This rare non-vampiric outing from Euro-horror master Jean Rollin is also the ultimate date movie for goths, making the “sex = death” connection in a more romantic, more chthonic way than your typical slasher movie. It’s more of an OG “Mary Shelley losing her virginity on her mother’s grave” type of thing, a hypnotic work of intuitive, dreamlike surrealism whose plot is simple but whose implications are profound. Jennifer writes that The Iron Rose “possesses all the eroticism and melancholia characteristic of [Rollin’s] other work, but this one is stripped back to the bare essentials and is the better for it.”
These elemental characters—they’re referred to in the credits as simply “The Girl” and “The Boy”—descend into a catacomb to make love, and emerge into the world of the dead. The fence no longer has a gate—multiple compare The Iron Rose to Luis Buñuel and The Exterminating Angel—and the girl is transformed, “wiser and scarier than her years should allow,” as Kai writes. They’re accompanied by a series of evocative, deeply weird archetypes, including a man in a vampire cape (Rollin just can’t help himself) and, even stranger, a clown.
It all means something, probably. But this is primarily a mood piece, a reflection on the fragility of youth next to the dusty permanence of death. Rollin took advantage of being based in Europe, where cities are literally built on skeletons, throughout his career: here, Brian writes that he “knows to trust in his location, the overwhelmingly atmospheric Madeline Cemetery, and in the quasi-Bressonian charisma of his actors… drawing indescribably potent sensations from fairly modest means and glossed with a peculiarly Gallic erotic-thanatoic gloom”.
That gloom—and the harsh spotlights on moss-covered tombs—will look especially striking in 4K, as The Iron Rose hits disc as part of UK label Indicator’s series of deluxe Rollin restorations. I have the label’s Fascination release, and it’s gorgeous; I can’t wait to pick this one up as well.
