A Virgin Among the Living Dead was once an elegy called La nuit des étoiles filantes ("The Night of the Shooting Stars"). Believing an elegy would not do as well commercially as an erotic film, softcore scenes were filmed and added by Pierre Querut, and it became known as Christina, Princess of Eroticism. Almost a decade on, in 1981, the usually brilliant Jean Rollin shot some very lethargic footage of men with blue makeup crawling through dead leaves, and so it was compiled and released under the name A Virgin Among the Living Dead. These three versions seem to be the best-known of many: recent blu-ray releases contain additional missing scenes with their very own titles, which is funny, because the version with the fewest scenes would be the one closest to Franco's original elegy. I've only managed to find the most compromised one, with the porn and the zombies and the English dub. Watching it, you would be forgiven for thinking someone had taped over parts of a film, with two unrelated films. I won't claim this damage benefits the film; I don't even find any of this particularly interesting, and I'm usually invested in the versioning of texts. Part of me thinks this is because I want the 'pure' original, and part insists it's because textual compromise like this is just par for the course.
In The Ego and the Id I made an attempt to derive mankind's realistic fear of death ... from the same parental view of fate. It seems very hard to free oneself from it.
—Freud, 1924.
Christina is called to Monserrate from her home in London, to witness the reading of her late father, Ernesto's, will. Prior to being notified about the will, Christina wasn't aware she had a father called Ernesto, nor a family in Monserrate. But she goes to witness the reading anyway. She does not seem to realise that she is in a Gothic fiction, and that one should always ignore the call of homecoming in a Gothic fiction, because it will bury you alive. Many in Gothic fiction have and will respond to the call of homecoming, and many have and will be buried alive for it. Some do not heed the warning because they are greedy. Others because they are fatally curious. Christina is neither greedy nor curious, although her fate remains the same. (There is no negotiating with a live burial). Christina thinks a homecoming will reunite her with a family she has only very recently come to realise she had lost. She's pure like that, and the film makes efforts to show this purity is untenable. Christina swims naked in a cold and stagnant pond, and when she's informed that people may have been watching her from the trees, she looks confused as to what the gaze of others should mean. It's as though she'd never left the garden, never been imbued with the shame engendered by our expulsion from paradise. It's because for Christina this is paradise, the missing thing that yawns and aches, and she has now found it, she is now safe, complete. Christina joins the living dead because it brings to her a feeling of the eternal.
I think Christina's desire for eternity in the living dead warrants investigation, because the film follows the patterns of tragedy, and she seems happy about it. A Virgin Among the Living Dead is most tragic when it's tender and not depraved, and its tenderness is born of an ambivalent, tragic distance between us and Christina. It strikes us as strange that she thinks this place paradise, not because it's ugly, but because it's lavishly decrepit. Christina's paradise is weeds and ruins. It's water more ominous black than the shadows inside, indelible and thick where the human figures flicker agitated in and out of time. The dead move and yet remain inanimate. Wide lenses deform the space so that we're unable to domesticate it. The edit repeats the same exact cutaways in dialogue, breaking cause and effect, insisting on the figures repeated as a constant presence in the house, and yet rendering them insubstantial, like a sound you can't locate the source of, or like the memory of an itch. Villagers refuse to enter the estate, to cross life's threshold into all this ruin. Christina appears to them incongruously alive, and they can't look away because they know one can only occupy this zone for so long. The zone indulges the fantasy of eternity, but it demands something in return: the dead will still be living, and the living must prepare themselves for certain death. Christina is dead, alive.
Ernesto is dead, and as a consequence he's stirring. He talks to Christina, beckoning her to the barn where his body still hangs. It's this relationship that most clearly marks A Virgin Among the Living Dead's debt to tragedy: the father calls like the ghost in Hamlet, demanding a proper burial. It's in Lacan's Seminar VII (1959-60) that the psychoanalyst talks about the "second death," and the "zone" of tragedy, where audiences witness the "fate of a life that is about to turn into certain death, a death lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death" (248). As I've said, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Christina's paradise, resides exclusively within this zone "between two deaths". Family, fate, and death all intermingle in the zone of tragedy. Ernesto, like Hamlet's father, has undergone the physical death of the body, but persists undead, demanding the progeny deliver the funerary rites that will free him from having to materialise exhausted in the text. This second death is the symbolic death the two have been robbed of, Hamlet's father by his brother Claudius, Ernesto by his brother, sister-in-law, and mistress. For Lacan the demand made by Hamlet's father's ghost demonstrates the duty of the living to the deceased beyond any physical limit. And this duty is more functional than anything else: the symbolic debt paid by the mourner allows them to begin the process of leaving behind the lost object, or, rather, of reconciling the intensity of their attachment to the lost object with the material reality of its transience.
But what's curious about A Virgin Among the Living Dead is that Ernesto and Christina were estranged, that Christina was never mourning, that, as it turns out, Ernesto does not in fact believe that his daughter owes him a thought, much less the delivery of a second, final death. Suspension in living death might be Ernesto's retribution for a life of cruelty, and he welcomes it. Why then does Ernesto call to Christina, the daughter he had abandoned? Well, he explains, he never called to her himself, and it was death calling all along, in his voice. This is a departure from the customary hauntings of tragedy. We manage our fear of impersonal death by telling ourselves that it's personalised, attached to family and to fate. In A Virgin Among the Living Dead, it's revealed this is a ruse designed by death to better accomplish its impersonal work. Death does not coldly come and go, but targets and then spreads, like a disease. Death possesses its cadavers so the grieving will permit it entry. It's wearing our loved ones as masks. We may think we're in dialogue with our memories, but, the film tells us, we're talking to death, and death is here. This is a horrifying prospect, not least because it undoes the function of funerary rites. The debt owed to the deceased is now lifelong: there is no other side to grief. Once death has begun its work, everything within its gravitational field is stained with it
While death takes its hold on the living, however, it's still by entering the zone of tragedy that the second death can commence. That is, the grieving process cannot free the living, but it's still needed to free the dead. And Christina is aware of this. Ernesto's revelation tells us that while we think we've been watching exploitation Hamlet, it's really Antigone. Remember that nobody will follow Christina to the estate in Monserrate, because it belongs to the living dead. And remember for Christina this place is paradise, for eternity is what she desires. She knowingly crosses the threshold, and the price is a social death. Lacan compares the Antigone of Sophocles' play to Hamlet's father, writing that the two experience their two deaths out of order: the former experiences a social death that precedes the natural, while the latter undergoes a natural death without the rites needed to free him from symbolic limbo. Antigone's duty to her deceased brother at the expense of life marks her as the ethical actor par excellence for the psychoanalyst: unwavering in her desire, she rejects the compromise of happiness on Creon's terms. Life without desire is a life lost, and this being asked of her cannot but radically alter her relationship to it:
from Antigone's point of view life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost (280)
By virtue of its narrative structure, we only know Christina as someone "already on the other side." From the way she has abandoned it we can assume her life in London was not worth living, and it's only by returning to Monserrate that she is confronted with what she had always already lost. When the reading of the will finally occurs, she's deeply confused by the prospect of receiving property. She doesn't want anything now that she's here. In the paradise of her eternal loss, no earthly goods are needed.
At the start of this I wrote that the scene of Christina swimming in the pond serves to show us that she is pure, oblivious to the gaze of others. I think marking her as vulnerable within the world of the film is one part of it, but it goes further: she also fascinates us because she's adrift in a paradise we cannot see. Lacan notes that Antigone is compared to a god when she descends into the tomb, and that her resolve is described by onlookers as beautiful, godlike, because she is declaring "I am dead and I desire death" (281). The world of objects cannot and will not do for her, and desire without an object is desire in its purest form: Thanatos, "the pure and simple desire of death as such" (281). Put another way, Christina's desire for eternity puts her at odds with both the living and the dead because she belongs to neither realm entirely. Her descent into the pond in the penultimate scene is her selfless deliverance of a second and final death for those in Monserrate, who are now freed from the limbo of perpetual dying. The final scene, with Christina catatonic in bed, shows the weight of her sacrifice: here she will remain, disqualified from the world of the living but unable to go anywhere else, buried alive in her earthly body. Antigone hangs herself. Christina can't.
A Virgin Among the Living Dead is said to have been made in the immediate wake of Soledad Miranda's death, and that she is the subject of Franco's elegy. Some have made the case that the film's ending tells us not to dwell in mourning, lest it become pathological, and we lose the will to live. I like this reading but can't quite relate to it. I think Christina's saintlike devotion to the deceased is made to align with an outsider's reading of melancholia, and that transcendence awaits neither. Death persists as a stain on the world, the mourner finds themselves bereft of the social belonging they once enjoyed, and the delivery of funerary rites may free the dead but not those who are left. Their duty becomes to persist regardless.
3 October 2025