Virgin among the living dead (V.O. Une vierge chez les morts vivants)

France, 1973

Director: Jesús Franco

Genre: Horror

Plot

Christina (Christina von Blanc) is a young orphan who arrives at a castle in the countryside to meet her relatives and collect an inheritance. Her father has hanged himself shortly before. Both the manager of the boarding house where she has been staying in the nearby town and a teenager she meets in the vicinity tell her with astonishment that the castle she intends to go to has been abandoned for years.

The girl meets her relatives, bizarre characters. Her pianist uncle, her gloomy aunt, the voluptuous cousin Carmencé (Britt Nichols), another dying cousin, a mysterious blind woman… And a strange butler (autistic?) named Basilio (Jesús Franco); mute, unable to articulate coherent words, of alienated appearance.

During the film, dreamlike scenes of dreams within dreams follow one after the other, trapping the protagonist more and more in a suffocating nightmarish spiral. Many times Christina does not know if what she is living is real or if she is suffering from hallucinations influenced by the demented atmosphere.

Carmencé making cuts on the blind woman’s breasts and vampirically sucking her blood, inviting Christina to join her; the hanged father appears to her on multiple occasions, saying that “they”, the “relatives” are the ones who have killed him; zombie chases through the woods; the uncle playing the piano while Carmencé, half-naked and alcoholic, writhes to the rhythm of the music on the carpet to the delight of the bizarre Basilio…

The young woman begins to suspect that her macabre relatives are indeed “living dead”.

Commentary

Although the story is extremely confusing, the gloomy and surreal atmosphere is very well achieved; to which the excellent soundtrack that accompanies the scenes contributes. Director Jesús Franco participates as a supporting actor, although he doesn’t say a word because his character, a kind of lunatic servant, is mute (but not deaf), and instead of speaking he emits unintelligible gurgles.

It is useless to try to find logic in the plot. Simply put, the scenes follow one after the other as in a grotesque nightmare. In some aspects (such as, for example, the beauty of the actresses) it is reminiscent of Jean Rollin‘s filmography.

The zombies that appear are not very elaborately characterized (nothing to do with the drawing on the cover), and are closer in appearance to normal men behaving as if they were under the effect of a drug that has made them lose their minds and pushes them to behave like automatons. They are reminiscent of the locals affected by the epidemic of radioactive grapes in Jean Rollin’s film “Les Raisins de la Mort”, shot later.

In general this film seems to be very underrated, when in my opinion, it is a very successful film within its genre. Much more interesting and less tedious than “Al otro lado del espejo” (also by Jesús Franco), “Virgen entre los muertos vivientes” also has some touches of humor – although probably unintentional.