One of the central ideas of the horror film is that the dead are always with us. Whereas in most movies, death marks an ending, in horror it usually means a new beginning: the transmutation of the human into vampire, zombie or restless spirit. And the line dividing the worlds of life and death is, in horror, always a very thin one - as these two very different Euro-horror classics demonstrate.
Jean Rollin's vision was always a dark, decadent one; his parade of nude vampires and gorgeous, swooning victims always owed more to the iconography of the French symbolists of the 1890s than to the tradition of British gothic as exported to Hollywood. The funereal pace and dreamlike atmosphere of films like Requiem For A Vampire and Lips Of Blood seemed always to place them in some twilight zone between waking and sleep, or life and death. In The Iron Rose (La Rose De Fer, 1973) - one of the director's least-known films - Rollin eschews his trademark bloodsuckers in favour of an everyday tale of provincial living death. The plot, as ever, is as gossamer-thin and pointless as a half-remembered dream: a boy meets a girl and they visit the town cemetery (full of weirdos, including a mourning clown and a clichéd vampire) and make love in a tomb; then, as darkness falls, they find themselves trapped. Surprisingly, none of the spooky customers glimpsed in the cemetery by day puts in an appearance; the young lovers simply scare themselves half to death before the girl realises it's the drab world outside that is the real graveyard full of corpses and that she wants to remain among the tombstones forever... It's a languidly paced, dreamily shot little film that doesn't bother with shocks, scares or the supernatural but gets right to the heart of the horror film's ambiguous appeal.
Panic Beats (Latidos De Pánico, 1983), on the other hand, stays well within the sometimes cheesy conventions of European gothic cinema, mixing its tale of a vengeful ghostly knight with elements nicked quite shamelessly from Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (not to mention Scooby Doo). Panic Beats may be the full-blooded, peppery Rioja to Rollin's delicate Chablis but, coming as it does at the end of the 1970s Spanish horror boom, it feels as tired and puffy as its star and director, the legendary Paul Naschy (whose bathtub scene rates as the film's scariest moment). In contrast to Rollin's dead, Naschy's don't laze about in picturesque old cemeteries waiting for converts: the fearsome Alaric de Marnac rises from his grave once every 100 years, dons a full suit of armour and bashes in the skull of the latest unfaithful trollop in the family line with his formidable double-flail, a bit of macho posturing that is presumably meant to tell us that even dead Spaniards have big cojones and know how to use them...
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