Honourable Mention: The Games of Countess Dolingen of Gratz

Does the name Countess Dolingen ring any bells? It should as the following quote is from Dracula’s Guest:

“I walked around it and read, over the Doric door, in German--


COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA SOUGHT
AND FOUND DEATH
1801

“On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble--for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone--was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters: "The dead travel fast."”

Marucha Bo as Nena

This, however, is a rather bizarre art-house movie from 1980, directed by Catherine Binet. It threads the story of a married couple, Louise (Carole Kane) and Bertrand (Michael Lonsdale) – his obsession with a burglar who eats his food and seemingly can slip past any locks and the story written by Louise’s friend Nena (Marucha Bo), a schizophrenic.

The Nanny

Nena’s story interjects the film and is the story (possibly intended to be semi-autobiographical) of a young girl and her march to puberty and the importance of father figures in her life. She has a Nanny, at one point, who is obsessed with Dracula and we see the tomb as described in Dracula’s Guest as she reads the passage. The nanny claims that to enter vampire country you must cross a border (the sea-shore, a forest, etc) and she knows of one. That is the vampiric element until Louise refers to this again in the climax of the movie. I say climax but the film meanders in strange and surreal ways, so much so that it hardly feels like a climax. The imdb page is here.