Thursday, January 24, 2008

Honourable Mentions: Vampire


A rather bizarre honourable mention, Vampire is a short film that appears on the UK DVD release of Satan (or Sheitan to give it the French title). Many thanks to Corroding Halo who provided me with the opportunity to watch this.

The film is very short, silent, black and white with juddery images and bizarre. A man enters a room, dressed as Father Christmas, where a woman (Monica Bellucci) lies sleeping. He drinks from a bottle, looks at her and then pulls the covers back. His hand extends as though to grope her when she awakens, which we can tell by his reaction as the camera focuses on his face as he blows kisses and seems to try to calm her. The camera focuses on her and she develops fangs.


She pulls him down, bites and then the camera focuses on her bloodied mouth and she sensuously licks blood from her finger. The film then repeats and repeats again. That’s it, short sweet and I can’t really say to the point.

In actuality the initial sequence can be seen in the main feature, early on, in a clip on TV in a gas station – there is nothing else within Satan that relates to the vampire genre but it is a great, if disturbing, film in which Vincent Cassel steals the show with one of the finest manic performances I have seen in some time. Why the sequence is looped, in the short, I can’t say but the vampiress is credited with the name La belle vampiresse. Bottom line, however, Monica with fangs in again – woot!

There is no imdb page for the short but you can get more information on Satan here.

No comments: