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Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973) While the forest zombies conduct themselves in the ravenous, hand-through-the-window manner of Romero's Living Dead, and Lemora's sentimental / sensual education of her young protégée fits in loosely with the early 70s depiction of the vampire as a force for feminist liberation (cf. The Velvet Vampire, Daughters of Darkness), Robert Blackburn's stately, oneiric, semi-art horror movie is otherwise like little else in talking pictures. The quaint subtitle, which remains on this video release, was scrapped by the American distributors and replaced with something more commercial. nevertheless, A Child's Tale of the Supernatural has an Alice in Wonderland / Valerie and Her Week on Wonders ring which aptly catches the archaic flavour of Blackburn's vision of a compromised innocence at large in a world of stylised degeneracy - from the red-lit sinfulness of a small town and its perverse human inhabitants through the haunted woods to Lemora's old dark house. Blackburn, later the co-writer of Eating Raoul, seems
to have been aiming for something like Baptist Buñuel in his
depiction of puritanical paedophilia ("She was holy and divine",
runs a ballad, "and I wish that she were mine"). Vampirism
brings out Lila's 'true self', and the girl's seduction / exsanguinations
of the repressive Reverend is presented as a liberating triumph. However,
the pulpit-thumping insistence of the message (matched by Blackburn's
own overstated performance as the minister) renders this, the most conventionally
ambitious aspect of the film, its least impressive side. More intriguing
is the Weird Tales vision of a 1920s America where vampires
are less remarkable than gangsters, and the unique examination of undead
class consciousness. Protected by a group of cowled and fanged vigilantes,
the chic Lemora pampers her exquisitely painted child charges like a
vampiric Mary Poppins, while outside in the woods, rather less presentable,
inelegantly throat-tearing ghouls howl for blood. First Published In: Monthly Film Bulletin vol.51 no.610 (November 1984) p.349 (UK) Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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