Axel, Jonathan and Ana live together in a house that seems like a bunker in a post-catastrophic world.Outside is a threatening landscape, seen only as a background from the terrace of their house.Once they were a perfect love triangle, with strong bonds of friendship, but today nothing is left of it.Ana is with Jonathan and Axel is alone, bit by bit tattooing his body with flies, completely covering it with flies.Their old relationship cannot be recovered, the wounds run too deep. To escape from this hell, Ana has invented "the therapy room," a small room where they record their confessions on a video camera.Each one of them speaks to an imagined other and records it, though really Jonathan just sits alone in the room in silence to please Ana. Axel, on the other and, only goes there to open a secret box that contains the tapes recorded by Ana.But everything changes when Axel and Jonathan go out on an expedition in search of provisions and return to the house with a zombie that they call Pythagoras. The creature, with an expressionless face, stares out at nothing, at a fixed point in space, like a lobotomized patient.Pythagoras' presence disturbs the others who begin to imagine an invisible presence in the room, exactly at the point where his gaze seems fixed.Perhaps that is why -or maybe it is because they need a cathartic element- they begin to beat him often, while he feels nothing of the torture, and the vicious circle of catharsis and guilt closes in more and more.Meanwhile Axel moves dangerously close to Ana, pushed on by Jonathan, as Ana gives into Axel's desire in a desperate attempt to stop the free fall of their house.

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 (1968); they are, rather, oozing transmitters of an impassioned insanity that can only be termed anarchy. It seems an odd boast to make for one title in a plentiful filmography devoted to vampires, ghosts and other undead, but the Grapes of death (Les Raisins de la mort) is Jean Rollin's most frightening movie. It was never really the goal of his previous films to frighten, and it is the unsettling, progressively chilling quality of Grapes that makes it unlike anything else in Rollin's poetical canon. Watching it, one is almost surprised that Rollin would--or could--direct a film to such a successfully commercial end, but the Grapes of death unfolds like an ever-expanding nightmare whose noose is drawn all the tighter by the efforts of its young heroine to escape it.