Just last month I had a chance to see at long last the French vampire movie LE SADIQUE AUX DENTS ROUGE (SADIST WITH RED TEETH, 1971).  I had first read about this film in Barrie Pattison’s 1975 study of the vampire subgenre The Seal of Dracula (Bounty Books, New York).  SADIQUE was not discussed at any length in the book, meriting but three sentences in the chapter titled “Sex-Vampires.”  There was an accompanying illustration, a black-and-white reproduction of the film’s theatrical poster, whose copy claimed it as “un film de sex-horreur.”  That’s all I had to go on.  The poster grabbed my attention because it seemed the film’s vampire sported a set of novelty store hillbilly teeth.  Even at the tender age of 14 or 15, that seemed to me a novel approach.  I’ll admit a part of me doubted the movie was real, suspecting that the poster was some kind of snooty French joke.  I won’t say I was obsessed but the specter of SADIQUE sat at the back of my mind as I went about my life.  Assuming I got The Seal of Dracula at some point in the year of its publication (a reasonable assumption), that means it took me 35 years to scratch this itch.  In so doing, I found out that LE SADIQUE AUX DENTS ROUGE is not only a real movie but a pretty good one, in its own little impoverished but imaginative way.  Thirty-five years!  Of waiting.  And wondering.  Is it likely that anyone will ever again wonder about a movie for thirty-five years before finally seeing it?

I have a history of wondering.  My list of Must-See/Can’t Find Movies is much shorter now but it used to be hella long, as the kids say.  I came of age in the 1970s, well before the advent of home video or these new fangled dee-vee-dees.  Back then, you found out about movies not from websites or cross marketing but from print, from film magazines and film books.  Like most nerds of my vintage, the spark that started my flame was Famous Monsters of Filmland and its regular treasure trove of strange and wonderful pictures.  As I got older, though, I gravitated toward stranger visions than the rather juvenile FM could offer me.  Books from Europe filtered into the American market and I had most of them.  Published around the same time as The Seal of Dracula was British writer David Pirie’s The Vampire Cinema (Crescent Books, New York).  This coffee table book came wrapped in a blood-red cover and boasted dozens of photographs of naked lady vampires (some of them in color!), taken from films made all around the world.  Now I’d seen Playboy and maybe I’d even seen Penthouse, so nudity wasn’t new to me, but seeing a naked woman in the context of a horror movie was an entirely different ball of flesh.  Throughout this book, women were all vamped up and baring more than just their fangs, or chained up in some dungeon or biting other girls on the boob – I went steady with this book for years.  Maybe it even made a man out of me.  These two books gave me my first taste of what we weirdos affectionately refer to as “Euro-Sleaze,” movies made at a time of relaxed censorship worldwide, which offered lashings of sex and/or violence wrapped up in a Gothic package that kept the taboo-shattering just this side of pornography.  It was within these pages that I first learned about the films of Frenchman Jean Rollin and Spaniards Jesus ‘”Jess” Franco and Paul Naschy.  I knew I’d like these movies but had no hope, in 1977, that I would ever see them.  So I bided my time… and I never forgot.

Flash forward, oh, nearly 20 years.  I’m living in Manhattan and coming out of a period of horror latency.  Oh, I’d gone to see horror movies all through my life but during college and my early Bohemian years I was too poor to afford to collect the memorabilia and ephemera related to le fantastique, so I learned to do without.  After a failed first marriage to someone who didn’t share these passions, I started going to horror conventions held along the East Coast.  In 1993, I hit the convention held for the relaunch of Famous Monsters in Virginia, and over the course of the next few years the twice annually Chiller Theatre and Fangoria cons.  I met people, I made friends, and I began exchanging video tapes.  Bootlegs, of course.  I’m not saying it was right, I’m just saying it’s what I did.  Anyway, that’s how I first saw CAGED VIRGINS, the cut-down, English dubbed version of Jean Rollins’ LES FRISSONS DES VAMPIRES (1971) that distributor Harry Novak distributed in America.  The poster, reproduced on page 12 of The Vampire Cinema, in a chapter titled “The Sex-Vampire,” looked cuh-ray-zee … like an episode of Scooby Doo with boobs and torture.  I couldn’t wait to see this movie.  But I did, as stated, about twenty years.  The tableau depicted on the poster doesn’t appear at all in the film but there’s still enough to gape at.  I wouldn’t see an uncut version of the movie, in good condition, for another several years, around the time I caught up with other Jean Rollin movies – LE VIOL DU VAMPIRE (1969), LA VAMPIRE NUE (197o) and LES DEMONIAQUES (1973) – discussed by Pattison and Pirie.  Ditto Jess Franco’s VAMPYROS LESBOS (1971) and LA MALDICION DE FRANKENSTEIN or DRACULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN (both 1972).  Happily, I liked all of these movies, after a wait of more than two decades.  By the time I caught up with them, I was fully versed in the kind of freewheeling, low budget Continental cinema they represented… shot in actual locations to minimize preproduction costs, cast with the occasional “name” actor, peopled with performers from several countries to appeal in as many markets as possible.  I wonder, though, if I had seen them right away, if I could have set down The Vampire Cinema and added CAGED VIRGINS to my Netflix queue and watched it within a day or two… would I still like these films?  Or do I appreciate them because I had to work at it?

This equation was worked out many times during my youth.  My first horror movie book was Ivan Butler’s Horror in the Cinema (an expanded reprint of his earlier The Horror Film) which I bought with my allowance at a school book fair.  This slim volume had a number of compelling black and white photographs and the ones that really jumped out at me were from Masaki Kobayashi’s omnibus ghost film KAIDAN (KWAIDAN, 1964).  The movie was only 5 or 6 years old when I found out about it, yet it took me twenty-five years or so to catch up with it, as a DVD in the Criterion Collection.  Moody, atmospheric, at times staggeringly beautiful and genuinely creepy, KAIDAN was worth the wait.  I’m glad, even after the distance of a quarter of a century, I came to the experience of seeing it somewhat cold, leaving me unprepared, vulnerable, a perfect target for haunting.  I’m glad my curiosity was piqued at a time before every new movie had its own website, chat room, publicity campaign and gambit of viral marketing.  Also pictured in Horror in the Cinema was a shot from Kaneto Shindo’s ONIBABA (1964), which took me even longer to see – thirty or thirty-five years.  But boy, oh boy does that one deliver.  It’s super freaky!  I still haven’t seen Shindo’s KURONEKO (1968), which is illustrated in the Butler book by a still of a Japanese woman eating what appears to be a big old cat leg.  Boy, that really made me want to see this movie.  Forty years later and I’m still waiting.  I wonder if I’ll like it.  But that’s okay, it’ll come around to me eventually.  Time and tide have made it clear that I’m nothing if not patient.