Loreta Tovar, the vampire aristocracy: "I was cast in such morbid roles because I wasn't afraid of anything."

A vampire is, in its truest sense, a contradiction. Count Dracula, like Nosferatu or Vlad the Impaler, is essentially a man. In the phallocrat's ideal, not only is he an aristocrat, a decadent man who inhabits a half-ruined castle, but women are his servants. And yet, both they and he are tasked with embodying the metaphor of freedom in its fullest expression. Theirs is the realm of individuality, of the dark side of each of us, of our inclination toward the perverse . Libertarian postmodernism finds in him or her its model and guide of extreme refinement. He or she is mesmerizing, but allows himself or herself to be hypnotized by art as the possibility of eternity.

The vampire (or rather, vampiress) is thus a paradox: she is the one who gives pleasure to her master and the one who, in her sudden immortality, recognizes pleasure as the only reason for living. Loreta Tovar embodied the character of the night in Javier Elorrieta's The Call of the Vampire in 1972. It was her debut in fantasy horror with all the honors. A year later, in El gran amor del Conde Drácula (The Great Love of Count Dracula) , also by Elorrieta, she was the innocent (or not so innocent) victim of the bloodsucker Paul Naschy. And in Amando de Ossorio's The Night of the Witches (1974), she would go from being an adventure photographer in the depths of Africa to a bewitched woman with bloody fangs in less time than it takes to behead a glorious woman. Hers.

"I imagine they chose me for these morbid roles because I wasn't afraid of anything. Many of my colleagues couldn't even watch the films they were in. That wasn't my case. I remember one afternoon I got sleepy in the middle of filming and fell asleep in a coffin. I'm not superstitious at all ," says Loreta, formerly Loreto, sometimes Dolores, occasionally Loretta, or, if necessary, even Lolita or Loli or María Dolores, as her ID states. "Long names were common in my family," she explains.

In fact, Loreta's horror debut came almost at puberty. Imparting the fear she'd never felt was the first thing this daughter of a notable and prominent lawyer with a family tree bearing privileged fruits did for cinema. No one was more suitable than her for the vampire aristocracy . At just 17 years old, her neighbor, none other than Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, noticed the very young Loreta to play a role, small but always on camera (she's one of the students), in La Residencia (1969), one of the key works of Spanish horror. And there she stayed.

"I was educated by the Slaves of Mary, and I have to say they did it very well. I never lacked anything. I combined my acting career with my modeling career and never stopped studying. To be fair, and with great sorrow, I have to confess that I was able to pursue my vocation as an actress because my father died very young in a car accident. Had he been alive, he wouldn't have allowed it, and I would never have been able to do what I did, " she says.

He says that what he remembers most from that early shoot was the elegant demeanor of Lilli Palmer , the cruel and magnetic protagonist. "I spoke with her and with María Gustafsson (who later became the most famous hostess on Un, dos, tres... ) because she was one of the few on the crew who spoke English," he says. He remembers that, along with the director's seriousness combined with affection. "Chicho was one of those people who commanded respect just by his presence, without saying anything," he comments. From that moment on, and without interruption, he strung together film after film, inspired by a Spanish comedy that needed young blondes like breathing. Objective: BI-KI-NI , You Shall Not Covet the Neighbor's Wife , and Two Magazine Girls are some of the titles of the era's developmentalism and quarrelsomeness . And so on until the first neck to bite.

At the same time, the double version arrived, the hidden and the unhidden ; the first for chaste and repressed domestic consumption, the second for unapologetically idealized Europe. "My mother was upset, but it wasn't that bad," she says. And she continues: "For me, honestly, it meant almost nothing. I'd spent my whole life spending the summer in Ibiza and there, topless was the most normal thing in the world . If you went around in a full swimsuit, they looked at you strangely. Besides, whenever I did a risqué photo (although never erotic or anything like that, just naked), the respect was utmost. Besides, I always looked even younger than I already was, so I noticed that everyone, from the director to the electricians, treated me with the utmost care, as if I were the little girl I seemed. And one more thing. I don't know if I should say it, but I have so little hair, being so blonde, that, in certain areas, they had to put a small hairpiece on me. It hurt when they took it off. I've already said it, go on."

What followed after The Call of the Vampire was a meteoric rise in fantasy horror, with very few of the most memorable titles missing. In Eugenio Martín's A Candle for the Devil , she coincided with her friend Lone Fleming , with whom she would work again in Amado de Ossorio 's Attack of the Eyeless Dead . Immediately after, or rather, at the same time, were Count Dracula's Great Love ; The Claws of Lorelei (1973), also by Ossorio; Jorge Grau's Bloody Ceremony ; and Jesús Franco's The Sinister Eyes of Doctor Orloff . All of them were films released in 1973. Franco, Jesús, used to scold her because Loreta preferred to eat with her friends rather than stay with the crew. Ossorio only asked one thing of her in all the work they did together, which was a total of three films: "He asked me if I knew how to read. Obviously, I said yes. And his response was: 'Then you're a good actress. To act, the only thing you need is to know how to read the part.' I have to say that I never showed up for a shoot without knowing my part perfectly."

And one more memory that comes back to Amando de Ossorio. "During the filming of The Night of the Witches , one of the extras got a little carried away. I, understandably, went ballistic and slapped him. Amando quickly came up to me and said, 'Loreta, please, you're the only Black people we have, and if you get offended, you can leave.' It turns out the tribe in the film was made up of a group of Black medical students in Madrid who were making the movie to earn some money," he says, laughing.

Then there would come around fifty films. And among them, one of the most adorable rarities that, although not horror, is at times frightening: Tarzan and the Treasure of Kawana , by José Truchado. "It was really a children's movie. My role was that of an explorer. We had a great time in Africa. As I said, nothing scared me and I didn't hesitate to swim anywhere without fear of any kind of creature. The most famous thing about that movie is that we had a monkey working with us, not a female monkey. I love animals and I treated him very well. The fact is that, for whatever reason, every time he saw me he went crazy with joy. So much so that there was no way to film and we had to do everything to calm him down," she recalls, and, surely, if she's still alive, she remembers the monkey.

If you ask Loreta about a role that has left a special mark on her, she goes to the theater, and from that other career far removed from film sets and fashion runways, she revisits Enchanted to Meet You by Óscar Viale, her greatest success; and Why Do You Run, Ulysses? by Antonio Gala; and The Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen; and, of course, each of her adorable vampires. "The only thing is that with the dental prosthetics and the fangs they gave you, it was hard to vocalize. But I can't complain. I've always really enjoyed it," she says. And that's where she leaves it.