In the Assassin’s Sights: 

What I Have Been Watching  

Kapo (ITALY/FRANCE/YUGOSLAVIA: Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960)  

Although it tends to stray a little towards melodrama at times, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Nazi holocaust drama still manages to maintain its devastatingly emotional power.     

****

Burn! (ITALY: Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969)  

Despite a fractious relationship between the actor and director, Marlon Brando is magnificent as a Machiavellian agent of the British Empire in Pontecorvo’s anti-colonial drama set in the Caribbean.  

**** 

The Five Devils (FRANCE: Léa Mysius, 2022)  

Sally Dramè stars as Vicky; a girl with a supernatural ability to capture people’s smell which enables her to travel back in time to moments in their life.  Atmospheric magic realist weirdness from the director of Ava (2017) 

**** 

In the Earth (UK/US: Ben Wheatley, 2021 

Ben Wheatley is one of the best directors currently working in the UK and this folk-horror features the director’s blend of dark humour and unsettling psychological dread as featured in his earlier film, A Field in England. (2013). With Reece Shearsmith, displaying the comically malevolent presence he has become renowned for in his TV co-creations, The League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and Inside No. 9.  

**** 

Gothic (UK: Ken Russell, 1986)  

Ken Russell’s reimagining of the events at the Villa Diodati in 1816 where Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Shelley (Julian Sands), Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson) and Byron’s private physician, John William Pollidori (Timothy Spall) gather to tell ghost stories. This event became the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polodori’s The Vampyre. As this is Russell, don’t expect too much historical accuracy, as the director was all about excess. And nobody did Baroque excess with as much flamboyance and panache as Ken Russell in his pomp. 

 ****

Freaks (US: Tod Browning, 1932) 

Focussing on, and featuring real-life travelling circus sideshow acts, Tod Browning’s horror melodrama was heavily censored in the US and banned in the UK. Now widely considered to be a cult classic.  

**** 

Opera (ITALY: Dario Argento, 1987) 

Dario Argento was a hugely influential director on the horror genre, and you can discern his influence on many latter-day horror movies. Opera concerns a soprano (Cristina Marsillach) who is forced to witness the gruesome murders of her assailant. Featuring all of Argento’s  Giallo trademarks: saturated colour, grisly-detailed horror and audacious shooting and camera movement, for which the director has become rightly lauded for.  

**** 

Halloween (US: John Carpenter, 1978) 

With the possible exception of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Halloween remains the best example of the slasher sub-genre of horror. And Jamie Lee Curtis is the exemplification of what Carol J. Clover termed as the slasher text’s “final girl”.  

***** 

The Passenger (ITALY/SPAIN/FRANCE: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975) 

Noted for one extraordinary tracking shot which lasts for over 6 minutes, The Passenger was Michelangelo Antonioni’s last film made for MGM after Blow Up (1966) and Zabriskie Point (1970). The film stars Jack Nicholson as a disillusioned journalist who swaps identity and walks away from his wife and career, meeting Maria Schneider along the way. Despite being directed by an Italian, the film is full of the nihilistic despair of the New Hollywood period, which is hardly surprising as Antonioni was the director of the ennui of modern life par excellence.  

*****