It's funny to think that this is the idea of "Hammer" films 'growing up'; that they decided to start going after an adult audience, when films about lesbian vampires is all I was trying to get my hands on as a kid. Then again, I think Hammer films are romance. I mean that in a very traditional way; they aren't romantic stories in fact they typify the differential between sex and religion, a just (and chaste) Jesus overcoming the forces of evil at the end. But the romance I talk of is the sets, the costumes, and that Ingrid Pitt can hold her laugh long enough to get her lines out, with thick 60's mod make up, in a Victorian era piece. She broods over unsuspecting young women to devour their souls. As they lay dying she'll show up for a brief second to tell the father of the victim that their daughter is dead.

Hammer films, even when they started to dabble in their own time (such as the Satanic Rites of Dracula - shot on location in the late 1970's), maintain this romantic idea. It's kind of why I think The Vampire Lovers is a brilliant film. It epitomises that romance in a woman who goes by 3 different names: Carmilla, Marcilla and Mircalla - played by Ingrid Pitt. The movie isn't just pure exploitation, it has brief yet expressionistic dream sequences, and while I don't think a person can get more exploitative then lesbian vampires, Pitt's character is one played with a touch of longing and jealous rage for her lovers, whom she seduces through nightmares.

While Pitt's a siren of what I could only call extreme sexuality, she is counter pointed by a nemesis played by the "Righteous and Good" Peter Cushing, who I'd have to say, is the opposite of sex. I have a lot of trouble with the end of Hammer films and I feel this one too is of a rather tragic nature, mostly because I'm the guy that does root for the monster. While I don't know if the producers where trying to saying something about how homosexuals are treated as monsters (being that this film was a joint venture between American International Pictures and Hammer, also know as Mr. Roger Corman and Hammer) it's even harder to say, being that Corman is the type of guy to play half art house - half grindhouse, and leave you wondering if he's just a cheap exploitationist or artistic genius.

The film is loosely based of the novella "Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu... but the story does pre-date Dracula (another good Hammer title). To me, plot is kind of insignificant in these films. They are very "Zen" in that you know the ending: Cushing will either behead or crucify our villain (or heroine?), and I say heroine because Carmilla is the most prominent and seen character throughout the story. By the terms of Northrop Frye's work she has to die because she doesn't change nor arc, but we see that she suffers in a moments notice because she, unlike other monsters, LOVES her victims. They seem to be more then just a simple seduction; they are her lovers and companions who become as much obsessed with her as she with them.

It's all part of the romance, and yes this is a typical romance. You will be brought flowers and a lobster dinner, you will sit by candlelight and be told how nice you look and that time means nothing when you are in the room. This film is emotive, sexual, beautiful and has just a hint of pain and a hint that it's about to giggle --the actresses to this day admit that they had trouble not giggling during some of the scenes, and you can see it in the corners of their mouths. To me, in some way, that makes it all the sexier.