Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
I'll be delivering a paper on Coffin Joe and surrealism at the Cine-Excess conference 'Raising Hell: Demons, Darkness and the Abject' on Wednesday 18th October 2023. Cine-Excess runs from 17th to 27th October 2023 in Birmingham, UK and online. More details on the Cine-Excess website. Pic credit: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (José Mojica Marins, 1964)
It was such a pleasure to contribute a video essay on Coffin Joe and demonic surrealism to Arrow's superb limited edition blu-ray set. New restorations, ten films, archival material featuring José Mojica Marins and tons of extras from Stephen Thrower, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Jack Sargeant, Lindsay Hallam and Tim Lucas among others. Co-produced by Kat Ellinger... Continue Reading →
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 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 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 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 →
Due to popular demand, I will be running my 4-week course on Surrealism in cinema again in November at Close-Up. I have been running this course once or twice a year in London since 2017. Surrealism is one of the art movements that has had the strongest influence on cinema and its impact has lasted to... Continue Reading →
Despite creating one of the most wonderfully strange films of 1970s Italian cinema, Footprints (Le orme, 1975), director Luigi Bazzoni remains little known. His output may be scarce, five features concentrated over a 10-year period, but his intelligence and visual sophistication are unquestionable. Skirting the dominant genres of the time, two of his films are... 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 →
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 →
Virginie Sélavy 