Grime

This week, a synthy slasher, women in horror, and a vampire's coming-of-age (medium spoilers  for Folies Meurtrieres, no spoilers for the rest) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Folies Meurtrieres, dir. Antoine Pellissier, 1984.

1. Grime. The experience of watching no-budget, Super 8 slasher Folies Meurtrieres is a fascinating, harrowing one. Outside of its surprising, story-altering ending, the film consists entirely of strung-together slasher set pieces of a masked killer stalking and killing women (the misogyny complicated, ultimately, by the ending). The scenes are at times quite amateurish, but Pellissier also has a photographer’s eye and a feeling for horror and the surreal (and several great locations). The experience is also a grimy one. Slashers can feel voyeuristic, feel taboo, but the no-budget aesthetic amplifies these qualities. This isn’t because the movie might be confused for something real—i.e. for a document, not a movie—though such movies exist. Folies Meurtrieres is always, unambiguously a work of horror fiction. Instead, there’s something about its personal-art-project feel, its ultra-auteur relationship with Pellissier, that has this effect. Movies with a budget, even the most subversive, even the most auteur, imply a degree of group buy-in by their very production process. This, though, is dark stuff “handcrafted” (as the BluRay marketing copy describes it) by a single dude with a Super 8 camera. This is the movie equivalent of a guy showing you his ultra-violent paintings that he stores in the attic—and it feels like it.
2. Dance. Folies Meurtrieres is not for the faint of heart, but it is never very convincing. The sight-lines, the speed, the physics, the reactions of the actors, never reach naturalism. It’s a “flaw” that functions as one of the film’s great strengths. Because the film is made with such care, with such a sense of composition, with elaborate gore effects, and with eye-catching locations and committed performers, Folies Meurtrieres can feel like a horror dance performance or experimental theater. The synthy score only enhances the effect. The actors are performing horror scenes, they’re hitting all the marks, but they aren’t really living them. This is not an attempt at meta-cinema, but it comes across as one, amplified by the repetition—the slasher performance repeats, over and over again. A viewer is hard-pressed not to ask, “What exactly are we doing here? Why are we doing it?”
3. Implication. Slasher movies regularly toggle between third-person filmmaking and a killer’s POV. Folies Meurtrieres does this too, but its kinetic, Super 8, voyeuristic style means that it’s often difficult to distinguish the two. This creates a pervasive sense of threat. Are we watching a woman wash her dishes through the kitchen window or is the killer? It adds to the "grimy" feeling described above. It's not news that slashers implicate their viewers—promoting identification with victims, yes, but with killers too. In Folies Meurtrieres, our view of the world overlaps messily with that of the killer’s. Our reality and the killer's bleed together. We find ourselves even more implicated. 

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ 1000 Women in Horror, dir. Donna Davies, 2025.

4. Intimate, learned. While 1000 Women in Horror, on a style-level, might look like the kind of talking-heads-and-film-clips pop culture documentary we’re all familiar with, it is, in fact, on a different level—a compelling and productive exploration of horror and gender. Its small panel of experts (filmmakers, critics, film professionals) make for an intimate, learned tour through horror cinema, organized not historically but around a woman’s progress through life—from childhood through working years and into old age. Its insistence on the centrality of the body provides a consistent thematic anchor for issues of horror, gender, and their overlap.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, dir. Ariane Louis-Seize, 2023.

5. Very vampiric. I wrote about this one briefly in the old version of this newsletter, but it’s worth an extra push, still an under-seen gem. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person tells a sweet, romantic, but still very vampiric, coming-of-age story. A story about not fitting in, about family, and about new, weird connections—it’s quiet, off-beat, and dark. There are gothy kids somewhere who have watched this a hundred times. I recommend watching it at least once.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

This morning, the president of the United States threatened that, if his demands are not met in Iran, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” While we now supposedly have a "cease-fire," this is the language of genocide. The time to resist fascism is now.