Some of the greatest horror films are the saddest, the ones that capture the melancholy of being far from what you know, and knowing you will never return. The empty train that takes you to a world you no longer recognize. The friend who disappears. The newcomer who, through the sheer oddness of his body language, seems to bring hell with him. The landscape that looks too, too calm, the unsettled emptiness that surrounds you, wide open and free and making you know that nothing you knew no longer exists over the horizon. The intensifying nightmare around you, as everyone you meet is either deranged and psychotic or as helpless as you. And even when you find the one person you were heading toward in the first place they too have changed, and are begging for death. You don't feel the event that triggers all of this, it's just a slow escalation, a feeling of drowning when there's no water in sight. The finality that arrives and settles, for good, now that everything you knew is gone.
Zombie horror is rife with movies that explore this emptiness. There may be no modern cinematic zombie more iconic than the first: Bill Hinzmann's awkward but suited creeper shuffles in under thunder as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD opens, wandering aimlessly through the empty cemetery before turning his sights on Barbara and Johnny. Hell does indeed come right behind him. And it explodes in George Romero's follow-up DAWN OF THE DEAD; the first third of the movie sketches in unforgettably economical terms how a zombie outbreak would lead to the absolute end of civilization, gelling nowhere so convincingly as when Fran's co-worker stares into space announcing, as he starts to truly grasp it, "Our work here is finished."
That horrible void literally spreads around the world, and a melancholy becomes pronounced in movies like Lucio Fulci's ZOMBI; there we start to feel that all bets really are off when dead people start moving and killing (the walking dead rarely feel so fundamentally wrong as they do in this film), and Fabio Frizzi's despondent main theme seems set to the rhythm of society's final heartbeat. Werner Herzog is more grandiose in NOSFERATU-PHANTOM DER NACHT; Klaus Kinski lends to his anti-human, parasitic Dracula an absolute helplessness to stop the feeding frenzy that is slowly murdering the world, and the victims can only live it up and get drunk even as the rats and coffins stack up around them.
With a resume that includes multiple surreal erotic vampire stories and hardcore pornography, Jean Rollin may not appear to be one who'd uphold this approach. To modern eyes used to the by now well-established tropes of modern zombie horror, THE GRAPES OF DEATH plays it surprisingly straight (indeed, it was Rollin's first critical and popular success.) The film makes more explicit the environmental threat that lurks in many of Romero's films: here, a new pesticide contaminates a remote French vineyard, infecting all who drink the wine made there with a disease that rots them physically and psychologically. The infected share with Kinski's Dracula an occasional terrible awareness that they are powerless to stop the violence they spread.
But the dream space Rollin actively investigated in his earlier work lends an expansiveness to THE GRAPES OF DEATH that only underscores its horrors. We experience the story largely anchored to Elizabeth (a sympathetic turn by Maria-Georges Pascal) and see this nightmare grow through her eyes. Though she weathers a number of one-on-one encounters with increasingly diseased and terrifying ghouls, many of the film's most striking moments see her isolated in expansive settings, airy but suffocating, as we see her options disappear around her.
Though Elizabeth's passivity is irksome to some viewers (just as Barbara's near-catatonia in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was, despite it being a logical response to the horror surrounding her), Pascal manages to hold our sympathies as her situation disintegrates. Anchored in the immediacy of her reality, her environment immerses us, and through her perspective we watch, we feel the world sliding beyond our control. Her reality becomes a nightmare, and we feel her hopelessness as that nightmare contaminates reality. Philippe Sissmann's sparse analog score feels even sadder than Frizzi's - it wouldn't surprise us to see him tinkering on a keyboard just out of frame, looking resignedly out into an abyss. The movie seems not to end as much as stop, and sticks with us so deeply that we feel that walking away from the movie will only take us deeper into its landscapes. I don't think we necessarily need to live in a world in which a pandemic continues to rage and keep us isolated from our loved ones to feel Rollin's void resonate powerfully post-experience, but it's sure as hell helping.
