Jean Rollin – Mad Love

The Iron Rose – 1972, 85 mins

This is one of Rollin’s rarest films, and a true treat for fans. Centred on a young couple who make love in an abandoned tomb and find themselves trapped for the night among the graves and crypts of a massive cemetery. The pair frantically try to escape the haunted grounds but all in vain as they are slowly overtaken by hysteria and finally death.

The Yellow Lovers – 1958, 12 mins

Jean Rollin’s very first film, made when he was just 20 years old and it is, despite that, immediately obvious that this very much a Rollin film. It was shot near the beaches of Dieppe, a stretch of coastline that Rollin would use in his films again and again, from Rape of the Vampire to Lips of Blood, through to Dracula’s Fiancée.

The film itself is a loose interpretation of Les Amours Jaunes (The Yellow Lovers), a collection of poems by Tristan Corbière from 1873 which focuses on loneliness and uses a series of apparently random Egon Schiele-like drawings intercut with the filmed beach footage to visually narrate the poem which is heard as a voiceover during the short film. An effect which helps convey the feeling of being between two worlds, a feeling attributed to Corbière which could just as easily be applied to Rollin himself.

Night of the Hunted – 1980, 91 mins

A man driving home stops to help a distressed and confused woman (Brigitte Lahaie), in a nightdress, running wildly in the road. He takes her home and one thing leads to another, but it is also apparent that she is very ill and rapidly, and totally, losing her memory. He traces her immediate past and finds that she has escaped from a sinister building known locally as the The Black Tower,  where people accidentally exposed to nuclear contamination are being taken.

Night of the Hunted (1980) is far removed from director Jean Rollin’s more familiar vampire films and is instead, a stark, often brutal, and sexually sadistic sci-fi film; with scenes that are in many ways reminiscent of Cronenberg’s early films and George Lucas’s THX 1138.

Browse our full Jean Rollin collection here.