Behind the Couch

2012 Dir. Éric Falardeau “ You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive .”  Jean Cocteau. The title of this unsettling low-budget film comes from the French word meaning the ‘visible signs of an organism’s decomposition caused by death.’ Moodily shot and with very little dialogue, Falardeau’s feature debut tells of a young woman who awakens one day to find her flesh beginning to rot. It unfolds as an unsettling rumination on the fragility of the flesh, an investigation of the body as an object, a commodity, and how we treat it while disconnecting ourselves from it in the process. With it’s rather Cronenbergian concept of someone essentially trapped inside their own body as it rots away before their eyes, Thanatomorphose is an unflinching body-horror that doesn’t shy away from depicting all manner of disturbing imagery and worrying ideas. The narrative charts this nameless woman’s downward spiral into madness. Ka...

Mario Bava with Jacqueline Pierreux ( Black Sabbath ) The undisputed Master of Italian horror cinema, Mario Bava, would have turned 98 years old today. Sadly, Mr Bava passed away in 1980 at the age of 65, but he left behind an astonishing body of work. Specialising in darkly beautiful Gothic Horror, Bava also dabbled in genres as eclectic as sword and sandal peplums, science fiction ( Planet of the Vampires ), comic book adaptations, psychological thrillers and is generally heralded as the filmmaker responsible for kick starting the giallo (later popularised by Dario Argento), with his morbidly exquisite films The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace . He also had a tremendous influence on the contemporary slasher movie, with his wickedly humorous whodunit, Bay of Blood . Taking the body-count template of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None , Bava created a staggeringly violent, though elegantly lensed shocker that would have an overwhelming impact on the likes ...

2008 Dirs. Marcel Sarmiento & Gadi Harel Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) and JT (Noah Segan) decide to bunk off school for the afternoon and go to a nearby abandoned psychiatric hospital to drink beer. Wandering through the labyrinthine basements beneath the hospital they eventually find a living-dead woman chained to a table. Ricky flees, but JT remains and rapes her. He eventually discovers she cannot be killed and becomes obsessed with her. The ostracised Rickie wrestles with his conscience and decides to somehow free the undead woman.  ‘She’s just a dead girl.’ Zombie films are ripe for reinterpretation and enable filmmakers to comment and critique certain aspects of modern society. Deadgirl makes its mark by twisting the usual conventions of zombie flicks into a dark fable about sexual abuse, predation and consent. It unfurls as a shadowy, harrowing rite of passage about a young man who repeatedly rapes a captive, (un)dead woman. One of the most horrific elements of the film i...

1962 Dir. Riccardo Freda This slice of quintessential Italian Gothic horror is a darkly beautiful and disturbing rumination on the most forbidden of desires… the love for the dead… Robert Flemyng stars as the tormented titular doctor, a respected surgeon with a morbid secret. Dr Hichcock has a pathological fascination with dead bodies, and harbours a deep desire to engage with them in sexual activities. He and his wife Margaretha (Maria Teresa Vianello), indulge in dark and sordid sexual encounters together: he sedates her with an anaesthetic he created, and as she slips into unconsciousness, he copulates with her deathly-still body. Margaretha eventually slips into unconsciousness, seemingly for the last time, when her husband administers too much anaesthetic during one of their macabre liaisons. Inconsolable, the doctor is unable to continue living in the house with ‘too many memories’ of his beloved wife, so he moves away. Cut to twelve years later and Hichcock returns wit...