Honourable Mention: Beauty and the Beast

This Czechoslovakian film from 1978 is a dark retelling of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast and can be found in the Severin films set All the Haunts be Ours Vol 2. There is a mention of blood drinking within that is not expanded on much within the film but given the unusual takes on vampirism in some of director Juraj Herz’s other films, namely the Ninth Heart and Upír Z Feratu, then I think it is certainly of genre interest.

In the film a merchant (Václav Voska) has three daughters. Two, shallow and money hungry are due to marry, but the third, Julia (Zdena Studenková) who had a different mother, is pure, innocent and loving. The merchant has sunk all his money and a considerable amount of debt into a venture and the caravan taking the merchandise back takes a short cut through a dark forest and – having desecrated a rose by picking it – ends up in calamity losing the cargo and thus his money.

bloodied beast

Ruined, the father has to sell all and leaves to try and sell the portrait of Julia’s mother. Caught in the forest himself, he is rescued by a mysterious stranger (Vlastimil Harapes), the beast, and he gives a mass of riches for the portrait. However, as the father leaves he picks a rose to give to Julia, which enrages the beast who would kill him. The father pleads to say farewell to his daughters and the beast allows him to leave but he must either have a daughter return to him to be sacrificed or return himself. He intends to return but does tell the daughters of the deal and Julia immediately rides out to save him. Though she is denied permission to see the beast, she begins to fall in love with him and that love has a transformative effect.

hunting a doe

So why are we looking at this? From the beginning her beauty has an impact on the beast – who in this is drawn as an anthropomorphic bird creature – and we hear the inner dialogue between beast and man. The beast urges him to kill her, pointing to her throat and saying that he knows how sweet her blood will taste. The other side of him denies he needs her blood as there are plenty of does in the forest from which he can drink and we do see him ride one down. The blood drinking is explicit, but it is not further built on. The film itself is wonderfully gothic in construction and is certainly of genre interest.

The imdb page is here.