Anytime you put vampires and scythes on screen, there’s a certain type of cineaste who will immediately point at the screen, Leonardo DiCaprio meme-style, and go, “Jean Rollin’s Fascination!”
The eternally eerie image of Brigitte Lahaie, clad only in a cloak and boots, wielding a two-handed scythe, is homaged in Who Far Does the Dark Go?, the sapphic horror by Bears Rebecca Fonté premiering at the Queer Screams Film Festival in Portland, Oregon on Aug. 2. “I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that one!” said the writer/director.
Fonté is well known to attendees of Austin’s festival scene as a behind-the-curtains constant: first for programming the Dark Matters strand at Austin Film Festival, now as executive director of the All Genders, Lifestyles and Identities Film Festival. But it’s her role as founder of sci-fi centric Other Worlds Austin that got the blood pumping for How Far Does the Dark Go?
In 2019, Fonté booked The Honeymoon Phase as the festival’s closing night film. Two years later, star Chloe Carroll was back with another film, a short called “Elysia,” that she not only starred in but wrote and produced. Fonté said, “It was about two women raising a vampire child who’s about nine. I got to be good friends with Chloe [and] as we developed our friendship it turned out that she had a feature idea in mind that she thought could be possible, so I started working with her on that and on the script. The film became something very different from what the short was, but it definitely was that idea of what’s possible of a female vampire in a female relationship, in a lesbian relationship.”
The film is seeded with references to Rollin and his Spanish peer, Jess Franco, “and re-examines those films from a modern, queer perspective,” Fonté says. The filmmaker even admitted to lifting a couple of lines from Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl, “which is a really romantic film despite it being about zombie vampires.”
While Rollin’s films are often discarded as Eurotrash fit for the grindhouse, his work is arguably better described as cerebral erotica, focused on social and sexual transgression through horror tropes and often containing a profound class element. That’s what really inspired Fonté. “The film only works because Grace already has a crappy life. She’s poor and addicted to morphine, and she’s like, ‘Well, why not be a vampire? Why not give in and get something back for a change?’”
However, there’s also the erotica part of the equation, and How Far Does the Dark Go? is not the film to shy away from the sexual element of Grace and Evienne’s relationship. Unlike many supposedly erotic vampire movies, sex is text, not just subtext. Fonté said, “From the very beginning I wrote it into the screenplay, and I kept checking with Chloe, ‘This is what I’m writing, is this OK?’ and she’d be like, ‘Are you sure that that’s where you want to go? I’m OK if that’s what you want.’ And then when we cast the rest of the actors, it was always like, ‘This is what it’s going to be.’”
Fonté also brought in an intimacy coordinator very early in the process and found that they were not the puritanical force many people seem to expect. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, you can’t do that, there’s no way that we’re going to be able to pull that off,’ they’d be like, ‘Well, let me see how I can make that happen.’ It would be in where you put the camera and getting the actors comfortable for what is going to happen, and understanding how something would appear on camera so that you don’t actually have to do everything in the way that it’s written.”
It was never about “having some gratuitous shower scene shoved in,” Fonté said. Instead, it’s about portraying the seductive stage of Evienne and Grace’s relationship and contrasting through flashbacks with the tensions between Evienne and Tempest about consent. “I miss the days when you were telling the tale of two people and their relationship, their power dynamics played out in who they work together in bed. That’s how a lot of people communicate, and you don’t have to tell someone who’s in change in a relationship if you can see it in screen.”
“Real people have sex,” Fonté added. “That’s the best part of an early relationship, getting to know someone physically as well as getting to be fascinated with who they are as a person.”
Now here’s an exclusive first look at the teaser trailer for How Far Does the Dark Go?
How Far Does the Dark Go? premieres Aug. 2 at the Queer Screams Film Festival. Tickets at queerscreams.com.
This article appears in July 25 • 2025.