Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
I will be speaking at the Suspirias symposium on Saturday 11th June at Queen Mary University. Tickets are free, registration essential. This symposium considers Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo horror Suspiria alongside Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 film of the same name. The 2018 film has been positioned in a cycle of ‘serious’ horror films, an arthouse spin... 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 →
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 →
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 →
Virginie Sélavy 