The End: cover

To celebrate 6 years of Electric Sheep, for February our publishers Strange Attractor Press are offering our anthology, The End, for only £9.99.

‘Refreshing and original’ say Frieze magazine.

‘Electric Sheep is idiosyncratic, ‘intelligent, informed and it really knows and cares about cinema. Long may it prosper.’ The Wire

Get it here!. The offer lasts until 28 February 2013.

The book features entirely new and exclusive written and visual material from contributors including:

Jim Harper (Flowers from Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film)
Greg Klymkiw (producer of Guy Maddin’s Careful)
Frances Morgan (former editor of Plan B Magazine)
James Rose (Beyond Hammer: Contemporary British Horror Cinema)
Jack Sargeant (Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground)

Read ‘Darkness Audible: Sub-bass, tape decay and Lynchian noise’ by Frances Morgan with illustrations by Lisa Claire Magee.

Take a look at some sample pages:

Contents
A Feast of Skeletons
Darkness Audible
Final Cut

The second volume of the World Directory Cinema series on Japan, edited by Electric Sheep contributor John Berra, will be published on 15 February 2012.

Building on and bringing up to date the material presented in the first installment of Directory of World Cinema: Japan, this volume continues the exploration of the enduring classics, cult favorites, and contemporary blockbusters of Japanese cinema with new contributions from leading critics and film scholars. Among the additions to this volume are in-depth treatments of two previously unexplored genres — youth cinema and films depicting lower-class settings — considered alongside discussions of popular narrative forms, including J-Horror, samurai cinema, anime, and the Japanese New Wave.

Accompanying the critical essays in this volume are more than 150 new film reviews, complemented by full-colour film stills, and significantly expanded references for further study. From the Golden Age to the film festival favourites of today, Directory of World Cinema: Japan 2 completes this comprehensive treatment of a consistently fascinating national cinema.

Illustration by Lisa Claire Magee

To mark the release of David Lynch’s first full-length solo album, Crazy Clown Time, we are making available as a PDF an article on David Lynch’s soundtracks published in The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (Strange Attractor Press).

Read ‘Darkness Audible: Sub-bass, tape decay and Lynchian noise’ by Frances Morgan with illustrations by Lisa Claire Magee.

From the gutter to the avant-garde, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology brings together a mind-bendingly eclectic programme of films, authors, artists and directors, including Bill Morrison’s chemical ghosts, the bad girls of 50s exploitation films, apocalyptic evangelical cinema, the human centipede, Spanish zombies, Japanese nihilists, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s lost masterpiece Inferno and Ingmar Bergman’s visions of the end. A must-read for all film lovers and those who like to wander off the beaten cultural track!

Let's Scare Jessica to Death

To celebrate the launch of Kim Newman’s updated essential horror tome Nightmare Movies (published 18 April), Newman and fellow horror expert Mark Kermode will take to the BFI Southbank stage for an illustrated conversation on all things scary in film. Immediately followed by a screening of a special evil treat picked by Newman, the rarely seen Let’s scare Jessica to Death.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (Dir John D Hancock, USA, 197, 89 min)
Recently released from a stay in a mental institution after a nervous breakdown, Jessica moves to a Victorian-era farmhouse with her husband and close friend in an effort to start afresh. Already fragile, when Jessica encounters Emily, an enigmatic and supposedly transient hippie in her new home, it disturbs her and, convinced that Emily is a vampiric ghost who is draining the rural town’s population, she becomes increasingly unnerved. Is Jessica having another breakdown or is something sinister going on?

Following the screening Kim Newman will be signing his new edition of Nightmare Movies which will be available for sale at the BFI Filmstore.

Image from Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Fare of the 1960s and 1970s

This is an excerpt from the book Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Fare of the 1960s and 1970s by Scott A. Stine, published by Headpress. It’s available through to the end of April for only £7.00 from Headpress.

As a young child, before the boom of home video in the seventies, I recall being captivated by the advertisements for 8mm films offered by Captain Company in the back pages of Warren’s esteemed publications. 200” reels were offered for as “low” as $9.95 US, and 500” reels for upwards of $19.95 US. Although I had seen most of these films in their entirety on television at one time or another, the thought of being able to actually own footage from one of these films, to be watched any time at my convenience, was too good to be true. And it was, as my family didn’t even own a film projector, and $9.95 was at least three months allowance. I would have thought these films were a pipe dream, had not one of my teachers – knowing my love for monster movies – borrowed a Super 8mm copy of Hammer Studios’ The Curse of Frankenstein and shown it to me and a few friends after school as a treat. A few years later, I had also seen a few of these priceless treasure offered by a local pharmacy that specialized in camera and film equipment, but they were always just out of reach, secured behind glass and bearing price tags that were far too rich for my blood.

Many years later, I managed to acquire a handful of films at a local swap meet where I spent much of my youth – a 50′s reel of The Creature Walks Among Us among them – but traded them to another collector once the novelty of owning the otherwise “useless” films wore off. I would rue this day when, fifteen years later, I was fighting tooth and nail for the very same pieces on eBay. I had no intention of watching the films I had begun to hoard, though; video made these highly condensed versions completely obsolete as far as entertainment value was concerned.

But then, I couldn’t watch them even if I was willing to risk damaging or wearing out the fragile film stock. I owned two 8mm projectors, leftovers from my days of producing my own Super 8 shorts, but both had essentially given up the ghost a few years previous. (One needed a belt replaced and the other a new lamp, but I had discovered that it would be much cheaper to simply replace them entirely than obtain the parts needed to get them working again. The bulb I needed would alone cost around eighty bucks special order, whereas with a little bit of diligent scavenging I could probably get a working unit for about fifteen dollars from a local thrift store or swap meet.) Owning the films as an adult had a completely different meaning than it had almost thirty years prior. Nostalgia aside, they had their own distinct charm in the way of box art, produced specifically for the once widespread format but available nowhere else. The painted art that graced the packaging held just as much allure for me as the covers of vintage monster magazines from the same era, even though they were much smaller and were usually defaced by format and price stickers. And like the magazines, I had to own them all.

But I was not alone in my quest to obtain these dated treasures, nor was I as rabid as many of the collectors scouring the Internet for the same; the fact that others were willing to pay ridiculous amounts to build a collection of obsolete 8mm and Super 8 films gave me pause and made me reconsider how badly I wanted them. Talking with other collectors, though, also made me realize just how little most people actually knew about the format and the field in which they delved. Many had never dealt with paper collectibles, and most had never collected celluloid prior to this. Not an expert by any means myself when it came to films, but still more well-versed than the people with whom I had dealings, I decided to make it my job to better understand this rarely discussed field.

A Brief History of the Format

The 8mm format grew from an attempt to condense the 16mm format even further. The first incarnation of this format – the Cine Kodak Eight, introduced in 1932 – was essentially modified 16mm film with twice the number of sprocket holes on either side, enabling the filmmaker to expose only one-quarter of a frame at a time. Thanks to the dual sprockets, the filmmaker could then reload the film after one side had been exposed and use the remaining half of the stock. After the film was developed, the film stock was cut lengthwise, producing two filmstrips that could then be spliced together.

Due to its economic format, 8mm replaced 16mm as the standard for amateur filmmakers within fifteen years of its introduction. By the fifties, 8mm cameras and projectors (one was rarely sold without the other) became almost as common in households as video cameras are today. In the sixties, there was a push to improve upon the format. This resulted in Super 8mm (often referred to as Super 8), which was introduced in 1965. The improvements were numerous. It used plastic cartridges that eliminated the need for threading the unprocessed film stock or flipping it midway through. The sprocket holes were made smaller so as to allow for a wider image area, about fifty percent larger than Regular 8mm. Other modifications were made that further improved the picture quality as well as reducing the risks of poor exposure.

Since 1965, most films sold to the home consumer were available in either 8mm or Super 8 formats. In some cases, the buyer also had a choice between silent and sound, B&W and color. Of course, the desire for the more expensive sound and color versions eventually won out, making the inferior versions obsolete.

Unfortunately, the accessibility of video cameras for the home consumers in the eighties quickly replaced Regular and Super 8 film as the standard for amateur filmmakers. Although Super 8 and – to a much lesser degree – Regular 8mm film stock is still available, the dwindling demand forced prices up considerably, relegating the format to the domain of purists.

Scott A. Stine

Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand

This addition to Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema series turns the spotlight on Australia and New Zealand. Though the two nations share considerable cultural and economic connections, their film industries remain distinct, marked by differences of scale, level of government involvement and funding, and relations with other countries and national cinemas. Through essays about prominent genres and themes, profiles of directors, and comprehensive reviews of significant titles, this guide explores the diversity and distinctiveness of films from Australia and New Zealand from Whale Rider to The Piano to Wolf Creek. Edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand.

Directory of World Cinema: American Independent

Electric Sheep contributor John Berra is the editor of the Directory of World Cinema: American Independent, which looks at the rise of the independent sector through interviews and profiles of key directors such as Adam Green, John Waters and David Lynch, reviews of a large selection of representative films as well as studies of sub-genres including African American cinema, queer cinema and documentary. It includes contributions by a number of Electric Sheep writers. It is available for a limited time as a free download from the Directory of World Cinema website. It is published in May 2010 by Intellect.

Electric Sheep contributor John Berra is the editor of a new guide to Japanese cinema, which offers in-depth essays, research resources and an A-Z of reviews on everything from samurai warriors, yakuza enforcers, anime heroes and atomic monsters to the political works of the Japanese New Wave.

Read John Berra’s reviews of the Fukasaku Collection and Nagisa Oshima’s Violence at High Noon.

Deeply rooted within the Gothic tradition, these post-Hammer films place their threats within contemporary Britain, allowing werewolves to roam the Moors; a family of cannibals to dwell beneath the London Underground; a virulent plague to be unleashed throughout the country and for a plague of zombies to stumble through middle-class suburbia. The juxtaposition between these unreal elements and the very real ‘Britishness’ of the characters and locations provides film-makers the opportunity to generate a body of work that examines the fears of contemporary Britain.

Written in a format accessible to the student, tutor and general horror film enthusiast, Beyond Hammer provides new critical readings of classic, contemporary and lesser-seen films of the post-Hammer British horror canon, including The Vampire Lovers, The Wicker Man, Death Line, An American Werewolf in London, Hellraiser, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 28 Days Later, The Last Horror Movie, Shaun of the Dead and The Descent.

James Rose’s work has been published in a range of international jounals including Vertigo, Senses of Cinema, Splice, MediaMagazine and Rue Morgue. This is his first book. Find out more about James Rose on his blog.

Behind the Pink Curtain focuses on the art and industry of one of the most notorious sectors of Japanese filmmaking, the erotic Pink Film, or pinku eiga genre, and the closely related Roman Porno films produced by Nikkatsu studios from 1971 to 1988. A phenomenon distinct from the cheaply-produced hardcore Adult Video (AV) market, from the early ’60s onwards major Japanese film studios and independent producers alike have kept up a conveyor belt level of output of pornographic features intended purely for cinema release. Still today, just short of 100 such titles are shot on 35mm every year intended for screening in a specialist network of adult cinema across the nation. In recent years, many have found themselves released on DVD in the West or screened at international film festivals, while many of Japan’s most noted filmmakers today have cut their teeth in this industry.

Just how close are the links between the arthouse and the grindhouse in Japan? Read about the ins and outs of Japanese censorship from the wartime onwards, and how topless deep sea diving girls came to woo local audiences in the ’50s. Learn how a TV nature documentary maker ended up helming nude female Tarzan movies, and how ’60s mavericks Kôji Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi met up with John and Yoko at Cannes while on the way to the Golan Heights to make a film about Palestinian revolutionaries. How Deep Throat’s Harry Reems wound up in Tokyo starring in a zany sex comedy about a penis transplant gone awry, and how one of Japan’s most famous literary figures ended up the subject of the country’s first gay porno movie. How one of Nikkatsu’s leading directors went it alone to make a film about powerboat racing and ended up in the bad books of the yakuza, and how the anti-Bush sex farce Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice came to be re-titled as The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai and became one of the most talked-about Japanese films of recent years, playing at over twenty international film festivals.

Based on extensive interviews with many of the leading figures in the field, Behind the Pink Curtain is a colourful and exhaustive trawl through Japan’s most vibrant and prolific filmmaking sector.

Jasper Sharp is the co-editor of the specialist Japanese film website Midnight Eye. For more details or to buy the book, go to www.fabpress.com.