The Velvet Vampire (1971)

If you love The Love Witch, go find this immediately.

I went in expecting a cheap Roger Corman drive-in picture and got one of the most gorgeous things I’ve seen all year. Stephanie Rothman directed it in 1971, and the whole time I kept thinking about Anna Biller, who made Viva and The Love Witch decades later. Same saturated color, same love of costumes and décor, same sense of a woman behind the camera having a great time staging female desire whether or not you take it seriously. Rothman got there first.

A married couple, Lee and Susan Ritter, accept an invitation from Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall) to stay at her house out in the desert. Diane is a vampire, and she WANTS both of them.

The dream sequences are where it goes from fun to stunning. Lee and Susan asleep on a bed with red sheets, set down in the middle of the open desert, while Diane steps out of a mirror toward them. Red shows up everywhere else too: her dresses, her lipstick, the drapes she watches them through. Rothman shoots the desert like it’s one more room in Diane’s house.

It’s also much hornier than I expected from 1971, and openly gay about it. Diane’s interest in Susan is never treated as a shock. She wants who she wants, and the movie spends its time on what that attention does to a marriage that was already a little brittle, at least until the last stretch drags things back toward the usual vampire ending.

The middle is slow, and the rules about vampires and sunlight bend to whatever the scene needs. I didn’t care. This is a sun-soaked, sexy, strange little movie from one of the few women directing genre films at the time, and it looks far richer than its budget should allow. I loved it.

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