Blood on the spats

By Jonathan Meades

"Le Rouge aux Levres"—aka "Daughters of Darkness" (1971)—is unquestionably the greatest lesbian vampire movie ever shot in an art-deco hotel in Ostend. A platinum-blonde Delphine Seyrig plays a reincarnation of the 16th-century serial killer Elizabeth Báthory. She drives a mid-1950s Bristol 403. The casting of this car seemed inspired. Curvaceous amplitude doesn’t lessen its sternness. Its exoticism comes with a gust of the hothouse and, despite borrowing liberally from post-war BMWs, it is supremely, dandiacally English—like flagellation, Beardsley and green carnations.

Many years after seeing the film, I was wandering round a sculpture park in Antwerp with its director, Harry Kümel. I mentioned the car. He shook his head in regret. The Bristol had got the role faute de mieux. Kümel’s obsessional preference had been for an immediately pre-war Tatra T87. He had scoured western Europe for one but they were all behind the Iron Curtain. And the properties I had ascribed to the Bristol were emphatically not what he had sought. The Tatra, however, was (a) manufactured in Koprivnice, 100km north of Countess Báthory’s sanguinary castle, and (b) had a central and sinister dorsal fin, spats over the rear wheels, no rear windows. Those were the properties which a Belgian surrealist believed that a Vampire Car should manifest.