Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
I'm very happy to have contributed an introduction + a commentary alongside the brilliant Kat Ellinger to Radiance Films' release of A Woman Kills (La femme bourreau), directed by Jean-Denis Bonan, a one-time Jean Rollin associate, in 1968. Lost for 40 years, A Woman Kills is a radically odd serial killer story that was shot... Continue Reading →
I reviewed Mark Jenkin's follow-up to Bait for the Sight&Sound website in May 2022. The review was published in the Winter 22-23 issue of the Sight&Sound magazine. An oblique take on 1970s folk horror, Enys Men creates a genuinely haunting experience rooted in the Cornish landscape. Synopsis: A middle-aged woman (Mary Woodvine) lives alone on... Continue Reading →
I wrote an essay on Blind Beast (1969), Yasuzô Masumura's hallucinatory masterpiece of perverse eroticism, for the Arrow Video Blu-ray, released 23 August 2021.
I am currently working on a book on sado-masochistic themes in 1960s-70s cinema, looking at films such as La prisonnière, The Story of O, The Night Porter and In the Realm of the Senses as well as the work of Jess Franco and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and exploring the way they revisit the themes laid out... Continue Reading →
I have written about Jean Rollin's virgins and vampires for The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (Issue 18, Autumn 2020), looking at the way in which they develop the subversive aspects of the persecuted maidens and fatal women of 18th- and 19th-century Anglo-Irish Gothic novels into the 1960s-70s. Pic credit: Le viol du... Continue Reading →
I have written about the enduring influence of 1970s cinema on horror film of the past decade for the November 2020 issue of Sight & Sound. Pic credit: Color Out of Space (2020)
I contributed an essay on Fando y Lis and surrealism to the new monumental Alejandro Jodorowsky box set from Arrow. Jodorowsky's first feature Fando y Lis (1968), an infernal adaptation of Fernando Arrabal's Panic play, psychedelic Western El Topo (1970) and delirious spiritual initiation The Holy Mountain (1973) are presented in new 4K restorations, and... Continue Reading →
I contributed a video profile of the fascinating Irish-Italian actress Lisa Gastoni for Hammer Volume 5: Death and Deceit, which includes Visa to Canton/Passport to China (1961), starring Gastoni as a beautiful, mercenary spy. Gastoni is best known for the roles of seductively transgressive women she played in Italian films such as Wake Up and... Continue Reading →
I have written an essay on 'Witchfinders and Sorcerers: Sorcery and Counterculture in the Work of Michael Reeves', published in the new book Sixties British Cinema Reconsidered, just out from Edinburgh University Press. Picture credit: The Sorcerers (Dir. Michael Reeves, 1967)
Pavel Juráček was a key figure of the 1960s Czech New Wave whose work has been steadily re-evaluated in recent years. Although he directed only two features, he co-scripted some major films of the period, notably Karel Zeman’s A Jester’s Tale (1964) and Jindřich Polák’s Ikarie XB 1 (1963), and supported the work of Vera... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 