The business with the moon goddess coming alive to dance is just silly, take it with a pinch of salt. This time he poorly articulates where Jacques Rivette was so agile to improvise from, Raoul Ruiz at around the same time as this came out. So we got images of some purity struggling with poor expression. He could never quite put to words what he had seen. But Rollin was never erudite, so to speak.
Mirrors permit the journey inwards, masks. A memory of a journey past? A fanciful, mysterious flight inwards? He frames before and after with an essay on the imaginative mind weaving narratives, fictions, cinema. It is about two Alices who transport themselves through a mirror of fictions the Wonderland as it turns out is eerie, desolate New York. This perfectly prefaces his work of twenty years, you should see it if you have solved how Rollin fits in your life. Memories about these, cravings that unsettle. So not an aesthetic, but the sensation of seeing, touching. Vampires were incidental as it turns out, they were usually involved but as seductive instruments of a sensually paced nightmare it was always, nowhere else more obvious than here and perhaps Night of the Hunted, about the ephemeral wandering.
Naked bodies, blood, he approached these from the indulgent standpoint of a connoisseur. I believe Rollin just happened to articulate in terms of horror.
