Recent releases from the BFI

Heroin addict Alex (Dexter Fletcher) retreats to a seedy hotel in Nichola Bruce & Michael Coulson's Wings of Death (1985)

Recent BFI releases offer a selection of amateur and professional short films from the 1950s to the ’80s in volume 3 of Flipside’s Short Sharp Shocks series, as well as a provocative documentary lecture from filmmaker Nina Menkes which asserts that the apparatus of cinema itself is gendered and weighted against women.

2022 reading

Tony Dalton's biography of Terence Fisher from FAB Press

Three books which I read last year connect with my love of genre film, particularly horror: Tony Dalton’s hefty biography Terence Fisher: Master of Gothic Cinema from FAB Press; Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, edited by Samm Deighan and now available as an e-book from Spectacular Optical; and – somewhat more esoteric – Powers of Darkness, an alternate version of Dracula first published in a Swedish newspaper from 1899 to 1900 and recently unearthed and translated back into English, published in an impressive limited edition by Centipede Press.

The Key to Eraserhead?

In the end, what's important is the film itself

Jon Fairhurst offers an original approach to film analysis by proposing the possible influence of a classic text on David Lynch’s Eraserhead in the form of a graphic novel, The Key to Eraserhead, released as an ebook on the 40th anniversary of the film’s first public screening at Filmex in Los Angeles on March 19, 1977.

Arrow’s American Horror Project, vol 1

William Preston makes a strong impression as one of the carnival's most deranged denizens in Robgert Allen Schnitzer's Malatesta's Carnival of Bloo (1973)

With a three disk first volume, Arrow Video embark on an ambitious undertaking with the American Horror Project, which intends to gather together independent, fringe features from the ’70s and ’80s, surrounded by supplementary features which provide context and possibly a cumulative history of this genre niche. Set one gathers three movies of varying quality.

Blasts from the past

Flipside: The Black Panther (1977)

Changes at Cagey Films

Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 2

Monsters, killers and existential dread on Blu-ray

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