Category Archives: Horror

Suspiria, giallo cinema & the lure of the sensory: An interview with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

Suspiria 3Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is a Melbourne-based film critic and academic, specialising in cult, exploitation and horror film. Her books include Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality, and most recently Suspiria, on Italian director Dario Argento’s 1977 film of the same. Alex kindly agreed to talk to me about her new book, the phenomena of witches in film and the ongoing fascination with giallo cinema. And a warning, unless your film collection is as good as hers, it will be hard for you to get through the following interview without making a lengthy list of films you’ll want to locate and purchase.

Drink-&-CameraAlex, You open the book with a playful but terrific quote from US film critic Joe Bob Briggs, that Suspiria is ‘the Gone With the Wind of Eyetalian horror’. You call it ‘one of the most breathtaking instances of the modern horror film’. Why is Suspiria such an important movie, not just in the context of Italian film cinema but horror cinema, generally?

If you forgive my turn to the colloquial, Suspiria is at its very core a film that sincerely does not give a fuck about what a film is ‘supposed’ to be: this manifests in a spirit of true experimentalism, a genuine love of ‘art’ both as a general concept and the very materiality of cinema itself.… Read more

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Giallo cinema, Horror, Peter Strickland

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thirst: Australia’s first vampire film

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Thirst 4Rod Hardy’s 1979 film, Thirst, now re-released by local distributor Glass Doll Films, is commonly referred to as a good example of Ozsploitation cinema, the term given to the wave of Australian low-budget horror, comedy, and action films made after the introduction of the R-rating in 1971. That description and categorisation doesn’t do justice to how good a horror film Thirst is in its own right, not to mention its place in the broader sub-genre of vampire cinema.

As well as being ahead of its time, Thirst borrows from the healthy lineage of vampire cinema in the late sixties and seventies, as well as horror cinema more generally, including the canon of stylish, erotic, vampire films that appeared in the seventies; Harry Kumel’sDaughters of Darkness (1971), Jesus Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (1971) and Female Vampire (1973), and on the other side of the Atlantic, Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1971). These fused art house sensibilities and soft-core porn aesthetics with horror tropes and sexual experimentation.

You can read my review of Thirst in full, here at the 4:3 site.… Read more

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Horror, Ozsploitation

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Pulp Friday: witches, sorcerers & Satan’s disciples

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Satan, witches, warlocks, demons, they were everywhere in the sixties and seventies and no more so than on pulp fiction covers. To mark Halloween, today’s Pulp Friday offering is a selection of covers featuring the lord of darkness and his various disciples.

It’s hardly surprising that Satanism and witchcraft featured so prominently in pulp. Not only did these books mirror then contemporary tabloid fascinations with black magic and witches, but the subject was an excuse for a bit of gratuitous sex and nudity. Especially sex. Devil worshippers, particularly Satan’s female disciples, were nothing if not sexually promiscuous, at least in the pages of pulp fiction.

The selection of covers below hail from the UK, US and Australia. They ran the gamut of key pulp fiction sub-genres: fiction (Dennis Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter, one of many occult themed books he wrote); history and so-called exposes (James Holledge’s Black Magic, ‘The world of uncanny occult rights, psychic phenomena, weird sex rities’); how to guides (How to Become a Sensuous Witch); television and movie ties ins (The Witchfinder General and  The Grip of Evil, the latter part of a series of paperback spin offs based on the hugely popular early 1970s Australian television show, Number 96), and smut titles (Bride of Satan and The Cult of Flesh – ‘Violent debauchery in a Satanic Cult of Flesh Worshipers’),

Even Carter Brown, hardly the most salacious of pulp writers in the sixties, touched on occult themes in books like Blonde on a Broomstick.… Read more

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Australian popular culture, Ben Wheatley, Horror, Horwitz Publications, New English Library, Pan Books, Pulp fiction, Pulp fiction in the 70s and 80s, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Scripts Publications, Tandem Books, Vintage pulp paperback covers

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pulp Friday: The Brides of Dracula

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Brides of dracula Monach 1960Halloween is almost upon us and to mark the occasion I’m going to be featuring a few horror themed offerings as part of my regular Pulp Friday posts.

Historically in Australia we don’t celebrate Halloween, and I’ve always been a bit iffy about what I consider to be an American cultural imposition. But Halloween actually originated with the Celts in parts of Europe. Specifically, it dates back to Celtic Festival of Samhain, which took place to mark the end of summer and the beginning of a long cold winter. The Celts believed on that night before the new year the boundary between the world of the living and the dead blurred.

Also, any excuse will do to post some horror themed pulp.

Anyway, a small Pulp Friday offering today, the 1960 paperback tie-in to the film released the same year, The Brides of Dracula. It starred Peter Cushing, David Peel, Martita Hunt and Yvonne Monlaur and was directed by Terence Fisher. The plot of The Brides of Dracula involves vampire hunter Van Helsing returning to Transylvania to destroy handsome bloodsucker Baron Meinster, who is conducted a reign of evil terror over the nearest village. I’ve re-watched it recently and think it is one of the better vampire films produced by Hammer.… Read more

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Horror, Monarch Books, Pulp Friday, Pulp paperback cover art, Vintage pulp paperback covers

Tagged , , ,

Return to The Last Wave

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

The Last Wave posterDuring the recent Melbourne International Film Festival, I had an interesting discussion about whether genre films can ever deal with important social issues in a way that is not titillating or exploitative. One example of a genre film that does, shown at this year’s MIFF, is Peter Weir’s 1977 film, The Last Wave.

The Internet Movie Database classifies The Last Wave as a ‘drama/mystery/thriller’ but it is also laced with supernatural/occult tropes popular in many horror films of the seventies. It’s a story about weather and the climate, in a way that can now be viewed as a remarkably prescient. But most importantly, given my introductory comments, it is also a relatively sophisticated attempt by a white director to engage with Indigenous Australian issues and mythology and the clash between Aboriginal law and Western law.

You can read my piece on Weir’s The Last Wave in full here on the Overland site.… Read more

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Australian popular culture, Dystopian cinema, Horror

Tagged ,