Some years ago there was a nonfiction book in part about necrophilia, including a section about a woman who worked for a funeral home & while she was driving the hearse to the cemetery, followed by the dead lad's folks & friends, she was overcome with a sense of grief that her latest boyfriend was going to be buried in the ground.

So she stepped on the gas, successfully kidnapping the corpse for a few days of romance, before being arrested & hitting the national news.

It's just not possible to write a wickeder, funnier, cooler necrophile movie than that true story. But a less significant interview in the same book was with a woman who worked in an old folks home & allegedly diddled dead old ladies.

Strangely enough this woman became my roommate for a couple of years. I'd had no idea how notorious she was -- notorious for sundry reasons.

When some gossip filled me in that she was interviewed for that book on necrophilia, I asked her about it. She was annoyed, because she hadn't known she was going to be quoted in a book when she told that story, & the writer exaggerated everything to fit a certain sleeze-factor.

In reality she fell in love with a living woman in the old folks home, despite the age difference. She found the woman intelligent, funny, & sexy.

They'd make love now & then. But one morning she came to work & found the old woman had died in the night. Overwhelmed with sadness, her goodbyes included a kiss good by, & a final gentle petting of her muff.

In the mind of the interviewer she told this too, that made her a necrophile. Really it was a sweet thing that a very bad writer reported for sensation without getting any of it right.

Well, so, as a Romanticist at heart, & a lover of horror, I've always found tales of dead love interesting, whether horrific, heartwarming, romantic, or merely demented, it's a good theme for a short story, a novel, or a movie.

My favorite-of-all-time necrophilia romance, Kissed (1996), is about sexy young girl-next-door type Sandra (Molly Parker) who has only one fault. She's a necrophiliac, & really can't fall in love with the living.

The film is based on a marvelous short story by Barbara Gowdy, "We So Seldom Look On Love." I am not shocked by such tales when they're fiction -- the real thing, well, maybe a little shocking -- so I can find such things romantic if the author writes them to be so. The fact that Gowdy transforms necrophilia into a sacred act would be disturbing to most readers, the more so because she's so convincing.

The film adaptation does complete justice to the original story. Like most necrophiliacs -- & there are a lot of them -- Sandra works in a funeral parlor as a part-time embalmer. This gets her access to precisely the type of young stud she goes for.

When Matt (Peter Outerbridge) falls for Sandra, he struggles to accept her deviance, & is even willing to pretend to be a corpse for her.

But it's obvious there will always be a barrier between his great love for her, & her restrained love for him. As long as he's alive, she'll never completely bond with him. And there seems to be only one way to fulfill both his dream, & her desire.

The cool thing about Kissed is that it is played so romantically despite that it is sick, sick, sick. The acting, direction, editing, score, everything about this film is top-of-the-line, very surprising to see the subject matter as true artfilm rather than microbudget horror.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl