Film History - vo.rs

The Censor's Scissors: How Cuts Made Some Films More Notorious

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 13:00:00 +0000

For a quarter of a century it was almost impossible to legally watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in Britain. The British Board of Film Censors refused it a certificate in the 1970s; it drifted onto the fringes of the “video nasties” panic in the early 1980s; and it was not passed uncut for a UK release until 1999. And the entire time it was forbidden, its reputation grew. A generation of British horror fans knew the film intimately as a rumour — a thing so extreme the state would not let them see it — long before most of them saw a frame. When it finally arrived, uncut, many were surprised by how little on-screen gore it actually contains. The censors had spent twenty-five years advertising a bloodbath that the film had been too clever to shoot.

The Vampire as Sexual Metaphor Across a Century

Tue, 21 May 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Of all the monsters, only the vampire seduces you into your own destruction. That is the property that has kept it the horror genre’s designated erotic figure for a hundred years of cinema. The bite is a fixed act — an intimate approach to the throat, a penetration, an exchange of blood, a surrender of the self to another’s appetite — and because the act never changes, it can be made to carry whatever a given decade happens to feel about desire. Track the metaphor across the century and you are really tracking the culture’s shifting relationship to sex, all of it displaced safely onto a monster in evening dress. The fang stays the same. The meaning moves.

Why Zombies Keep Changing What They Mean

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The vampire has a castle, a wardrobe, a personality and a set of rules you can break. The werewolf has a calendar. The zombie has nothing. It has no lair, no seductive intelligence, no origin story worth the name, no individual identity — it is a body with the person scooped out, moving in a crowd of other emptied bodies. And this poverty, which ought to make it the dullest monster in the catalogue, is precisely why it has outlasted almost all the others as a vehicle for meaning. You cannot pour much into a monster that already means something. The zombie means nothing on its own, so every era fills it with whatever that era is afraid of. The blankness is the whole trick.

The Women Directing Horror, From Ida Lupino to Julia Ducournau

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The most durable myth about women and horror is that they mainly turn up in it screaming. It is a myth with a long tail, because for decades the genre’s female roles really were written by men and photographed for men, and the criticism that grew up around the films inherited the same blind spot. Look at who was actually directing, though, and a different line appears — a thin but unbroken thread of women who used horror precisely because it was the least guarded room in the house. The genre’s low prestige was its own kind of open door. Nobody polices the servants’ entrance.

Grindhouse Double Bills and the Death of 42nd Street

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Ask a young cinephile what “grindhouse” means and you will usually get a description of a look: scratched prints, missing reels, jump-splices, over-saturated colour, a fake “our feature presentation” bumper. That look is an invention of the 2000s, a nostalgic costume assembled by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for their 2007 double feature and copied a thousand times since. The real thing was never a genre or an aesthetic. It was a way of watching, tied to a specific few blocks of Manhattan, and when those blocks were redeveloped the way of watching died. What survives is a memory of a room, and a shelf of films that room built.

The Video Nasties Panic and What the BBFC Was Really Afraid Of

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Every moral panic needs a phrase, and the British one got a good one. “Video nasty” arrived in the tabloid press around 1982, a piece of alliterative shorthand that did the campaign’s work before a single argument had been made. It sounded like something a child would say, which was precisely the point — the word framed the whole subject as a matter of nursery hygiene. Within two years it had produced an Act of Parliament, a prosecution list, and a generation of horror fans who could recite forty-odd titles the way other people recite football squads. The strange thing, looking back, is how little the panic was actually about the films.

Russ Meyer and the Satire Under the Sleaze

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Russ Meyer sold sex to American men for four decades and spent most of that time laughing at them. This is the fact people miss when they file him under smut. The films are stuffed with the buxom women that made his name and his fortune, and they are also, watched with any attention, savage cartoons about male appetite — its greed, its violence, its comic impotence. Meyer is one of the genuine independent auteurs of American cinema, a man who wrote, shot, edited, produced and distributed his own pictures and owned every frame, and the satire that runs under the sleaze is the thing that has kept the work alive long after the shock wore off.

Pinku Eiga and Nikkatsu Roman Porno: Japan's Studio Erotica

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 13:00:00 +0000

In 1971 one of the oldest film studios in the world faced extinction and decided to save itself with sex. Nikkatsu, founded in 1912, was haemorrhaging audiences to television, and rather than fold it converted almost its entire output to softcore erotica under a house brand it called Roman Porno. The gamble worked for seventeen years and, as a side effect nobody planned, turned a genre most people filed under smut into one of the most productive training grounds Japanese cinema ever ran. To understand how that happened you have to understand the pink film that came before it and the censorship law that shaped both.

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.

The Erotic Thriller's Rise and Fall, From Body Heat to Streaming

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 13:00:00 +0000

For about fifteen years the American multiplex ran a reliable machine in which a successful man met a dangerous woman, the two of them generated enough heat to fog a lens, and by the third act one of them was probably a murderer. The erotic thriller was among the most commercial genres of its era and one of the most disreputable, which are frequently the same thing. It rose fast, printed money, buried itself under imitators, and then quietly disappeared from cinemas — a full life cycle you can trace from one 1981 debut to the streaming libraries where the form now dozes.