Beware the weasel!

"I am asleep. I'm dreaming all this."

Jaromil Jireš' VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970) is often described as the story of a young girl's sexual awakening but it's really about her emergence from the slumber of childhood to the waking uncertainty of adulthood. Certainly sexuality plays a big part in the story, in which the waking and dreaming realities of the orphaned Valerie (13-year old Jaroslava Schallerová) combine to describe a complex and confounding world in which purity is ever at risk for corruption by creatures of the underworld, personified by a bat-eared vampire (Jirí Prymek), whose specter may just be an inflation of her fears of a weasel seen decimating the family hen house. As Valerie experiences her first menstrual flow, this creature begins (or seems to) a campaign to possess her, hoping to prolong his life with her blood.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS is at heart about a child's natural curiosity, a sense of wonder and a hunger for answers thwarted by misinformation perpetuated by adults to maintain social status and protect the innocent and by predators who employ lies and half-truths to mask their sins. Cinematographer Jan Čuřík shoots often through keyholes and peepholes as characters spy on one another, or look on from windows and doorways.

The clammy specter of molestation lingers. When Valerie's dessicated grandmother (Helena Anýžová) makes a Faustian pact with the vampire to restore her lost youth, she reintroduces herself to Valerie as a cousin... and promptly goes for the girl's throat. Valerie's almost absent-minded response, to simply brush off of the woman/monster, betrays her obvious experience with predators. That she flees to her bed suggests she has found a refuge from the real world in dreaming.

Like a lot of Eastern Bloc "new wave" directors of this time, Jireš marries Old World superstitions and folklore with visual references to the Industrial Age, as when Valerie awakens within the cobwebbed guts of a humming machine, oily cogs and wheels turning all around her like the synapses of her busy mind. But far from providing a respite from her nightmares, this new world apparatus is part of the old world, or rather the netherworld in which ancient vampires take their sustenance from the young. Throughout the film, characters take on double and even triple identities as the dead are revealed to live, past and present merge and waking and dreaming share the same stage.

On a purely visual level, VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS impresses as an imbroglio of fantastic images. Check this flexible, changeable and highly erotic fugue with the more literal, obvious offerings from America (HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS, COUNT YORGA VAMPIRE) and the United Kingdom (THE VAMPIRE LOVERS); VALERIE is closer kin to the films of Jean Rollin and shares their trunk show aesthetic, suggesting that the particulars of Valerie's nightmare have been co-opted from the plays of the wandering troupe of actors who pass through town early in the film and later perform as Valerie, denounced as a witch by the clergyman thwarted in molesting her, is burned at the stake.

The faces in VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS are incredible, even the faces of the bit players (Alena Stojáková, above, as Hedvica, whom Valerie saves from being drained of her vitality at the hands-- or teeth-- of her elderly husband by sleeping with her) and extras from the Southern Czech town of Slavonice, where principal photography took place in the autumn of 1969.

You won't find VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS on many top 10 (or top 31) lists of great horror films this Halloween but it is deserving of atention and rediscovery. Multiple viewings are encouraged. Take a week off and sink your teeth into this.