The Blood Spattered Bride
| La Novia Ensangrentada | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Vicente Aranda |
| Produced by | Jaime Fernadez-Cid |
| Written by | Vicente Aranda |
| Starring |
Simón Andreu Maribel Martín Alexandra Bastedo Dean Selmier |
| Music by | Antonio Pérez Olea |
| Cinematography | Fernando Arribas |
| Edited by | Pablo Gonzalez del Amo |
| Distributed by | Morgana Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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100 minutes |
| Country | Spain |
| Language | Spanish |
The Blood Spattered Bride (Spanish: La Novia Ensangrentada translation: "The Bloody Bride") is a 1972 Spanish horror film written and directed by Vicente Aranda, based on the vampire story, "Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. It stars Simón Andreu, Maribel Martín, and Alexandra Bastedo. The film attained cult film status for its mix of horror, vampirism, rejection of fascism, and progressive ideas on gender and sexuality. A well-known U.S. trailer advertising a double feature paired with the 1974 film I Dismember Mama was filmed in the style of a news report covering the "story" of an audience member who had gone insane while watching the films.
Susan, a newly married young woman still wearing her bridal gown, leaves on honeymoon with her new husband and eventually arrives at a hotel. Another woman seems to be stalking the couple from her position in a nearby car, and when Susan is left alone in the room for just a few moments, she has a violent fantasy of a strange man leaping out of the closet and raping her. Her husband returns she insists on leaving, and they do.
The couple arrives at a house where the husband apparently grew up. This is where the rest of the story unfolds. The wife sees the woman from the hotel in the woods on the property but she does not tell her husband. Susan notices in the house that there are paintings up of male ancestors but none of the wives. She is told by the servants' daughter that the wives' paintings are in the cellar. Susan notices that one of the paintings of the wives has the face cut out of it. Susan's husband tells her that the woman in the painting is named Mircalla Karnstein, one of his ancestors, who two hundred years before murdered her husband on their wedding night because he supposedly made her commit unspeakable acts. Susan has violent dreams involving the mysterious woman she has been seeing. She wakes up and finds a dagger under her pillow. Susan starts to become detached from her husband. The husband calls on a doctor to figure out why she is having all of these dreams and what is wrong with her. Soon Mircalla is invading Susan's dreams, persuading her to use a mysterious dagger, which keeps reappearing no matter where it is hidden, to butcher Susan's husband as Mircalla did hers.
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Wikipedia