![]() ![]() Not that it was nearly as gruesome as Lars von Trier’s 2009 dark torture porn film, but in that it showcased a lauded auteur suddenly giving sophisticated movie audiences something they had never quite confronted before, and many were shocked. One of the weirdest SF movies ever made, Marcel L’Herbier’s 1924 L’Inhumaine was something of an Antichrist of its time: you either loved or hated it. The film is available on Vudu and Youtube. The Devil Commands is a rare example of a Golden Age mad scientist movie that approaches Lovecraftian cosmic horror. ![]() The film narrowly missed out on this list. In 1943 ha also directed the surprisingly good cut-paste movie Captive Wild Woman with the mysterious Acquanetta and John Carradine, which spawned two much inferior sequels. The film was directed by Edward Dmytryk, who would rise to A status with films like Crossfire (1947) and The Caine Mutiny (1954). In the film’s final moments, Revere finds herself hooked up with a group of corpses into an evil-looking soul/brain machine trying to reach into the great void beyond. We accompany him down the rabbit hole as his fixation deepens, spurred on by Anne Revere’s wonderfully dark occult medium - she almost outshines Karloff in the movie. Taking its cues from the rapid developments with EEG, the film follows Karloff becoming obsessed with reaching beyond the veil, after he believes he has been able to contact his dead wife with an EEG machine. Karloff does one of his most sympathetic mad scientists in this atmospheric chiller based on William Sloane’s novel The Edge of Running Water, published in 1939. In the late 30s and early 40s horror icon Boris Karloff made five films with Columbia, of which the fourth, The Devil Commands (1941), is without doubt the best - even if they are all better than the average low-budget horror programmer churned out at the time. The film is in the public domain available for free on Youtube. While Méliès was rediscovered in the thirties and again in the early 21st century, Chomon has remained in obscurity, and is only now again slowly being discovered by a new generation of movie buff, largely thanks to the magic of the internet. Segundo de Chomon was one of the great stars of the French film industry between 19, but along with so many of early cinema’s pioneers, was forgotten with the coming of the feature film. This is one of only two short films on our list, and very much worth to check out. The sequence where he plummets back to Earth is downright psychedelic, again incorporating a technique that had not been seen on film at that time. The film contains perhaps the most ambitious camera moves made up to that point, as the camera is dragged along the ceiling of the studio, filming the floor, masked as the night sky, with the protagonist “climbing” a seemingly endless ladder to the planet of war. But rather than copy, Chomon almost spoofs Méliès, and instead of using Méliès’ tricks, he creates his very own. The building blocks of the story were cliché at the time, and the film could easily be derided as yet another Georges Méliès imitation. ![]() The movie chronicles a scientists trip to Jupiter, where he gets into a fight with the god of lightning, and tumbles down through space into his own bed, where he awakes from the dream. His pièce de resistance may well be the 1907 short film A Trip to Jupiter or Le voyage sur Jupiter, a wonderfully playful, imaginative and pioneering piece of avantgarde comedy, beautifully hand-coloured by Pathé’s small army of female film painters. The body horror genre typically features a focus on special effects, and often includes social commentary as well.Catalan filmmaker Segundo de Chomon was one of the greatest and most imaginative artists in film during the first decade of the 20th century. Things like diseases, viruses, infections, and parasites are common in these movies.Īdditionally, these films often take on surreal, sci-fi, or supernatural qualities, mutating the human form into something that would be impossible in real life. Rather, it's about being transformed into something grotesque. ![]() The key difference between this sub-genre and other types of gory horror is that it isn’t about the human body being destroyed. This type of horror revolves around distortions of the human body. The goal of this sub-genre is usually to gross out and disturb viewers. One film might contain elements of this sub-genre, while another might be considered a body horror film full stop. The term is versatile and a little bit flexible. BODY HORROR DEFINITION What is body horror?īody horror is a specific type of bodily imagery in horror films and can also be considered a subgenre unto itself. ![]()
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