electricsheep

Twisted Romance

Murderous tenderness, destructive desires, awkward love

Reviews:

  • Days of Heaven: Terrence Malick’s glorious American rural epic focuses on a tragic love triangle
  • Post Mortem: A lonely mortician falls a troubled dancer as Pinochet brutally takes power in 70s Chile
  • Guilty of Romance: Sion Sono returns with a bloody melodrama about two women degraded by their search for love
  • La piscine: Classic French noir-ish tale of desire, jealousy and male rivalry among the glamorous St Tropez jet set

Comic strip review:

  • Black Heaven: A young man falls in love with a mysterious suicidal woman and her computer game avatar

Interview:

  • Athina Rachel Tsangari talks about Attenberg, which charts an isolated woman’s awkward journey of discovery through sex and death

Podcast:

See all cinematic themes & personalities covered in Electric Sheep Magazine

Theme image - September 2011

Illustration by James Mathurin

BIG BAD WOLVES
Blood-thirsty bogeymen, teen monsters and lone wolves

BUTTERFLIES
Dazzlingly beautiful, elusive and to die for

SIN & PUNISHMENT
Dark transgressions and darker castigation

CONVOLUTED TITLES
The Strange Vice of the Second Time Virgin Who Became a Parade of Roses

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS
Female prisoners, vampires, possessed bodies and demonic women

SOUNDS OF SCI-FI
Samplers, sonic spaceships, acoustic science and electro-dystopian visions

DOOMED ADVENTURES
Failed expeditions, sinister missions and ill-fated road trips

SLEEP
Nocturnal monsters, dreamers and insomniacs

FORTRESSES
Hidden, black, ancient, high-rise and alternative

REPULSION
The strange attraction of vile acts, dark emotions and messed up characters

CREATURES
Ancient beasts, mystical monsters, sleepwalking murderers

FREEDOM
Skid row outsiders, uninhibited deviants and liberating servitude

MEMORY
Lost love remembered, ghosts of the living and the dead, bygone cinema

FAKES
False child, art forgery, duplicitous moles, unreliable reality

MUTATIONS
Metal men, werewolf girls, freaks and hybrids

TREACHERY
Cheaters, liars, tricksters and traitors

MANGA ADAPTATIONS
Tackling Fukushima, delinquent school boys and vengeful women

FEMMES FATALES
Deadly dames and murderous man-eaters

FAKE DOCUMENTARIES
Political satire, media manipulation, horror trickery

2011 IN FILM
The year’s highlights and low points

ECO SCI-FI
Dead forests, mutant animals, food riots

TWISTED ROMANCE
Murderous tenderness, destructive desires, awkward love

THE ART THEATRE GUILD
The creative explosion of Japanese independent cinema in the 1960s

APOCALYPSE NOW
Deserted cities, sinister machines, survivalist dogs

SECRET SOCIETIES
Freemasons, religious cults, suicide clubs and spy organisations

ALIENS
Spaced out pop stars, extra-terrestrials and foreign organisms

WOMEN IN HORROR
Scream queens, she-devils and scare mistresses

CONFESSIONS
Tricky revelations, poetic admissions and Catholic guilt

BITTERNESS
Fallen Women, Sour Love and Toxic Memories

FREEZE
Iced up Santa, freeze frames, Antarctic creatures

WOMEN ON THE VERGE
Psychotic spinsters, possessed housewives, troubled temptresses

FUTURISTIC CITIES
Cinematic visions of metropolises to come

PROPAGANDA
Revolutionary Soviets, Nazi bombast, apolitical America

OUTLANDISH WESTERNS
A wild bunch of demented gunslingers, mystic outlaws and revolutionary bandidos

CONFINED SPACES
From tanks to locked rooms and futuristic cubes

MOMMA'S BOYS (AND GIRLS)
The deviant offspring of excessively loving mothers

BLOODY BALLET
Bewitched ballerinas, dancing vampires and enchanted pumps

I FOUGHT THE LAW
Gangsters, thieves, bikers and banned filmmakers: what makes a cinematic outlaw?

DEVIL IN THE BLOOD
From Christic masochism to satanic cruelty: religious extremes on film

ANDRZEJ ŻUŁAWSKI
Strange births and spectacular meltdowns

JOHN WATERS
Bad taste, good tunes, high camp

VÊRA CHYTILOVÁ
The leading lady of 1960s Czech New Wave

STANISLAW LEM
Chemical futures, living oceans, alien transfigurations

WALERIAN BOROWCZYK
From Radical Animator to frenzied erotomaniac

KÔJI WAKAMATSU
Porn, politics and provocation

SION SONO
Social earthquakes, secret cults and strange perversions

KEN RUSSELL
Master of excess

SHÔHEI IMAMURA
The cultural anthropologist

ANDREI TARKOVSKY
Metaphysical landscapes, mystical visions, melancholy longings

DARIO ARGENTO
The lush colours of terror

JIM THOMPSON
Mean men, hellish women, savage minds and corrupted souls

ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY
Messiahs, midgets and metaphysical laughter

GUY MADDIN
The poetic, macabre and playful visions of a wonderfully twisted mind