Alexandra Bastedo brings eerie solace to an abused young wife in Vicente Aranda’s THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE.
“Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.”
THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE La Novia Ensangrentada
1972, Blue Underground, $9.99, DVD-1 Blue Underground, co-feature to DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, $11.89, BD-A
Vicente Aranda’s fascinating and much ma- ligned variation on CARMILLA (misspelled as “Carmila” in the opening credits) begins with new- lyweds Susan (Maribel Martín) and her husband (Simón Andreu) arriving at the hotel where they plan to consummate their union. Unnerved by both the presence of a mysterious woman in the park- ing lot and an imagined rape at the hands of a masked intruder, Susan rejects her groom’s sexual advances and demands they continue on to his estate. Arriving at the ancient family villa, they meet the middle-aged servants and their young daugh- ter, Carol (Maria-Rosa Rodriguez), who displays her penchant for deception by lying about her age. Secluded in the marital boudoir, Susan offers her- self to her husband only to experience a sexual encounter every bit as brutal as the imagined rape. As the days progress, she attempts to cope with her husband’s repeated sexual abuse—first by imagining him a satyr, then by attempting to play
the willing submissive. However, his combination of brutality and insatiability soon prove too much to bear.
Susan’s doubts about her love for her husband are amplified when, upon enquiring about the ab- sence of female portraits from the villa, she learns the darker aspects of his family’s marital history. According to Carol, the master’s grandfather had all of the portraits removed to the basement after his wife first attempted to poison him and then fled to Paris. Over a century before that, another bride—Mircala Karstein (sic)—stabbed her husband to death with a dagger on their wedding night after he “tried to make her do unspeakable things.” Ac- cording to legend, Mircala was found the next day, lifeless but still warm, dressed in a blood-spattered wedding gown and lying next to her husband’s body. After two years, she was interred in the fam- ily crypt, murder weapon in hand, though her body had yet to decay. The chilling story is related to Susan by her husband as he leads her to Mircala’s crypt, only to open it and callously break one of the bones he finds there (perhaps in warning). This sickening display transforms her fear into hatred and revulsion, leading her to close herself almost entirely from him.
The atmosphere in the villa becomes consider- ably more tense when Susan experiences a night- mare in which the mysterious woman from the hotel returns and hands her a dagger identical to that depicted in the (faceless) portrait of Mircala, then
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