Paul Naschy: Spain's Ambassador of Horror pt.2
The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman on Walpurgis Night!
“Marginal characters have always held an appeal for me. The same kind of appeal you find with broken toys. I can readily identify with them. I've felt like a broken toy myself.” - Jacinto Molina (aka. Paul Naschy)
La Noche de Walpurgis (1971), better known to English-speaking audiences as The Werewolf Versus The Vampire Woman, saw the release of Naschy’s first collaboration with Leon Klimovsky, an Argentinian arthouse director who would become a frequent collaborator of the stocky former weightlifter.
Like most of the Hammer films, Walpurgis takes place in the Gothic fairy tale version of Germany, only updated to the modern age. A coroner is called to autopsy the body of a man who, according to the local caretaker of the morgue, was reputed to be a werewolf. As he removes the silver bullets from the corpse’s heart, the doctor condescendingly dismisses such provincial beliefs as superstitious claptrap until, of course, the resurected Waldemar drops his hairy, clawed hand on the man’s shoulder. Waldemar tears the men to bloody ribbons and escapes into the night, where he tears out the throat of an attractive young woman. In the international cut, we get a nice, long close-up of blood streaming down between the girl’s naked breasts.
The story jumps to a swinging Paris night club where graduate history student Alvira (Gaby Fuchs) is explaining a research project to her handsome-but-bland boyfriend Marcel (a Euro-trash take on the Other Men in Universal Monster movies whose sole existence is to give the heroine someone’s arms to fall into at the tragic end). Alvira and her friend Genevieve (Barbara Ceapell) travel North intent on finding the burial site of Countess Wandessa (a clear stand-in for a real historical figure, the infamous “blood countess” Elizabeth Bathory.
When they find themselves lost, Waldemar appears and invites them to stay at his villa. Over dinner the ladies explain their quest to him and it becomes clear that they’re not the only ones searching for Wandessa’s tomb, which is said to contain a silver dagger in the form a cross that might be Waldemar’s only hope for eternal peace. The following morning Waldemar joins Alvira and Genevieve to search for the grave, which they find near the ruins of an ancient abbey. As she pulls the cross dagger from the desicated remains of Wandessa she cuts her finger and blood spatters onto the skeleton’s open mouth.
Rising from her grave, Wandessa seduces and vampirizes Genevieve and soon Waldemar finds himself struggling to not only protect Alvira from the bloodsuckers, but from himself as the full moon approaches.
La Noche de Walpurgis represents everything that is special about Spanish Horror cinema. At turns silly and surreal, eerie and sexy, gory and romantic, it combines the old fashioned thrills of Universal Monster movies, the garish bloodletting and eroticism of Hammer Horror and the poetry of Jean Cocteau to create something altogether unique.
It’s filled with sublime, breath-taking moments:
After tearing a woman’s throat out, Waldemar sets her body down on the ground gently, like a lover.
A patch of naked soil seems to pulsate, as if breathing, when a hand emerges.
Wandessa appears in the distance, out of focus and, in an amazing, simple effect, seems to literally melt into the shadows.
After drinking Genevieve’s blood for the first time, Wandessa embraces her in a way that is both sisterly and erotic. In a dream sequence, the two of them drift into Alvira’s room and stab her in the neck, filling a golden goblet with her blood. Wandessa drinks first, then passes the goblet to Genevieve, who quaffs the remainder, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and tosses the goblet aside in a lusty, decadent gesture. Then the vampire women hold hands and spin like little girls, dissipating into the night.
It’s a creepy, fascinating moment. Wandessa and her saphic “bride” inhabit an eerie yet sensual half-light world located someplace bewteen dream and nightmare.
At dawn, Waldemar lays in wait for Genevieve to return to her coffin. When they confront one another, she slowly brushes the hair out of her eyes to reveal a pair of tent-peg fangs. It’s the kind of sublime, gasp-inducing moment you can only find in European Horror films of the age.
Patty Shepard is mesmerizing as Wandessa, projecting an air of aristocratic disdain and cruelty. Hammer’s vampires had been given a raw sensuality and Dracula’s Daughter hinted at an “unnatural” desire beyond a tast for human blood, but never had a vampire been depicted as so clearly homosexual in their desire. Walpurgis boldly strides into this territory because, at this point in cinematic history, it could.
The Waldemar Daninsky films, much like Mexican Horror movies, take place in a distinctly Catholic universe where humanity finds itself in pitched, never-ending battle with Satan. At the climax of La Noche de Walpurgis, the Devil himself appears as a shadow on a wall! It’s a moment that might inspire guffaws in the uninitiated, but for those who have allowed themselves to succumb to the film’s trance the rather quaint effect makes you feel as though you are watching a strange child’s dream.
Although both Naschy and Klimovsky would go on to make technically better movies, there is an undeniable, irresistable magic to La Noche de Walpurgis that make it a fan favorite. A certifiable hit at home and abroad, it was the film that set the Spanish Horror boom in motion.
Next up was another Daninsky film, The Fury of the Wolfman (1972), a real mess that “borrows” footage from La marca del Hombre Lobo and has a similarly madcap plot, but it all ends up a confusing, incoherent mess. Rumor has it that the director was a drunk who turned script-revisions over to his 14 year-old nephew! I guess that explains the man-eating plant.
Of all the Daninsky films, a series that has Naschy’s tormented, doomed werewolf fighting vampire women and the Yeti, Doctor Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo (1972) has perhaps the most clever, toss-monsters-in-a-blender batshit crazy plot of them all.
Waldemar travels to modern-day London to find the grandson of Dr. Jekyll in hopes he can find a cure for lycanthropy. In one of the truly great, bat-shit crazy plot points of Spanish Horror history, Jekyll tries to suppress Waldemar’s transformation by injecting him with his grandfather’s Hyde serum, then applying the antidote to turn him human again! Unfortunately, Jekyll’s assistant Sandra (named after one of the villains in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein!) isn’t playing with a full deck herself and sets the experiment awry.
It’s all done with a sense of chaotic fun, self-aware without descending into self-parody. Although he doesn’t get much screen time, Naschy’s Hyde is quite fun to watch, a murderous letch who prowls London’s notorious red-light district cira 1971 like a modern day Jack the Ripper (a scenario that would be played out some ten years later in Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time).
NEXT TIME:
Molina/Naschy has his most prolific year. Hunchbacks, Zombies, Dracula, oh my!