By the late 70s Jean Rollin was starting to feel that perhaps he had exhausted the vampire genre. He had made a series of wildly unconventional surrealist vampire vampires and that cycle of films would come to an end in 1979 with the superb Fascination. He was also disillusioned by the commercial failure of Lips of Blood. Between 1978 and 1982 he made three extraordinarily interesting and unusual movies, The Grapes of Death (1978), Night of the Hunted (1980) and The Living Dead Girl (1982). The Grapes of Death and The Living Dead Girl are horror movies and they’re zombie movies, although they’re not like anyone else’s zombie movies. He also made The Escapees about this time, a movie that has thematic similarities to Night of the Hunted.
Night of the Hunted (the original French title was La Nuit des Traquées) is not quite a horror movie. It’s not quite a zombie movie, but it has close thematic links to The Living Dead Girl. It’s a science fiction film, of sorts. And, being a Jean Rollin movie, it’s an exercise in subtle surrealism.
In 1978 Rollin had begin his filmic association with Brigitte Lahaie. Miss Lahaie was a very successful nude model and porn star (making both softcore and hardcore movies). Rollin thought she had potential. He thought she had an intriguing screen presence and plenty of charisma. And he was right. She went on to make quite a few non-porn movies but her superb performance as Elisabeth in Night of the Hunted is the highlight of her acting career.
This movie’s origins are intriguing. A producer asked Rollin to do a hardcore film. Rollin told him that for the same minuscule budget he could make a proper movie. The producer agreed. With $40,000 Rollin shot Night of the Hunted in ten days.
The movie begins with a girl running along the road, dressed in a nightgown. We will find out that her name is Elisabeth. Robert (Alain Duclos) picks her up and takes her back to his apartment. She is clearly frightened and confused. She is running away from something but she cannot tell Robert what she is running away from. She cannot tell him where she lives.
Robert is a good-natured guy. He wants to help her but he doesn’t know where to start. Elisabeth knows where to start. She wants to make love. She needs to make love. That’s the only thing she is sure about.
Robert leaves for work the next morning and a man and a woman show up. She is told that the man is her doctor. They are going to take her home. They take her to a huge modernist building. Elisabeth is told that she shares an apartment with Catherine (Cathy Stewart). She doesn’t recognise Catherine and Catherine doesn’t recognise her.
Catherine also has no memories. They live in a tower building referred to as the Black Tower. All the people there have the same problem. They are losing their memory. They are becoming mindless zombies.
Elisabeth has not lost her humanity completely (unlike some of the inhabitants of the Black Tower). She still has emotions. She cares about Catherine. She also cares about Véronique (Dominique Journet). She doesn’t remember her but she thinks they had been friends. Elisabeth makes plans to escape. Véronique had accompanied her the last time she escaped. Elisabeth intends that the three of them – Véronique, Catherine and herself – will escape together.
But escape is not easy, and the attempt will have unexpected consequences.
At times this movie is just slightly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in its use of stark modernist architecture as a science fiction setting, and its use of modernism as something remote and alienating.
The Black Tower is neither a prison nor an apartment block nor a hospital, or perhaps it’s all three. It’s an incredibly stark setting and the visuals in this movie are bleak and colourless, and deliberately so.
The performances are generally effective. Lahaie is the standout. She really is superb. It’s sad and very moving performance.
The sex scene between Elisabeth and Robert is fairly explicit but it’s absolutely necessary. Indeed it’s a crucial scene. Elisabeth is losing touch with her own humanity. She is becoming something less than human. She desperately wants something human to cling to, some intense human experience. And human experiences don’t come much more intense than sex. It’s one of the most touching sex scenes you’ll ever see. And it’s desperately sad. Elisabeth’s pleasure is intense. For that moment she is human again. She is a woman again. But her joy is fleeting. She had hoped that the sex would be something so intense that she would not forget it. But she forgets everything that happens to her within a few minutes.
Rollin does not make the mistake of explaining what is happening at the beginning. He lets us piece things together. Elisabeth has no memories. None at all. Five minutes after Robert introduces himself to her she has forgotten his name or how she came to be in his apartment. We gradually figure out some of what is happening. The eventual explanation is perhaps the only disappointing thing about the movie.
There’s a lot of nudity and a lot of sex. Additional much more graphic sex scenes were also shot by Rollin. He was keeping his options open. There was always the possibility the film would be recut as a softcore sex film (although it would have mystified the audience for such movies). A version with hardcore insets was later released although Rollin wanted no connection with that version.
Night of the Hunted was savaged by critics (who entirely failed to understand it) and flopped at the box office. That was perhaps inevitable. This is a very bleak movie. It’s also a weird kind of love story, but in a way that would hardly draw mass audiences in.
Night of the Hunted remains one of Rollin’s most fascinating movies, with an extraordinary and powerful ending. Very highly recommended.