Stephanie Rothman’s 1971 lite-porn art-house erotic thriller The Velvet Vampire (a/k/a Cemetery Girls) is a beautiful mess of a film, and I can’t stop watching it.

Like most post-Stoker vampire media, it’s irrepressibly horny, if fairly tame by current standards regarding what you see on screen. Vampires are hot – anyone who’s survived for hundreds of years on their seduction skills knows how to tantalize and has the patience to keep the boiler on through some awkward moments. The movie’s atmosphere – its whole, like, gestalt and stuff – is so well-developed, even in the first 30 minutes, that Diane, the titular bloodsucker, can embark on an extended riff comparing her vagina to her dune buggy without driving the whole thing straight into absurdity. Low-key, it might be the most intelligent movie Roger Corman, who half-assedly distributed it through New World, was ever associated with.

We start in Los Angeles, where the city’s dumbest couple is taking in an art show and pretending to cruise each other (which, it should be noted, is a great date idea if you want some managable excitement). Unapologetic scumbag Lee (Michael Blodgett) and his understandably anxious wife Susan (Sherry Miles) fall under the spell of Diane (the magnetic Celeste Yarnall). This eccentric, hyperliterate “desert freak” widow coaxes them to spend a few days at her isolated Spanish ranch house in the Southern California desert, a part of the world that Desert Oracle, the only good podcast, has taught me to respect the hell out of. When they get there, their pretensions to libertinism (Lee lacks the maturity for monogamy, polyamory, or anything else but life as a bumbling fuckboy) cause the sort of dramatic tension you’d expect. And they start having very strange dreams.

Aesthetically, The Velvet Vampire is a must-see. By placing its action not in the Old Country but in the sun-scorched desert (Diane limits her UV exposure with big, floppy hats), it glories in a post-Manson California creepiness all its own. The soundtrack, by Clancy B. Glass and Roger Dollarhide (incredible names), is very early-70s but also remarkably complex and diverse. The movie shares some DNA with Vampyros Lesbos and other flicks from the early-’70s bisexual-vampire wave, but it emphasizes the feminine perspective. (Diane and Susan are infinitely more complex than Lee, who pays dearly for failing to see their desires reflected in his.) That makes it an obvious precursor to Anna Biller’s 2016 film The Love Witch, a subversive film in its own right that, simply in terms of style, is “Come As You Are” to Rothman’s “Eighties.”

So what happened? It stiffed at the time, which Rothman chalked up to people’s frustrating urge to categorize things. “It’s not a traditional horror film nor a hard-core exploitation movie. In some places, it was booked into art theatres. In others, it had one-week saturation release in drive-ins and hard-top theaters.” It has proto-porno-chic elements, but it leaves too much to the imagination if you’re trying to watch hot people fuck. At the same time, the Deep Throat-level acting chops of Blodgett and Miles create a dizzying contrast with Yarnall’s captivating performance, which is another thing that makes The Velvet Vampire feel like too many movies at once.

The challenge Rothman diagnosed is even more prevalent now. Our entertainment options tend to be carefully, sometimes mechanically curated based on what we already like. It’s rare to stumble into anything that really mixes genres, takes risks, or has the courage to be “bad” in an interesting way. Sometimes, you don’t get a good view of these lost gems until decades out, when more calculating artists have absorbed their influences and used them to create more commercially savvy work.

So pour one out for Cemetery Girls, or whatever it’s called. It’s a rare pleasure for me when a horror film can shift from laugh-out-loud weird to genuinely nightmarish and disturbing, all while maintaining a killer sense of style. This thing deserves more fans than just Biller and Quentin Tarantino (who owns the last 35mm copy, because of course he does.) Low-budget, subgenre-agnostic horror has always been a creative goldmine. Don’t let Halloween pass you by without checking out some misfit art.

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