Most films never cause half the furor as “Lemora” did. The Catholic League of Decency (a now-absorbed organization with the joke-tempting acronym of CLOD) went on the warpath when this flick appeared. Got it pretty much banned, except in France where it attained some cult status. Later folks re-discovered it in the 1990s. But why?…
Tag: France
The Heartbreaking Tale of Gabrielle de Launay
While reading a book on vampires I came across a name I had never heard of before – Gabrielle de Launay. The book tells of her romantic, yet sad, story of love, life and death. While fascinating, her story, which went to trial in Paris in 1760, didn’t bring “vampire” to mind, yet here it…
R.I.P. Jean Rollin
Jean Rollin died December 15, 2010. The event hardly made headlines, and in one sense that was logical as could be. How noticeable after all is the death of a seventy-two-year-old film director whose movies were invariably low-budget and barely distributed? Yet to vampire fans, Rollin had proved himself if not a giant, certainly a…
Moonlit Dance and Moonlit Death
Time for some more vampire folklore! Today’s post is on les Dames Blanches which is a combination of a few folkloric ideas. The name itself means “White Ladies” and it is usually used to describe a type of creature that looked half-ghost and half-fairy, but with very vampire-like traits. The name also suggests that there…