An Ur-film Among the Living Dead

P. has spent half a life-time trying to find one vampire film, or rather to re-find it. In this post he explains why.

If you asked me about it last week, I would have said that I must have first seen my long-lost vampire film late one night in the early eighties. It was the sort of wonderful, crazy film I watched a lot of at the time, and was just the sort of film that might have been shown as part of a Jess Franco double feature with Vampiros Lesbos (1971).

I will call this film of my memory, my ur-film, though it wasn’t the first vampire film I watched by a very long shot. But it was the film that, even twenty years later, kept me ordering and watching one crazy seventies vampire film after another, searching. Now I think I have found my lost film: A Vampire Among the Living Dead (1971).

For the last five years at least, since I started collecting vampire films and systematically re-watching them, I have often wondered which weird film it was that started … well, as this film starts … and which had lots of scenes set in an overgrown and run-down old garden, with a lake … as this film does … but I managed to conflate these scenes in my memory with chunks of other strange European vampire films from the early seventies, so that lots of the films that I bought and watched seemed close to my ur-film, but none quite matched everything I remembered.

I realise now that my ur-film—the great Franco film of my memory—was probably a conflation of a number of weird and wonderful scenes from films by Franco and Jean Rollin (and other similar films like The Devil’s Nightmare (1971), etc). As I watched more and more of these films, trying to find my ur-film, I would see scenes that were close to, or which matched part of, my lost film, but the match was never complete. And as my memory was vague, so I could never be sure whether the scenes were familiar because they were from the ur-film, or they were familiar because I had simply seen the films before. (Which, given the number of films I have watched, happens all the time).

Now that I have found the ur-film, or at least the film containing the scenes I remember most clearly from my ur-film, I realise that it is actually “missing” a whole host of scenes and it includes a host of scenes that I don’t recall at all.

Of course, Franco was forever chopping-up and re-releasing his films under a myriad of titles, so even if I had known the film-title at the outset there is no guarantee I would ever have found the late-night version I watched on TV in the eighties, because it may not have been available on DVD or DVD-R ripped from VHS or recorded from TV in some other place, at some other time. It is almost as if every showing of a Franco film is a unique event, never to be repeated, and can never be reconstructed.

So, it may have been that the ur-film of my memory was not a fabrication and a distortion of memory but a crystal-clear recollection of a version of A Virgin Among the Living Dead that really was pieced together from chunks of film from this and other Franco vampire films, and was shown only in Sydney in the early eighties.

Having read the entry for this film on INDB, and elsewhere, I think this is unlikely. More likely, I simply have gathered together in my mind a series of memorable scenes and, well, remembered them all as belonging to one film: my ur-film.

The other vampire films (the films that seemed a bit familiar at the time, but which were clearly not my ur-film) contained scenes that did match a part of my remembered ur-film, but which were missing other scenes that I remembered quite clearly. I dismissed them at the time, and as a consequence, despite the fact that I now want to re-watch them, I can’t recall them clearly enough now to identify them either! So my ur-film remains vague and elusive.

All is not lost however. I have my ur-film, or most of it, and since we intend to re-watch all of our vampire films again, in chronological order this time, I am bound to identify these other films soon enough. To tease your memories, and to help strengthen my own, I will jot down the scenes I am looking for here, as I remember them, then I will identify the films they come from as I watch them.

As we re-watch the 220 vampire films in our film library, I will also add the titles of the films, and describe the scenes I recognise from my ur-film, but which I failed to recall in advance and list below. Eventually, I will have a list of all of the scenes from my ur-film and we can see what sort of film they represent when gathered together!

Typically, right now I can only remember one scene. It is:

[1] A woman fleeing an attack, with a castle, falls into an enormous spider’s web, at the foot of a circular stair-well, and is attacked by a huge and very fake-looking spider.