In 1905, it was fashionable for anemic women in Paris to visit slaughterhouses and drink fresh ox blood. Doctors prescribed it as a cure.

Jean Rollin opened a film on exactly that image, elegant women in Victorian dress sipping blood from silver bowls among the hanging carcasses. Then he asked: What if some of them developed a taste for it?

FASCINATION (1979) is the answer. A thief on the run with stolen gold hides in a remote chateau with two beautiful women, certain he holds the upper hand. He has walked into a circle of aristocrats who graduated from ox blood to human, and he is not their hostage but their dinner.

It gets called a vampire film, but there are no vampires in it and nothing supernatural, only bored aristocrats and their appetite. The image that outlived everything else is a woman in a black cloak, naked beneath it, crossing the causeway to the chateau and cutting down the thief's gang with a scythe, like Death come to collect. She is Brigitte Lahaie, France's biggest adult-film star, whom Rollin lifted into cult immortality.

Rollin was laughed at most of his life, funding these dreamlike, blood-soaked poems by directing pornography under other names. The critics who jeered him are forgotten now, and his films are treasured. All you ever needed to make one, he said, was a beautiful woman and a castle, or a cemetery.