Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
18 (2020)
122
magazine, ‘hated’ The Rape of the Vampire and did not review it; The Iron Rose (La rose de
fer, 1973) was booed and heckled at the Convention du film fantastique de Paris, and The
Night of the Hunted (La nuit des traquées, 1980) got a similarly hostile reaction at the Sitges
fantastic film festival.
3
Damaging myths were constructed around him, and Rollin gained a
terrible reputation in the French film industry.
4
A special derogatory term, ‘Rollinade’, was
even coined to describe what was perceived as the disastrous quality of his filmmaking.
5
As a result, Rollin’s work has received comparatively little thoughtful attention. This
has been slowly changing since the landmark publication of Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’s
book Immoral Tales in 1994, and the Redemption DVD releases in the early 2000s, which
made Rollin’s work more readily available. In recent years, a special issue of Kinoeye, Samm
Deighan’s edited collection Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, and
key essays by Isabelle Marinone and Mario De Giglio-Bellemare have started to develop
more complex reflections on Rollin,
6
although to this day, his work is still categorised as
‘Eurotrash’ by numerous scholars, including those who appreciate his films.
7
Despite this
enduring perspective on his cinema, and the feminist dismissals by authors such as Bonnie
Zimmerman and Andrea Weiss,
8
within the exploitation framework that he was working in,
Rollin created a richly transgressive gothic-inflected world dominated by women. Over the
course of his long and turbulent career, he persistently ignored genre conventions and
3
Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: Sex and Horror Cinema in Europe 1956-1984 (London:
Primitive Press, 1994), p. 142. According to Tohill and Tombs, Midi-Minuit Fantastique did not mention the
film because the magazine’s publisher, Eric Losfeld, was a friend of Rollin’s and did not want to give him a bad
review; see also Rollin, MoteurCoupez!, pp. 118, 194.
4
Rollin, MoteurCoupez!, p. 101. According to Rollin, he had an atrocious reputation in the early 1970s, and
there were even rumours that his actresses disappeared and ended up in brothels in Tangiers or Egypt.
5
Tohill and Tombs, Immoral Tales, pp. 151-52. The term was later reclaimed positively by sympathetic critics,
starting with Jean-Marie Sabatier in 1973 (Rollin, MoteurCoupez!, p. 118).
6
See Blood Poetry: The Cinema of Jean Rollin, ed. by Steven Jay Schneider, Kinoeye, 2.7 (2002)
<http://www.kinoeye.org/index_02_07.php> [accessed 23 September 2020]; Samm Deighan, Lost Girls: The
Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (Windsor, Ontario: Spectacular Optical, 2017); Isabelle Marinone, ‘Le
surréalisme au service du fantastique. Jean Rollin un cinéaste “parallèle”’, in Les cinéastes français: A l’épreuve
du genre fantastique, ed. by Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), pp. 271-86; and Mario De
Giglio-Bellemare, ‘Dreaming Revolt: Jean Rollin and the French Fantastique in the Context of May 1968’, in
International Horror Film Directors: Global Fear, ed. by Danny Shipka and Ralph Beliveau (Bristol and
Chicago: Intellect Press, 2017), pp. 191-222. Jean Rollin’s films are now available to stream at
<redemptiontv.net>.
7
Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945
(London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004) includes a foreword by Jean Rollin and a chapter on his work.
It is telling that in his foreword, Rollin uses the terms ‘popular’ and ‘B-series’, and never ‘Eurotrash’ or
‘exploitation’, to define the cinema he practises.
8
Bonnie Zimmerman, ‘Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in Planks of Reason: Essays on
the Horror Film, ed. by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2004), pp. 72-81
(p. 74); and Andrea Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 85.