Summary: Girl‑power as revenge.
Drained of spunk, blood & money by feminists‑as‑vampires out for revenge on behalf of all women against all men - for being killed by a man. White men are shown here as gluttons for punishment and as being easily‑controlled by women, sexually - not by White women who refuse sexual intercourse, but by those who offer it willingly; hence, the gilded erotic cage into which all men here fall - eventually.
This male sexual passivity is the product of White male sexual insecurities in the face of female sexual voraciousness. These help women sensually‑entrap men with the sex the men so desperately want in their loneliness and alienation from their own feelings. The downside is that like the male Black Widow spider, there is the ever‑present fear of being consumed by the female’s lust or, at the very least, having to pay the price of contracting some kind of venereal disease. That so much here appears to be a dream suggests that the civilizing tendencies of White culture lead to the horrifying nightmares of the emotionally‑repressed: Everything that the horror genre is really all about.
This movie works well as a pure cinema spectacle since it has little dialog, rhyme nor reason. The horror comes from the fact that it all makes so little literal sense; while, emotionally, it makes all the sense in the world. The caravanning couple are a dramatically‑useful and sexually‑normative contrast to the weird sisters (well‑played, with great gusto & personal chemistry, by DZIUBINSKA & MORRIS) because the latter can only entice single, lonely men, rather than experience fulfilling and healthy sexual relations with them. Yet, their very normality is upset because embedded within it is a sexual boredom that makes the lesbianism and vampirism on show here seem much more interesting than healthy sex - as well as their naive world‑view that could just get them killed.
This movie is up there with Near Dark and Let the Right One In as an exploration of revenge and need - regardless of who is actually to blame. This, despite the rather odd fact that we never discover why the two women were murdered in the first place - nor why they should return as vampires, rather than just as ghosts.
Ken Russell, Jean Rollin or Jess Franco would, undoubtedly, have been proud of this movie - if any one of them had directed it - as it proudly‑visualizes the inner emotional world of its tormented characters. This is further exemplified in the use of Oakley Court as the perfect location for this gothic horror; especially given the large number of Hammer horror movies once shot there.
