Fantasies, Dreams, & Legends

This week, lots of vampires and one creepy hotel . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Blood Spattered Bride, dir. Vicente Aranda, 1972.

The reality of fantasy. The Blood Spattered Bride’s Carmilla-inspired fantasia provides a meditation on the nature of dreams and reality with visuals and atmosphere that evoke the gothic romance paperback covers of its era (of the nightgown-clad-woman-fleeing-a-castle variety). It’s an interesting place from which to interrogate fantasy and reality because the gothic romance exists itself in fantasy territory. It's fitting, ultimately, that there is no solid ground in a film obsessed with stories and correspondences—with legend and folklore, psychoanalysis, allegory, and dreams. The Blood Spattered Bride presents a fantasy about fantasies. There is no requirement, after all, that art must depict reality in order to say something real about it.

Dreamlike. What does it mean to be "dreamlike?" It might mean gauzy, ethereal, or otherworldly, and The Blood Spattered Bride is all of these things. But dreams might also be tonally inconsistent, dissonant, and absurd. This is the effect of the film’s most bizarre scene, in which the husband (he’s given no name) comes upon a stretch of beach with a tube emerging from the sand. Investigating, he discovers Carmilla, naked but wearing a scuba mask, buried beneath. It's a scene that does not represent a recurring technique. Instead, it's the one incongruous departure from gothic romance. Its sheer incongruity makes the whole thing feel more dreamlike.