Vicente Aranda’s Spanish horror film, The Blood Spattered Bride, begins with a scene in which a newlywed couple arrives at a hotel for their honeymoon. The husband (Simon Andreu) instructs his young, virgin wife, Susan (Maribel Martin), to check in while he parks his car in the garage. Before entering the hotel, she spots a woman from afar staring at her. Susan enters her room and starts unpacking, but as soon as she opens the closet, a strange man bursts out and attacks her, pulling off her clothes and raping her. It turns out she’s suffering a hallucination, and when her husband enters the room, she demands to leave. It’s a fantastic opening sequence and sets the tone for the rest of the film, which becomes increasingly bizarre and unpredictable.
Regardless, at Susan’s behest, her husband takes her back to his childhood home for their honeymoon—an isolated mansion maintained by servants (the servants’ daughters, Carol (Rosa Maria Rodriguez), also live there). Susan realizes that he has an intense sexual drive, and his sexual games and perversions make her uncomfortable. She also learns about his family’s dark history, particularly the story of Mircala Karstein (Alexandra Bastedo), an ancestor of her husband’s for two centuries who committed the horrific act of killing her spouse on their wedding night because he had coerced her into performing unspeakable sexual acts. Soon after, Susan begins to have violent nightmares involving Mircala. One such dream depicts Mircala paying a visit to Susan and handing her a dagger—the same one Mircala used to kill her spouse centuries ago—and persuading Susan to use it on her husband as well. However, when Susan wakes up, she discovers a dagger under her pillow, which confuses her. As a result of constant nightmares, her mental health deteriorates, and she begins to drift apart from her husband. During an attempt to dispose of the knife on the beach one day, the husband comes across a naked woman buried in the sand. He saves her, brings her home, and when asked, she says her name is Carmila. Things get complicated when Susan meets her for the first time and realizes she’s the same Mircala who haunts her dreams. The two eventually become incredibly close after Susan falls under Carmila’s influence, which has disastrous ramifications for everyone around her.
The Blood Spattered Bride’s notable aspect is its seamless transition from a psychological thriller to an erotic lesbian love story to a horror film with vampire undertones. Vicente Aranda deftly manages to subvert the audience’s expectations regarding the story’s trajectory, since at first glance, it appears to be yet another film about a troubled woman who descends into madness and, eventually, is incapable of distinguishing between dreams and reality—a premise we’ve seen countless times before. However, that changes in the second act, during a bizarre beach scene where the husband discovers a naked woman, who happens to be the same person tormenting Susan in her dreams. As a result, everything shown from Susan’s point of view before—the woman appearing only in her nightmares—changes when that woman is revealed to be an actual person, leaving viewers bewildered about her true identity.
The film’s slow pacing is deliberate because Vicente Aranda takes his time establishing the characters, notably focusing on Susan’s mental state, which pays off towards the end. Additionally, he accomplishes the intriguing feat of placing the onus on the audience to determine which character to empathize with—the husband, who harbors a slight propensity for sexual cruelty but nevertheless cares for Susan and attempts to cure her mental condition—or Susan, who is spiraling into insanity, estranging herself from her husband, and developing violent tendencies that eventually culminate in a few murders. As a result, this contributes to a satisfying climax and skillful exploration of the themes of patriarchy and sexual repression; in this case, a lesbian woman arrives to rescue a sexually naive Susan from her husband, whose bourgeois mindset stems from his family history and upbringing. The film ends on a bleak, ominous, and ambiguous final scene in which all the pieces are laid out for viewers to connect.
The Blood Spattered Bride movie links: letterboxd, wikipedia
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