Vamp or Not? Short Night of Glass Dolls

This was the 1971 directorial debut for Aldo Lado, known here for his sci-fi flick the Humanoid, and is a gaillo styled film set in Prague. It came to my attention as I read Vampires in Italian Cinema, 1956-1975 when it was mentioned as 1 of 6 Italian films following Franco’s Count Dracula, which used (transnational) co-production agreements to cushion themselves financially but also “tapped into the vampire mythology”. Five of these have been previously covered here.

As you can tell – as this is a ‘Vamp or Not?’ - things are not as clear cut with this film. I may have been tempted to run with a ‘Use of Tropes’ article but I think that strays beyond the (knowing) use of tropes and flirts with that line.

Moore in the park

The film starts, after a sweeping city shot, in a park. A worker sweeps rubbish as a crow hops around. It eventually comes across a rather dead looking individual, who we’ll soon discover is American journalist Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel). He is taken to hospital and pronounced dead when examined on arrival. Yet we hear Moore’s thoughts, he is still alive but trapped in a catatonic state (and not producing normal life signs as he is later examined, though not cooling as expected and without rigor mortis). The film is then him trying to remember what has happened to him as his body tries to awaken before anything (such as an autopsy) occurs.

Jean Sorel as Moore

So, we get the tale of him and his girlfriend Mira (Barbara Bach, the Humanoid), who he meets at the train station. She brings him a gift of a display of butterflies (I’ll come back to them) and they spend a montage of time together. He is due to move to London in a few weeks and wants her to come with – but, of course, they are in the then Communist Czechoslovakia. He suggests he knows someone well connected who can ease her movement out of the country and takes her to a party of luminaries.

Mira's body

At the party he bumps into an old Doctor friend (Relja Basic), also his reporter colleagues Jacques (Mario Adorf) and Jessica (Ingrid Thulin, Hour of the Wolf) are there. Jacques is creeping around with a rich woman (Michaela Martin), who seems out of it, and Jessica and Moore may have had a past relationship, but she certainly is jealous of Mira now. Mira herself finds herself surrounded by creepy old blokes. Moore takes her home but gets a call from Jacques in the night, a story has broken. It is a false alarm but when he gets back to his apartment Mira is gone, though all her things and papers are there.

the 1%

So Moore and his friends are warned off investigating by the police, but he does anyway and starts looking into other young women who have vanished never to be seen again and here we go to some massive spoilers… The path leads him to a secret society of elite old people who are responsible for the girls disappearances – all of this coming out of a place called Klub99 (which we discover has branches across the world) This is a place developed to maintain the power of those in charge (in today’s parlance, the 1%) but it is the hint of how they do so that interests us.

the high priest

There is an occult element to this and we see a ritual, with a naked young woman on a table as the elderly elite rut around her in an orgy. The implication is they survive off their energy – we do not see an actual sacrifice, but assume that this does involve sacrificing both the young in these rituals and also on the field of battle – keeping those below them in their place. In many way these are Voltaire’s vampires, the “stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces.” (1764). The high priest (Fabijan Sovagovic) wears a hat that could be said to have bat wings and declares, “We need the young to stay alive.”

grey like the dead

I mentioned the butterflies and Mira describes them as creatures that cannot fly, despite their beautiful wings, but hop from spot to spot. This is, of course, describing the beautiful youth pinned and controlled by the elite. However (although likely a coincidence) the connection between vampire and butterfly is a known trope, with the butterfly or moth being a physical manifestation of the vampire’s soul. What is clear is that when we see the elite watching a chamber orchestra in Klub99 the audience do look like the living dead, many with their faces deliberately greyed.

framing Moore

So… things like the greying of the faces may have just been playing with tropes and the question is… do the elite act as vampires, feeding on the young. Had we seen a blood sacrifice this would have been easier to call – we do not, but that there is one can be assumed to sit within the text. The fact that Mira is dead, might point to that, or it might be the murder of a trafficked young woman who would not play along – and her body later used to try and frame Moore. However it really does feel like Lado was hooking into the myth and portraying the vampires of Voltaire (with a touch of occult shenanigans for good measure).

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK