The Living Dead Girl

• Special effects artist Benoît Lestang was only 17 and still in high school when he created the film's gore effects, including the graphic eye-gouging and the toxic-waste face-melt kill — years before his later credits on Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Martyrs.
• The film was produced by Les Films ABC, the same company behind several of director Jean Rollin's pseudonymous adult films from the same era — work he took on specifically to help finance his horror and fantasy projects during a lean stretch of his career.
• Despite its reputation for extremity, the film was never part of the UK's original early-1980s Video Nasties panic — it didn't even reach British video shelves until 1994, and even then the BBFC trimmed roughly two and a half minutes of violence and cannibalism content. It wasn't passed fully uncut in the UK until 2007.
• The film got a proper cult resurgence through Redemption Films' restoration work: an uncut UK DVD in 2007, an uncut US DVD release in 2010, and a Kino Lorber/Redemption Blu-ray in 2012, complete with a Rollin intro and interviews — introducing the film to a new generation of genre fans.

Catherine's tears after each kill read as a metaphor for addiction relapse. She doesn't want blood, she needs it, and the weeping is the hangover. Hélène becomes the enabler who tells herself she's protecting Catherine when she's really just keeping her dependent.

Hélène's devotion is less friendship than it is a grief projection that metastasized. She could not let Catherine go two years ago, so the universe handed her back a version of Catherine she could control. The ending, where Catherine turns on Hélène, is the projection finally eating the projector.

The photographer character functions as Rollin's self-critique. She shows up to exploit the château's decay for art, mirroring how Rollin himself uses ruined French architecture for atmosphere. Her death suggests the director punishing his own opportunism, or at least acknowledging it.

Two men bumble into a vault of toxic waste and accidentally resurrect a corpse locked inside a coffin. Catherine, dead two years, crawls out ravenous and confused, still wearing her burial dress. She stumbles to a nearby château where her childhood friend Hélène recognizes her and becomes something between caretaker and accomplice. Catherine kills because she must, then weeps over the bodies. Hélène cleans up, covers the trail, and feeds her. A visiting photographer and her boyfriend stumble into the mess. The friendship curdles into dependency, and the dead girl starts remembering what she used to be.