The Blood Spattered Bride

Lesbian Vampires in Lilac: Alexandra Bastedo in The Blood Spattered Bride

Vincente Aranda's The Blood Spattered Corpse, from 1972, is an interesting lesbian vampire flick that straddles the border between art and exploitation. A young bride, married to a brutish aristocrat, is haunted by a phantom who closely resembles an 18th century murderess whose portrait just happens to be hidden in the basement of their aged manse. Aranda, best known in this country for the 1991 film Lovers, successfully alternates between the competing pulses of repression and passion that are the nexus of concern in Gothic horror. 

The film is a loose and modernized adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's novella, Carmilla. An author of Victorian potboilers, Le Fanu is not much read today, but he was the primary influence on Bram Stoker. Carmilla itself has been adapted into twenty or so films, most notably Dryer's Vampyr. The character of the husband is an Aranda addition to the tale, mostly to bash the patriarchy and make his sapphic couple more sympathetic. 

Not all of Aranda's touches work. The sexual symbolism of the film, like the bride snagging her veil on a miniature cannon, verges on the ridiculous. The lead performances are overly somnambulant, though Simon Andreu is suitably reptilian as the husband. I did appreciate Aranda's use of animal traps, representing the vain attempts of man to keep the chthonic forces of nature at bay. I also got a kick out the film's color coding, especially the symbolic use of white, black, red, and lilac. 

Aranda's films have a genuine erotic charge to them. The interiors and exteriors of The Blood Spattered Bride contain the right amount of decay, dread, and mystery for a gothic yarn. The female lovers here are a rebuke to man and his hegemony. Aranda portrays man as not as in touch with the supernatural pull of nature as the so-called weaker vessels. The Blood Spattered Bride has most of the defects of exploitation cinema of this era, but its images contain enough beauty and provocation to rise above its genre.