Behind the Couch

2011 Dir. Jeremiah Kipp Director Jeremiah Kipp follows up his stark and unsettling brood-fest Contact – a Cronenbergian meditation on addiction and paranoia – with a similarly provocative short focusing on a young woman’s suicide bid and the myriad instances and thoughts that have led to it. Much like the scene in The Rules of Attraction in which a young woman slips into death’s embrace by slitting her wrists in a warm bath, Crestfallen captures the painfully wrought moment in an abstract, lyrically beautiful way that, while poetic, doesn’t lessen the impact. An ethereal atmosphere is conjured with shards of sunlight streaming through a window into the darkened world of the woman (Deneen Melody). As the life bleeds out of her and swirls into the bathwater, we are privy to her equally swirling thoughts. Unfolding as a series of disarming and striking images, Crestfallen is tentative in its observation of shattered dreams and submerges us deep within her trauma. While ...

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...