Blood and Roses

Roger Vadim's adaptation of Sheridan le Fanu's "Carmilla" is an exquisite looking if somewhat slow romantic gothic horror with cinematography by Claude Renoir and costumes by Escoffier. It's stately pace will not really appeal to anyone looking for a Hammer-style gothic (who also adapted this story as "The Vampire Lovers"), but it is likely to appeal to fans of Italian gothics from the period. The climax, which blends color and black and white footage to remarkable effect, is gorgeous.

Atmospheric affair that neatly contrasts gothic and modern elements. This handsome, crisply told terror tale features a terrific nightmare sequence, color and B&W photography within the same frame (a la Lars von Trier's 1991 hallucination _Zentropa_) and the more widely hyped _Pleasantville_), relatively daring lesbian imagery, and an eerie danse macabre that prefigures _Carnival of Souls_, all in a compact 74 minutes.

The costumes and the set pieces are all nice to look at, but overall for me the narrative underwhelmed. I wanted a lot more from it, maybe because it's such an obscurity but definitely because there's just so much to play with within this story and almost none of the potential is realized.