The Velvet Vampire (Stephanie Rothman, 1971)

 

In the opening scene of Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire, a woman walking alone at night is assaulted by a man who rushes her from behind - within seconds, he’s dead, and (with the notion of gender power shifts thus already established) the woman, Diane, walks on to an engagement at an art gallery where she’s rapidly flirting with a married man, Lee, under the nose of his immediately hostile wife Susan. Diane invites the couple to her house in the desert, clearly with seduction somewhere in mind, but once they’re there the dynamics gradually shift, summed up in a central scene where Diane and Lee make love in the living room, while Diane locks eyes with Susan watching from the stairs. Diane, evidently, is the vampire of the title, equipped with the bottomless resources that facilitate eternal life (big house, faithful servant attuned to her needs) but also a sense of fragile neediness which rapidly unravels over the few days of the film’s narrative – her final pursuit of Susan is as much desperate as it is malevolent. Despite one’s enthusiasm for the film’s underlying ideology and concepts (their scope enhanced by several symbolic dream sequences), it’s hard not to regret the often flat dialogue and acting and staging, or the way that key scenes seem unnecessarily rushed: not least the ending, when Susan spontaneously enlists a group of passers-by to join her in crushing Diane’s life force. Of course, this may only be to say that the film works within commercial and genre constraints - its more artless aspects can be defended besides as a way of deliberately limiting our unthinking capitulation to such fanciful mechanics, of holding the spectator at a degree of analytical distance. Likewise, while it’s superficially very much a product of its time, with a general laid-back early 70’s vibe, it’s one that always feels precarious, and rife for fragmentation and reinterpretation.