Eurohorror - vo.rs

Jess Franco: The Prolific King of Eurotrash

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000

No serious account of Jess Franco can avoid the number, so let us start there. He directed something like a hundred and eighty films, by some counts more than two hundred, under a scatter of pseudonyms — Clifford Brown, David Khunne, Franco Manera and a dozen besides — across five decades and half of Europe. That output is the first thing everyone says about him and the biggest obstacle to taking him seriously, because a good portion of it is genuinely terrible: incoherent, threadbare, shot in a week and abandoned. But bury a real filmmaker under that many films and you are guaranteed a handful of genuine spells, and Franco’s best work casts a hypnotic, dreamlike charge that nobody else in exploitation cinema quite managed. The trick with Franco is knowing how to find the spells without drowning in the swamp.

The Vampire-Cinema Canon: A Century in Ten Films

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The vampire is the most adaptable monster the cinema owns. Werewolves are stuck being werewolves; the vampire can be a plague, an aristocrat, a lover, a junkie, a lonely child, a metaphor for whatever the decade happens to be anxious about. That elasticity is why the figure has survived a hundred years of screen fashion while other monsters aged into camp. A vampire canon, then, has to do more than list the frightening ones. It has to trace how the same creature kept meaning different things to different audiences, from the plague-carrier of the silent era to the grieving child of the streaming age.

The Eurohorror Canon: Ten to Start With

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Eurohorror is less a genre than a weather system. From the early 1960s onward, film-makers in Italy, France, Spain, Belgium and Germany treated horror as a licence to chase mood ahead of mechanism — a killer’s motive mattered less than the colour of the light he stood in, a plot hole less than the shape of the dread around it. Co-productions shuffled cast and crew across borders, English-language dubs travelled the results to grindhouses and late-night television, and a certain dream-logic hardened into a house style: saturated colour, unmoored geography, deaths staged like paintings.

The Dubbing of Eurohorror and What English Tracks Did to It

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Put on a Lucio Fulci film and you will hear something faintly wrong before you can name it. The voices sit a fraction ahead of or behind the lips. The room tone is too clean. An American cop and an Italian villager somehow share the same acoustic space, as though recorded in the same padded booth, which they were. This is not a fault in the print. It is the native condition of a whole national cinema, and once you understand why, the question of which version of a Eurohorror film is the “real” one becomes genuinely knotted. There often is no single original. There are only versions, and the English track is one of the strangest and most consequential.

Nunsploitation: The Convent as a Horror Engine

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Take a group of women, seal them behind high walls, forbid them the flesh, place absolute authority in a single office answerable to God, and add total silence. You have just described a convent, and you have also described a pressure vessel. Exploitation cinema noticed this in the 1970s and built a whole disreputable subgenre on it — nunsploitation, the convent horror film — which spread across Italy, Spain, France and Japan and produced work ranging from the genuinely serious to the cheerfully indefensible. What unites the good and the shameless is the setting itself, one of the most efficient horror engines the movies ever found ready-made.