#3: The Grapes of Death

Les raisins de la mort

Dir.: Jean Rollin

France 1978

90mins

IMDb page

A confession of slight snobbery must open this Unsequence Cinema entry: I never would have undertaken any research into the films of Jean Rollin unless I’d read a DVD-review-cum-reappraisal in ‘Sight and Sound’ magazine a year or so ago, arguing that the director was far more than just a sexy-vampire-obsessed art-exploitation purveyor – he was, in fact, one of cinema’s foremost surrealists. Whether or not this bold claim holds water is irrelevant – it’s all the more odd that I pursued an interest at all, considering I have no real predilection for either cheap 70s erotica or high-art surrealism. But I do have a thing for little cinematic obscurities, and Rollin’s unique universe turned out to be so weirdly distinctive that I couldn’t help being drawn in.

I’ve only seen two of his movies: Fascination (1979) and The Grapes of Death. The pair are generally regarded among his best, and after seeing a few clips of his notoriously dumb and shitty Nazisploitation movie Zombie Lake (1982) I can believe it. Fascination is sexy, Gothic and mysterious, but ultimately it’s very much an exploitation/erotica movie with only a few good bits of photography to recommend it higher than a thousand other curiously unconsummated softcore flicks. However, Rollin conceived The Grapes of Death squarely as a horror flick: there’s no mysticism, no nude vampire sisters, no faux-profundity in the dialogue, and the result is a successfully striking piece of genre cinema. Most of his films have a very pervasive atmosphere of remoteness, and he clearly had an excellent eye for evocative location shooting on a limited budget. Rollin applied these two established knacks to a leaner, flat-out scarier premise than his usual films, and managed to deliver a movie that achieves some way beyond its promise. I’m no aficionado but, to my eyes, The Grapes of Death must be one of the most thoroughly out-there films I can think of that’s ever likely to be mistaken for a zombie movie.

The plague-struck French villagers aren’t zombies, of course, because they don’t eat people. They remain ‘themselves’ after infection, except they have a tendency to murder those closest to them – family first, then anyone who unfortunately crosses their paths. One of these unfortunates is Élisabeth (Marie George Pascal), who is on her way by train to visit her boyfriend at the rural winery in which he works. The winery has, unknown to her, been spraying its vineyard with a new pesticide, and hey presto: a plague of sores, murder and general melty-faced homicidal unpleasantness ensues. Rollin plots are so skeletal that they barely matter, and so I don’t consider that much of a spoiler. Very little dialogue and screen time is dedicated to the cause of the outbreak, and in a way that’s its strongest connection with other classic zombie movies. The Grapes of Death is made up of ominously paced, gruesome set pieces – a string of dread-filled and beautifully photographed escape scenes that lead inevitably into the next deeply unfortunate situation. The characters react quite realistically too, which is a rarity in horror, especially in movies so stylised as this. Élisabeth’s first contact with the villagers after her friend is murdered on the train is a great example of this: she is baffled into hysteria by their unwillingness to help her reach the police. She doesn’t try to deal with the problem herself as a lot of modern horror protagonists inexplicably do (it’s usually treated like a matter of Fate or some such bollocks) – she is legitimately terrified and seeks only safety from the infected.

Along the way she meets Lucie, an angelically innocent blind village girl who lost her way after the trouble started, circling the sharp and craggy hillsides with outstretched arms. Élisabeth guides her home, finds the whole place ruined and corpse-strewn, then tells her she’s not at her village, this is somewhere else. Lucie knows she is lying, and demands to find out why. Élisabeth never gets the chance to explain that everyone is dead, but by nightfall the pair discover that ‘dead’ isn’t quite the state her former friends and family are now in. The villagers awaken and hunt the two women down with flaming torches and the single-mindedness of a lynch-mob… only much slower.

There are a few more characters involved in The Grapes of Death, but I’ll leave the narrative alone and mention instead the movie’s real strength. Jean Rollin has tapped into the audience’s fear of the wilderness, of isolated places, of antiquated places in fact, and has shot the creepiest scenes in daylight. Night does indeed fall upon Élisabeth’s predicament, and horrible things do happen, but the night scene’s most memorable shot is of Brigitte Lahaie, in a long white night-dress, in and out of focus as she carries a torch towards the camera:

A lot of the camerawork is handheld, which could account for the wavering focus that the cameraman was perhaps not entirely in control of, but this fits the atmosphere perfectly. The situation Élisabeth finds herself in is unreal, dreamlike, and we can imagine her struggling to digest the events that surround her. This is not to say that the camera squints and wobbles because it is meant to represent her point of view throughout, but there are several strange and lethargic dialogue scenes, shot front-on and in shallow focus close-up, in which the characters read their lines directly to camera. Élisabeth’s distraught face, filling the screen, is lingered upon. This is another world entirely from modern horror’s quick cutting jump-scare tactics.

The film has its flaws of course, and if 1970s horror has never interested you then I doubt The Grapes of Death has the power to convert. Anyway, it’s hardly representative of a decade in European genre cinema. There’s a strange conversation about Fascism and the French Resistance that’s so aggressively shoehorned in that it comes across ridiculously – as if a bit of political banter is appropriate during a pandemic. The visual effects are quite primitive too; the decapitation scene should be very nasty but comes across as cartoonish. However, this is made up for by the executioner later kissing the severed head on the lips passionately, and with a brutish catharsis of grief, as if he wasn’t to blame for its doll-like dead stare. I also very much like the horde of crazed homicidal villagers muttering “Je t’aime Lucie!” as they go about their pursuit of Élisabeth: a very nice touch, un-zombielike in the extreme.

I’ve also avoided mentioning the opening set-piece on the train until now because, frankly, you need to watch it for yourselves, and it’s on YouTube so I can just do this:

This one scene convinced me I needed to watch the movie. I absolutely love the long shot at 2m55s: a quick fade of the soundtrack, then a very tense thirty second handheld panning shot looking in on empty carriages in near-silence, then… well, watch it if you haven’t already.

The closing paragraphs have tended to be quite long so far in these entries, but my summary here is short: if you like 1970s horror movies of any kind, you really must watch The Grapes of Death. It’s very, very odd indeed, and you won’t soon forget it.

Edit: Yes I have noticed the mouse cursor is in these screenshots. No I'm not doing them again, neither am I editing them and re-uploading them. Yes I'll make sure it doesn't happen again.