Art house horror is beloved, but usually only in the realm of folks who can find old VHS, random Youtube uploads, or speciality DVD order. For October Kino Now is offering a few titles that are not as easy to get a hold of. These films are arthouse European horror and many have been mentioned by directors like Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino on influences for their future films. Like services such as Amazon Prime, they do charge for streaming rental. Check out some of what they are streaming this month:
Kill, Baby…Kill!
Directed by Mario Bava
In a turn of the century Transylvanian village, a doctor
arrives to investigate a young maid’s mysterious death, only to learn the legend of a deceased girl whose ball-bouncing ghost may be driving the locals to suicide… With its hallucinatory colors and sinister moods, this is the pinnacle of Gothic Euro-horror, an influence on Scorsese, Lynch, Fellini, Argento, del Toro, and countless others, and the ideal entry point into Mario Bava’s body of work.
|
|
Black Sunday
Directed by Mario Bava
After being crucified for devil worship, Barbara Steele, in her breakthrough role, is brought back to life to haunt her 19th-century descendants, and sets her sights on possessing young Katia (also played by Steele). Adapted from a Nikolai Gogol short story and filled with cobwebs and blood, Bava’s first on-screen directorial credit defined Italian Gothic and remains a richly atmospheric masterwork.
|
|
Fascination
Directed by Jean Rollin
Inspired by a purportedly fact-based Jean Lorrain short story, one of Jean Rollin’s most-admired works showcases his frequent collaborator Brigitte Lahaie (at the time France’s top adult-films star) and discovery Franka Mai (later a novelist). It’s the early 20th century, and thief Jean-Marie Lemaire double-crosses his partners in crime and hides out in a château, confident he can handle chambermaids Lahaie and Mai But all bets are off, even before the sun goes down.
|
|
The Iron Rose
Directed by Jean Rollin
Eerie and sensual, this love story finds Jean Rollin in a particularly contemplative mode. Françoise Pascal (later a UK sitcom star) and Hugues Quester (later of Kieslowski’s Blue) catch each other’s eye and flirt their way into a graveyard frolic. After canoodling in a tomb, they emerge into a nighttime world and find themselves lost and disoriented, with the sinking feeling of a no-exit scenario. Rollin trouper Mireille Dargent appears—as she often would for him—in clown makeup.
|
|
Female Vampire
Directed by Jess Franco
Channeling his deepest libidinal desires and darkest fears into films, with no apparent concern for narrative convention or the boundaries of mainstream taste, Jess Franco is a cinematic iconoclast. Here, his wife Lina Romay stars as the mysterious Countess Irina Karlstein, a beautiful vampiress who feeds on victims at their moments of sexual climax. Because she destroys those whose essence she consumes, Irina is doomed to a life of solitude, wandering through the Western Coast of Europe in a dreamlike state, shrouded in a lush musical score by Daniel White.
|
|
The Awful Dr. Orlof
Directed by Jess Franco
Jess Franco’s career was launched by what is generally considered the first horror film produced in Spain. Cloaking the story in the visual style of the British gothic film, Franco injected Orlof with the kind of morbid eroticism that would quickly become his signature. Howard Vernon stars as a diabolical surgeon who, with the help of his blind minion Morpho (Ricardo Valle), lures beautiful women into the operating room of his stone castle, so they may provide the raw materials for a series of experimental face grafts for his disfigured daughter.
|
|
