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)
The Psychedelic Renaissance
Early Women Filmmakers: Marie-Louise Iribe
Despite living only to the age of 39, Marie-Louise Iribe was a dynamic film pioneer who crammed multiple achievements into her short life, as an actor as well as director and producer. Ambitious and cultured, she formed her own production company, directed two features and was one of the few women directors who made the... Continue Reading →
Blood Hunger: The Films of Jose Larraz
Underappreciated Spanish director José Larraz made his first five films in Britain, and his best-known and most reputable, the psychological mystery Symptoms, even represented the UK at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974. The isolated mansion of Symptoms, where obsessive passions dangerously brew, the surrounding damp, leaf-littered woods and the murky river hiding buried secrets,... Continue Reading →
Fantastique: the dream worlds of French cinema
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 →
Peeping Tom: The Petrifying Gaze of Mechanical Medusa
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 →
Films by Sergio Martino
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 →
Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks, or the Sadean Shock of the Body
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 →
“Castles of Subversion” Continued: From the roman noir and Surrealism to Jean Rollin
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 →
We Are the Flesh: video essay
I contributed a video essay on We Are the Flesh (Tenemos la carne), the spectacular debut by Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter. This hallucinatory tale of rituals and rebirth, libidinous excess and transformative violence creates its own Theatre of Cruelty, in direct line with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Antonin Artaud. In the spirit of its illustrious... Continue Reading →
Cheap Thrills: Shock Value
Ever since the image of a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor was dreamt up by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a whole renegade strand of cinema has delighted in brutally assaulting its audience, violently forcing it to face the gory nature of the body and the mulchy depths of the psyche. The cinematic... Continue Reading →
