"In some ways, Blood and Roses strikes me as a much-belated European response to Val Lewton's horror movies for RKO. Like the majority of those films, Blood and Roses cloaks what is fundamentally a psychological thriller in a skin of supernatural horror, and circumvents the target audience's natural antipathy for "rational" explanations by making the validity of the supernatural manifestations the story's central mystery. Obviously, that demands from Vadim and his collaborators a much more acute understanding of people's mental and emotional processes than was typically displayed by horror filmmakers in this era, together with a far greater investment in character development. At a time when most fright films were simplistic stories of good vs. evil, Blood and Roses presents a startlingly mature examination of sexual neurosis and the dark side of exactly the sort of romanticism in which escapist cinema normally trades." - Scott Ashlin, 1000 Misspent Hours