The Sweet Sound of Death (1966)

Original title: La llamada

Young lovers Pablo (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) and Dominique (Dyanik Zurakowska) belong to that – one might say traditional – group of romantics who, between promises of love, marriage and thoughts of children, like to do the things the Shelleys and Byron would have approved of. Namely, visiting romantic, foggy graveyards.

And when one is at such a place, one might as well swear the kind of eternal love that promises whosoever of a couple dies first to return and stay with their loved one forever. In fact, Dominique is rather insistent on them doing just that; Pablo, for his part, is accommodating if a little bewildered.

Shortly after that oath, the airplane on which Dominique travels to visit her family in Brittany (the most gothic part of France), crashes, with few survivors. At first, it seems as if Dominique were among the victims; still, mistakes can certainly be made in such situations, so it is not completely strange when she returns to Pablo very much alive. However, after spending a night with Pablo, she suddenly disappears with a merry wave.

As it turns out, she has indeed died in the crash and is to be buried a few days later, her body already claimed by her family. Pablo grabs the assistance of his favourite professor (Carlos Lemos) – the 60s certainly were a different time - and travels to Brittany to find out what is actually going on. Which, as it turns out, isn’t the best of ideas.

Despite taking place in a very budget-hip student mid-60s Europe, Javier Setó’s slow and atmospheric Sweet Sound of Death is really deeply in love with the Romantic and the Gothic. Thus, the film puts its very modern-at-the-time (or modern seeming, in once case) characters into a world of foggy graveyards and breaking winter, where ghosts may indeed walk and love, and where the relations of one’s foreign beloved are invariably creepy and weird, or just plain bizarre.

This is a very patient movie that tells its comparatively simple tale without much of a sense of urgency. Suspense is kept at bay until a final act that culminates in a very creepy, empty and candle-lit mansion before the kind of eternal return twist you’ll either find annoying or a perfect fit for the tale’s very gothic mood. Before all that happens, this is all about slowly and carefully creating a mood, showing its emotionally very young characters without rancour or irony, and hopefully lending at least some of Pablo’s confusion to the audience.

Being the kind of viewer I am, I very much enjoyed the film’s approach to the supernatural, though I can certainly imagine some viewers getting impatient. For me, The Sweet Sound of Death is a small hidden gem of a gothic horror movie that knows the tone it wants to strike, and never wavers from doing that.

Salem’s Lot (1979)

Yeah, nobody needs me to explain even a tiny bit of plot for this one, right? Well, the makers of the 2020s movie abomination probably could have used one.

Anyway, after he had made one of the most important, genre-defining horror movies in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper never did manage to catch all the acclaim he deserved. Even when he made another commercial hit and obvious classic like Poltergeist, people simply pretended he didn’t direct it, even though his fingerprints are all over it for anyone to see. Seen from my vantage point now, he directed quite a few films that have made it into my personal pantheon, and never phoned it in even in those years when money was tight and acclaim elusive.

Hooper just wasn’t the kind of director who, even though he mostly kept inside of the horror genre, seems to have had any interest in making the same film again and again. Between his aborted job with The Dark and The Funhouse (a film that’s understandably overshadowed by the horrible story around it), he made this classic two-part adaptation of one of my favourite Stephen King novels.

The script by Paul Monash does condense elements of the novel, and has a couple of moments where it clearly wants to hit a core scene of the book but didn’t have the space to really prepare it – what’s left of Father Callahan’s plot line is an obvious example – and can’t go quite as panoramic as the book does. However, most of the changes here are well thought-through.

While it gets talky in the way TV movies of the era do, what is most striking about the film is how much of a mood piece it often is, with a sense of doom and dread hanging over many scenes.

With a comparably limited budget and working with heavy censorship requirements, Hooper often focusses on the effect of slight shifts in camera angles – actual Dutch angles are used much sparser –, discrepancies between what we see and hear, and the idea the supernatural can be expressed as something lingering that shifts natural forces to its desires. My personal favourite here is right at the end of part one, when grave digger Mike Ryerson (Geoffrey Lewis) is called into the grave of young Danny Glick by the power of a sudden wind and camera work and editing that suggest a mental pull without ever needing to actually have the undead kid call the man.

Whenever the vampires are actually on screen, the film’s editing rhythms become slow and dreamy, one of the best encapsulation of encounters with things that can’t be but aren’t I’ve ever seen on screen. Here, Hooper uses some effective call-backs to the techniques of silent horror movies – there’s a reason Reggie Nalder’s Barlow looks like a relation to Murnau’s Nosferatu – to then emphasise the handful of modern (of the time) special effects he can afford for the project.

Really, what makes this version of Salem’s Lot so wonderful is that mood of some ineffable evil hanging over the titular town right from the start – as represented by the Marsden House – created out of shadow and light by Hooper in ways I can’t quite always put a finger on but feel.

Schalcken the Painter (1979)

Leiden, in the Dutch Republic, during the 17th Century. Budding painter Godfried Schalcken (Jeremy Clyde) is studying under the renowned master Gerrit Dou (Maurice Denham). Schalcken is studious and clearly ambitious, but also in love with Dou’s niece, Rose (Cheryl Kennedy), who lives with the old painter. Rose does look at him favourably, as well. Dou doesn’t realize this, and if he did, he surely wouldn’t approve. There’d be no profit in it.

However, when a very rich, very pushy and rather corpse-like looking gentleman (John Justin) Dou has never heard of before appears one night and basically throws some money at Dou to buy Rose, he’s all too happy to comply.

Once she’s met her new betrothed, in a particularly awkward dinner scene, Rose isn’t too happy with the situation. Her uncle doesn’t care, and when she’s not terribly subtly suggesting to Schalcken he might want to run away with her, he’s noncommittal – his ambition, you see…

So when Rose is married, she appears to disappear from the face of the Earth completely. There’s a small attempt by her uncle and Schalcken to find out what happened to her and her husband some months later, but it’s abortive as well as inconclusive.

Years later, when Schalcken is a successful if not exactly spirited painter himself, Rose very suddenly appears, distressed, in terrible fear, asking for a priest as the only way to protect her.

Based on a story by M.R. James favourite Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Leslie Megahey’s BBC TV film is a strange and fascinating beast that often feels like a cross between a docudrama and a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas. Charles Gray’s narration (as Le Fanu) certainly hits both modes very well, with as much thought given to the potential meaning of a darker strain in Schalcken’s paintings as to the supernatural elements of the story.

Those supernatural elements are realized wonderfully, with the handful of effects used harkening back to stage techniques more than filmic ones – like many Japanese kaidan movies liked to use – and some make-up on John Justin that combines with his nearly motionless performance to suggest a living corpse without the film ever needing to state this outright.

The filmmaking is fantastic in general, with nearly every shot based on a contemporary painting, where camera movement often reveals the day to day details the carefully staged and controlled paintings do not show. Much of the film is lit by candles, which is beautiful as well as suggestive of the darkness that increasingly dominates the character of Schalcken.

On a metaphorical level, this is – perhaps a bit too obviously – the tale of a man who forsakes love and a genuinely human inner life as well as True Art™ for money, commerce and (gasp) mere craftsmanship, with his true artistic talent as well as his guilt only manifesting itself in women’s enigmatic smiles and the deep shadows lingering in some of his paintings.

It is also a film made from a male perspective that appears genuinely angry at the idea of using women only as props (while also using one as a prop) for one’s art, instead of committing to them as persons you might actually need to sacrifice something for. Or, give yourself fully to, if they want it.

And it’s also a cracking, if unconventionally paced and structured, ghost story that mostly works through suggestion – until it doesn’t suggest but shows.

Beast-Man (Wolf) (1987)

aka The ryôjoku

aka Exciting Sexy Story: Beast Man Wolf

Our heroine of the evening is called to some village out in the middle of Japanese nowhere, for her twin sister has been killed. Apparently, the perpetrator was a wolf! Apart from the rapey local doctor, the villagers don’t seem terribly interested in the whole affair, so our heroine dresses up like an 80s action hero, shoulders her gun (!) and goes off into the woods where her sister died.

Where she gets beaten early on by a rainstorm, retreating into a lone cabin. The cabin’s owner is a woman in terrible age make-up, who goes off into a series of flashbacks that explain the local wolf lore: forty years ago, a young woman was raped by villagers. Their ringleader, some rich guy’s son (of course) then ties her to a tree so that she’ll be eaten by wolves. Instead, the girl kills and eats the lone wolf that attacks her. Then, another rapist appears (they really need to check the water supply around here), but gets killed by another wolf. Together, girl and wolf then eat the would-be rapist’s corpse, as you do. Sweet, sweet interspecies romance ensues – also the kind of bestiality that’ll happily get you into the FBI these days – and even produces a son.

Later, said son goes off into the world, seduces the daughter of the original rapist villager, and eventually turns into a gorilla suit with a sort of wolfish head to kill the father and (sigh) rape the daughter.

You wouldn’t believe who the old lady in the hut actually is!

This (and I’ve left plot elements out) is rather a lot of stuff to pack into a pinku runtime of barely sixty minutes, but veteran director Shuji Kataoka – who’ll end up with a filmography with more than 150 entries - has no trouble with that. The merry insanity of Beast Man Wolf zips along so happily, there’s never a boring minute. Not even in the butt and nipple-focussed sex scenes, for Kataoka, in good old pinku style, appears to relish the opportunity to shoot them in curious/artful/absurd ways that only accept repetition in the guys’ sex moves – so expect peculiar camera angles or a whole sex scene shot through what looks like a particularly ugly white, flowered drape. The, ahem, money shot here is of course the faked bestiality scene where normal blurring as well as a cut-out shaped like a yellow full moon do god’s censorship work, and which is absolutely made by the facial expression of the dog playing the wolf – he looks pretty happy with his life, and therefore has a much more likeable sex face than, say, Noboru Ando.

Add to this the absurd gorilla costume, the merry, straight-faced absurdity of everything, the handful of genuinely funny jokes, and Kataoka’s eye for cheap stylish flourishes of the Japanese gothic, and this is much more pure entertainment than you’d expect from this kind of pinku horror.

Shrunken Heads (1994)

Backlot New York in the 50/90s! Three kids (actor names redacted to protect the presumably innocent) are geeking out over DC comics – featuring specific superhero names and all –, spending time with their favourite newsagent, Mr. Sumatra (Julius Harris), who is also a former agent of Haiti’s repressive regime, and getting into trouble with the local gang of greasers. Because greasers are still a thing in New York, right?

Things escalate particularly badly when the kids believe they are in an afterschool special and stand up to the greaser bullies. It probably helps that one of our heroes has the hots for bully girlfriend Sally (Rebecca Herbst), too.

Alas, it turns out, these teenage delinquents come from a very different kind of movie than the kids believe they are in, and are actually part of organized crime, in this case lead by Big Moe (a cross-dressing Meg Foster, because at this point, why the hell not?), who has a bigger quiff and an even bigger ego than their underlings. Thus, standing up to Big Moe like a hero gets our three kids killed.

Fortunately(?) Mr. Sumatra is a proper Tonton Macoute, and therefore knows his voodoo. So, obviously, he cuts off the dead kids’ heads, shrinks them and brings them back to life as flying machines of vengeance with their own special powers – one can cast lighting, one has big teeth, the third carries a switchblade(!?).

Time for vengeance, fighting random crime and a valuable lesson about flying under your beloved’s shirt.

If it weren’t R-rated and somewhat inappropriate, I’d call this Full Moon production the kind of entry level horror they just don’t make anymore today. Though, really, this is probably just the particular weirdness director Richard Elfman (indeed the former Oingo-Boingo guy, brother to Danny, who does some of the scoring) prefers.

And who can blame a guy for wanting to make a film that apparently takes place in the 1950s and the 1990s at once, believes a running gag about how a character we are supposed to be somewhat positively inclined towards is a former Tonton Macoute and still glorifies the lifestyle is a good idea, and features a short sequence that parodies the then-current crop of superhero and proto-superhero movies by replacing the hero with three murderous flying kid heads?

As is obvious, Shrunken Heads goes for a certain tone of self-conscious camp and weirdness I often find rather difficult to vibe with in films. I’m of the “if you can’t bother to take your film seriously, why should I bother with it at all?” persuasion, so this sort of thing tends to annoy me more often than not. In this case, however, I found myself at least a little charmed.

Perhaps because the film does aim for a very personal seeming aesthetic, where the goofy and the macabre mix as well as the visual and pop cultural hallmarks of two very different decades, instead of a more generic kind of self-ironic nothingburger; or simply, because the juxtaposition between the childish and the very much not meant for children elements here come together to form something I think most children would actually enjoy rather a lot.

And since I’m incurably childish myself when it comes to horror, I’m pretty much Elfman’s core audience.

She-Wolf (1965)

Original title: La loba

A rural part of past Mexico is cursed by what one might believe are strange, deadly, animal attacks on people of all shapes and sized. In truth the killings are committed by a female werewolf, all jumping rage and frizzy hair. Curiously enough, the werewolf arises from a grave to go on her killing sprees, to return there after ger business is finished.

As it turns out, the grave comes with a practical tunnel that leads to the bedroom of one of the beautiful daughters of scientist Professor Fernandez (José Elías Moreno), kept under the watchful eye of the Professor’s creepily staring but buff servant Crumba (Crox Alvarado). The Professor is of the mad scientist persuasion, as it turns out – he is researching cryogenics, which will somehow be useful in curing lycanthropy, apparently. Just don’t ask me how.

Given that he’s letting his daughter out to murder her way through the peasantry in the meantime, we can assume his own experiments aren’t too kosher either, in any case.

In an uncommon turn, this scientist comes with not one, but two beautiful daughters, each of whom could the the wolfwoman. One is beautiful and wilful Clarisa (Kitty de Hoyos), the other is angelic Alicia (Adriana Roel), so it may not be a surprise to learn which one of the two has full moon hobbies.

To complicate the plot a little, the narrative also involves Clarisa’s secret lover, Dr Bernstein (Joaquín Cordero), a man very interested in lycanthropy, as it happens, as well as a wolf hunter (Noé Murayama) and his werewolf-certified dog. Also, rather more lycanthropic romance than I expected of a film of this era, so if that sort of thing floats your boat, you’re welcome.

But then, I also didn’t expect Rafael Baledón’s film to start with surprisingly explicit wolfwoman rampage that shows rather more of our titular character ripping out hearts than I would have expected going by other Mexican films of the era. In fact, the attack scenes here are on the savage side, with a ruthless choice of victims, and some fast editing and camera work that’s neither typical of Mexican pop cinema of this era nor of Baledón, who is usually at his best when it comes to the creation of backlot gothic mood and a certain dramatic dreaminess. Curiously enough, there’s much less expressionism and moody shadow play on display here than I would have expected going in, and instead much more muscular, straightforward and sometimes overlit pulpiness that seems to prefigure our favourite Spanish wolf person Paul Naschy’s body of work.

This directorial approach does fit the general tone of a script that contains two mad scientists, two werewolves, two sisters, two melodramatic romances, a police investigation, a cool werewolf hunter and his dog, as well as a mute child to be threatened, and that still finds time to squeeze several werewolf attacks and even a somewhat poignant ending into a runtime of less than eighty minutes.

Not surprisingly, the whole thing does feel a little messy and more than a little rough around the edges, but there’s a wild energy and conviction to everything that should make the film impossible to dislike for any pumpkin-minded viewer.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

On a far future post-apocalyptic Earth that was once ruled by a class of vampire “nobles”, who are now in decline. Here, tech levels fluctuate wildly between cyborgs and laser guns and torches and pitchforks, so it’s a post-apocalyptic western gothic kind of place.

Peasants still huddle in their houses at night, for while they don’t rule whatever societies are left, there are still some vampires roaming the nights, doing as they please when they have a mind to.

These dangerous monstrosities are hunted by wandering bounty hunters like our protagonist D (voiced by Hideyuki Tanaka). D is a half-vampire with a somewhat standoffish manner, a talking face in one of his hands, at odds with his vampiric heritage but not great at living like a human being either. He’s also frighteningly good at what he does.

Which will stand him in good stead when he is hired to rescue Charlotte Elbourne (Emi Shinohara) from the vampire who kidnapped her. The somewhat dubiously named Meier Link (Koichi Yamadera) is said to be that rare vampire lord who does not use his fangs, though a village full of vampire ghouls left behind on his flight with Charlotte suggests something a little different about his sense of morality.

Compounding’s D’s problems are a rival group of vampire hunters – who come with their very own battle wagon and various wacky powers – and the barbaroi mutants Meier Link has hired to guard him. There’s also the little problem that Charlotte has actually left with the vampire of her own free will to live her private little vampire romance, everyone else be damned (sometimes literally so).

And even that’s not the final problem thrown at our hero and the other vampire hunters: for their prey’s escape route leads right into the castle of Carmilla Bathory (Bibari Maeda), a particularly dangerous vampire, who also protects the last rocket to the vampiredom’s now empty space station.

Fifteen years after the first anime based on a very popular (though not exactly critically acclaimed) series of novels, Madhouse produced this second anime adventure of everyone’s favourite (sorry, Blade) dhampir. This time around, directorial and scriptwriting duties fell on the wonderful Yoshiaki Kawajiri, a man well-versed in stylized over the top action, blood fountains and gore soups, sleaze and the beautifully grotesque, potentially all in one shot.

Which does make him the perfect candidate for a romp through a post-apocalyptic horror and SF world that also more than just nods at the Italian Western and Universal’s gothic backlot Europe.

Aesthetically, the Bloodlust is a little wonder that brings its disparate elements together with a sense of the grandiose that, in good gothic manner, simply ignores the inherent absurdity of the task of uniting only the cool bits of basically all genres. It’s beautiful to look at, full of things you still couldn’t realize in any other form than animation, and brought to life/undeath with an often breath-taking sense of detail.

As is his wont, Kawajiri directs the action with verve and grandiosity as well as clarity, but there’s also space for the slow moments, and for a film whose plot is absolutely based on the rule philosophy of one cool thing after another, there is a lot of time for quiet character moments. Every character here has lived too long and/or seen too much in a world that’s perhaps grown a bit too strange for normal human comprehension. Thus, there’s a sense of tiredness and melancholia, and the senselessness of a life that’s only ever going from one fight to the next, the dreariness of survival running through everyone.

However, curiously enough for a film whose aesthetics are so focussed on the rule of cool and maximalism in everything, it also suggests a potential for actual change, for going on in better ways than the one with the most cool violence, for genuine hope. Of course, it does come to this via moments of operatic melodrama and after a lot of wonderful bloodshed.

Nahual (2025)

After having been attacked by an elderly woman in a house in Chicago that basically screamed “witchcraft”, an encounter the old lady doesn’t survive, social worker Katia (Jenny Sanchez) is understandably traumatized. She takes some time off work and travels to a resort somewhere in rural Mexico.

Shortly after Katia’s arrival there, a series of killings committed by a very fast, very strong, and very strange animal begins. At the same time, Katia begins changing, in behaviour and appetites. It soon becomes clear she has been possessed by a malevolent animal spirit, a nahual, and is indeed the monster killing the locals.

The indigenous people know this sort of thing of old, but that doesn’t mean it is going to be easy to get rid of what has become of Katia.

To my delight, microbudget veteran Ricardo Islas is still making films. He is apparently still from the US, his homebase for two decades or so, but in the case of Nahual, the production was probably shot in Mexico, with a cast of exclusively Spanish language speakers. Which does give the director’s return to the realm of the were-creatures (see Plenilunio for his first, classic, visit there) a strong sense of the local, generally an asset in any production, particularly in the microbudget realm where you have to find your uniqueness because you typically can’t afford to construct it. How much of the local here is an imagined one or how much of it a real one, I’m not in a position to say from Germany, of course.

This is clearly made on the very cheap, with many of the cast members not professional screen actors, but the central roles are well-cast, and nobody is the kind of horrible you shouldn’t cope with in a film made on this kind of budget. Pleasantly for my old ass, this is very centred on middle-aged people who haven’t jumped into the well of chirurgical youth too enthusiastically, which, as the feel of locality does, provides this with a nice base of reality for the supernatural to work on. Plus, in how many horror movies do you find a normal looking, indigenous Mexican woman as the eventual heroine?

His decades of experience as low budget filmmaker have provided Islas with a full toolkit as a filmmaker: his script is much better structured than these things often are, his character work, while not exactly deep, is precise and adds enough interest to everyone involved you are invested in their final fates, and though some of the direction is rough around the edges, there’s a solidity in the visual staging and the editing that simply works. When it is called for – the monster attacks and a great suspense scene in the climax particularly come to mind – Islas’s work becomes focussed and effective.

Obsession: A Taste for Fear (1987)

Original title:  Pathos - Segreta inquietudine

In some bizarre cyberpunk-ish near future as seen from 1987. Diane (Virginia Hey) works as a photographer and videographer doing arty softcore stuff with loads of elements of queerness and a bit of sadomasochism.

Despite/because of her unpleasantly dominating personality and a streak of badly hidden sadism – we in the biz call her state of mind being a self-centred, horny asshole – she is adored by her often mistreated assistant Valerie (Gioia Scola), who oh so very much wants to get into her boss’s panties.

Continuing the unhealthy relationships, Diane is still very close with her ex-husband Georges (Gérard Darmon), a peddler in smut somewhat darker than her own, and with a personality even more egotistical than hers – we in the biz call guys like him a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen.

After Diane helps out by fucking a potential client of Georges to lose that “potential” qualifier, ex-hubby gifts her with muscle model Teagan (Teagan Clive). Diane really rather takes a fancy to Teagan, but after one abortive shoot, the model disappears.

As it turns out, Teagan was murdered by a female killer wearing black gloves who loves to leave behind video disks of her exploits. Shaving-impaired Lt. Arnold (Carlo Mucari) is on the case, but between fighting off Diane’s advances (she finds his resistance to her dubious charms irresistible, of course) and moralizing, he just might need the unasked for help of our protagonist doing the amateur detective bit, as per the giallo handbook.

Conceptually, one-time director Piccio Raffanini’s Obsession is pretty much irresistible to me. A giallo taking place in a sleazy, hi-tech of 1987 near future, where somehow still everyone is from the platonic ideal of the late 80s, and where nobody can stop thinking about sex for more than a scene sounds rather perfect.

In practice, you need a bit of patience with the film. The giallo elements really only come to the fore in its second half – even the inciting murder isn’t shown in any relevant detail – and before that, you are at the mercy of garish/stylish lighting consisting of all the colours of the neon, copious amounts of nudity draped in some of the weirder attempts at arty sexiness I’ve encountered (the question “who’d masturbate to that!?” did go through my mind repeatedly but then I remembered humanity), and a bunch of deeply unlikeable hot people being horny at each other.

If that’s terrible or awesome really depends on one’s mood and personal predilections, I suppose. I certainly enjoyed the pretty colours, the nearly as pretty people, the analogue future tech weirdness on copious display – so many CRT TVs in the future, generally coming in stacks – but did not necessarily enjoy spending time with the characters until the giallo plot at least got into second gear.

Faster than that, the film doesn’t ever run, but as an occasional lover of slow cinema and slow horror, I did find myself more often captivated than not, if only in appreciation of the film’s distinct style of absolute 1988.

There’s a lot to be said for aesthetic conviction, and that, Raffanini clearly had in spades.

Amazing World of Ghosts (1979)

Here is a genuine picture of a ghost [cue static shot of a blurry black and white photograph that might show a cat, or a goat, or your mum, for all that’s visible]. What are its plans? Is it staring out at us, longingly, trying to send us a message from the void?

Look at the moon! Our majestic, silent companion! Did you know the number of UFO sightings increases on nights of the full moon? What do these visitors from outer space want from us? Do they fear like we do, love like we do? Or is this the beginning of an invasion? Why is it that the number of reports of ghosts increases whenever there are more UFO sightings?

Here is a picture of Nessie.

And so on, and so forth. If this sort of thing droned in an endless dramatic monologue performed by actor Sidney Paul’s (disembodied, obviously) voice over a backdrop of blurry photos, archival footage, mondo style nonsense and shots of outer space floats your boat, this late 70s documentary devoid of arguments, facts, or logical progression of thoughts or themes may very well become your new favourite movie. Sometimes, Paul’s monologue is even connected to the pretty pictures; sometimes, 70s racist assumptions meets bizarro nonsense; sometimes, it all turns to ambient noise devoid of meaning despite the use of actual words, put into order one assumes would make them sentences, before one gets distracted by Nessie.

Also included is what I can only be assume to be a pretty impressive assemblage of library music ascribed to one Jim Cookman that wavers between some lounge, quite a bit of lite acid rock and pleasant amounts of woozy synth drones that turns the whole affair even more bizarrely cosy, at least if you’ve got my aesthetic preferences.

It’s actually pretty amazing, as if a High Strangeness doc had turned into some kind of off-beat poetry project as written by people who never, ever should have been allowed to write poetry. Amazing, this most certainly is.

Three Films Make A Post: Touch of Leather

The Nightman (2023): For its first hour or so, this Belgian movie shot in Ireland with an Irish cast directed by Mélanie Delloye does some fine work adapting elements of the non-supernatural gothic to modern sensibilities, carried by some wonderful locations – the rural mansion at the foot of a castle ruin is pretty much perfect for this sort of affair – and a fine lead performance by Zara Devlin.

Once the plot has stabilized, the supernatural has been put aside, and it is clear what’s going on, things become less interesting.

The mood of dread and growing paranoia is replaced with Crazy Guy tropes and thriller by numbers plotting that’s executed well enough, but simply not all that interesting, particularly after what came before.

Hauntology (2024): Parker Brennon’s movie has nothing to do with hauntology, but is instead a very fun, decidedly queer microbudget indie horror anthology movie that tells some straightforward spook stories and a giallo homage from a queer perspective.

It’s that pleasant kind of horror that does tend to like its main characters a bit too much to have horrible or unfair things actually kill or really hurt them – that sort of thing belongs to backstories and the giallo segment here – but instead provides a fun, spooky time with ghosts, curses and (good) witches. If you’re not going in demanding a bad time for every character on screen, this is actually a very good time for a viewer, shot well enough (or rather, much better than the budget would have you expect, though not as idiosyncratically stylish as I always hope for), and with generally decent performances. Among the acting talent is the Love Witch herself, Samantha Robinson, as well as an unretired Nancy Loomis (now Nancy Kyes), so we are in very good hands.

Her Private Hell (2026): Following his success with Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn has put increasingly more effort into driving away any viewer who might come at his body of work from the direction of conventional thriller or horror expectations. In this sense, the highly divisive Her Private Hell is a rousing success. If anyone hasn’t noticed that Refn makes movies predominantly for himself, this one really should do as a teachable moment.

Given my predilections, and despite how little I enjoyed The Neon Demon (a film I should probably rewatch sooner rather than later, in hopes of better appreciation), I think Her Private Hell is rather brilliant as a film that’s all about wallowing in its directors’ obsessions, his kinks, and his favourite visual ideas. Imagine Cattet and Forzani with the kind of budget and clout to be able to hire an up and coming actress like Sophie Thatcher, and afford even more tacky/lovely tricks from an idealized version of the giallo and exploitation playbook, with even more pretentious dialogue and you’re pretty much there. This is the sort of thing I rather avoid to analyse on a plot and thematic level – though one could probably deduce all of Refn’s favourite sexual obsessions if one were of a mind to – but love to inhabit as an aesthetic place of muted neon, languor and the most Pino Donaggio score every to be Pino Donaggioed.

Tell Me Something (1999)

Detective Cho (Han Suk-kyu), right now under investigation for taking dirty money to pay for the medical bills of his now deceased mother, is still tasked with solving a serial killer case in rainy, dark Seoul. After a couple of dead men, Cho finds out that the victims all have something in common – they once dated artist (and daughter of a very famous artist herself) Chae Soo-yeon (Shin Eun-ha).

While Soo-yeon is not a suspect, she is very much of interest to the investigation, though she doesn’t really appear to want to break out of her shell of being a quiet, mysterious beauty. Perhaps she’ll change her mind when Cho finds himself rather drawn to her; or when the killer’s gaze seems to fall more directly on her than on her former lovers?

Often glacially paced, Yun-hyeon Jang’s serial killer thriller takes all of the elements of the late-90s state of the genre and gives them a good shake in a very typical South Korean approach to genre filmmaking to reconfigure it in shapes still quite recognizable yet also slightly estranged from their common form.

Which, given that part of the film’s thematic heft rests on creating a mood of alienation that’s just as big as its mood of menace, is a rather good way to get its audience on track, or at least in the right mood.

And mood really is where the film’s strengths rest – this is all grungy locations, rain, moody dark lightning, noir gone just about digital, interspersed with some moments of brutality, some of action, and carried by Cho’s halting attempts to move through the labyrinth of a case that appears constructed to foil and fool him personally. Why, if you didn’t know it better, you might think the universe wanted to tell him something about himself, the doubtful nature of mysteries or even the depths of his own heart.

In other – okay, American, hands, this would probably have turned into an erotic thriller with copious fucking between cop and witness, but even though there’s a growing attraction between Cho and Soo-yeon, the film really rather prefers to titillate us through the same sense of distance that attracts Cho, as the men before him, to Soo-yeon. It’s certainly still in the ballpark of femme fatale tropes, but reconfigured for a more distanced world.

Somewhat fitting to its insistence on distance and alienation, watching Tell Me Something is never quite the experience thinking about the film afterwards is – there’s a quality to it that makes it difficult to enjoy it in the moment as you’d do with most other good genre films. Instead, the idea of it, as well as the more abstract elements of its aesthetic start to nestle or linger in one’s mind, turning the experience of watching this much more intense in hindsight than during the actual time spent with it.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

Original title: Al otro lado del espejo

The dominating father (Howard Vernon) of jazz-singing rich girl Ana (Emma Cohen) is really unhappy about her planned marriage to a perfectly okay young man. So unhappy, he disturbs Ana’s happy pre-marriage phase via a pretty dramatic suicide that leaves Ana rather turned off from getting married to her beau at all.

Instead she really jumps into the night life of jazz improvisation and alcohol, finding quite a bit of male company to pass the time as well. However, the men she gets involved with have the unhappy tendency to die, struck down with a particularly rare kind of dagger.

Curiously enough, whenever that happens, Ana has dreams – or are they visions? – of a mirror from her father’s house that reflects him, hanging dead, and what may or may not be her double (or is it her Jungian Shadow?), wielding a (particularly rare kind of) dagger more often than not.

I have probably made this particular joke before, but Jesús “Jess” Franco is my favourite Jesus as well as my favourite Franco. I am, still, and by now quite on my way to forever, the kind of viewer who really vibes with Franco’s output more often than not.

This one’s a film as much about Emma Cohen’s eyes, the transcendent joys of improvisation and the kind of woozy quality of sunlight Franco loved so much, as it is about its psychological thriller plot which may or may not carry a supernatural element but certainly wants to play with Jung as well as with Medea (the latter, the film is very explicit about). So if you’re looking for tightness or a structure that isn’t light and improvisational, you’re really going in for a bad time. Though in that case, you’re probably better off not engaging with Uncle Jess at all.

I’d argue that Franco is often at his worst when he attempts to care about providing more conventional genre thrills instead of shooting something he finds exciting or interesting at the moment (which may very well be slowly zooming towards a vagina, or getting really interested in a sax player soloing) and eventually editing it together into a movie-like shape. No worries about that here – Mirror is a thing of mood and moods, carried by Franco’s interests and his little perversions, Cohen, and whatever a given viewer brings to it.

Which is all I ask of the man’s films.