Directed by Jean Rollin • 1978 • France
Starring Marie-Georges Pascal, Félix Marten, Serge Marquand

The polluted wine produced for a village’s annual grape-harvest festival has left all but a few rabid with some chemically engendered form of zombiism. They may saunter about like sleepwalkers, but these are not the zombies of George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD; they are, rather, oozing transmitters of an impassioned insanity that can only be termed anarchy. With its deeply unsettling, progressively chilling atmosphere, THE GRAPES OF DEATH may be director Jean Rollin’s most traditionally frightening film, unfolding like an ever-expanding nightmare whose noose is drawn all the tighter by the efforts of its young heroine to escape it.