FlixOlé pays tribute to Jess Franco by incorporating six new titles from the most prolific director of Spanish cinema. On Friday, July 11th, the platform will premiere ‘Gritos en la noche’ (1962) and ‘Las vampiras’ (1971). Both titles will be included in a special collection dedicated to the director, which will also feature the additions of ‘El conde Drácula’ (1970), Jess Franco’s version of the myth created by Bram Stoker, and three B-movie thrillers that the director infused with high doses of humor: ‘Bésame, monstruo’ (1969), ‘El diablo que vino de Akasawa’ (1971), and ‘El muerto hace las maletas’ (1972).
As part of the premieres on the platform, Filmoteca Española has scheduled a cycle titled ‘Jess Franco. Renewed Classics’ dedicated to the filmmaker. The program will consist of the screening of the aforementioned six feature films at the Sala 1 de Cine Doré during the months of July and August, starting on Wednesday, July 9th.
There are over 200 films that make up Jess Franco’s vast imaginary, as he filmed his works in many countries and featured faces like Christopher Lee, María Schell, Klaus Kinski, Shirley Eaton, Howard Vernon, and Fernando Fernán-Gómez.
The filmmaker’s early years were marked by his roles as a composer, second unit director, and production assistant for some of the great Spanish filmmakers: Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis Gª Berlanga, Pedro Lazaga, and León Klimovsky, among others.
‘GRITOS EN LA NOCHE’
This experience encouraged him to start directing, and in his early films, he showed his penchant for police, fantasy, and horror cinema, genres through which he channeled his cinephilia with numerous references to American classics and Universal monsters, displayed his expressionist and surrealist influences, as well as his obsessions around desire and death.
From this background came ‘Gritos en la noche’, one of Franco’s early successes. Considered one of the first gothic horror films in the country’s film industry, it also paved the way for the so-called Spanish fantaterror and introduced the sinister character Orlof (played by Howard Vernon) to the audience.
This doctor tries to reconstruct his daughter’s face, burned after an accident. To do this, he transplants the skin of young women kidnapped by his blind assistant, Morpho. Inspector Tanner (Conrado San Martín) and his girlfriend (Diana Lorys) try to uncover who is behind the strange disappearances.
Jess Franco adapted European and American horror in this film that impressed not only genre lovers but even the legendary Orson Welles, who invited his Spanish counterpart to participate in ‘Campanadas a medianoche’ (1965), thus initiating a fruitful professional and personal relationship.
‘LAS VAMPIRAS’
The director’s unstoppable need to film and his desire for creative freedom clashed with Franco’s disdain for the conventions of the Francoist regime, coupled with the subversive themes and high sexual content of his films, forcing him to try his luck in the foreign industry. From voluntary exile, Jess Franco forged his international reputation for decades as a master of genre cinema, B movies, exploitation, and eroticism.
Within this period falls ‘Las vampiras’, a feminized version of the ‘Dracula’ story that popularized the lesbian and sensual archetype of blood-sucking creatures. The film follows the steps of Nadine, the last descendant of Count Dracula and the sole heir of the mansion who is visited by Linda, in charge of the will, and with whom she feels a strange connection.
As the epitome of Jess Franco’s cinema, ‘Las vampiras’ (‘Vampyros Lesbos’ in its foreign version) explosively combined terror and the dream world with integral eroticism. The director unleashed all his imagination and narrative inventiveness through daring shots where the zoom sets a style complemented by jazz, psychedelia, and improvisation.
The avant-garde and radical ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ has influenced numerous directors. The most recent being Sean Baker, who included a tribute to Jess Franco and Soledad Miranda, the deceased lead actress, in the credits of his Oscar-winning ‘Anora’ (2024), following an accident before the film’s release. Similarly, Quentin Tarantino, a known admirer of the Spanish director’s films, incorporated one of the themes from the movie into his film ‘Jackie Brown’ (1997).
DRÁCULA AND THE JESS FRANCO COLLECTION
A year before the release of ‘Las vampiras,’ the filmmaker had brought to the big screen one of the most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel, ‘El conde Drácula’. Jess Franco delved into the story of the prince of darkness for the first time and crafted a gothic fantasy befitting the popular character and the Hammer films.
A film marked by the portrayal of Dracula by Christopher Lee (the vampire king who had portrayed the character in four more films that same year) and the memorable role of Klaus Kinski, who embodied the deranged Renfield.
In addition to ‘Gritos en la noche’, ‘El conde Drácula’, and ‘Las vampiras’, FlixOlé will also add three B-movie titles to its catalog on July 11th, in which the director played and deconstructed different genres with high doses of humor: ‘Bésame, monstruo’ (1969), a comedy revolving around the contents of a strange red box that two attractive adventurers obtain from Dr. Bertrán; ‘El diablo que vino de Akasawa’ (1971), a parody of spy movies; and ‘El muerto hace las maletas’ (1972), a very cheap coproduction with Scotland Yard inspectors and an extravagant killer.
The films will be included in a special collection composed of titles that span the entire filmography of Jess Franco, from his beginnings linked to horror and detective genres (‘La muerte silba un blues’, ‘Rififí en la ciudad’, ‘Al otro lado del espejo’, and ‘Un silencio de tumba’), forays into exploitation and erotic projects (‘Camino solitario’, ‘Macumba sexual’, ‘Mil sexos tiene la noche’, and ‘Killer Barbys’, among others), as well as documentaries (‘A ritmo de Jess’ and ‘La última película de Jess Franco’).