Horror Movie Guide: The Blood Spattered Bride

Okay, now I've been unceremoniously freed from distraction, I can get back to plugging through the Guide. The next entry was Vicente Aranda's 1972 film The Blood Spattered Bride, for which I of course knew the title - even before it showed up in Kill Bill chapter card - but was quick to find that I didn't know thing one about its actual subject matter.

Newly hitched Susan (Maribel Martin) moves into her husband's (Simón Andreu) family estate where she begins having nightmares about a former denizen who murdered her husband on their wedding night.

For some reason, I always figured this was a rape revenge film, something like I Spit On Your Grave or They Call Her One Eye, and the first five minutes with the apparently imagined assault didn't really steer me away from that assumption. Not having any knowledge of the Carmilla novella on which this movie was based, I thought I might be watching a more rape-y version of And Now The Screaming Starts, until the bloodsucking started finally happening around an hour in.

I initially thought this movie was Italian, not only because of the names and Mario Bava aesthetic, but who else would shotgun a poor fox in the FUCKING FACE on camera? The Spanish apparently. That was a hell of a jolt, in amongst all the nakedness and lascivious behaviour. I recognized Andreu from his work with director Luciano Erconi, but everything else was foreign to me.

Just one of Blood Spattered Bride's many memorable images.

I read that The Blood Spattered Bride gained notoriety in part due to its rejection of fascism, but to me it seems more of a “smash the patriarchy” kind of joint. I don't think they are the same thing... right? The Guide seemed to think this movie palatable, at least for a Gorgon Video title anyway.