Fascination

• The bloodletting premise has a literary root. Rollin credited Jean Lorrain's 1893 short story 'Un verre de sang' (A Glass of Blood), in which a sickly girl is prescribed daily glasses of bull's blood to cure her anemia. That medicinal-blood detail is the only thing the film borrows. The image everyone remembers, a row of well-dressed women drinking ox blood on a slaughterhouse floor, is Rollin's own invention, and his prologue plants it in April 1905.
• Brigitte Lahaie came to Rollin straight out of hardcore. She entered the French adult industry in 1976 at age 20, right after France legalized explicit pornography, and went on to appear in well over a hundred erotic films. Rollin first directed her that same year in the porn film 'Vibrations Sensuelles' under his pseudonym Michel Gentil, clocked her charisma, gave her a part in 'The Grapes of Death' (1978), then built 'Fascination' around her.
• Rollin funded his horror habit with porn. Unable to raise money for his surreal vampire pictures after they flopped critically, he directed hardcore under pseudonyms like Michel Gentil through the 1970s and plowed the cash back into his fantastique films, which is how a no-money outfit could bankroll a moody chateau piece at all.
• Lahaie's most reproduced image lives here: Eva in a black hooded cloak, naked underneath, crossing the causeway with a scythe and cutting down the thief's gang, then scything the female accomplice who stole her dress and dumping the body in the moat. The shot became one of the most circulated frames in Rollin's entire filmography.
• It's a real location, not a set. The film was shot over roughly two weeks almost entirely on location at the seventeenth-century Chateau de la Motte in Chateau-Renard, Loiret, and Rollin leaned on the genuine moat-ringed, fallen-aristocracy decay of the building instead of dressing a soundstage.
• Lahaie walked away from porn right around the film. By 1980 she had ended her hardcore career entirely and pivoted toward mainstream and cult cinema, later taking small parts in pictures like 'Diva' (1981) and 'Henry & June' (1990).

The whole picture is a class revenge fantasy dressed as a vampire tale. The thief is working-class predation, grabbing what he can and running. The women are aristocracy that long ago stopped needing money and started needing blood. The 1905 abattoir prologue makes it literal: the rich already drink the blood of the slaughterhouse. He thinks robbery puts him on top; the film's whole architecture is built to show him he's livestock that wandered indoors.

Read it as Rollin processing his own double life. He paid for his dream films with porn, and 'Fascination' is openly built on a porn actress's body and aura, then framed as something hauntingly beautiful. The cult of women who turn a prescribed appetite into ecstatic ritual mirrors the director turning a commercial necessity into transcendence. The seduction-then-consumption structure is the artist's bargain made flesh.

The hostage dynamic inverts the home-invasion script on purpose. Every cue says the armed man controls the room and the women are victims playing for time. They are playing for time, just not the kind he assumes. The slow, almost tender captivity is the trap baited as rescue, and the scythe on the causeway is the moment the genre flips: the safe house was never a refuge, it was a pantry with a clock.

A jewel thief on the run from his own gang holes up in a fog-bound chateau, certain he's the predator in the room. He's wrong. The two women he takes hostage, all soft welcome and slow smiles, are killing time until midnight, when the lady of the house and her circle gather for a standing appointment. Rollin opens in April 1905, with fashionable women lined up at an abattoir drinking ox blood as a cure for anemia, then lets the habit curdle into something far worse than a doctor's prescription. The thief thinks he's bargaining. He's the main course.