Writer. Editor. Film Scholar. Script Consultant
Italian director Sergio Martino worked in a wide variety of film genres, starting with Mondo-type documentaries in the late 1960s, followed by the obligatory Western, before moving on to giallo, for which he is best known, and later, poliziottesco. The 1960s-70s were an ebullient time for the Italian film industry, which rapidly moved from one... Continue Reading →
In this conference paper, I examine the sorcery theme that runs through Michael Reeves’s work in relation to key countercultural ideas and place it in the context of other witch films of the period. I discuss how under the cool, liberated, thrill-seeking, free-love, anti-authoritarian surface of the 1960s Reeves sees the dark side of the... Continue Reading →
A woman’s legs and big flowery knickers as she urinates on the side of the road, soon to be followed by her mangled severed torso lying next to the crashed car in which she was travelling with her husband. A man stabbing himself in the stomach while abundantly ejaculating out of a large penis amid... Continue Reading →
In its run of horror and genre festivals last year, We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne, Mexico/France 2016), written and directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter, stunned and divided critics and audiences alike. Its sensational material, including candid sex scenes, incest, cannibalism, orgy and slaughter, may on first view identify it as exploitation. Its inclusion... Continue Reading →
I contributed an essay on the castle in Jean Rollin, exploring the Gothic and surrealist origins of one of the director's preferred settings, the real locations used, and their subversive significance to LOST GIRLS: THE PHANTASMAGORICAL CINEMA OF JEAN ROLLIN, edited by Samm Deighan and written by all women critics, scholars and film historians, published... Continue Reading →
Amid the political upheaval of late 1960s France, Jean Rollin offered anachronistic visions of ruined castles and decaying cemeteries, steeped in the Gothic novel of the 18th and 19th century via his love for surrealism. But despite their seemingly archaic Gothic settings, Rollin’s films transgress genre expectations, and in particular, the conventional opposition between female... Continue Reading →
I contributed a video essay on We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne), the spectacular debut by Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter. This hallucinatory tale of rituals and rebirth, libidinous excess and transformative violence creates its own Theatre of Cruelty, in direct line with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Antonin Artaud. In the spirit of its illustrious... Continue Reading →
Mixing exploitation with politics and formal experimentation, the Female Prisoner Scorpion series created a mythical female avenger that fired off the imagination of 1970s Japanese audiences. It sparked numerous sequels, although none ever came close to the original three films, directed by Shunya Itô and starring Meiko Kaji. Adapted from Tôru Shinohara’s violent manga, it... Continue Reading →
Ever since the image of a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor was dreamt up by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a whole renegade strand of cinema has delighted in brutally assaulting its audience, violently forcing it to face the gory nature of the body and the mulchy depths of the psyche. The cinematic... Continue Reading →
Death and Beyond: In this month’s show, Virginie Sélavy caught up with Death Waltz Records’ Spencer Hickman and legendary composer Fabio Frizzi at this year’s Horror Channel Frightfest to talk about Frizzi’s scores for such classic Italian horror films as The Beyond and Zombi 2 in the light of his upcoming new London live show... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 