Summer Showcase: Jean Rollin

Two blind and orphaned teenage girls, Henriette and Louise, have two little secrets which they keep from the nuns that look after them… they are vampires and at night they can see. They also hunt and kill in the darkness, drinking their victims blood, before, their white sticks clacking on the stone pavements, returning to the sightless safety of the orphanage where they wait for night to return.

One of Jean Rollin’s rarest and least seen films, The Escapees centres on two young women, one feisty, the other quiet and withdrawn, who are on the run from an asylum for the insane. While travelling from place to place they have a number of surreal encounters including spending time with a group of travelling erotic dancers.

A late addition to the Jean Rollin collection, Dracula’s Fiancée (2000) has everything you might expect from the master of surreal horror, and so much more! Mad, chain-smoking nuns, raging dwarf-jesters, vampires, she-wolves, baby-eating Ogresses and wizards galore, as a professor and his young assistant on the hunt for Count Dracula’s remains are thrown into a parallel universe.