Yet perhaps Rocky Horror<\/em> wasn\u2019t as innovative as it initially seems when one considers the existence of director Harry K\u00fcmel\u2019s Daughters of Darkness<\/em> \u00a0\u2013 \u00a0released in 1971, several years before Rocky<\/em>\u2019s stage show debuted. Part of a wave of lesbian vampire movies in the early 1970\u2019s, Daughters<\/em> is not a musical but rather an erotic thriller-cum-horror film, one that has influenced numerous other vampire movies that followed. Yet its similarity to Rocky Horror<\/em> in plot and theme is remarkable, and while it\u2019s not clear whether O\u2019Brien, Sharman, or anyone involved with Rocky<\/em> saw the film, it seems that Daughters<\/em> is at least partially responsible for the musical\u2019s cult success as well as its own.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daughters of Darkness<\/em> plays with the same tropes as Rocky Horror<\/em>, albeit in more concealed fashion. Where Brad and Janet are left helplessly alone and lost on a dark and stormy night after their car breaks down in a spooky woods, the honeymooning newlyweds in Daughters<\/em>, Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) and Stefan Chilton (John Karlen), find themselves waylaid in a hotel on the Ostend seafront in Belgium after their train is delayed. It turns out that the place is a favorite haunt of a Hungarian countess, Elizabeth B\u00e1thory (Delphine Seyrig), who, along with her companion Ilona (Andrea Rau), becomes the only other guest to check in to the hotel. B\u00e1thory takes a keen interest in the newly married couple, inserting herself into their discussions and telling them sordid, ambiguously threatening and enticing tales of her connection to the historical Erzs\u00e9bet B\u00e1thory and that countess\u2019s numerous violent and deadly atrocities. Meanwhile, the murders of some young girls in nearby Bruges casts further suspicion on Elizabeth, and the hotel\u2019s sole staff member (Paul Esser) and a retired policeman (Georges Jamin) seem to remember Elizabeth from decades ago looking the exact same age. Valerie and Stefan realize too late Elizabeth\u2019s vampiric identity, succumbing in their own way to her wiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The horror film aspects of both Daughters of Darkness<\/em> and The Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em> are presented in as classical a fashion as possible to allow each film\u2019s commentary on sexuality to be smuggled in. Both are unabashedly queer, with Frank and Elizabeth open and voracious in their bisexuality. The two of them, fulfilling the roles of mad scientist and queen vampire, have goals that ostensibly involve domination and obliteration, yet they appear to be far more interested in experimentation and play than mere murder. Each are far more driven by exploring their various kinks and fetishes: Frank takes particular delight in seducing Brad and Janet separately by impersonating the other, and of course cannot wait to unwrap his Frankenstein\u2019s monster of a sex toy, Rocky (Peter Hinwood). Elizabeth already has her own sex toy in Ilona, but her ultimate goal seems to be awakening the dormant darker libidos of Valerie and Stefan. In Rocky Horror<\/em>\u2019s climax, Frank attempts to start a five-way gender-bent orgy, while Daughters<\/em> ends with B\u00e1thory apparently trying to initiate a threesome with Valerie and Stefan. The fact that neither Frank nor Elizabeth are totally successful serves a dual thematic purpose: for the more conservative and mainstream audience members, their defeat fulfills the trope in horror where the deviant and the radical is destroyed, and for the more progressive and open-minded, it\u2019s a wry commentary on how true sexual freedom is routinely oppressed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Where Daughters<\/em> and Rocky<\/em> are the most subversive is in their destruction of expectation and character stereotypes, using the then-new permissiveness in film to comment on cinema\u2019s past. Frank and Elizabeth, the envelope-pushing sexual experimenters in the guise of Gothic horror villains, are also a comment on Old Hollywood and its iconography: each has their own pixie-like woman in fishnet stockings companion that look like they\u2019re from the 1920s or \u201830s, Ilona appearing like Louise Brooks and Columbia (Nell Campbell) recalling Fred Astaire in top hat and tails. Frank himself fantasizes of being the star of \u201cAn RKO Radio Picture\u201d while Elizabeth resembles the actress Marlene Dietrich from her perfectly coiffed blonde hair to her slinky, sparkly gowns. Brad and Janet are literally and figuratively stripped down and reconstructed as the more sexually fluid people their staunchly conservative facades were hiding, while Valerie and Stefan undergo a similar transformation-cum-revelation, with Valerie discovering her bisexuality and Stefan\u2019s latent sadomasochism coming to the fore. Stefan\u2019s biggest secret remains hidden from his wife Valerie, but not from the audience: his wealthy \u201cMother\u201d that he\u2019s so wary to introduce Valerie to is really a gay man (Fons Rademakers)\u2014or perhaps a trans woman\u2014who has apparently kept Stefan for an indeterminate amount of time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether O\u2019Brien and Sharman saw K\u00fcmel\u2019s film before creating Rocky Horror<\/em> or not may be a moot point considering the wave of permissive, progressive and transgressive cinema in the 1970s. Genre films have always been the best and most powerful way to smuggle in themes and concepts that would be rejected in more straightforward drama, and it\u2019s entirely possible that the makers of both movies saw the opportunities inherent in the horror genre to make explicit what was implicit before, both in horror movies themselves and culture at large. It\u2019s difficult to make a fully progressive read of either movie given their dedication to the horror genre\u2014while Frank and Elizabeth could be seen as queer heroes, they\u2019re still ostensibly the villains of their stories. However, both Daughters of Darkness<\/em> and The Rocky Horror Picture Show<\/em> seem to paint their villainy not due to their sexuality or tastes but their appetites, their freedom as creatures of the night giving them license to go too far and do more harm than good. The larger evil force in both films seems to be the repressed nature of society at large, a fear of sex and denial of self that results in a violent explosion of everyone\u2019s id, perpetuating a cycle that is doomed to continue: Valerie takes on the mantle of B\u00e1thory and seduces a new young couple, while the Transylvanians will undoubtedly do the Time Warp again. At least we have these cult genre films to help open our minds and our eyes, lest we do the same.\u00a0 The references and homages in \u2018Rocky Horror\u2019 are numerous, but one film in particular lines up with the cult classic in themes, narrative, and approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":16882,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22225,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16879\/revisions\/22225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/rocky-horror-1024x689.jpg\")
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