Behind the Couch

2014 Dir. David Robert Mitchell Like one, that on a lonesome road  Doth walk in fear and dread,  And having once turned round, walks on,  And turns no more his head;  Because he knows a frightful fiend  Doth close behind him tread -  Samuel Taylor Coleridge After Jay (Maika Monroe) and her boyfriend have sex, he tells her that he has passed a curse onto her and now something will begin to follow her. And when it catches up with her, it will kill her. Sure enough, she begins to experience an inescapable feeling that someone, or something, is after her… It Follows is an insidiously creepy, yet beautifully produced shocker, moments of which will haunt you for some time afterwards. Blurring the line between sex and death, it taps into some very dark and primal fears indeed - abandonment, betrayal of loved ones, social ostracism. Most obviously it mines that very specific fear of being pursued so relentlessly by something unknowable, harmful and u...

1987 Dir. Clive Barker When Larry Cotton moves back to his long-abandoned family home, his new wife Julia discovers the eviscerated remains of his brother Frank, her former lover, in the attic. Having solved a bizarre puzzle box, Frank lost his earthly body to a group of sadomasochistic demons, Cenobites, but is resurrected by a drop of blood on the attic floor. He soon convinces ex-lover Julia to bring him human sacrifices to help him regain his body and escape the clutches of the Cenobites… Into this deadly fray wanders Kirsty, Larry’s headstrong daughter, and the only one who is able to prevent her diabolical family from achieving their gruesome goals. The prime, albeit declining trend in horror in the mid to late Eighties, was the slasher movie. Countless titles featuring teenagers getting murderlised by hulking, masked psychopaths in isolated locations cluttered cinemas and video shelves alike. When Barker’s hellish vision was unleashed however, it towered over its peers, ...

Anyone familiar with the irresistibly beautiful, yet devastatingly violent Italian giallo films of the Seventies – made popular by Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Sergio Martino – will no doubt have wept tears of joy while watching Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s breathlessly sensual Amer . Many of the now iconic motifs, visual codes and stylistic traits from the vivid archives of the giallo were present and correct throughout Amer ; a virtually dialogue free film revolving around concepts of obsession, sexual desire, psychological trauma and murder… Following on from their contribution to The ABCs of Death - O is for Orgasm – the duo are currently making their sophomore feature, tantalisingly titled The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears ( L'Etrange Couleur Des Larmes De Ton Corps ). They have released a teasing synopsis, describing the film thus: The Strange Colour is the story of a man who investigates the weird conditions of his wife's disappearance. It's ...

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...

This month’s edition of Audiodrome focuses on Bruno Nicolai’s hauntingly beautiful score for Sergio Martino’s gothic-flavoured giallo, Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key . Loosely adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat , it stars Edwige Fenech as a scheming vixen, whose arrival at the crumbling villa of her alcoholic uncle seems to spark a slew of bloody murders. Nicolai's harpsichord-driven score eschews the usual jazz-inflected music associated with the giallo for something altogether more clandestine and melancholic, perfectly underpinning the macabre desires at the heart of the story. Head over to Paracinema.net to read my review and listen to a track.  While you’re there, why not pick up issue 16 of Paracinema Magazine . Amongst the abundance of articles and essays on genre cinema you’ll find the likes of Images of Horror and Lust in Ken Russell’s The Devils by Samm Deighan, The Films of René Laloux: Notes on the Golden Age of French Science Fic...

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 ...

1973 Dir. Sergio Martino AKA The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence The brutal murders of several college students plunge the campus into paranoia and terror. Four friends (including Suzy Kendall - The Bird with the Crystal Plumage ) decide to leave town for a few days until the killer is apprehended. They head for the safety of a secluded mountain-top villa - little do they realise though, that the crazed maniac has followed them to the retreat and fully intends to off them one by one. “ Death is the best keeper of secrets .” Director  Sergio Martino was never content to limit his output to just one genre and since the Sixties he dabbled in projects ranging from horror to westerns, action to sci-fi. His best work though is without a doubt his lurid gialli – works that are often criminally overlooked - such as The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key and All the Colours of the Dark . Torso , one of his later giallo flicks,...

1978 Dir. Joe D’Amato A team of geologists attempt to remove an indigenous, allegedly cannibalistic population from their island home in order to set up a power station and perform atomic research. The islanders' leader has other plans though, and she sets about disposing of the the pesky geologists one by one, utilising the art of seduction to aid her quest. Papaya (Melissa) is just your average voodoo priestess, eco-activist and blood crazed cannibal, willing to do whatever it takes to keep her tropical island home from being exploited by nuclear scientists hell-bent on building a nuclear reactor on it. And if that means stripping off her clothes every five minutes and seducing them one by one, then killing them by castrating them - so be it!  The film opens with Papaya emerging from the sea, strutting across the beach, entering a palm-hut, smearing fruit over a man before biting off his penis and watching as her henchmen (who look like they’d be equally at home on the ...

2010 Dir. Ian Powell While searching for his twin brother, young escort Paul embarks on a dark and dangerous odyssey through the lurid netherworld of male prostitution and the gay porn movie industry. All the while he experiences bizarre nightmares and orgasmic visions – shared by his clients when they have sex with him – of a mysterious masked stranger… Can Paul find his long lost twin and unlock the riddle of his perplexing visions before it’s too late? Ian Powell’s atmospheric and provocative gay art-house horror unfolds as an increasingly nightmarish mystery filtered through the candy-coloured lens of Mario Bava. High-brow allusions to the likes of Narcissus and various other helplessly self-destructive figures of mythology pepper the narrative, not only in the arresting images, but in the story itself. Figures such as Dorian Grey, the doppelganger and Jekyll and Hyde are referred to as Powell works through a series of complex personal ideas about identity, fate and trag...

2009 Dir. Chad Ferrin A group of young medical students experiment with bizarre pharmaceutical research drugs while listening to therapy session tapes from the Seventies. On the tapes are interviews with homicidal couple John and Wilma Hopper (Ezra Buzzington and Elina Madison) - psychotic sexual deviants who claimed to be possessed by demons. Soon the group of students are pursued and essentially raped to death by the shape-shifting Hoppers and their monstrous genitalia. If the above synopsis sounds pretty fucked up to you, you’re not alone! Someone’s Knocking at the Door is part of a breed of horror flicks in which the source of the horror stems from the human body: monstrous, warped and shockingly mutated bodies featuring all manner of grotesque orifices and ghoulish appendages. Troma graduate Ferrins' ups the absurd factor and the ludicrous, comedic tone, riffing on the likes of Frank Henenlotter's Bad Biology and, well, most of David Cronenberg's back catalogue....

1977 Dir. George Romero Insecure teenager Martin believes he is actually an 84-year-old vampire and that he must drink the blood of humans to remain alive. His belief is reinforced by his elderly cousin, Cuda, with whom he is sent to live. Cuda is convinced vampirism is part of a family curse. Driven by his insatiable blood lust, the frustrated and confused teen  forces himself to kill and feed, drugging his victims to reduce their suffering before opening their veins with a razor blade. However, his inhuman desires are almost overcome when he begins an affair and he starts to question his vampirism… Criminally undervalued by audiences and critics at the time of its release, Martin is now generally accepted to be among Romero's finest work to date; it’s certainly the director’s personal favourite of his own movies. With Martin , Romero slyly subverted the conventions of the vampire myth and added a truly fresh angle to the vampire movie genre; in its wake came films such as ...

Director Dario Argento really needs no introduction. For over forty years now he has been responsible for creating some of the most important and controversial horror movies in cinema history and his work has influenced a slew of filmmakers. Famed for titles such as Deep Red, Suspiria and Opera , his films are inimitably stylish, atmospheric and dazzlingly shot, as well as being unbelievably violent and unnerving explorations of the darker side of human nature. Drawing from an encyclopaedic array of influences such as art, philosophy, literature, cinema and indeed Italy’s own rich and full-blooded culture, Argento continues to experiment and forge ahead in the creation of beguiling and devastatingly violent visions to this day. I recently had the absolute pleasure of conducting a brief interview with Dario Argento himself – words I never thought I’d type! With the help of Kamera Books’ Francesca Brazzorotto, who kindly set up and facilitated the whole interview, translating my ques...