The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

             Just about everything I know about the Franco regime in Spain I learned through Guillermo del Toro movies, which doesn’t say great things about me.  The fact that his dictatorship didn’t end until 1975, basically yesterday, and that active Spanish fascism was a reality during the making of this film is something I’m able to grasp intellectually but doesn’t feel quite real.  There is an underlying tension to the film, a fundamental uncomfortableness, that I’m not going to attribute directly to Franco still being in power during production but I do think living under such a system necessitated the indirect and fractured methods the film uses to display and interrogate its themes.

              Normally I’d be a lot more defensive bringing such relatively lofty ideas to the discussion of a movie titled ‘The Blood Spattered Bride’ but we’ve accidentally stumbled upon a real filmmaker here.  Vicente Aranda was one of the giants of Spanish cinema.  Getting a start relatively late in life, even though this was only his fourth movie he was already 46 when he made it, having an entire life already behind him  He’d started as a fairly experimental filmmaker, gradually shifting to more mainstream, commercial films as he went along without losing his desire to explore ideas through his movies.  Four years after this movie he made ‘Cambio de Sexo’ which examined the changeover of Spain from the dictatorship of Franco to a democracy through the story of a young teen going through the process of a sex change.  In 1991 he became known worldwide for ‘Amantes,’ which won several international awards and became a modest American arthouse hit.

              This is another movie that claims to be based on Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” although instead of a loose adaptation in this case we’re closer to the territory of ‘vampire as metaphor’ again.  Once more the move doesn’t really care about vampiric lore or clearly established rules for the supernatural but for once it’s because the vampire is the least interesting part of the movie.  As played by Alexandra Bastedo the character of Mircalla is a fine enough vampire, but the movie isn’t really about her.  Instead the movie is about Maribel Martin’s Susan and her relationship with her new husband.  The movie rather tips its hand in that the only characters in the movie to get names are Mircalla, Susan, and a small girl named Carol, everyone else, even the husband (especially the husband), just get descriptions or are referred to by their relationship to the other three.

              I’m not sure the movie has a thesis as such but it’s certainly very focused on the central idea of whether marriage is inherently sexual violence.  Kinda directly about that.  The movie opens shortly after the leading couple’s marriage ceremony, as Susan and her husband arrive at their hotel on their honeymoon.  While the husband is parking the car Susan goes to their room and while undressing has a very vivid fantasy of a masked assailant jumping out of the closet and raping her.  Under the mask the assailant looks an awful lot like the husband.  When her husband get to the room she asks if they can leave the hotel and drive directly to his family estate.  This isn't obviously marked as a fantasy, it's presented as an actual event and only shown as not real in the following scene.

              After arriving and meeting the servants Susan looks out of a window and sees a woman in the courtyard wrapped in a gauzy pink sheet who meets her gaze then walks away.  She catches glimpses of this woman both in reality and in dreams over the course of the first half of the movie.  After this scene she’s finally alone with her husband who startles her by ripping off the front of her wedding dress as a kind of foreplay.  She darts away, then dramatically spreads her arms and allows herself to be taken to bed by him. 

              The first half of the movie is the slow escalation of both of these threads.  Susan will see the woman but mention it to no one and her husband becomes increasingly demanding, both of her time and her body.  He tries to pull her up onto a rock by her hair, hurting her, casually tries to initiate fellatio in the middle of a forest, and gets visibly upset whenever she tells him she’s not interested in sex.  Meanwhile she starts to wonder about the lack of women amongst all of the portraits throughout the house.  The servant’s daughter, Carol, eventually leads her to the basement, whereupon she sees Mircalla’s portrait, revealed as the woman she's been seeing.  Finding Susan down there her husband then brings her to Mircalla’s tomb and tells the legend about his ancestor, how she killed her husband on her wedding night for asking her to do unspeakable things, then frightens her by snapping a human arm bone in her face.

              After this Susan once again refuses sex with her husband and finally Mircalla appears to her directly, albeit in a dream.   She hands Susan the dagger from her portrait, saying its hers now, then bites her neck.  Susan is into it at first then bolts upright, screaming herself awake.  Everyone rushes in and assures here there’s no one in her room.  Except the dagger really is in her bed, under her pillow.  She worries about it to her husband and their doctor.  They brush off her concerns, although they do hide her dagger.  Things again slowly escalate until Susan has a dream where Mircalla comes to her, shows here where the dagger is hidden, then assists her in repeatedly stabbing her husband to death and cutting out his heart.

              And here’s where the movie makes its biggest leap and fully commits to being more or less allegorical.  In an effort to finally get rid of the dagger once and for all Susan’s husband goes down to the beach and buries it in the sand.  While he’s there he sees the end of a snorkel and a hand coming out of an otherwise untouched area of sand.  He digs out a naked woman who promptly gets in his car, claiming rather unconvincingly she doesn’t remember anything other than her name, Carmilla.  He drives her home and offers to let her stay the night until he can bring her home the next day.  None of that business with the beach is ever explained, by the way.

              Susan immediately points out to him that the woman is the same one from her dreams, but her husband again brushes her off.  That night, however, he wakes up in the middle of the night to find himself alone in bed.  He looks out of the window and sees Susan and Carmilla walking hand-in-hand out into the woods.  Later that night Susan returns to their bed much calmer and more distant, refusing to answer his question about where she’d been.  The next morning Carmilla is gone.  Susan and her husband go to the beach where she picks up seashells.  She insists she’s feeling better and the woman isn’t important, and then he notices the bite mark on her neck.  She runs to where the dagger is buried, digs it up, and attacks him, although he easily fends her off. 

              The next day he hides the dagger again and confides his worries to their doctor.  That night the doctor follows Susan to the tomb of Mircalla, where she and Carmilla have a vague ceremony where they bond with each other about being vampires, the upshot of which is that Susan finally decides she hates her husband and hates their sexual relationship specifically, likening it to enslavement.  The doctor leaves when Carmilla begins feasting on Susan while they moan in overtly sexual ways.

              The next night the doctor is still creeping around the house while Susan desperately tries to break into the cabinet containing the dagger.  She succeeds just as the doctor finds her and with Carmilla’s help she stabs him to death.  As they’re dragging the corpse down the stairs the husband comes out to see what all the noise is about.  They chase after him as well but he manages to run outside, get into his car, and drive away.

              As Susan and Carmilla make their way back to the tomb they come across and kill one of the husband’s servants in the woods.  In an effort to truly get the message of the movie across after stabbing him and shooting him in the face Susan deliberately lowers the rifle and shoots him in the crotch.  Back at the house, having returned and gotten his own rifle, the husband hears the shot and takes off after them.  He finds the dead servant then makes his way to the tomb.  Here he finds Susan and Carmilla lying naked in each others arms in a coffin.  He closes the lid, steps away, then very carefully shoots the coffin again and again until blood is pouring out of the bottom.  When he’s done the girl Carol comes in, shows him she’s been bitten as well, then kneels down to allow him to shoot her in the head as well.  The movie ends with a shot of a newspaper headline reading “Man cuts out the hearts of three women.”

              Even though I say this is not a subtle movie that doesn’t mean I entirely understand the point that it’s going for.  There’s a pretty obvious feminist reading here, that the husband’s assumptions of marital attention are indistinguishable from overt violence.  The movie even makes a point of noting how young Susan is (the actress was only 17 during filming so all her nudity was done by body doubles).  The husband tears her clothes, pulls her hair, at one point she locks a door to keep him away and he just kicks it in.  On the other hand Carmilla / Mircalla is a pretty obvious stand in for a violent version of radical feminism.  While Susan is attacking her husband near the end Carmilla yells out “Put an end to his arrogance!  Kill his masculinity!”  Susan goes from frightened to spree killer pretty much instantly under Carmilla’s influence and by showing Carol to be infected as well it implies that this kind of radical feminist thought can spread rapidly.  On the third hand the husband is not portrayed at all sympathetically in response to this.  The last few minutes are spent watching him coldly gun down two defenseless naked women and then putting a bullet in the head of a twelve-year-old, all with no expression on his face.

              I was, on the whole, pleasantly surprised by this one.  I’m not going to say it was a great movie but it was well put-together and surprisingly substantial.  A lot of thought went into the themes and ideas behind this film and the vampire parts added to them rather than being thrown in as an excuse for gore or jump scares.  This would make an excellent double feature with ‘Daughters of Darkness.’