1978’s The Grapes of Death is a zombie film that moves at a relentless place, combining effective body horror with an ominous atmosphere that leaves you feeling as if anyone could be the next victim of the zombie horde.

At a vineyard, a worker complains about the new pesticides that are being used and is told, by his smug manager, not to worry so much.  Later, when that worker stumbles aboard a train, his face is pulsing with hideous ulcers.  He kills one woman and chases another, Elizabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal), off the train.  Elizabeth, who is just trying to visit her boyfriend in a nearby village, makes her way across the French countryside, meeting men and women who have been infected by something and who are now going mad.  They may not technically be the undead but, with their nonstop pursuit and their obsession with killing everyone that they come across, they are definitely zombies.

The Grapes of Death is also one of the most French films ever made.  In this film, the zombies are not the creation of a voodoo curse or outer space radiation or even there no longer being room in Hell.  (In fact, it becomes fairly obvious that The Grapes of Death takes place in a world in which there is no Heaven or Hell.)  Instead, this film features people who are transformed into zombies because they drank contaminated wine at an annual festival.  When Elizabeth does eventually meet two men who have not been turned into zombies, they are both revealed to be beer drinkers.  One could actually argue that, despite the film’s grim atmosphere and all of the violence committed and the blood shed and the philosophical discussions that occur, The Grapes of Death is ultimately a satire of French culture.  Only in France could a bad crop of wine lead to the zombie apocalypse.

The Grapes of Death was one of the more commercially successful films to be directed by the great Jean Rollin.  Rollin is best-known for his surreal and dream-like vampire films.  In an interview, he stated that The Grapes of Death was his attempt to make a commercial horror film and that, when he was writing the script, he closely studied the structure of Night of the Living Dead.  While the film does have its similarities to Romero’s classic zombie film, The Grapes of Death is still definitely the work of Jean Rollin.  The lingering shots of the fog-shrouded French countryside and the ancient French villages, with blood staining the cobblestone streets, could have come from any of Rollin’s vampire films.  The film also uses the same serial structure that Rollin used in many of his film, with Elizabeth going from one adventure to another and almost always managing to narrowly escape danger.  Elizabeth goes from fleeing the infected man on the train to finding herself a near prisoner in an isolated house to protecting a blind girl (Mirella Rancelot) for her crazed boyfriend to being menaced by the mysterious Blonde Woman (played by frequent Rollin collaborator Brigitte Lahaie).  There’s a new cliffhanger every fifteen minutes or so.

(Rollin said that he originally envisioned contaminated tobacco as being the cause of the zombie outbreak but he ultimately went with wine instead.  Not everyone smokes but, in France, just about everyone drinks wine.)

First released as Les raisins de la mort, The Grapes of Death has been described as being “France’s first zombie film.”  I don’t know if it was the first but it’s certainly one of the best, a relentless chase through the French countryside that ends on a proper note of downbeat horror.  This film made me happy that I’m not a wine drinker.

(Be sure to read Arleigh’s thoughts here!)