Original title: …Et mourir de plaisir

Roger Vadim’s adaptation of Carmilla, brought smack up to date and transplanted to 1960 Italy, hasn’t all that much to do with J Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella but cleaves close r to the essential sprit of the story than the previous Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Gray (1932) or Hammer’s subsequent Karnstein trilogy, The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971). An achingly gorgeous film, it should be spoken of in the same breath as Terence Fisher’s The Brides of Dracula (1960) or Mario Bava’s La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday (1960) – that it all too often isn’t may be down to a puzzling lack of availability. At the time of writing, only a decent but less than optimal German DVD is available.

The full length version of the film opens with one of the many scenes missing from the American version as Dr Valeri (René-Jean Chauffard) tells fellow passengers (including Vadim himself) on an airliner about a strange case he recently had to deal with. Count Leopoldo de Karnstein (Mel Ferrer) has become engaged to Georgia (Elsa Martinelli), much to the dismay of his cousin, Carmilla (the director’s wife Annette Stroyberg, here credited under her married name). Carmilla is in love with Leopoldo, the descendant of a long line of vampires, and turns up to the engagement party in a dress that makes her look very like the image of the only unaccounted for undead member of the family, Mircalla that hangs in the family chateau. Carmilla wanders off during a fireworks display and finds Mircalla’s tomb. After that she becomes ever more distant – has she been possessed by the vampire Mircalla or has she lost her mind?

This Carmilla is a decidedly modern young woman, dancing to jazz records rather than attending a party where the dancing is more traditional, a small detail that pays off later when the “possessed” Carmilla seems to forget how to use her record player. The eroticism of Le Fanu’s story is still there though it’s more subdued than it would be in later adaptations, the lesbianism reduced to a few coy encounters. But shots like Carmilla prowling seductively around Georgia’s bed have a charge to them that would have troubled more straight-laced American and British censors and critics. The bedroom sequence leads into the film’s most celebrated sequence, a brilliantly staged dream sequence inspired as much by Jean Cocteau as Le Fanu. Fading into black and white, the sequence encompasses people swimming past a window, blood seeping from the monochrome image and a group of silver-faced, red-gloved surgeons performing some unexplained nastiness in a sterile operating theatre.

The descent into a dream world is doubly disorientating as the entire film has a languorous, chimeric feel to it. Carmilla drifts serenely around the countryside in a wedding dress, emerging through the haze from a fire to frighten groundsmen or stalking young women for prey. But is Carmilla really a vampire? Vadim keeps us guessing to the end. She frightens the horses and certainly Dr Verari thinks that it’s all in her mind, Carmilla shocked into neurosis by the announcement of Leopoldo’s marriage: “Traumatism, neurosis, split personality… The defeated Carmilla became the uncompromising Millarca, the one who hurt people.” The ambiguity only adds to the stinging melancholy and dreamlike ambience of the tale, as does Stroyberg’s ethereal detachment. She’s come in for some criticism over the years but she’s perfectly fine as the troubled woman haunted more by her fragile state of mind than the undead.

There are certainly hints of supernatural forces at work here and there – flowers that wither in Carmilla’s presence (and the final image of a crumbling rose is just as chilling), a blood-red candle stain on Carmilla’s dress that magically disappears, Millarca’s tomb seemingly opening on its own, or the village children that really do believe in vampires and set out armed with garlic to find one. Vadim leave it up to you to decide for yourself if the supernatural is a real force in the film and it’s testament to the power of the film that it works brilliantly whatever you choose to believe.

Vadim’s films were regularly trashed by the critical establishment who seemed more interested in his string of glamorous partners – Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, Stroyberg, Jane Fonda, Catherine Schneider, Ann Biderman, Marie-Christine Barrault – than in his actual films. And sadly, Blood and Roses was no different. Today it’s fallen through the cracks rather, exalted in fan circles but not as widely known and loved as it should be – and those who have seen it may likely only be familiar with the butchered American print of the film that removes the framing sequences and adds an intrusive voice-over. Shorn of 13 minutes, often in terrible pan-and-scan prints of dubious quality, it’s no way to watch and appreciate one of the most atmospheric and indelibly beautiful horror films of its era.