From France, Bitten (La Morsure) really makes a meal of its fairy-tale premise, in which two Catholic teens break out of an all-girl convent school for an overnight costume party in a decaying rural mansion. Françoise (Léonie Dahan-Lamort) is ostensibly acting on superstition, believing that she received a premonition of her own death in a dream. She’s also clearly jealous of best friend Delphine’s (Lilith Grasmug) advanced sexual experiences. Set at the end of the ’60s and featuring two hand-holding elfins in a midnight descent into the mysteries of Eros and Thanatos, there’s an obvious debt here to the work of Jean Rollin, who gave horror cinema unsurpassed visions of beautifully sad young women abducted by the supernatural in films like 1972’s Requiem pour un vampire. Delivered to the party by a Renfield-esque character they encounter at a café (Fred Blin has the vibe of the late-great British actor David Warner), Françoise is eventually confronted by an image straight out of Rollin, when she finds herself stalked by a shaggy-haired but oddly noble youth who may or not be a real vampire.

Sex and death do indeed ensue in Romain de Saint-Blanquat’s near-perfect film, which otherwise benefits from gorgeous photography and a killer soundtrack, but Bitten maintains a delicate ambiguity throughout. It’s decidedly a film about the passage into adulthood, which is a haunted trip for everyone. It’s also an exercise in pleasure for those (I suspect Romain de Saint-Blanquat is among them) whose own youthful curiosities alighted on the modish softcore eurosleaze that flooded the VHS market in the ‘80s.

Stir, September 2023