ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched a vampire B-movie from 1973 called Lemora (alternatively known as Lemora: Lady Dracula, The Legendary Curse of Lemora, and Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural), written and directed by Richard Blackburn.
A golden-pigtailed teenage girl named Lila lives under the care of a Baptist pastor who seems obsessed with what he sees as Lila’s angelic purity. Lila receives a letter summoning her to a mysterious town so as to aid her dying father (who is apparently also a notorious gangster). Lila escapes the pastor’s house in the night and gains passage to the town aboard a sputtering bus driven by a grizzled creep. The bus is attacked by a hoard of bestial forest-dwelling cannibals with rotting flesh. Luckily, Lila is rescued by the servants of the woman who sent the letter, Lemora. They take her to Lemora’s gloomy manor house. Here, Lila at last meets the titular queen of the night herself, in all her hypnotically sepulchral glory. Lila demands to know where her father is, but Lemora is much more interested in introducing Lila to the delights of immortal darkness.
Given that Lemora has only ever had limited distribution, that it’s Blackburn’s only feature, and that it’s filled with bizarre and fascinating choices in scripting, editing, and acting, this is truly a cult film among cult films. It could not have been made other than as a passion project outside the studio system and in an era before straight-to-video (now -streaming) releases. First, there’s the fact that it thrusts its thirteen-year-old protagonist into a world of sexually predatory and violent men, each more unhinged than the last. Next, there’s its off-kilter pacing, where the first fifteen minutes cram in a gangland shooting, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, a stowaway’s road trip, a brutal zombie attack, and an abortive prison break—but the following half hour concerns a woman and a child having a vaguely philosophical conversation while preparing for bed. Finally, there’s its weirdly triumphant ending, where the protagonist succumbs to the vampiress’ wiles, but we are told that this is truly what both she and we want. The major standout of the film, though, is Lesley Gilb’s Lemora. The excellent makeup, wardrobe, and lighting for Lemora come together with Gilb’s striking features, poise, and delivery to create such an iconic mistress of evil that it’s unfortunate there were no further Lemora movies. Overall, despite the awkwardness of the dubbed-in dialog and other production cost-cutting measures, I really enjoyed the alluring nightmare logic of this strange piece of horror cinema.
TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS:
Let’s use Lemora as an occasion to compare the doppelgänger to the vampire. Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of discourse lamenting the domestication of the vampire into a heartthrob antihero, such that it is no longer a monster capable of inspiring fear. One remedy proposed for this is to introduce a more violent and inhuman type of vampire, like a more powerful and intelligent version of the zombie. This is also the wrong way to go, though, I think, because to me the most frightening vampire scenes involve victims who believe they are speaking to ordinary humans. In Lemora, the compellingly creepy moments all come when Lila is firmly in Lemora’s clutches, but Lila is only beginning to suspect that Lemora is anything other than an abnormally nice lady. In such scenes, the vampire’s next meal, or the target of her next enthrallment, doesn’t know she is a powerful and hungry killer, like a tiger wearing a human face. And this is what the vampire shares with the doppelgänger: the convincing external skin of humanity. An advantage the doppelgänger has over the vampire—or perhaps we should say the non-vampiric doppelgänger, if we count vampires as, in a sense, another subspecies of doppelgänger—is that we know much less about it than the vampire. We don’t know what it wants, what its weaknesses are, or what produced it. We only know that it isn’t what it seems.
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