Jean Rollin and the Perceived (and often misinterpreted) Feminine Psyche

Jean Rollin’s films exist in the space between dream and death. Known primarily for his surreal vampire films of the 1970s and early ’80s, French director Rollin created a cinematic language rooted in repetition, eroticism, decay, and myth. His female characters drift through haunted chateaux and moonlit beaches, barefoot and half-nude, often spectral figures. Critics have long accused him of indulging in softcore erotica disguised as horror, but this reading overlooks the psychic and symbolic work his films are doing, particularly when it comes to his women. As a woman watching Rollin’s work, I find it shallow to deem it objectification when there is such reflection. I see mourning. I see contradictions. I see what feminist theorist Hélène Cixous might call écriture féminine or “women’s writing” as postulated in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” An intuitive and engaged language that resists linearity and embraces multiplicity. In Rollin’s films, the feminine psyche is not defined; he doesn’t even attempt this undertaking. Rather, it is evoked and made mythic.

Jean Rollin’s films are undeniably made through the eyes of a man, but what makes them feel different from many male-directed horror films of the same era is that Rollin doesn’t pretend to fully understand women. Most crucially, he doesn’t try to. His female characters are never explained or reconciled. Instead, they are rendered with reverence and distance, as if he recognizes that the feminine experience is something he can only approach symbolically, not inhabit directly. This is why so many of his women are supernatural: vampires, ghosts, revenants. They are metaphors for something beyond his grasp, converting into figures of myth rather than psychology. Rollin’s eroticism stems not from control, but from awe. The sensuality of his films is often framed not through conquest, but through surrender. His camera doesn’t strip women down to diminish them, but to elevate them into symbols of transformation and desire that resist containment. In contrast to the aggressive, punitive eroticism often found in exploitation cinema, Rollin’s version leans toward melancholy and myth. The women are not presented as passive victims, but as beings in possession of knowledge and power that the audience cannot access. By refusing to impose a reductive logic on his characters, Rollin reveals a deeper truth: that men cannot fully understand what it means to be a woman in a landscape that constantly tries to define and constrain them. Rather than pretend otherwise, Rollin employs that distant part of the atmosphere. His films feel like what it means to try and reach someone you’ll never fully know—a lover, a ghost, an unattainable version of yourself. This is not the absence of meaning, but a different representation of recognition: that the presence of enigma can be a form of reverence. In this manner, Rollin's cinema walks upon a frail and especially fine line, filtered through a male gaze, but a gaze that looks toward in reverence, not through.

Rollin’s women are not psychologically “developed” in the traditional sense. They inhabit a multiplicity of psychic states, whether it be grief, hunger, desire, innocence, memory. These manifest in the visual and tonal fabric of the films. This abstraction has often led to accusations of incoherence or superficiality, but when viewed through the lens of Cixous’s écriture féminine, as mentioned earlier, this ambiguity becomes the very point. To return to “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous describes feminine expression as fluid, nonlinear, emotional, and transgressive of masculine logic. It is not narrative, though deeply rhythmic. This is precisely what Rollin offers. In his film Lips of Blood (1975), a man is haunted by visions of a woman from his youth, eventually revealed to be an imprisoned vampire. The film, though told from his perspective, centers the woman’s affective presence as entirely ethereal and elusive. She does not speak much, but her gaze and her stillness, her sudden reappearance, carry the crux of the narrative. She is a figure of repressed memory and feminine power, denied expression but not agency. Her existence transcends language, akin to a memory one cannot fully access, only feel. Similarly, in Requiem for a Vampire (1971), two young women dressed in clown costumes flee across the French countryside, eventually finding themselves in a decaying château filled with vampires. There’s almost no dialogue for the first third of the film. Their relationship is tender, occasionally sexual—but never clearly defined. They sleep curled beside each other, drift between being victims and predators, eventually becoming vampires themselves. Their transformation isn’t framed as horror, but inevitability. Rollin does not ask us to explain them, but to witness them.

In Jean Rollin’s films, dialogue rarely serves as mere exposition or straightforward communication; instead, fragments of forgotten lore are suspended in a liminal space between speech and silence. His characters’ words are often drenched in metaphor and allusion, weaving a tapestry of meaning that evokes the spectral presence of history, myth, and desire. The conversations are less about conveying facts and more about evoking moods, stirring memories, and conjuring enigmas. The language his female characters employ resonates with an archaic cadence. They speak not as inhabitants of the present but as timeless specters, caught in a perpetual twilight of occultic significance. Their words ripple with poetic suggestiveness, inviting the viewer to listen not for clarity but for the reverberations beneath. What is unsaid, the hidden, the deeply intimate. This deliberate elusiveness, this “suggestiveness,” renders dialogue a form of ritual, where each phrase becomes an invocation. The speech is pregnant with layers of meaning, opening spaces for multiple interpretations and resisting the reductive logic of linear narrative. In these moments, speech, time, and logic dissolve together. The characters’ language is not bound to chronology or rational causality, but to sensation. They speak as though outside of history itself, inhabiting a circular temporality where memory and myth coexist. This timelessness is what allows their dialogue to feel both ancient and immediate—less communication than incantation. In Requiem for a Vampire, one of Rollin’s young women murmurs, “Nous ne savons rien, seulement que la nuit est belle”—We know nothing, only that the night is beautiful. The line is as simple as it is unfathomable, a statement of unknowing that becomes a mode of feminine wisdom. It subtly recalls the story of Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi, who proclaimed him the wisest of men as he alone recognized his ignorance. Reflecting on this, Socrates famously said, “I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know.” Put simply, “All I know is that I know nothing.” In Rollin’s world, this acknowledgment of unknowing shifts from the rational to the sensual. His women do not seek knowledge through dialectic but through surrender; their wisdom lies in feeling rather than defining. The Socratic “I do not know” becomes, in Rollin’s cinema, the embodied poetics of mystery—a way of inhabiting the unknown rather than dispelling it. The women’s speech transforms philosophical humility into a kind of nocturnal intuition, an openness to the night’s obscurity as revelation. It gestures toward the feminine psyche not as a terrain to be mapped or mastered, but as a shimmering, ever-shifting landscape to be felt and sensed. Moreover, the subtlety of suggestion permeates every exchange, intensifying the films’ dreamlike eroticism and the aura of mystery enveloping Rollin’s women. Nothing is articulated plainly; instead, we are made to interpret glances and poetic cadence. This echoes feminist understandings of feminine expression as lyrical and fragmentary, defying directness in favor of resonance and depth. Rollin’s dialogue becomes a portal to the ineffable. His women speak in tongues shaped by history, longing, and silence. These are voices that invite us not to decode but to enter into their haunting, beautiful mystery.

It is impossible to discuss Rollin’s work without addressing eroticism. His women are often nude, gazed upon, and placed within lush, sensual settings. But unlike mainstream horror, where nudity often precedes punishment or death, Rollin’s use of the female body feels ritualistic. Much less concerned with titillation and more about symbolic presence. The body in his films is not just sexual, it is innately psychic. It is the site where transformation, trauma, and memory are held. Fascination (1979) exemplifies this. A group of aristocratic women lure men to a countryside manor under the pretense of offering sensual pleasure, only to kill them in a ritualistic bloodletting. One of the most iconic scenes involves Brigitte Lahaie, dressed in a flowing sheer gown, scythe in hand, emerging from a foggy corridor to kill a man. The image is erotic, yes—but sovereign. She is not vulnerable; she is a symbol of female death and desire fused. The film inverts the logic of consumption: it is not the women who are devoured, but the men. Critics often interpret these scenes as fetishistic, but they overlook how eroticism here is a tool of feminine control. The women are not punished for their sexuality; they preside over it. Their pleasure is not in submission, but in performance, ritual, and power. 

If one film could serve as Rollin’s most poignant exploration of the feminine psyche, it is The Living Dead Girl (La Morte Vivante, 1982). The story follows Catherine Valmont, a woman who is accidentally resurrected by toxic waste. She returns, feral and confused, to her family’s now-abandoned estate. When her childhood friend Hélène discovers her, she decides to protect her by offering her victims, lying to authorities, and eventually losing herself in the fantasy that they can live together forever. On the surface, it’s a gory vampire film. But underneath, it’s a meditation on female intimacy, trauma, and emotional possession. Catherine is a figure of psychic rupture, she is not simply “back from the dead,” but fractured. She cannot speak; she kills instinctively. Her body remembers violence, but her mind cannot process it. In this way, she becomes a symbol of repressed feminine pain that returns not in words, but in symptoms. The character’s inability to communicate verbally, her muteness or fragmented speech, mirrors the societal erasure of female voices, especially those that speak of pain, violation, or autonomy. Instead of articulate protest, her suffering manifests as bodily symptoms: her body spoils,  she is bestowed an insatiable hunger, and an uncanny, unsettling presence that disrupts the world around her. These symptoms become a form of language in themselves, a language in which the body refuses to be ignored or neatly contained. She is wholly abject: she disturbs the boundary between self and other, between life and death, between beauty and horror. The relationship between Catherine and Hélène further complicates this reading. It is deeply intimate, coded with erotic and emotional longing, also controlled. Hélène wants to preserve Catherine in a childlike state, untouched by her violent hunger. She refuses to accept that Catherine has changed— and that she is no longer innocent. This mirrors the cultural impulse to freeze women in roles that serve others: the innocent girl, the loyal friend, the lover who does not devour. Hélène’s fantasy collapses when Catherine kills again, and the film ends in tragedy. But it is not Catherine who is judged, it is the fantasy itself that cannot be sustained.

Jean Rollin’s women are easy to misread because they do not behave according to patriarchal codes of intelligibility. They do not “grow.” They do not “speak their truth.” They do not explain their motives. They seduce, drift, kill, and return. For some critics, this makes them incoherent. For others, merely decorative. But that is a failure of interpretation, not of the films. Rollin’s work isn’t about coherent identity; instead pondering on what happens when identity is ruptured, when memory leaks, when desire doesn’t follow rules. This is precisely what makes his films so resonant for female viewers who feel alienated by mainstream portrayals of empowerment. They are allowed to be more than consistent. They are allowed to be unknowable. As a woman watching these films, I find in them not realism, but recognition. I see the ambiguity of femininity represented in atmospheres. I perceive trauma that doesn’t “teach” a lesson. I see beauty that’s inseparable from pain. I see female characters who plainly are. 

Jean Rollin’s cinema stands apart from both conventional horror and feminist film in that it refuses to resolve the feminine into anything fixed. His women do not speak in declarations; they bleed in symbols. They don’t seek empowerment; they haunt, return, and vanish. They are not moral lessons, but arcane presences and expressions of an inner world often dismissed as incoherent. By framing the feminine psyche as a place of ambiguity and characterized darkness, Rollin offers something rare: not an answer, but a collective dreamlike lucidity. And in that dream, the feminine is not misread; it is finally liberated.

Bibliography:

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–893.

Eliana Abdel-Khaleq is a freshman at Barnard College majoring in Aesthetic Philosophy. She has a tremendous love for literature, the academic tradition, and philosophy in all its appearances, such as lamenting music or contemplative film. 

@scarletswell