Jean Rollin’s Satanic Feminism: A Conversation with ‘Orchestrator of Storms’ Co-Director Kat Ellinger
Pat King
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Cult horror director Jean Rollin was a one-of-a-kind personality and artist. Quite appropriate, then, that he’s the subject of UK writer and director Kat Ellinger’s first feature documentary (co-directed with Dima Ballin), Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin. After all, Ellinger herself is a very singular personality.
If you collect boutique blu-rays from places like Severin, Blue Underground, and especially Arrow Video, you’ve no doubt heard Ellinger’s name attached to an audio commentary, a video essay, or an essay booklet at least once. She’s mind-bogglingly prolific, but in a way that never sacrifices quality. So when Ellinger announced last year that she had a feature documentary coming out, it was simultaneously a surprise (like, how in tarnation did she fit a major project in between everything else?) and no surprise at all.
Myself, I thought I’d heard of Jean Rollin before this documentary. And it’s definitely possible I’d heard the name before. But after watching the documentary, I realized that I didn’t know the first thing about the guy. And this turned out to be a good thing. Because every revelation about the man was a fresh discovery. And Orchestrator of Storms is a fast two hours full of information waiting to be devoured. So if you go into this completely blind, as I did, you’re in for a hell of a ride. I definitely wish I could watch it for the first time again.
Jean Rollin loved vampires, especially women vampires that got naked a lot and devoured massive amounts of flesh. This was the subject of his first four features, and many, many, others after that. One thing was for sure about the man: he knew what he wanted and he went out and did it, and you really have to admire that in an artist. Crumbling gothic architecture, sex of all types (including a handful of hardcore porn films), masterful cinematography, experimental film techniques, surrealism, and decadence were just some of the many things he explored again and again. By the time you finish Orchestrator of Storms, it’s very likely that you’ll easily recognize a Rollin film if you’re lucky enough to find one in the wild.
Rollin, a French filmmaker, was at his height during the late ’60s throughout the ’70s, a time when horror was almost non-existent in his home country. And though he shared many similar techniques, he stood apart or was even outright ignored by the New Wave, who, by the time Rollin came around, had ceased to be aesthetic rebels and had basically become the establishment. This is one of the things I was most interested in asking Ellinger to expand on during our video chat.
“It was peripheral to them,” Ellinger said. “So he knew them. They all kind of traveled in the same circles. But he was like the fringe of the fringe…they were literally the establishment at that point in France. You can’t get any more respected than those guys. So they weren’t edgy anymore. I know that triggers the New Wave people, but they weren’t. And really, like edgy people, [Rollin was] totally suppressed by the market. There was just nowhere for them to show their films. It’s really bizarre.”
And as for the lack of a horror scene? As an American, there’s never been a time when we didn’t have some sort of horror industry around, so for any country to have basically only one filmmaker working in the genre seemed completely alien.
“Within France itself,” Ellinger said, “as a homegrown French horror filmmaker, Jean Rollin was it. It is really bizarre. A few of the other directors would do loads of other stuff. They’d do weird borderline films that wouldn’t really be horror, and Rollin was making specifically films about vampires.”
But I’m perhaps getting ahead of myself here. What we need to know at the moment is the vast “what” of it all. What made Rollin the perfect subject for a first feature documentary? But to go even further back, I asked Ellinger when she had first heard of Rollin.
“It was in the 2000s. There is a channel here called Channel Four and it was formed in 1985. They had a lot of culture and music programs. They also showed a lot of world cinema. Channel Four really was amazing,” she said. “They would show stuff like Flesh for Frankenstein 3D. I don’t know how, but they got away with so much. So it was probably through there.”
If it took Ellinger, a cult film fanatic, that long to find him, then it’s safe to say that Rollin was not an easy director for anyone to find. Ellinger pointed out that though publications like Fangoria were writing about European horror directors such as Fulci and Argento, “Rollin was more obscure. No one was talking about him. No one was writing about him.”
It wasn’t until the popularity of DVDs, especially those released by Nigel Wingrove’s boutique genre label Redemption, that Jean Rollin and his films started to become more well-known in the genre community. “When they started to go to DVD,” Ellinger continued, “they became more well known. People in the very early days of the Internet started to import things. It was a great time in the very early 2000s.”
That scene really seems like it was something else, especially considering that the Video Nasties era, all things considered, wasn’t too far behind the turn of the century golden age that Ellinger described. Out of curiosity, I asked Ellinger what it was like as a young genre film fan coming of age in the UK during that period. “I guess it primed me. It made me a lot more open-minded,” she said. “It gave me the networking skills to look further out of the box. I guess it makes you more determined to look around. If you’re just being fed stuff, you’ll often just take what’s on the table. So yeah, there were things about it that I hated, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
But Ellinger was quick to point out that none of this would have made any difference in Rollin’s case anyway because he was too obscure. People have to know who you are before they can put your stuff on a naughty list.
So how did all this start? What was the seed that led Kat Ellinger and Dima Ballin toward making one of the best biographical documentaries I’ve seen in years?
“It was supposed to be this thing for Arrow, which I pitched to them because I heard they were doing all [Rollins’ films] on streaming. So I thought I’d go in and pitch something,” she said. “I thought it would just be a few talking heads, and then I got talking to Nigel Wingrove. Then Nigel put me in touch with Jean’s son, Serge. Then we met Veronique [Djaouti, Rollin’s friend and collaborator]. It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I just started to keep going back.”
Ellinger’s mention of Arrow made me wonder whether having the company backing her and Dima might have made getting archival material easier. After all, that is pretty much what they’re known for, what with the massive amounts of special features on their blu-ray releases and all. And Ellinger said that it did make some things easier. But, alas, not everything. “The photos,” Ellinger said. “That was an absolute nightmare. Thankfully, Serge and Veronique helped us with that. Although a lot of the stuff that they had got lost over the years, they gave us everything they had. And then Kier-La Janisse, an associate producer on the film, she had a big archive that she’d assembled over the years.”
Then there were other frustrations. “We couldn’t use Rollin’s original music outside the film clips, because that was separately licensed. We didn’t have a huge budget,” Ellinger said. “So we actually had to get a soundtrack made for it. We did have all the footage from Rollin’s films. So that was good. But outside of that everything else we had to find ourselves.”
All the effort was worth it in the end. Not only was there a plethora of archival material, but everyone interviewed for the movie was incredibly knowledgeable. One of the things that surprised me about that was that the majority of the Rollin experts were women. I’m not sure exactly why this surprised me. So I asked Ellinger why so many women dug films that featured so many naked vampire women. “It’s the same with people who like Jess Franco,” she said. “Their depiction of sexuality is without that judgment of the virgin and the whore.”
And then Ellinger got right to the heart of the matter:
“The women are so often fierce or savage, and it’s sexuality on their own terms. Personally, as a feminist, I think that’s really important for society, because women still don’t have their own sexuality on their own terms. Even some of the most open or supposedly open-minded thinkers, you can still see that kind of dichotomy, the virgin and the whore embedded in everything. One of the most transgressive films that Jean Rollin ever made is Fascination, which is a satanic feminist film.”
Satanic feminism? Okay, now I was very intrigued.
“If you look at the history of the church, women have never had any power. The Romantics start using Satan as this anarchist figure. As the bringer of knowledge. He’s not evil anymore. What he is is enlightenment. He is a freedom fighter. He is against the establishment,” said Ellinger. “So you see these occult societies start springing up in the 1800s, one of them led by Madame Blavatsky, where women became high priestesses. They have equal footing with men. So it’s not just Satanism, because a lot of them weren’t worshiping Satan, but they use Satan out of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as this kind of figure. And it was really liberating to them.”
“If you look at a film like Fascination,” she continued, “they might kill people because they’re vampires, or maybe they just kill people because they want to. Along with Daughters of Darkness, I feel like that’s one of the most transgressive things to ever come out of horror. Because if we look at how women are used in horror, they become a vampire or whatever, they’re always lesser than the males. It’s a curse or they get carried away or they’re a bit nuts. Whereas men kill in horror because they like to kill. And that’s absolutely accepted, sometimes even glorified. But to have a woman who kills just because she can, because she wants to, I just find that mind-blowing.”
Well, that certainly cleared up any confusion.
Now, having written about Rollin and studied his career extensively even before she started on the film, I wondered if there was anything Ellinger was surprised to learn over the course of her research. “I knew he’d been ill at the end. And obviously I’d heard stories over the years that he was not well, because it wasn’t really a secret, but I didn’t know how bad it was,” said Ellinger. “When all the interviews came in with people who had worked with him at the end of his life—he’s going out on shoots, then he’s going on dialysis, and then he gets cancer. It’s just like Jesus Christ. I knew he had some sort of kidney issue, but I didn’t know how much pain he was in and how difficult it was. It made me admire him even more.”
I mentioned that it seemed to me that another tragedy was his death just as he was starting to get some real recognition for his work. He was being invited to film festivals, he had DVDs out, and Blu-rays were on the horizon. Critics were beginning to take his work seriously. “Can you imagine if he was still with us?” Ellinger said. “That’s all he ever wanted. He wanted people to enjoy his films. And he’d be having the time of his life now. That was just starting to happen and then it was taken away, which is so cruel and so sad. He really didn’t get to see the end of his legacy.”
If he was still alive, and she could ask him anything, what would it be? “I don’t know. If he was still alive, I’d crowdfund him making [Georges Bataille’s novella] Story of the Eye. I’d grovel to every single person in the world. I’d get him the money. That’s what I’d do. Because I think he should have been the one that made that.”
Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin is now playing on the Arrow app, which is available on all major streaming devices.
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