A Virgin Among the Living Dead: Franco's Dream-State Eurotrash

Before anything else, a warning about what you are buying. A Virgin Among the Living Dead is a set of overlapping films assembled by different people over roughly a decade, sharing a negative, and the version you watch determines almost everything about the experience. Some cuts contain zombies. Some contain hardcore inserts shot by other hands with other actors. Some contain neither. Jess Franco spent his life complaining about what was done to this picture, and for once the complaint is justified — the film really was rebuilt around him while he was elsewhere.

Underneath the accretions is a 1973 picture Franco shot in Portugal called Christina, princesse de l’érotisme, and it is one of the two or three best things he ever made. Getting to it is the problem.

The will

Christina arrives at her family’s château for the reading of her father’s will. She has not been there before. The relatives are waiting — an uncle, an aunt, a cousin, a servant — and they are strange in a manner she cannot place: too formal, too still, faintly amused, apparently unbothered by heat or time. Christina von Blanc plays her, and the performance is the film’s spine: open-faced, polite, increasingly unable to make the house’s arithmetic add up.

Howard Vernon plays Howard, the uncle, and Vernon is Franco’s great recurring instrument — a gaunt, courteous presence who can suggest something appalling by declining to blink. The household treats Christina with impeccable hospitality throughout. Nobody threatens her. Nobody bares anything. They simply keep being where she is and answering slightly the wrong question, and the film’s entire dread comes from that.

The idea underneath is old and Franco plays it perfectly straight: a young woman inherits a house full of people who have every reason to want her to stay. What makes his version work is the sunlight. He shot in Portugal in bright heat, and the château is filmed as a pleasant place to spend an afternoon. The horror happens in good weather with the doors open.

Franco, unsupervised, sober

The interesting question about Jess Franco is always which Franco turned up. He directed something close to two hundred films, most of them fast and many of them careless, and the standard defence — that the volume was a method, that shooting was how he thought — is true and does not rescue the bulk of the output. What it does explain is why the peaks are so high. A man making eight films a year will occasionally make one where the improvisation lands on something.

Christina is one of those. The picture is unusually still for him. The zooms that deface much of his work are used sparingly. The compositions hold. There is a patience here that is closer to Vampyros Lesbos than to the eight pictures either side of it, and the two films together make the argument that Franco’s real subject was the specific dread of being somewhere beautiful with people who are not what they claim. The full case on Franco has to reckon with both.

Bruno Nicolai’s score deserves separate credit. It is mournful, harpsichord-led, and it is doing something quite specific: the music grieves throughout a film that has not yet told you anybody is dead. Watch it a second time and the score is the only honest thing on screen from the first reel.

Why it works: hospitality as horror

The mechanism is worth naming precisely, because it is rare and Franco executes it better here than anywhere else in his filmography.

Almost every horror film builds threat by escalation — a series of incidents, each larger. Christina has essentially no incidents. What it has is a household that behaves correctly at all times and a guest who is slowly running out of ways to explain them. The dread accumulates through etiquette: a meal at an odd hour, a relative who is present at breakfast and absent from the photograph, a conversation that closes off a topic without seeming to. Franco keeps the film courteous, and the courtesy is what tightens.

The technique that sells it is the framing. Franco puts Christina in the centre of shots with the family arranged around her in depth — behind, to the sides, at the edges — so that in nearly every scene she is surrounded and the composition tells you before the script does. She never notices, because you cannot see your own blocking. The audience is watching a trap that the protagonist is standing inside of, and Franco holds the wide shot until you want to shout at her.

The daylight is the other half. Give this material to a Gothic director and you get candles and thunder and a film you have seen. Franco’s afternoon light means there is nowhere for the fear to hide and no atmosphere to blame, so the wrongness has to come from the people, which is where it belongs.

The Rollin problem

Here is where the film’s history turns genuinely bizarre. Some years after release, distributors wanted a version that could ride the zombie boom, and additional footage was shot — sequences of the undead moving through fog — by Jean Rollin, who was doing work-for-hire at the time. That material was cut into some prints, and the film was retitled to sell it.

The result is a French vampire poet’s zombie footage grafted into a Spanish director’s Portuguese ghost film to satisfy an Italian market trend. The inserts are visibly Rollin’s — the slow figures, the flat landscape, the absence of urgency — and they are entirely alien to what Franco shot. They also, maddeningly, are not bad on their own terms. The grief-haunted stillness of The Living Dead Girl and the fields of Requiem for a Vampire are recognisably the same hand. Two of the great European genre eccentrics collided inside one negative without collaborating, and the collision produced a mess.

Then there are the hardcore inserts, added by a third party with body doubles for the export market, which are indefensible on every axis and are the reason the film’s reputation curdled for two decades.

The version to seek is the one closest to Franco’s cut — restored editions from the cult labels generally offer it, often with the alternate material as an extra, which is the correct place for it. Anything titled to promise zombies is telling you what has been done to it.

The ancestor

The zombie framing is a distributor’s lie and should be ignored. There is no plague, no siege, no crowd.

The real ancestor is Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey’s 1962 picture, and once you see it the resemblance is complete: a woman in a place that will not quite behave, surrounded by people whose interest in her she cannot account for, in a film where the dread comes from social wrongness in ordinary light and the ending recontextualises everything. Franco almost certainly knew it. He made the sunlit Portuguese version.

The other cousin is the Val Lewton line — the horror that is custodial, where somebody is being kept — which runs through I Walked with a Zombie and lands here almost unchanged. The family are keepers. The château is the ward.

The verdict

In its own cut, A Virgin Among the Living Dead is the film that makes the case for Jess Franco as an artist rather than as a phenomenon of volume. It is patient where he is usually frantic, it is scored beautifully, it has a genuine central performance, and it runs on a mechanism — politeness as menace — that almost nobody in seventies horror attempted.

The case against is unavoidable and it is not really about the film. This is a picture that has been so thoroughly interfered with that most people who think they have seen it have seen something else, and Franco’s habit of working faster than his own quality control meant he had no standing to defend it. Even the good cut has slack passages and a couple of scenes that exist because a producer wanted them. You are watching a fragile thing through several layers of other people’s commerce.

Worth the excavation. Start with the eurohorror canon for the map, then come here with a restored disc and an hour and a half of patience.

Spoilers below

The family are dead and Christina is dead with them.

The reveal is that the will-reading was never going to produce an inheritance. The house is a way-station, the relatives have been waiting for her, and the father who summoned her did so from the other side of the arrangement — the hanging that shadows the film is the family’s business rather than a stray Gothic detail. Christina has been dead, or dying, or crossing, for the entire runtime, and the château’s impeccable hospitality has been a reception rather than a welcome.

What makes it land is Nicolai’s score and Franco’s blocking, both of which have been telling you since the first reel. The relatives arrange themselves around her because they are an honour guard. The film is grieving from the opening bar because it is already a funeral. Every scene you read as sinister on the first pass reads as gentle on the second, and that inversion is the whole design. The household has been receiving her all along, with the patience owed to family, and the terror belonged entirely to the guest who had not been told.

Franco lets the last stretch dissolve into the pure dream-state the title promises, and it is the only place in the film where his zooms come back, because now the ground genuinely will not hold. The Queen of the Night figure who drifts through the closing material has no explanation and needs none.

The cruellest fact about this ending is what happened to it afterwards. Distributors looked at a film whose entire structure is a slow, tender revelation of death and decided it needed some zombies in it — and hired Jean Rollin, of all people, to walk them through a field.