Lips of Blood

Jean Rollin’s hauntingly poetic horror about a man trying to solve the riddle of a tormenting childhood memory.

In the most personal of Jean Rollin's moody, erotic horror films, a man is haunted by a childhood vision of a girl trapped inside a castle, whom he longs to free. Determined to find the girl in real life, he tracks her down to a deserted chateau where she’s surrounded by vampires and pursued by other shadowy forces.

Arguably Rollin’s most successful work, Lips of Blood is one of the most sublime works of poetic horror. The dream-like atmosphere perfected by the director over the course of several films is ideally married to a narrative that’s also preoccupied with the elusiveness of dreams and memory. And some of the images he conjures are unforgettably haunting, such as the famous shot of a coffin floating out to sea.