Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
In this essay for Sight & Sound, I trace the fantastique tradition of French cinema, from A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Raw (2016). Over the last two decades, some of the most notable films to come out of France have shunned realism, choosing instead to challenge the boundaries of the tangible and the... Continue Reading →
From the very first films by the Lumière brothers, French cinema has been perceived as tending towards the real; but there’s an alternative tradition that also stretches back to the dawn of cinema – that of the fantastique. It incorporates elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction into bizarre, atmospheric tales in which the unexplained... Continue Reading →
It is possible to see in the frightening “watching” camera of Peeping Tom an echo of one of the most archaic figures of terror in Western culture: the ancient Greek monster Medusa. Not only does Medusa embody “the most primitive fears of the kind that men have dreaded since earliest times” (Feldman, 1965: 490), it... Continue Reading →
It has been a long time coming, but the films made by French master director Henri-Georges Clouzot in the later part of his career are finally getting some attention. For decades, the general critical consensus has been that he made his best work in the 1940s-50s, with Le corbeau (1943), Quai des orfèvres (1947), Le... Continue Reading →
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 →
