Carrie Gemmell — who also appeared in director and writer Chris Alexander’s Queen of Blood and Blood for Irina — is She. During the day, she’s merely an office drone. Yet at night, She dreams of another woman (Cheryl Singleton) that she works with, as well as blood, sex and death. And when she wakes up, it isn’t where she went to sleep. And her fangs are growing.
I thought maybe it was all in her head, but then after luring the woman back home, She opens her mouth and reenacts The Company of Wolves with a head emerging from her lips. Or is this her finally coming out? Ah, maybe I just need to remember the words of Georges Bataille. “Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.”
If you haven’t seen one of Alexander’s films, they remain deceptively simple. There’s a moment here where She is looking in the mirror when she wakes up and the white wall creates an effective split screen, juxtaposing her inspecting herself with absolute nothingness. It’s all in camera, not something created in the edit, and so much of this is just art emerging for long takes or color taking control of the screen.
There’s also another woman — Shauna Henry — who was Irina in Blood for Irina, Blood Dynasty and Queen of Blood. Is she playing the same role, lending her vampiric power to this tale of another creature that walks the night — “To walk the night / To feel no love / To know the touch of another kiss / Never more.” — and wakes to wonder if these transformations and desires could be true?
Instead of Samhain, maybe I should have considered The Electric Prunes as a theme for this film. “Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room / I touched your golden hair and tasted your perfume / Your eyes were filled with love the way they used to be / Your gentle hand reached out to comfort me / Then came the dawn / And you were gone / You were gone, gone, gone.”