Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
I am thrilled to be one of the 8 writers selected as part of the New Blood class of 2021 for my script REFRACTED. New Blood is an initiative organised by producer Giles Edwards of Queensbury Pictures in partnership with FrightFest to find new UK genre screenwriters. The workshop session on Thursday 26th August with... 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 →
During the first lockdown, I made a horror/fantastique short film. In KINSHIP, a Zoom call between a mother with dementia and her daughter is not what it seems. Kinship was made with no budget. I wanted to see if I could make a film in these restricted circumstances. In the strange atmosphere of lockdown I... 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 had the pleasure of talking to Anna Bogutskaya about a pair of 1950s she-creature films, Curse of the Cobra (1955) and The Wasp Woman (1959) in the 26/06/2020 episode of the Final Girls weekly podcast. https://thefinalgirls.transistor.fm/episodes Picture credit: The Wasp Woman (Dir. Roger Corman, 1959)
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)
Virginie Sélavy 