Fascination

My favourite very specific genre of WLW movies are 1970′s European exploitation films with queer lady vampires. I’m pretty sure Fascination falls into this category but not certain. It’s not entirely clear of these women are actually vampires or just regular women who’ve started drinking people’s blood. I actually like this. It shows that I don’t need to wait around and hope I get made into a supernatural creature for me to live in a spooky manor with other queer women, engage in satanic rituals and kill men. I could do that right now if I wanted. This was very inspirational movie for me at least.

The main character in Fascination is Marc, that always-terrible heterosexual man who appears in these movies to remind me that though I love these films, I am not the intended audience. Marc is a thief and after taking a girl hostage to escape from the thieves trying to murder him, takes refuge in a spooky manor where two mysterious, hot bisexual chambermaids greet him.

Despite the fact that he is generally unpleasant and also keeps threatening them, both the girl he took hostage earlier as well as the two chambermaids all try and seduce him. Marc ends up sleeping with one of the chambermaids, Eva. This makes Eva’s partner, Elizabeth jealous.

After the thieves Marc was escaping from are dispatched, the movie changes tracks. Eva and Elizabeth’s superior, the Marchioness arrives and Marc is drawn into the weird, sex games of this potentially vampiric group of Satan-worshipping queer women.

I’m not going to pretend like this movie isn’t sexist but it’s this sort of old-timey sexism which in some ways at least, I find funny and weirdly charming. What I love about this whole genre of film in general is that it’s really clear that the directors are straight up afraid of women, feminism and queer female sexuality. These are always the villains of the piece and also where the villains draw their power from.

This movie more or less posits that a group of entirely women doing stuff together must be a satanic ritual and conflates feminism to witchcraft and misandry. This is obviously not true and bad but I’m always sort of complimented by this stuff? How powerful did they believe feminists and lesbians to be in the 1970′s? I’m honestly rather complimented that these directors thought women to be this dangerous.

I almost feel like the moral of the story is, “see? this is what happens when you let women talk to each other! They’ll form non-platonic attachments to each other, practice witchcraft and kill men. We must stop them!”  As a feminist I probably shouldn’t find all of this so entertaining but I definitely do.

 I’m less complimented by the portrayal of all women as sex-starved vixens but even that I think is funny. It’s like the director hasn’t ever met a real woman and only heard stories. None of these women act remotely like any female person I’ve ever know.

Fascination is definitely a movie in which the male director had no idea how women have sex if there’s not a man present. The actresses also don’t commit to it which doesn’t help. Their kisses are pretty tentative and neither actress would go anywhere near her partner’s vagina.

What helps though is that they use a soft-focus lens and a soft, piano ballad as background music so it does seem more romantic. This is why I generally prefer the European sexploitation films to the American ones; the European ones like to set a romantic mood. The American ones tend to just have some actors simulating sex in a single, uninterrupted take. In this sex scene in particular, the soft focus, zoom-ins on the characters’ face and change in camera angles made it slightly less obvious that these two women were not even close to having sex.

As I mentioned, despite loving these films, I was definitely not the target audience. This was clearly written for straight men who fear women, not gay women who love them. Having Marc as a lead character proves that. Marc is so unlikable and yet every woman just falls at his feet even after he physically attacks or threatens them. I absolutely hate him as a character.

 What’s pretty weird about this, a 1979 exploitation movie, is that it does touch on the concept of female-on-male rape which I sort of thought would be beyond them. They mention a few times that some of the women in the manor wish to rape him. Conversely, there’s never any talk of male-on-female rape. The women are just always up for it and definitely like being held down and threatened. So while the filmmakers clearly know what rape means and indeed brings it up as a concept, he falters when it comes to the concept of a woman not consenting to a man. Not great.

So, objectively I shouldn’t like this movie. I hate the main character, it’s sexist and also it completely changes direction halfway through from Marc hiding from thieves to Marc being surrounded by feminist witches who want to kill him. And yet, I found this to be a very enjoyable movie. There’s no accounting for taste, I guess. In my defense, Fascination is a movie where a half-naked bisexual woman kills four men with a scythe.

Overall rating: 5.7/10

Other WLW films in similar genre