This film is freakin’ brilliant. Don’t allow the title to mislead you. Although the translation of the Spanish title (La Novia Ensangrentada) is accurate, this film is so much better than the title (and the insane original trailer) suggests. It may have been a B feature, but it is an A-grade film.
The Blood Spattered Bride is a reworking of Sheridan La Fanu’s Carmilla story with an important innovation; Carmilla is a misandrist, separatist-feminist. La Fanu wrote his story before the women’s movement existed, but The Blood Spattered Bride was written at the height of 70s feminism. The film plays on anxieties in the 70s audience about the growing women’s movement and the fear that women’s collective anger will lead them to bone-handled violence. So the director has imbued La Fanu’s homoerotic tale with a political awareness and a misandrist philosophy.
Carmilla is motivated by the desire to avenge the wrong done her two hundred years (or so) earlier. As a blushing bride her newly-minted husband asked her to perform, we are told, “unspeakable” acts on the wedding night. So appalled was Carmilla that she butchered him on the spot (thus the “blood-spattered” bride). Carmilla is found in a catatonic state and after two years without movement she is buried. It is unclear whether she is dead or undead when buried.
[Carol playing Carmilla, while showing Susan all the female portraits that have been dumped in the cellar]
[Susan and her husband search for Carmilla's grave. When they find it, Susan watches in horror as he snaps one her bones]
Fast forward to 1972. Now, the beautiful Susan is the blushing bride (we first see her in her wedding dress, and she looks fantastic). Susan does not butcher her husband on her wedding night, but she dreams about her never-named husband raping her, and about a diaphanously-gowned Carmilla visiting her, and inciting her to violence against her husband. The line between dream and reality, fear and desire, is never very clear.
[Carmilla helps Susan butcher and castrate her husband in her dream]
[But Susan finds the knife Carmilla gave her in her "dream"]
[Susan's husband discovers the "real" Carmilla, buried on an empty beach, while trying to hide the knife. A surreal moment]
Susan is actually a very complex character; and the film is directed in such a way that the viewer really has to work to understand what is really going. So, for instance, it is not apparent on a first viewing that the rape scene at the beginning of the film is, in fact, a fantasy (or, more accurately, a dread-filled day-dream).
In fact, the trustworthiness of all three central female characters—Susan, Carmilla and Carol, the housekeeper’s daughter—is undermined. When we first meet Carol she says she is fourteen when she is actually twelve. Since her testimony is crucial in a later scene, the viewer is left uncertain whether Susan or Carol’s account of events is true (meaning, whether we also accept Susan’s other “dreams” as reality or not).
Also, the validity of Susan’s anger toward her husband is also treated with skepticism. We are encouraged to dismiss her “bad dreams,” and defloration-anxiety, with a bit of psychobabble. But, as the film progresses, it is clear that Susan’s anger is very real indeed. And, although Susan is increasingly influenced by Carmilla—in her thrall—it also becomes obvious that Susan’s emotional state is the product of her own agency.
The issue of credibility is a central point for the complex character of Susan. It is a truly adventurous film in it’s depiction of female sexual desire and the various forms that desire can take; often including unconventional desires like domination and “rape.” But there is a “safety word” in even the most extreme consensual fantasies, which Susan’s husband just doesn’t seem to understand. And in scene after scene, his behaviour gradually steps from awkward to inappropriate to nasty and wrong.
[Susan hides from her husband in the dovecote. He breaks down the locked door to get to her. Is this their game, or his alone?]
The script is so clever that even the viewer is not always sure of when trust has been breached but there is a creeping feeling at these moments during the film that something really important has transpired. The uncertainty Susan displays about her own sexual responses to her husband makes it difficult for the viewer to understand her, or to understand her growing violence. Even she doubts her growing anger toward her husband. However, Carmilla has no doubts that her Susan’s anger is justified.
This twisted version of “sisterhood” is the essential appeal of the film. Carmilla wants to generalize the revenge she took against her husband to revenge against all men. So she encourages Susan to take revenge against her partner, and she seeks to influence an even younger generation, Carol. Her thrall is a catalyst for feminist-political awareness, she is the agent that unleashes female anger and builds female solidarity. It is a great credit to the Carmilla of this film that she is doesn’t speak of calling on dark masculine powers to give her potency to enact her revenge; she is her own dark power.
[Susan's husband drones on, but the women are in their own world]
[That night, Susan and Carmilla sneak out together]
With Susan, Carol and Carmilla joined against the men in the film, the men in the film are forced to join against them. The film becomes an us-and-them morality tale. The message; it is dangerous for the girls to spend too much time together, not just because of the potential for lesbian sex, but because of the feminist awareness. And once the sisterhood are “aware,” the spattering begins!
All three women are frightening figures to mainstream heterosexual society, but Carmilla is truly monstrous to the men in this film: she encourage her sisters to rise up and right the wrongs done to them with a beautiful bone-handled knife.
[Susan waiting for her husband to go to bed. She is planning to kill him]
[That night, Susan attacks her husband while Carmilla urges her on: "Kill Him! … Slash his face! Find his heart and cut it out! Silence him! Punish him for his insolence! … Put an end to his arrogance! … Destroy his masculinity!"]
[Carmilla is caught in a rabbit trap while returning, with Susan, to her crypt]
And the violence is directed at the phallus. Carmilla helps Susan repeatedly stab her husband, and then instructs her to cut his penis off. In another scene Susan attacks Carol’s unnamed father. After slashing him across the face and neck scores of times she shoots him once in the head and once in the crotch. When Susan and Carmilla consummate their union, Carmilla has Susan say "He has pierced your flesh to humiliate you … He has spat inside your body to enslave you." (full text below)
[Susan about to shoot the caretaker in the crotch]
When Susan’s husband finds Susan and Carmilla in a coffin together, naked, he closes the lid, shoots the coffin and the women full of holes.
[Carmilla and Susan in a nice wide coffin]
Immediately after this, Carol arrives, in a red mini-skirt, rings on her fingers and bite marks on her neck. He has her kneel between his legs before shooting her in the head. (Her last words are "They will come back. They cannot die".)
[Carol arrives]
What happens next is truly disturbing: the final shot is of the husband about to slice a breast off Carmilla. The close-up image freezes, with one of his hands tightly holding a handful of breast, the other holding the knife, the blade is pressed into the flesh. The scene cuts to a newspaper headline: “Man Cuts Out the Hearts of Three Women.” The sexual subtext, and sexual politics, of the film give a new meaning to this traditional removal of a vampire’s heart.
Carol’s story is as interesting as Susan’s, and her relationship to Carmilla is almost as complex. She has been helping Carmilla from the start, she brings flowers to her crypt and clearly adores her. It turns out that Carmilla is her teacher, and so her loss of innocence to Carmilla—her developing feminist awareness is articulated, but her developing sexual awareness is only suggested—has quite a disturbing edge to it.
[Susan's husband finds Carol in the crypt, leaving flowers for Carmilla]
Having said this much about the meaning of the film, we should say a few words about the bits we particularly like, the cinematic highlights. (For plot outline, see the Wikipedia entry here.)
The film is beautifully shot, the shots are clever, the sets are sensational, and the actors are breathtakingly beautiful. Only Blood and Roses has a more beautiful central cast. We have scattered screen caps of the highlight moments from the film throughout this post, but some moments are hard to capture.
[The husband's gorgeous house]
[Susan meets Carmilla. The painting symbolises what is to come]
It was only during a third watching of the film, for instance, when we realized that Susan and Carol not only look very much alike (oval face, fair hair), but are almost always seen in very similar clothes: just different enough for this not to be not too obvious. In one scene Susan and Carol are both wearing a cotton shirt, short skirt, and knee-high socks; in another scene they are both wearing dark Corduroy jeans and a pale skivy, and so on. But in both scenes you almost never see the two at the same time, the camera shows one then another.)
Another great example is the morning-after-the-night-before scene. Susan and Carmilla creep out of the house at midnight and spend the night together. The next morning, Carmilla is gone, and Susan arrives at breakfast, late, in Carmilla’s dress. As she swans across the lawn, she slowly runs her hands through her loose hair. Once she sits down, she takes a teacup in both hands and raises it to her lips, only then looking at her husband. It is only then that you notice she has rings on all her fingers, worn jewel-inwards in the distinctive style of Carmilla. (In the final scene, when Carol arrives at the crypt, we see she is also wearing a full set of finger rings in this way, indicating that she has joined Susan and Carmilla.)
[Carmilla's distinctive finger rings]
[Susan comes to breakfast wearing rings Carmilla-style]
You cannot capture such moments in a screen cap. The genius of it is that you can’t see Susans fingers throughout this whole shot, though her hands are almost always in view, the are hidden by the flowing dress at her side, her hair, her neck, the cup, catching you unaware, after you have processed the dress, the tension between the two, the lack of eye-contact, etc.
The stand-out scenes: Susan taking Carmilla’s vow (for M.) Susan's husband finding Carmilla buried at the beach (for P.) The script for the vow follows. Note how the desecration of Carmilla's grave by Susan's husband is elided with Susan's "desecration" or defloration.
C: "Your sanctuary has been ravaged, your tranquility disturbed, your shrine stained, corrupted, grossly invaded by violence. In this desecrated fortress, I search for consolation for my troubled soul. Do not judge me too harshly, for I obey a desperate law that forms both my strength and my weakness. If your heart is wounded, mine bleeds too. Within the rapture of my vast death I live only through your vibrant life. And you will die gently, in order to live through me. I can do no more. As I come search for you so, in turn, you will search for another, to share with you the ecstasy of this cruelty. The only kind of love for you and for me."
After drinking blood from a wound on Susan's hand, Carmilla has Susan recite the following words:
C: "Say it."
S: "I hate him."
C: "Say it again."
S: "I hate him."
C: "Say it will all your heart."
S: "I hate him!"
C: "He has pierced your flesh to humiliate you!"
S: "He has pierced my flesh to humiliate me."
C: "He has spat inside your body to enslave you!"
S: "He has spat inside my body to enslave me."
Carmilla then drink from Susan's neck, and the moaning begins...
