Daughters of Darkness[b] is a 1971 erotic horror film co-written and directed by Harry Kümel and starring Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Andrea Rau, and Danielle Ouimet.

Stefan Chilton, the son of an aristocratic British family who was raised in the United States, is traveling with his new wife, Valerie, through Europe.

The couple check into a grand hotel on the Ostend seafront in Belgium, intending to catch the cross-channel ferry to England, where Stefan's mother lives.

In their suite, Valerie reads a local newspaper article about a series of child murders in Bruges, each a girl whose throat was slashed.

Elizabeth takes charge, ordering Valerie to clean up the blood while Stefan sits in shock, and the three subsequently drive into the country to dispose of Ilona's corpse.

While speeding on a dense forest road, the women are blinded by sunlight, and Valerie loses control of the car, crashing.

Elizabeth is thrown from the vehicle and impaled through the heart on a broken branch before her body is lit on fire by the car's subsequent explosion.

Director Kumel, interviewed by Mark Gatiss for the BBC documentary Horror Europa said that he deliberately styled Delphine Seyrig's character after Marlene Dietrich and Andrea Rau's after Louise Brooks to deepen the intertextual resonance.

[clarification needed] Because the vampire character of Elizabeth Bathory is also a demagogue, Kumel dressed her in the Nazi colours of black, white and red.

[citation needed] The critic Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae (1990) that Daughters of Darkness is a good example of a "classy genre of vampire film" that "follows a style I call psychological high Gothic."

Paglia sees this "abstract and ceremonious" style, which depicts evil as "hierarchical glamour" and deals with "eroticized western power", as beginning in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel, Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Ligeia", and Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw.

Daughters of Darkness leans flamboyantly toward the artistic end of the spectrum, with Delphine Seyrig sporting Marienbad-like costumes and the Belgian director conjuring up images of luxurious decadence replete with feathers, mirrors, and long, winding hotel corridors.

At the film's core, however, is a deeply unpleasant evocation of a war of nerves between Seyrig's vampire and the bourgeois newlyweds into whose honeymoon she insinuates herself.

Jaded age preys cunningly on narcissistic youth, and seductiveness and cruelty become indistinguishable as Seyrig forces the innocents to become aware of their own capacity for monstrous behavior.

Her accidental death following the sex scene ends up being the straw that breaks the camel’s back and he is rendered utterly useless to the surviving women.