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Vampire’s Ecstasy (1973, aka The Devil’s Plaything, The Veil of Blood, Curse of the Black Sisters) raises that critical temptation of trying to reclaim a film from its obvious first intention to a counter-reading, or an ‘against the grain’ reading. In this case, suggest that a film clearly intended for a male audience, made by a male filmmaker with the goal of titillating a straight male audience, can be read as having a feminist lining. On the one hand, while this was never intended as an outright feminist film, it features many lesbian vampires, a few who are either weak or silenced, and would no doubt be a candidate for a retro billing at a hip lesbian/gay film festival. Hence from a certain standpoint, this is a unique horror film by the prolific filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno, known mainly for his soft-core and hardcore erotica and sexploitation fare (Inga, 1968, The Young, Erotic Fanny Hill, 1971, Confessions of a Young American Housewife, 1974, Butterflies, 1975, Misty, 1976). Unique because the film presents a world where men are ostensibly cast aside for the wanton desires of an (practically) all-female vampire sex cult that worships an infamous 17th century Countess Bathory-like German aristocrat named Danielle Vaga (only represented through a portrait painting, though her ‘spirit’ is ever present).
The film opens with a long shot of a castle at night, and cuts to an extended pre-credit dungeon scene of a bevy of nearly nude women dancing sensually to a tribal drum beat. The dancers are led by an intense, dark-haired woman named Wanda (played by Hungarian actress Nadia Henkowa), the leader of the cult. Wanda begins to fondle the dancing women aggressively, but they all seem to enjoy her touch. One woman from the group is selected, laid on a table, sexually pleasured by the other women, and encouraged to masturbate with a large black phallic shaped sculpture. This begins a motif of unending phallic objects that the vampire women please themselves with, or use to please captive women, who are either under a spell induced by the cult and/or in a state of sexual euphoria. The objects include the black sculpture, a variety of different shaped, sized candles, including some hilarious penis-shaped candles.
Nadia Henkowa as...