Daughters of Darkness

Kat and Samm return to talk about Walerian Borowczyk's transgressive take on Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Gothic tale of duality, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, exploring one of the most perverse and empowering adaptations of the tale.

Kat and Samm return to explore the overlooked work of director John Hayes, in typically outrageous fashion. While many know Hayes’ horror efforts Dream No Evil (1971) and Grave of the Vampire (1972), his extensive work in exploitation, sexploitation, and pornographic film still remains widely unknown to all but a very few cult aficionados. This episode focuses on three different films from three different genres, Help Female Wanted (1968), Mama’s Dirty Girls (1974), and Baby Rosemary (1976), as Kat and Samm attempt to unravel the director’s career.

Help Female Wanted starts out as a typical roughie, before leaving reality to travel into the warped fantasies of an emasculated man; sadism and necrophilia, and much much more, follows. Meanwhile, straight up seventies exploitation number Mama’s Dirty Girls is a late film for one-time Hollywood A-lister, and Queen of the Noir, Gloria Grahame. Grahame stars as an unscrupulous woman, who along with her band of sexually oppressed but overly flirtatious teenage daughters, is out to make her fortune by murder and deceit. And finally, Baby Rosemary, mixes hardcore pornography with occult fantasy, in one of the strangest coming of age tales to come out of the Golden Era.

Kat and Samm are back at long last to discuss the final films of beloved producer and director William Castle. Though he’s generally celebrated for gimmicky horror classics like The Tingler (1959) and House on Haunted Hill (1959), in this episode, they’re going to explore some of his underrated later titles and recurring themes. This includes films like The Night Walker (1964), a surreal affair starring screen legend Barbara Stanwyck, and the subject of Castle’s collaborations with renowned actresses like Stanwyck and Joan Crawford. Other topics include his children’s thrillers like I Saw What You Did (1965), and Castle’s sensitive use of teenage girl protagonists, and the brilliant and sadly neglected Shanks (1974). This beautiful, thoroughly creepy film was Castle’s final directorial effort and is a rare collaboration with the great Marcel Marceau, so it gets some long overdue love in this episode.

Kat and Samm return from a lengthy hiatus with this personal, boisterous episode that explores desire, consent, and sexuality by comparing two very different films: Nelson Lyon’s forgotten erotic classic, The Telephone Book (1971), and Paul Verhoeven’s challenging rape-revenge drama, Elle (2016). Made early in the porno chic period, before mainstream titles like Deep Throat (1972), The Telephone Book follows a young woman who becomes the target of an obscene caller. Instead of feeling victimized, she’s excited by the encounter and goes on a ribald odyssey through New York City to find her loquacious love.

And though Elle’s approach is quite different, Kat and Samm discuss how it serves as an important counter example to the idea that such films can’t be made in recent years. Marking Verhoeven’s return to filmmaking in a decade, Elle stars the great Isabelle Huppert as Michele Leblanc, an unconventional business executive who is raped in her home by a masked attacker. Refusing to see herself as a victim, Michele becomes determined to learn her rapist’s identity and uncover his potential motivations. Hovering somewhere between domestic drama, rape revenge film, and black comedy, Elle explores complicated notions of power, consent, and intimacy.

In a very special episode, Kat and Samm explore some of their favourite things, unedited, unscripted, and unrestrained. The list was long, but they only made it to two subjects. Listen to the show to find out what they are…

Kat and Samm begin an exploration of the films of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. This episode focuses on his collaborations with actor Antonio Banderas, beginning with 1986’s explicit serial killer film Matador, where a young would-be bullfighter (Banderas) confesses to several murders, though it’s immediately apparent that the real killer (or killers) is still on the loose.

This was followed closely by controversial romantic comedy Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1989), where Banderas returns as a man recently released from an asylum who kidnaps a junkie actress (Almodóvar regular Victoria Abril), because he’s in love with her. He’s convinced that if he can just make her reciprocate his love, they could lead a happy life together. Almodóvar and Banderas teamed up again several decades later for the labyrinthine La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In, 2011). In this adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s novel Mygale and Georges Franju’s film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960), a doctor (Banderas) experiments on the skin of a beautiful young patient (Vera Cruz), but all is not as it seems.

In this final part of their series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984, Kat and Samm discuss unclassifiable French director (and writer) Alain Robbe-Grillet. Known for his surreal and often controversial arthouse and erotic films, this episode focuses on three of his titles in particular, and centers on his collaborations with actor Jean-Louis Trintignant and his wife, Catherine Robbe-Grillet. The first of these, Trans-Europ-Express (1966), follows a director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) who discusses the plot for an upcoming film he’d like to make while onboard the titular train. It concerns a man (Trintignant) smuggling drugs, or perhaps diamonds, across Europe, who is interrupted by a sadomasochistic affair with a strange woman (Marie-France Pisier).

The second of these is the sublime and surreal Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Successive Slidings of Pleasure, 1974). A young woman (Anicée Alvina) is imprisoned in a remote convent for murdering her lover, though the crime may have been consensual. Based loosely on Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière, this traverses sadomasochism, violence, and the occult, resulting in a singular and hypnotic work. Finally, they discuss Robbe-Grillet’s follow up, La jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire, 1975) about a the botched kidnapping of a banker’s young daughter (Alvina again), who is “protected” by a detective (Trintignant) by being placed in a violent, otherworldly brothel where women are set ablaze.

In the third part of their series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984, Kat and Samm explore the work of French poète maudit Jean Rollin. First, they discuss Rollin’s colorful, Franju-inspired second feature, La vampire nue (1970) aka The Nude Vampire, about a suicide cult’s obsession with a young female vampire. Their leader, a nefarious businessman, tries to use medical science to unlock the secret in her blood, while his son has fallen in love with her and hopes to set her free.

Also discussed is Rollin’s iconic Fascination (1979), about a turn of the century cult of women who routinely drink human blood and are set upon by a young criminal who thinks he has taken them prisoner; this film encapsulated many of Rollin’s favorite themes, including female agency, sexual power, and the transgressive potential of violence. Finally, Kat and Samm discuss Rollin’s devastating yet poetic La morte vivante (1981) aka The Living Dead Girl, about a young woman who wakes up in an animalistic state after years of death, but is nursed back to health by her devoted childhood friend. Unfortunately, she craves human flesh and blood in order to survive, setting in motion a tragic chain of events.

Kat and Samm continue their series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ cult cinema bible, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984. This time they explore the work of prolific but divisive Spanish director Jess Franco, who made the first Spanish horror film (1962’s Gritos en la noche aka The Awful Dr. Orloff) and went on to make reams of sex, horror, and all-around cult films. This episode looks at some titles from his early career, like Miss Muerte (The Diabolical Dr. Z, 1966), but primarily focuses on three of his films: first, the enigmatic and beautiful Paroxismus aka Venus in Furs (1969), where a jazz musician witnesses a woman’s murder but comes to find that she might not be dead after all.

Also discussed is the delightful De Sade 70 aka Eugenie (1970), an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. Maria Rohm and Jack Taylor star as a couple who coerce an innocent teen back to their remote island to educate her about sex… and sadism. Finally, they turn to another loose adaptation—of Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black—with She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), one of the last films Franco made with his early muse Soledad Miranda. She stars as a young widow, whose doctor husband was driven to madness and suicide by his colleagues’ destruction of his unconventional research.

With this episode, Kat and Samm begin a new four-part series inspired by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ seminal film book, Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984. Here they explore a few key films from Jose Larraz, one of the directors explored in depth in Tohill and Tombs’ book. This Spanish-born artist, writer, and director made some of his most famous films in England, such as Vampyres (1974), which was explored in Daughters of Darkness episode two. Here the focus is on Symptoms (1974), The Coming of Sin (1978), and Black Candles (1982). Symptoms, which was recently uncovered after it was believed to be lost for decades, existing only in bootleg form, is Larraz’s masterpiece. The film follows a disturbed young woman (Angela Pleasance) spending a few days in her family’s country house with her friend Anne (Lorna Heilbron), but Anne soon begins to hear strange things happening at night.

The Coming of Sin similarly follows two women in a country estate: a wealthy amateur painter (Patricia Granada) and a young gypsy girl, Triana (Lidia Zuazo), temporarily staying with her. Triana suffers from a disturbing, recurring nightmare about being assaulted by a naked man on horseback (Rafael Machado), and soon he shows up at the estate just as she and the painter begin an affair… The fun and sleazy Black Candles utterly lacks the dreamy, surreal qualities of Symptoms or The Coming of Sin and was disavowed by the director himself. Also set an isolated house, this follows a group of Satanists who prey on a woman (Vanessa Hidalgo) investigating the mysterious death of her brother. Goat sex and orgies ensue.