‘Shiver of the Vampires’A new subgenre opened up in the shadowy margins between art cinema and sexploitation in the new cinematic permissiveness of the seventies. In the U.S., it was mostly seen in grindhouse films from directors aspiring for something more meaningful (see Joe Sarno’s Sin in the Suburbs, 1964) or drive-in titillations from hungry young filmmakers with room to slip something personal between the sex scenes (like Roger Corman‘s “Student Nurse” films). The Europeans, however, who were traditionally less coy about sex, worked sexuality into everything from social commentary (I Am Curious Yellow) to sophisticated psychological cinema (The Lickerish Quartet) to a whole subgenre of horror sometimes known as Eurotica. While most were crude, clumsy films that dropped sex and nudity into new takes on familiar stories, the best married the surreal beauty of French fantasy seen in the le cinema fantastique of Cocteau‘s Beauty and the Beast and the weird poetry of Franju‘s Eyes Without a Face with the lurid style and sexuality of the gothic horrors of Hammer Films. If the tradition of French fantasy is about dreams and nightmares breaking through the fabric of reality, the seventies added desire and sex to the equation and brought elegance and class to exploitation cinema.
