Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
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 →
As part of the Barbican’s ‘Cheap Thrills’ season, I examine the unique women directors who worked in the golden age of exploitation cinema, their struggles and successes, and the singular works they created in this one-hour lecture. Stripped and slashed, sometimes both at the same time: this is the fate usually reserved to women in... Continue Reading →
The 1960s-70s saw copious amounts of on-screen self-flagellation, brutal witch-hunting, delirious possessions and sadistic exorcisms, culminating into the so-called ‘nunsploitation’ genre. Beyond the desire to shock and titillate, many of these films, most notably Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), were part of the time’s questioning of all power structures, pitching repressive, corrupt and hypocritical religious... Continue Reading →
In the 1960s-70s, the relaxation of censorship, together with women’s greater social assertiveness, led to the appearance of a substantial number of art and/or exploitative films that explored male/female relationships through sexual power games. A large sub-section, including Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), Sergio Martino’s The... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 