against the abuse Stefan unleashes (eventually) on Valerie. One might say that love can be found among the lesbian vampires, certainly to a greater extent than what Stefan, cad that he is, gives towards his new wife. The story is a confusing jumble of ideas like this, but it never actually feels like it reaches the lofty heights that were intended. It tries, and maybe trying is good enough, but to me it felt more like failure than success.

Whatever the ambitions were for Daughters of Darkness, it never feels like the film reaches them. It’s too focused on mood, on watching these characters circle each other without ever doing anything, and eventually it becomes a chore sitting around, waiting. There’s nothing quite so bad as a horror film that actively seems to regret having to be horror, but in the end that’s what we have with Daughters of Darkness. It’s an arty film that fails at being arty wrapped in a horror shell that fails at being horror. I wished it were better simply so I wasn’t so bored while watching it.