Going only off the title, I thought Daughters of Darkness was going to be a typical early 1970s vampire movie, featuring breasty young goths with prosthetic teeth wafting around in chiffon. My prejudices. I was partly right – it is from the early 1970s, and it is about vampires of a sort. There are breasts too.
But the tone is not the cartoon gothic of many a Hammer horror film. Instead this Belgian cult item goes in for a sort of chilly giallo – Northern Europe just isn’t as warm-toned as Italy.
It’s all set in an out-of-season hotel in the Belgian port of Ostend, where a rich young man and his new bride are about to make the hop over the Channel to England. He has married in haste and beneath him and now he’s suddenly nervous about introducing his new bride to his aristocratic mama. So instead of getting the next ferry to an uncertain welcome, they sit in this hotel on the edge of continental Europe, where Stefan (John Karlen) is coming up with one excuse after another for not taking the boat while his loved-up Swiss wife Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) is wondering what’s really going on.
Enter, in a magnificent old Bristol 403 saloon, the Countess Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) and her secretary/handmaid Ilona (Andrea Rau), an odd couple of Europeans of indeterminate provenance. The clerk on the front desk, an old boy who’s been there for decades, reckons he recognises the Countess, who asks for her usual room. She hasn’t aged a bit since she was last there 40 years before.
Countess Bathory, as every vampire-savvy punter will know, is the 16th-century Hungarian noble famous for staving off death by drinking virgins’ blood. We’re in a familiar world of the vampire and its quarry, in other words, but director/co-writer Harry Kümel wants to mix things up a touch. Is Stefan, for instance, a vampire hunter hiding his true nature from his wife? Or a vampire on the run from a different sort of mother, maybe? The ambiguity is what gives this elegant horror its legs. And if that lack of a definite plot with hard edges doesn’t do it for you, Danielle Ouimet and Andrea Rau both takes their clothes off now and again, the wife to make legitimate love to her new husband and the secretary to lead him woefully astray. This move will catalyse the entire movie – suddenly the countess is looking to replace Ilona with Valerie, as a secretary and as a lover. Lesbianism was still causing quite a frisson in 1971.
It is gothic in looks – bright and richly hued, though its coolness of tone sets it apart. On the soundtrack a mellotron and a cimbalon – the hammered dulcimer made famous by The Ipcress File adding a detective/thriller note to the vampire dynamics. Director/co-writer Harry Kümel throws in a touch of Marlene Dietrich in the countess’s hair and make-up, a bit of Louise Brooks in Ilona’s, plus a tiny reference to Hitchcock in the plot’s pivotal moment.
What really sets it apart is the performance by Seyrig, a casting coup. She’s most well known these days for starring in Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the film by Chantal Akerman currently sitting at the top of Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time poll. She’s also known for Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad. So, proper arthouse catnip. She brings an elegance to everything that helps slow the pace. She’s also the embodiment of the film’s ultimate theme – female power ascendant, male power challenged, sex not as erotic or sleazy but as a projection of power.
Frightening? Not in the least. It’s too dislocated for that, and the acting by Karlen and Ouimet – neither has English as a first language – is a touch stilted. But that, too, seems to be what Kümel is after – an almost empty hotel, a scattering of souls all far from home, a searching for something never quite expressed. If you’re looking for a modern analogue, The Ice Tower, by Lucile Hadžihalilović consciously borrowed from it, with Marion Cotillard – Seyrig’s modern equivalent – aping her distracted acting style.
Daughters of Darkness – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
