The Blood Spattered Bride 1972

Susan, Maribel Martín, a newly married young woman still in her bridal gown, sets off on a honeymoon with her new husband, Simón Andreu, and the pair eventually arrive at a hotel. From a nearby car, another woman seems to stalk them, watching with a quiet, unsettling intensity. When Susan is left alone in the room for a moment, she experiences a brutal vision of a strange man leaping from the closet to attack her. After her husband returns, she insists they leave, and they do.

The couple travels to a house tied to the husband’s childhood, where the rest of the story unfolds. Susan sees the woman from the hotel in the woods on the property, but she keeps this sight to herself. Inside, she notices walls lined with paintings of male ancestors, with no portraits of the wives. The servants’ daughter, Carol Rosa M. Rodríguez, explains that the wives’ paintings are kept in the cellar, and Susan discovers that one of the wife portraits has the face crudely cut out. The husband explains that the woman in the painting is Mircala Karstein, Alexandra Bastedo — an ancestor who two hundred years earlier supposedly murdered her husband on their wedding night for unspeakable acts. Susan’s sleep becomes a battlefield, as Mircala invades her dreams and urges her to wield a mysterious dagger that keeps reappearing no matter where it is hidden, so she can butcher her husband just as Mircala did hers.

One day on the beach, the husband discovers a naked woman buried in the sand, air provided only by a snorkel. He digs her out and brings her home, where she reveals herself to be Carmila, a vampire who seduces Susan and drinks her blood. The husband soon realizes that Carmila is really Mircala Karstein and that his life is in danger. The repressed Susan’s desires are awakened in a fierce, intense lesbian bond with Carmila, setting off a spree of bloody mayhem. The couple kills the doctor, the guardian of the property, and even attempts to kill the husband, but he fights back and kills them as they lie resting in their coffins. The servant’s daughter arrives again, revealing she was bitten too; she kneels and allows him to shoot her in the head. He returns to the coffin with the dagger, and the scene closes with a newspaper column declaring that a man has cut out the hearts of three women, implying that the husband has been found and arrested for the murders. The eerie chain of past and present, dream and deed, lingers as a chilling echo of the family’s cursed history.