A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)

Jesús Franco was nothing if not prolific. The Spanish director, working under dozens of pseudonyms across a career that stretched from the late 1950s well into the 2000s, produced somewhere in the region of two hundred films, which is either an extraordinary achievement or a warning sign depending on your appetite for low-budget European exploitation cinema. Westworld came out the same year as this one, just to give you a sense of the cultural moment. By 1973, Franco had already carved out a particular niche for himself: gothic horror, erotic fantasy, and a kind of dreamy, unfocused atmosphere that his admirers tend to describe as hypnotic and his detractors tend to describe as incoherent. This film, a French, Belgian, Italian and Liechtenstein co-production assembled under the Comptoir Français du Film Production banner among others, sits squarely in the middle of that reputation.

The premise is a fairly classical one, at least on paper. A young woman travels from London to a remote castle to attend the reading of her recently deceased father's will, only to find that the relatives awaiting her there are not quite what they seem. Think gothic family horror in the tradition of the isolated-house chiller, except filtered through Franco's particular sensibility, which means the narrative logic tends to take a back seat to mood, imagery, and a good deal of nudity. Christina von Blanc takes the lead, with support from Carmen Yazalde, Rosa Palomar, Anne Libert and the reliably sinister Howard Vernon, a Swiss actor who appeared in a remarkable number of Franco's films over the years. The production is modest by any measure, shot with the kind of lean efficiency you get when a director is making several films more or less simultaneously, which Franco frequently was. If you've spent any time with other horror films touching on ritual and the supernatural, something like The Serpent and the Rainbow for instance, you'll have a rough sense of the territory, though Franco's approach is rather more impressionistic and rather less concerned with coherence. For another angle on horror that trades in atmosphere over conventional plotting, there's also You Won't Be Alone, which handles the slow-burn end of the genre rather differently.

The film has accumulated a cult following over the decades, partly because Franco's work tends to attract devoted enthusiasts who appreciate precisely the qualities that put off more casual viewers: the loose, associative structure, the languid pacing, the sense that the film is operating on dream logic rather than conventional screenplay craft. Whether that constitutes a genuine artistic vision or simply the by-product of working fast and cheap is a debate that Franco fans have been having for years, and this particular film is one of the titles that gets cited most often on both sides of that argument. It is, by most accounts, a polished but unremarkable production on a technical level, with the more striking moments coming from its imagery rather than any discipline in the storytelling.

I really don't understand the love for this film. It's a nonsensical mess from start to finish. Is that the point? Maybe?

I'll be honest, I came in having read a fair bit of the cult enthusiasm online, and I wanted to find the thing that people were responding to. Perhaps if you have a genuine fondness for Franco's wider output the wavelength becomes easier to tune into, but for me it just never clicked. There's a version of this kind of dreamy, logic-free horror that really works, and I've seen it done well elsewhere, but here it felt less like a deliberate artistic choice and more like things simply not holding together. If you're already a Franco convert, you probably don't need my blessing. If you're not, this isn't the place to start.

Rating: ½  | Year: 1973  | Watched: 2025-05-19

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)