Tuesday, October 26, 2021

In short: Folies Meurtrières (1984)

A masked killer stalks and slashes various women, using whatever tools are around. The killer often uses a male corpse(?) as an accessory in the slashings (and there’s a reason for that). A plot twist that’s actually pretty interesting ensues, and we end on a set piece right out of an American Golden Age horror comic (most probably not published by EC).

Apparently, some people call this kind of film “Murderdrone” now, clearly in a direct attempt to make me – yes, me personally – feel very old indeed. At least in the case of these rather astonishing forty-five minutes of murder shot on Super 8 by Antoine Pellissier, I can see the point of the term, though. The washed out, wavering quality of the footage – which is often edited rather well indeed – of people wandering through non-descript places, the homecooked gore, the warbling synth score that really seems to consist of someone randomly pressing a single key and holding it for a minute or so, the nearly complete lack of dialogue and often of any sound beyond the music whatsoever can indeed combine into a rather hypnotic atmosphere, until what many a viewer would hardly call filmmaking at all transmutes into a very particular, repetitive mood you can nearly touch as if it were something physical.

Given how unexpectedly clever and savvy about the structures and rules of the slasher genre the final ten minutes of the film are, I wouldn’t even be surprised to learn Pellissier did this on purpose. In any case, Folies Meurtrières something rather special, if most probably only for a very distinct number of people.

No comments: