ABCs of Horror 3: “V” Is for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

There are certain unique films on the periphery of the horror genre that stand out as such oddities, such unreplicable, one-off experiences, that just giving an expansive description of the subgenre would reveal to the trained eye exactly which movie you’re talking about. Say, for instance, that someone told you they had just finished watching a “Czech gothic surrealist coming-of-age psychological dark fantasy vampire horror film.” Well, there’s not a lot of contenders for that particular title, suffice to say. The long and short of it is that they just wrapped up Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and that means they’re probably some combination of befuddled and delighted by what they’ve seen.

I hadn’t really intended it when laying out the slate of films for 2024’s ABCs of Horror run-through, but this is apparently the year when I’ve decided to embrace arty, unconventionally psychological vampire cinema, with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders as the crown jewel. It would pair quite nicely in a double feature with our “L” installment of this very series, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death from one year later in 1971, though on every level Valerie is orders of magnitude more inscrutable and surrealistic. This is a hodgepodge of disparate, competing influences–traditional gothic horror, sun-soaked Kubrickian tableaus, anti-religious or clerical sentiment, and feminist erotic awakenings. Its full intent feels alien, particularly viewed from the perch of the western, English-speaking modern world, in which so much of its Czechoslovak New Wave satire is undoubtedly being lost on us.

This can make Valerie and Her Week of Wonders something of an inscrutable experience to the modern viewer, but at a brisk 77 minutes, it barely matters how often you find yourself scratching your head in wonderment at its sudden detours and disconcerting, abstract imagery. The film’s true calling card is its impeccable lenswork and evocative mise-en-scène, which combine to create exceptionally memorable individual shots that linger in the mind afterward. I find myself thinking on specific images, like that of the table for a wedding feast after all the guests are gone, covered in food scraps, candles, garbage and pools of spilled wine–decadence rapidly transforming into debasement and decay. Many of these shots look like they should be hanging in a gallery.

The title character is 13-year-old Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová), who has seemingly just begun to experience her first menstruation–a time heavy in omens and portents for both the young girl’s budding sexuality and the film’s vampiric overtones. Valerie lives a cloistered existence with her disconcerting grandmother, an actress clearly being played by a much younger woman in heavy layers of stark, white makeup, and she mourns the absence of her largely unknown father and mother, a nun who left her a pair of seemingly magical earrings. Those earrings quickly become central to the film’s plot–what little there is that can be described as “plot”–being tangled up in plans of several of Valerie’s admirers, including those of Eaglet, the young man who may or may not be her brother, and the vampiric Richard … who may or may not be her father. These personalities weave around each other as they scheme and plot to control Valerie’s suddenly adult future, but she seems largely protected by a sheen of untouchable inner radiance, a virtue that radiates from her as she moves through the world with a grace beyond her years.

And Valerie will need that strength, in order to resist the corruption and debasement of the world she’s living in. The film takes aim squarely at the church and particularly at the priesthood via the corrupt and hedonistic Father Gracián, who attempts to force himself at one point on Valerie before she manages to repel him with a supernatural charm. He later returns in vengeance, attempting to burn Valerie as a witch after she spurns him. The message is clear: The church aims to possess and itself despoil that which it claims to be protecting from corruption with its severe piety. The provocateur tone calls to mind a film like Ken Russell’s The Devils from 1971, which likewise provided a scathing condemnation of the base human evil at the heart of organized religion. Who’s up for a Valerie, Jessica and The Devils 1970-71 triple feature?

Though Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is apt to be confounding, it’s never anything short of mesmerizing in its imagery, swinging wildly between the nightmarish (like Richard’s pale, vampiric leering, seemingly taking design cues from Murnau’s Nosferatu) and the ethereally beautiful. In the end, its most pointed criticisms are the universal ones that will be familiar to any audience, like a teen girl being deflowered by her new, middle-aged husband, who says the following in the face of her tears: “Don’t cry. You look old when you cry.” Ick.

Valerie feels mythological in its overtones, like an excerpt from a cosmology that is totally foreign to the viewer. We know none of the rules, and thus have no idea of what is truly possible, but the sense of dreamy magic permeates every minute of it. The beauty of its composition renders it as an experience you won’t soon forget.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.