[ IMDB ]
Blind, in an orphanage run by nuns. A doctor examines them. Two girls, two nuns. Blond Henriette, brunette Louise. Later, two female victims that parallel them.
They escape at night and we find out that they are faking blindness (or, later, that they are only blind during the daytime). “The day is black but the night is blue.”
First night out they philosophize via long dialogues about their lives, deaths, and constant rebirth. People hunt them and they are always reborn. Melancholy about their future.
[faces framed, looking at the camera; swapping lines quickly, theatrically like the male cousins in The Shivers of the Vampires; always the same outfits]
They sneak out to a graveyard. Flashback: first tale of wandering in the city, drinking the blood of a painter on a bridge, then apparently dying in an abandoned building. Second tale of wandering the train yards and meeting a female werewolf connected to the moon. End with drinking the blood of a stray dog in the graveyard.
The doctor adopts them.
They obsess over an Aztec book that reference bat gods. This returns later.
First night out: they attack a woman at an abandoned carnival. Standing together naked, unseen in front of the doctor’s window. Second night out: wander a graveyard. An older couple and a young couple there, the younger girl is attacked. They escape to a church an a female vampire appears with wings. They are given shelter for the night. The female demands to be alone, like the werewolf.
The next day when returning home they must bite each other to quench their thirst. The doctor, not seeing who they are, shoots one of them as they hide in the bushes. In their beds but one is dying and so drinks from the other’s chest, motherly, as she tells the story of the Aztecs.
That morning, the doctor discovers they can now see. A celebration and then they kill him, burn house, and walk across the countryside. They meet a woman who feeds on the dead, a ghoul connected to the earth, then return to the orphanage. They convince a sick girl that they are a dream, then stalk and feed on two girls smoking outside.
Doubles: Henriette and Louise, the nuns, the two sets of couples in the cemetery, the two female victims back at the orphanage; re the other Jean Rollin films: the Castel sisters, the male cousins, the Renfield sisters from The Shivers of the Vampires; the protagonists from Requiem for a Vampire.
A milk girl at farm discovers them in the barn but is not afraid. They describe who they are by enumerating historical examples.
“All gods are real, because they are imaginary.”
Henriette is shot by the old man from previous night.
Henriette: Aztec gods are mortal.
Nicole: We are asleep, you are the dream. The dead dream about the living, not the reverse.
Singles: the werewolf, the winged vampire, the ghoul, the milk girl.
Henriette dies.
Louise: We are sublime disorder. we are from before their gods. They made him say “let there be light” to cut our night in half. But their order is chaos, our disorder is mad poetry. Our existence awakens, and our night is clarity. The two orphan girls roar alone in the night, like flames. And so, no one can touch them. All others are puppets for our game!
Henriette: We will return Louise. We will be the wind and the rain. We will be the elements that men fear the most. The thunder, the tempest. But our bodies, they can’t let them find us.
They walk into the water, as they become blind by the day, and drown themselves in the marsh’s reeds as the milk girl holds a Houdini magazine. The closing credits show images from Houdini posters and of escapes and magic.