Of all the movies in history that might call for a remake, 1974’s Lorna the Exorcist isn’t one. Not because of its apparently insalubrious provenance; on the contrary, for those who have spent some time inside the deviantly alluring world of Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco, Lorna is a peak. But like any of the jaw-droppingly prolific filmmaker’s wild exploitation exercises, it’s just too unique to tamper with.

Still and all, Lorna is the film that Brit director Peter Strickland was asked to rethink. He didn’t do it, but he did mine Franco’s universe as the starting point for The Duke of Burgundy (opening Friday [February 13]), his own characteristically sideways meditation on those early-’70s Eurosleaze quickies. For Duke, Strickland turned his attention to the mammoth chunk of Franco’s catalogue that explored sadomasochism.

“I think it was just such an interesting way to explore power in any relationship, but also power with directors and actors,” says the filmmaker, calling the Georgia Straight from London, England. “It just seemed really rich for probing. But I also like that genre of cinema: Franco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and so on. It was always looked down upon, most people dismiss it as smut. That alone is interesting to me.”

The Duke of Burgundy utterly nails the richly decadent feel of Franco or the erotically fixated Polish surrealist Walerian Borowczyk (who mastered the grey area between art and porn) with its tale of a lepidopterist, her “maid”, and the ancient mansion they inhabit. But then, in Strickland’s typically perverse fashion, all the nudity, urophilia, and other erotic strokes are kept off-screen.

“To me, it ended up like a domestic drama,” Strickland says with a laugh. “The starting point was, like, the first 15 minutes of one of those films. And then the rest of the film is sort of postorgasm and exploring what happens once that fantasy’s over. She’s going to take her wig off afterwards; she’s going to take her heels off; she’s going to snore at night—she’s going to be a very different character. A lot of those films from the ’70s, it was almost sacrilegious to puncture that fantasy, and that for me was fascinating.”

As with his last feature, Berberian Sound Studio, Strickland has managed to fashion his genre elements into something new and intensely personal, again employing a musician’s feel for formalism and repetition to advance his story in almost minute measures. What survives of its debt to Franco is the sense that we’re seeing something possibly much greater than the sum of its dirty little parts. That plus Monica Swinn, a Belgian actor who fell in with Franco’s crowd during his most intense period of work.

“A lot of them have either died or they don’t really want to be associated with that anymore,” Strickland says, “but Monica was incredibly open to doing it. Absolutely lovely woman, and fascinating stories as well. She had no regret, never felt as if she’d been exploited, just said that it was this wonderful period. I think she did 23 Jess Franco films, and she said they were like a family, like a gang of outlaws, just running around Europe. I wish I’d recorded our conversations, actually.”