A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)
½ — A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)
I genuinely don't get it. I've sat with this one, turned it over, tried to meet it halfway, and I still can't work out what people are seeing that I'm not. A Virgin Among the Living Dead has a devoted following in certain corners of cult cinema, and every now and then someone will point at it and talk about its dreamlike atmosphere, its hypnotic strangeness, its je ne sais quoi. And I want to say: fair enough, different strokes. But I also want to say: come on.
Because what I actually watched was a nonsensical mess. Not the good kind of nonsensical, not the sort of surreal logic that pulls you under and makes the confusion feel like the whole point. Just... a mess. Scenes that don't connect to other scenes. Character motivations that exist only to shuffle people from one murky room to another. A mood that keeps promising to coalesce into something and then simply doesn't bother.
Now, I know the obvious defence, and I've already made it for myself in my head. Maybe that IS the point. Maybe the incoherence is the film working exactly as intended, dragging you through a half-remembered nightmare where nothing needs to make sense because dreams don't make sense. And look, I'll grant that there's a version of that argument I respect. I loved Fantastic Planet (1973), which came out the same year and is plenty strange in its own right, but that film earns its weirdness. There's something underneath it. Here, every time I reached for something solid, my hand went straight through.
The frustrating thing is that I can see the raw ingredients for something genuinely unsettling. The setting has a certain mouldy gothic texture to it. There are images that flicker past and almost lodge in the brain. Almost. It's like watching someone describe a nightmare rather than actually having one. The atmosphere keeps arriving in fragments, never quite assembling itself into a sustained experience.
And this is where I start to wonder whether my problem is temperamental rather than critical. Some films in this particular pocket of European horror from the early seventies reward a very specific kind of patience, a willingness to let go of expectation entirely and just float. I can do that. I've done it with films that make even less narrative sense than this one. But floating requires something to hold your weight, and A Virgin Among the Living Dead kept letting me sink.
The performances don't help. There's a flatness to much of what's on screen that could be read as eerie, detached, dream-puppet stuff, and occasionally it does tip in that direction. But mostly it just feels like people hitting their marks without any particular conviction. And when the film tries to build tension or unease, it tends to reach for shock value that lands with a thud rather than a shiver.
I think about something like The Serpent and the Rainbow, which also plays in that space between waking and the occult, between rational fear and something stranger. That film commits. It pulls you in and doesn't let you entirely back out again. This one keeps one foot in the doorway the whole time, never fully deciding what it wants to be.
Half a star. There are moments, scattered and brief, where something stirs. But I can't pretend the experience added up to anything I'd recommend, or that I'd rush back to revisit. Maybe on another night, in another mood, with someone beside me who loves it and can tell me what I'm missing. For now, it goes in the category of cult cinema I respect the existence of without being able to defend my own indifference to.
If you're a devotee, I genuinely want to understand. Tell me what you see in it. I'll listen. But I'll probably still be sat there squinting at the screen, waiting for it to click.
Rating: ½ | Year: 1973 | Watched: 2025-05-19
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Watch in the UK
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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)
