There are filmmakers who make films, and then there are filmmakers who seem to have wandered into a film laboratory, knocked over several shelves of chemicals and decided to see what happened.
Yoshihiro Nishimura was very much the latter.
With Geisha War, the Japanese cult filmmaker delivers one final eruption of blood, absurdity, political provocation and gloriously impractical visual effects. It is a film that frequently appears less interested in whether its story makes sense than in whether the next image can possibly be more outrageous than the last.
The answer, more often than not, is yes.
Set in the historic pleasure district of Yoshiwara, Geisha War pits an American gangster and his associates against the local community, led by Kiki, a ramen vendor who finds herself caught up in the struggle to protect the district from outside control. The basic premise provides Nishimura with an excuse to stage a collision between American gangster mythology, Japanese popular culture and his own particular brand of cinematic insanity.
And insanity is certainly the operative word.
Nishimura’s cinema has never been particularly interested in restraint. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films transform bodies into weapons, flesh into sculpture and practical effects into a kind of gleeful visual assault. Geisha War carries that tradition forward with an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, outrageous transformations and fountains of artificial blood. FilmInk describes the film’s visual approach as a combination of solid practical gore and cartoonish digital effects, with everything from chainsaw weaponry to giant scissors entering the fray.
It is less a film than a fever dream with a production budget.
Yet beneath the carnage is something considerably more pointed.
The conflict between Carmine and the residents of Yoshiwara is essentially a battle over cultural ownership. The American gangster sees the district as something to acquire, exploit and reshape for his own purposes. Nishimura responds by turning that clash into an exaggerated piece of exploitation spectacle, where cultural imperialism is answered with severed limbs, weaponised geisha and enough blood to repaint the streets.
Subtle it isn’t.
But subtlety was never particularly high on Nishimura’s list of priorities.
The film’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous. A conventional action film might introduce a weapon and expect us to accept it as part of the world. Nishimura introduces something completely absurd and then seems determined to make it even more absurd. The result is a cinematic universe in which rickshaws become vehicles of lunacy, weapons emerge from unexpected places and characters can transform into things that would be difficult to describe without sounding like the result of a particularly feverish drinking session.
This is Gallows Horror stripped of the gallows and given a flamethrower.
There is also something strangely poignant about watching Geisha War as Nishimura’s final film. The director died in May 2026, making this an unintentional farewell from one of Japanese genre cinema’s great visual anarchists.
It is certainly an appropriate final statement.
Nishimura never seemed particularly interested in behaving himself. His cinema was messy, confrontational, juvenile, political, horny, grotesque and frequently hilarious. He understood that practical effects could be more than technical achievements: they could be jokes, provocations and punctuation marks. A severed limb wasn’t merely a piece of gore. It was a punchline.
Geisha War occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its own excess. The narrative is skeletal, characterisation is largely functional and the film’s relentless barrage of ideas can become exhausting. For all the visual invention, there are moments when it feels as though Nishimura has several films fighting for space inside the same one.
But perhaps that is part of its charm.
This isn’t polished underground cinema. It isn’t attempting to disguise its seams or convince us that its world is realistic. It is handmade, excessive and proudly artificial. The practical effects have weight; the digital effects deliberately flirt with cartoonishness; the action seems designed around the question of what could possibly make an audience yell what the hell was that?
And then, just when the film seems incapable of slowing down, it finds an unexpectedly reflective note beneath all the bloodshed.
That contradiction is what makes Geisha War work.
For all its ridiculousness, there is a genuine sense of resistance running through the film. Its grotesque spectacle becomes a weapon against the forces attempting to commodify and control its world. Nishimura takes the familiar machinery of exploitation cinema and turns it back upon itself, producing something that is simultaneously crude, playful and politically mischievous.
It is not his most accomplished film.
It may not even be his most outrageous.
But it is unmistakably his.
And as the final film from a director who spent decades proving that there was still room for strange, handmade, bloody and completely unclassifiable cinema, Geisha War makes for one hell of a final curtain call.
Underground Horrors is a series of reviews exploring the strange, confrontational and boundary-pushing films emerging from the underground of contemporary horror cinema.
There is something wonderfully rebellious about a film that seems to have been assembled from equal parts heavy metal, grindhouse cinema, 1990s music videos and a complete disregard for good taste.
Donnie Hobbie’s Jump Scare is that film.
The feature debut from Hobbie follows the all-female metal band Jump Scare as they retreat to a remote cabin to work on their new album. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to escape the pressures of everyday life and find some creative inspiration.
Unfortunately, their neighbours are cannibals.
It is, admittedly, a familiar horror premise.
But Jump Scare has absolutely no interest in behaving like a familiar horror film.
Instead, Hobbie takes the cabin-in-the-woods template and runs it through a neon-soaked, blood-splattered analogue nightmare. The result is a deliberately scrappy collision of comedy, gore, animation, psychedelia and heavy metal attitude.
It looks like a horror movie that escaped from a late-night music-video block.
And that’s a compliment.
There is a tremendous amount of visual personality here. Grainy imagery, saturated colours, stylised lighting, graphic overlays, practical effects and bursts of animation give Jump Scare the feeling of something excavated from a particularly deranged corner of the VHS era.
The film wears its influences proudly.
There are obvious echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, grindhouse cinema and the splatter-comedy tradition, but Hobbie isn’t particularly interested in disguising those influences. Jump Scare is closer to a mixtape than a traditional horror film: take something from here, something from there, turn the volume up and see what happens.
And, for considerable stretches, it is a hell of a lot of fun.
The band themselves are one of the film’s strongest assets. Their camaraderie gives the early sections a loose, lived-in quality, and the chemistry between the performers provides a welcome sense that these characters actually enjoy being around one another.
That matters.
Because once the cannibals arrive, the film could easily have become another disposable exercise in slaughterhouse horror.
Instead, the personalities keep it moving.
Hobbie also demonstrates an obvious affection for practical filmmaking. There is a joyous physicality to the violence, with blood, guts, creatures and assorted bodily misfortune given an appropriately handmade quality. Some of the effects are deliberately rough around the edges, but that imperfection is part of the film’s aesthetic.
Jump Scare isn’t trying to convince us that we’re watching reality.
It wants us to enjoy the artifice.
That gives the film a particularly punk-rock quality. It is less concerned with polish than with energy.
The problem is that energy can only carry a film so far.
At 102 minutes, Jump Scare occasionally feels as though it has run out of ideas before it has run out of runtime. The same jokes, stylistic flourishes and conversations can begin to repeat themselves, while the middle section lacks some of the momentum generated by the film’s opening.
There are moments when you can almost see the more tightly edited version of Jump Scare hiding inside the finished film.
And that’s frustrating because there is so much here to admire.
Hobbie clearly has an eye.
There are sequences that burst with invention, and the film’s visual confidence is remarkable for a feature debut. It understands that horror doesn’t always need to be dark, grim or self-serious. Sometimes it can be loud, colourful, stupid, funny and covered in blood.
In that sense, Jump Scare feels like something of a corrective to the more restrained tendencies of contemporary horror.
It wants to have fun.
Even when that fun becomes excessive.
The film also gets something right about its metal-band protagonists. Their world isn’t simply used as an excuse for a soundtrack. Music is woven into the film’s identity, with the aesthetic of heavy metal becoming part of its visual and comic language.
The result is less Texas Chain Saw filtered through a conventional horror-comedy structure than Texas Chain Saw dropped into a particularly unhinged music video.
And then somebody added puppets.
And animation.
And considerably more blood.
For all its rough edges, there is something admirable about a filmmaker arriving with this much personality. Jump Scare isn’t afraid to be ugly, ridiculous or excessive. It isn’t interested in sanding down its eccentricities in the pursuit of conventional genre polish.
Sometimes that works beautifully.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
But I’d take an occasionally overstuffed film with this much personality over something technically accomplished and completely anonymous.
Jump Scare doesn’t reinvent the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie.
It throws the old model into a blender, adds a metal soundtrack, pours in a bucket of fake blood and hits the switch.
The result is messy.
Loud.
Occasionally exhausting.
But undeniably alive.
SUFF #20
Jump Scare screens at 9:45pm on Friday 11 September in Cinema 2, with a second screening at 8:00pm on Saturday 12 September in Cinema 4, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20 at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There are few things more immediately relatable than stepping on a rusty nail.
The sudden stab of pain. The instinctive inspection of the offending piece of metal. The brief mental calculation of just how bad this might be.
Then there is Carroll.
When Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm introduces its protagonist, he is already a man seemingly determined to make his own life as unpleasant as possible. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman, conspiracy-minded malcontent and habitual misanthrope, Carroll has developed an elaborate worldview in which the world is broken, society is collapsing and everyone else seems to be conspiring against him.
Then he steps on a rusty nail.
It is, perhaps, the least surprising turning point in cinema history.
What follows is a grimy, grotesque and frequently darkly funny descent into paranoia, physical deterioration and self-destruction. Carroll’s body begins to break down, but so too does his already precarious grip on reality. The question becomes increasingly difficult to answer: is the world genuinely falling apart around him, or is Carroll simply becoming incapable of seeing anything beyond his own increasingly distorted perspective?
Bagworm is at its most effective when it refuses to provide an easy answer.
There is certainly a straightforward body-horror film lurking underneath all the grime. The rusty nail becomes the gateway to an infection that gradually consumes Carroll, providing Bernsen with ample opportunities for increasingly revolting practical effects. His deteriorating body becomes a physical manifestation of the rot already present in his life.
But the film isn’t really interested in asking whether Carroll is sick.
He’s obviously sick.
The more interesting question is whether the infection is responsible for his behaviour or merely giving physical form to everything that was already there.
Carroll is not an easy protagonist to spend ninety-six minutes with. That seems entirely deliberate.
He is petty, suspicious, angry and convinced of his own righteousness. His relationships with women, friends and strangers become increasingly disastrous, yet he repeatedly interprets the resulting hostility as evidence that there is something wrong with everyone else.
It is a particularly contemporary form of horror.
The world hasn’t necessarily turned against Carroll.
Carroll has simply constructed a worldview in which it must have.
This is where Bagworm finds its sharpest satirical edge. Its protagonist’s paranoia and resentment place him within the orbit of the modern manosphere, where personal failure can be transformed into political grievance and loneliness becomes evidence of a conspiracy rather than an invitation to self-reflection. Critics have similarly read the film as an exploration of toxic masculinity, male isolation and the tendency to externalise personal misery.
Bernsen’s achievement is that he doesn’t make this entirely miserable to watch.
Bagworm is often very funny.
Not necessarily comfortable funny, and certainly not always “laugh with the character” funny. Much of the humour comes from watching Carroll’s increasingly bizarre attempts to navigate ordinary social situations while apparently possessing no ability to recognise how thoroughly he is sabotaging himself.
The comedy works because there is something painfully recognisable beneath the grotesquerie.
We’ve all encountered some version of Carroll.
Perhaps not quite this version.
Hopefully.
Peter Falls gives the film an important centre of gravity. Carroll is repellent without becoming entirely abstract. There are flashes of vulnerability beneath the hostility, moments where the character seems less like a cartoon of internet-age masculinity and more like a desperately unhappy man who has spent so long blaming everyone else that he no longer knows how to examine himself.
That distinction matters.
Because Bagworm isn’t particularly interested in redemption.
It isn’t a story about a troubled man discovering the error of his ways and becoming a better person. Instead, it watches him continue digging, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is holding the shovel.
And then it makes the shovel increasingly disgusting.
The physical deterioration is where Bernsen’s filmmaking becomes particularly effective. The film’s grubby aesthetic gives the horror a distinctly tactile quality, while Carroll’s deteriorating body increasingly resembles the physical embodiment of his internal state. The world around him feels just as diseased as he is.
His house is decaying.
His relationships are decaying.
His body is decaying.
And somehow Carroll remains convinced that the problem is everybody else.
That is the joke.
And the tragedy.
Bagworm isn’t always as controlled as its best moments suggest. Its deliberately abrasive tone can become exhausting, and its third act doesn’t quite sustain the same combination of psychological unease and dark comedy that makes the earlier sections so compelling. Even critics who responded strongly to the film have noted that its various stylistic and thematic ambitions don’t always land with equal force.
But there is something admirable about the sheer unpleasantness of it.
Bernsen isn’t attempting to make Carroll conventionally sympathetic. Instead, he asks us to look at a particularly ugly form of contemporary loneliness and watch what happens when isolation, resentment and paranoia are allowed to feed one another.
The result is body horror with a distinctly social infection.
The rusty nail gets into Carroll’s foot.
The paranoia gets into his head.
And before long, it becomes difficult to tell where the disease ends and the man begins.
That is what makes Bagworm considerably more than another gross-out horror film.
It is a portrait of a man rotting from the inside out — and a world that may not be quite as responsible for the smell as he thinks.
SUFF #20
Bagworm screens as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20, celebrating the festival’s 20th anniversary at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There are few expressions more insidious than “the daily grind.”
It suggests something mundane. Something repetitive. A little unpleasant, perhaps, but ultimately survivable. Get up. Go to work. Put in the hours. Do it again tomorrow.
In Species, the daily grind becomes something considerably more literal.
Marion Le Corroller’s electrifying debut takes the familiar anxieties of professional burnout and pushes them through the meat grinder of body horror, imagining a generation so thoroughly consumed by work that exhaustion becomes a physical transformation.
Margot wants to be a doctor.
For an ambitious young intern working in one of France’s most competitive emergency rooms, however, the dream is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The pressure is relentless, the hours punishing and the stream of young patients arriving with mysterious symptoms linked to extreme burnout is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Then Margot begins experiencing changes of her own.
The harder she works, the more her body begins to betray her.
It is an appropriately grotesque premise for a film about workplace exhaustion. Rather than depicting burnout as a vague psychological malaise, Species gives it flesh, blood and plenty of opportunities for it to tear itself apart.
Le Corroller is clearly interested in the traditions of body horror, but Species isn’t simply an exercise in mutation for mutation’s sake. The transformations are an extension of the film’s social commentary. Margot’s body becomes the ultimate workplace casualty — an organism pushed beyond its limits by a system that expects productivity regardless of the consequences.
The horror is that nobody seems particularly surprised.
There is something darkly comic in the way Species treats this environment. The absurdity of professional expectations gradually becomes indistinguishable from the grotesque. The emergency room is already a pressure cooker before Margot’s physical transformation begins, and the film finds humour in the bureaucratic machinery surrounding people who are quite literally falling apart.
It is social satire with a viscous coating.
Le Corroller also demonstrates a clear affection for practical effects. When Species gets its hands dirty, it doesn’t hold back. Flesh stretches, ruptures and mutates with the kind of tactile unpleasantness that reminds us why practical body horror remains so effective. There is an immediacy to seeing physical matter behave in ways it absolutely shouldn’t.
The influence of contemporary French body horror is certainly apparent. There are echoes of Titane in its collision of identity, flesh and societal expectation, while the workplace anxieties inevitably invite comparison with The Substance. Yet Species is less interested in abstraction than in taking a very recognisable contemporary problem — exhaustion — and asking what it might look like if we could actually see it happening to the human body.
The answer is not pretty.
Nor is it subtle.
But subtlety isn’t necessarily the point.
Species operates at the intersection of visceral horror and social satire, and its best moments understand that the two can amplify one another. The more grotesque Margot’s transformation becomes, the more ridiculous the expectations placed upon her begin to seem.
The film’s central conceit also taps into something particularly recognisable about contemporary working life: the idea that exhaustion is not necessarily regarded as a warning sign, but as evidence of commitment.
You’re tired?
Work harder.
You’re struggling?
Push through.
Your body is changing?
There are patients waiting.
It is here that Species finds its most uncomfortable joke. The system doesn’t necessarily need to destroy you deliberately. It simply needs to keep demanding more until there is nothing left to give.
And Margot is very much a product of that system.
Le Corroller’s direction is energetic and visually confident, particularly for a debut feature. There is an infectious willingness to push the material into increasingly strange territory, and the film’s mixture of blood-soaked practical effects, absurd humour and social commentary gives it an identity of its own.
At times, however, Species can feel as though it is operating at maximum intensity when a little restraint might have made its sharper ideas hit harder. Its satirical targets are rarely difficult to identify, and the film occasionally favours escalation over deeper exploration.
But there is something refreshing about a debut that would rather overreach than play it safe.
And Species certainly overreaches.
Thankfully, it does so with enthusiasm.
The result is an exhilarating piece of contemporary body horror that understands the grotesque potential of modern working life. Its monsters aren’t simply lurking in the shadows. They are sitting in fluorescent-lit offices, hospital corridors and examination rooms, smiling politely while asking you to work another shift.
Because that’s the real horror of the daily grind.
Eventually, something has to give.
In Species, it’s the flesh.
SUFF #20
Species screens Friday 11 September at 9:45pm in Cinema 1 as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There is something inherently unsettling about a dream.
Not necessarily because of what happens within it, but because of the strange rules governing the experience. Familiar places become alien. People we know acquire unfamiliar faces. Memories surface without invitation. Cause and effect become slippery. And beneath it all is the uncomfortable knowledge that the nightmare is coming from somewhere inside us.
Lucid, the surreal art-punk horror film from Canadian filmmakers Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, takes that premise and runs headlong into the subconscious.
Set in the 1990s, the film follows Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student whose creative ambitions are beginning to collapse beneath the weight of a seemingly insurmountable block. With her place at art school under threat, Mia turns to a mysterious lucid-dreaming elixir in the hope that she can unlock the creativity she feels slipping away.
Instead, she opens a door that perhaps should have remained closed.
The resulting descent into dreams, memories and increasingly monstrous manifestations makes Lucid less interested in conventional nightmare mechanics than in the uncomfortable connection between creation and self-examination.
For Mia, the problem isn’t simply that she can’t make art.
It is that she may not yet understand what she is trying to express.
Milligan and Fendall approach this psychological territory with an appropriately handmade aesthetic. Shot on 35mm and Super 8, Lucid has a tactile quality that distinguishes it from the increasingly polished digital language of contemporary genre cinema. The imagery feels deliberately unstable, as though the film itself is slipping between waking reality and the fragmented visual language of a dream.
That is where Lucid becomes most compelling.
Rather than treating lucid dreaming as a convenient supernatural gimmick, the film uses it as a mechanism for peeling away the layers Mia has constructed around herself. The deeper she travels into this increasingly fractured reality, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between imagination, memory and emotional trauma.
The monsters, consequently, are more than things to be feared.
They are things to be confronted.
One of the film’s most striking ideas is that artistic expression cannot necessarily be separated from the experiences that produce it. Creativity may be liberating, but it can also be invasive. To create something genuinely personal may require confronting the parts of yourself that you would rather leave buried.
That makes Lucid an interesting companion piece to some of the more traditional forms of body and psychological horror appearing at SUFF this year. Where films such as Bagworm externalise transformation through the physical body, Lucid turns inward. Its battleground is the imagination itself.
And imagination proves to be a particularly dangerous place.
There is an undeniable influence of 1990s alternative and underground culture running through the film, but Lucid isn’t simply nostalgic window dressing. Its period setting becomes part of the film’s identity: a world of handmade art, subcultures and analogue imagery that feels particularly appropriate for a story about an artist struggling to discover her own voice. The filmmakers’ use of 35mm and Super 8 reinforces that connection, giving the film an aesthetic that feels deliberately tactile and imperfect.
It is also a film willing to take risks.
At times, those risks work against it. Lucid isn’t particularly interested in holding the audience’s hand, and its narrative can become as fragmented as the dreamscape through which Mia is travelling. There are moments when the symbolism threatens to overwhelm the story itself.
But that is also part of the film’s appeal.
Lucid isn’t particularly interested in behaving itself.
It wants to be strange.
It wants to be messy.
It wants to crawl inside the head of its protagonist and rummage around in the places where memory, fear and creativity become indistinguishable.
And for a film about an artist desperately searching for inspiration, there is something wonderfully appropriate about that approach.
The result is an ambitious piece of independent horror that feels less concerned with delivering a neatly constructed nightmare than with asking what happens when we deliberately surrender control of our own minds.
Sometimes the things we discover there are frightening.
Sometimes they’re grotesque.
And sometimes they are the very things we need to confront before we can create anything worth showing the world.
Lucid may occasionally lose its way inside its own dreamscape, but its willingness to embrace uncertainty is precisely what makes it such an intriguing piece of underground cinema.
SUFF #20
Lucid screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm in Cinema 3 as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There is a peculiar pleasure in watching a cinematic disaster being taken seriously. Not excused, exactly, but examined with enough curiosity to discover what might have been buried beneath the wreckage.
Few films arrive with quite the baggage of Exorcist II: The Heretic. John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist has spent decades occupying that strange territory reserved for movies that are discussed almost as much for their failure as for their contents. A notorious sequel. A critical punching bag. A cinematic oddity. A film so frequently invoked as an example of Hollywood hubris that its actual ambitions can become almost incidental.
David Kittredge’s Boorman and the Devil is interested in those ambitions.
Rather than constructing another gleeful autopsy of one of cinema’s most infamous misfires, Kittredge approaches The Heretic with something considerably more valuable: curiosity. The result is a documentary about a much-maligned horror sequel that gradually reveals itself to be less interested in proving that everyone was wrong than in asking why anyone would attempt something so strange in the first place.
On paper, the sequel looked almost impossibly well positioned. Boorman arrived having already established himself as a filmmaker of considerable ambition, while The Exorcist had become a cultural phenomenon. Yet instead of attempting to reproduce Friedkin’s approach, Boorman took the material somewhere considerably more abstract.
And that, perhaps, was the original sin.
The Exorcist II: The Heretic isn’t particularly interested in being The Exorcist II in the conventional sense. It is stranger, more metaphysical and more concerned with ideas than the straightforward continuation audiences might reasonably have expected. The result is a film that can feel less like a conventional horror sequel than a fever dream constructed from fragments of mythology, psychology and spiritual inquiry.
Kittredge understands that contradiction is precisely where the story becomes interesting.
The documentary’s greatest strength is its refusal to reduce The Heretic to either of the two easiest interpretations: misunderstood masterpiece or unmitigated disaster. Instead, Boorman and the Devil allows both possibilities to coexist.
There is plenty here to remind us why the film was so violently rejected. The production was troubled, the tonal shifts were substantial and the distance between what audiences expected and what Boorman attempted was enormous. Yet alongside those failures sits an extraordinary amount of artistic ambition.
That ambition is what Kittredge wants us to reconsider.
The documentary benefits enormously from access to Boorman himself. His presence gives the film an immediacy that no amount of archival reconstruction could quite replicate. Alongside him are recollections from Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, while contemporary filmmakers including Mike Flanagan and Karyn Kusama offer their own perspectives on the film’s peculiar legacy.
What emerges is less a conventional making-of documentary than a meditation on artistic risk.
That distinction matters.
There is something increasingly unusual about the idea of a major studio giving an established filmmaker the resources to make something genuinely eccentric. Contemporary filmmaking is hardly devoid of experimentation, but the scale at which The Heretic was allowed to pursue its particular vision feels increasingly alien.
Kittredge consequently finds something unexpectedly contemporary in a film that was once dismissed as an embarrassing relic.
Boorman and the Devil asks us to consider whether failure itself has become too threatening to contemporary filmmaking. A film that takes no risks can be competent, polished and entirely forgettable. A film that takes enormous risks can collapse spectacularly — but it can also produce images, ideas and artistic possibilities that would never have existed had everyone involved simply played it safe.
That makes The Heretic a fascinating subject not merely because it failed, but because it failed while attempting something.
And there is a difference.
Kittredge’s documentary is at its most compelling when it recognises that the history of cinema is littered with films whose reputations have changed because the cultural conversation around them changed. Sometimes reassessment reveals a genuine masterpiece. Sometimes it merely makes a fascinating failure more fascinating.
Boorman and the Devil doesn’t necessarily need to convince you that The Exorcist II: The Heretic is secretly a great film.
It only needs to make you curious enough to watch it again.
That is a considerably more interesting proposition.
For horror audiences, there is another reason the documentary resonates. Genre cinema has always been particularly susceptible to critical dismissal when it refuses to behave according to expectation. The horror sequel is expected to deliver familiar pleasures with familiar machinery. Boorman instead delivered something dreamlike, philosophical and formally eccentric.
The question isn’t whether that decision worked.
The question is whether we still value filmmakers enough to allow them to make that decision.
In an era increasingly dominated by intellectual property, established formulas and the gravitational pull of audience expectation, Boorman and the Devil becomes an accidental argument for artistic recklessness. Not recklessness without consequence, but the kind that accepts that failure is occasionally the admission price for originality.
There is something rather fitting about a documentary examining one of Hollywood’s great cinematic disasters arriving at that conclusion.
Perhaps The Heretic wasn’t a failure because John Boorman reached too far.
Perhaps its real failure was that audiences weren’t prepared for where he reached.
Boorman and the Devil doesn’t erase the film’s flaws, nor should it. Instead, it digs through the wreckage and finds something considerably more valuable than a verdict: the evidence of ambition.
And sometimes that is enough reason to look again.
SUFF #20
Boorman and the Devil screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm as part of the 20th Sydney Underground Film Festival at Factory Theatre.
Sleep is supposed to be the great surrender. We close our eyes, relinquish control and allow consciousness to dissolve into whatever strange machinery waits on the other side. Horror has long understood the vulnerability of that state, from the nightmare logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street to the psychological labyrinths of contemporary supernatural cinema. Parasomnia takes that familiar anxiety and gives it a promising contemporary framework: what happens when the thing haunting your dreams stops respecting the border between sleep and waking life?
Directed by James Ross II, the Shudder Original places Jasmine Mathews’ Riley at the centre of a story shaped by night terrors, unresolved trauma and disappearance. When her best friend becomes the latest person to vanish, Riley begins to suspect that the demonic presence stalking her dreams may have found a way into the waking world. It is an immediately attractive premise, one that offers the possibility of psychological horror, supernatural mystery and nightmare imagery existing simultaneously, with Riley’s own fractured perception leaving us uncertain about where one state ends and another begins.
Unfortunately, Parasomnia never quite manages to turn that intriguing foundation into the film it initially promises to be.
There is plenty here to admire. The central concept has genuine potential, particularly in the way it connects Riley’s trauma with the supernatural threat. Rather than simply introducing a demon and allowing it to run amok, the film attempts to make the creature part of a larger psychological landscape. Riley’s night terrors are not merely convenient vehicles for scares; they are connected to grief, memory and the unresolved events that have shaped her life. That gives the supernatural elements an emotional foundation, even if the eventual story struggles to build upon it.
Jasmine Mathews is particularly strong in the lead. Riley could easily have become a conventional horror protagonist — traumatised, frightened and increasingly convinced that nobody believes her — but Mathews gives the character a more complicated interior life. There is a convincing fragility to her performance, but also a determination that prevents Riley from becoming passive. She carries the film through some of its weaker narrative stretches, grounding the more fantastical material in recognisable human emotion.
That becomes increasingly important as the storyline begins to show its limitations.
The problem with a horror film built around dreams is that the possibilities are virtually limitless. Once the audience understands that reality itself may be unreliable, the filmmaker has access to a wonderfully unstable cinematic space. A bedroom can become a trap. A familiar face can become threatening. A mundane location can suddenly acquire the logic of a nightmare. The rules of reality can be stretched, distorted or discarded entirely.
Parasomnia occasionally understands this, but too often it seems reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities of its own premise.
The film’s strongest moments are those in which uncertainty takes precedence over explanation. When Riley is caught between sleep and waking, the question isn’t necessarily whether what she is experiencing is real, but whether reality still provides a useful distinction. Those sequences possess an unnerving ambiguity, allowing the horror to operate somewhere between psychological breakdown and supernatural intrusion.
Yet the more the film attempts to explain its mythology, the less compelling that ambiguity becomes.
This is a recurring problem with supernatural horror. The unknown is often considerably more frightening than the known, particularly when the unknown exists inside something as personal and uncontrollable as a nightmare. Once the film begins establishing the mechanics behind its demonic presence, some of the mystery starts to evaporate. The audience is no longer trapped inside Riley’s uncertainty; we are increasingly being given the answers.
And unfortunately, those answers aren’t always particularly satisfying.
The storyline feels serviceable rather than revelatory. There are ideas here that could have produced something considerably more psychologically intricate, particularly around trauma and the persistence of grief, but the screenplay frequently settles for conventional supernatural-horror machinery. Characters move towards revelations because the narrative requires them to, discoveries arrive with an increasingly familiar rhythm and the mystery ultimately feels less substantial than the concept that initially introduced it.
This is where Parasomnia becomes frustrating rather than outright disappointing.
Because there is clearly a better film lurking inside it.
The concept is strong. The performances are strong. The atmosphere is often effective. There are moments where the film creates precisely the kind of disorientation it needs, leaving Riley — and the audience — uncertain about whether they are experiencing a nightmare or something considerably more tangible.
But those ingredients don’t quite coalesce into a satisfying whole.
The supernatural entity itself is another example of this imbalance. As an idea, a demonic figure capable of moving between dreams and reality is an excellent horror proposition. It weaponises one of humanity’s most universal vulnerabilities: sleep. There is something deeply unsettling about the possibility that closing your eyes doesn’t protect you from the monster, but actually gives it access to you.
Yet the creature ultimately feels more effective as an idea than as a fully realised antagonist.
The film is strongest when the demon remains at the periphery of Riley’s experience, when its presence is suggested through fragments and disturbances rather than presented as something that needs to be completely understood. Once it becomes a more conventional supernatural threat, Parasomnia loses some of the psychological unease that made its premise so attractive.
There is also a noticeable tension between the film’s ambitions and its storytelling. It wants to explore trauma, grief, friendship and the lingering consequences of tragedy while simultaneously delivering supernatural thrills. Those elements are not incompatible — horror has been doing exactly that for decades — but they require a narrative capable of allowing the emotional and genre components to reinforce one another.
Here, they sometimes feel like separate tracks running alongside each other.
Riley’s emotional history gives the horror meaning, but the horror doesn’t always deepen our understanding of Riley.
That distinction matters.
The best psychological horror makes the monster inseparable from the character confronting it. The supernatural threat becomes an external expression of something internal, allowing every encounter with the creature to reveal something about the protagonist. Parasomnia gestures towards that territory without quite committing to it.
As a result, the film’s emotional material can feel somewhat underdeveloped just when it should be reaching its greatest intensity.
That is particularly evident in the final act.
Without venturing into spoilers, the conclusion struggles to deliver the catharsis that the preceding story seems to be building towards. The film has established a compelling relationship between Riley’s trauma and the supernatural threat, but the eventual resolution doesn’t quite capitalise on that connection. Instead of transforming the earlier ideas into something thematically resonant, the ending largely feels like the narrative arriving at its required destination.
It isn’t disastrous.
It simply isn’t enough.
And that distinction is important because Parasomnia is never a bad film. It is an intermittently effective one that repeatedly demonstrates what it could have been. There are enough strong ideas and performances here to make the experience worthwhile, but also enough conventional storytelling to prevent it from becoming the psychologically disquieting nightmare its premise suggests.
Mathews remains the film’s greatest asset. Her performance gives Riley emotional credibility even when the screenplay becomes predictable, and she brings enough vulnerability and resolve to make the character worth following. The supporting performances similarly help maintain the film’s human dimension, preventing the supernatural material from becoming entirely detached from the people experiencing it.
Ultimately, however, Parasomnia is caught between two versions of itself.
One is a strange, unsettling psychological horror about trauma invading dreams and nightmares crossing into reality. That film is genuinely intriguing. It understands that the most frightening aspect of sleep is not necessarily what we dream about, but the surrender of control that makes dreaming possible in the first place.
The other is a more conventional supernatural thriller that needs to explain its mythology, organise its scares and eventually provide answers.
The first film is considerably more interesting than the second.
When Parasomnia embraces uncertainty, it works. When it allows Riley’s perception to become unstable and makes us question whether the nightmare has crossed over or whether Riley is simply losing her grip on reality, the film finds its unsettling centre. But whenever it retreats into familiar supernatural storytelling, the tension dissipates.
There is a good horror movie buried somewhere within Parasomnia. At times, you can almost see it clawing its way to the surface.
What ultimately holds it back is not a lack of ideas, atmosphere or talent. It is that the story doesn’t quite know what to do with all three.
The Prognosis:
Parasomnia is a film with a genuinely strong horror concept and committed performances, particularly from Jasmine Mathews, but its mediocre storyline prevents the material from reaching its full potential. It is worth entering the nightmare for the atmosphere and ideas; just don’t expect the waking world to provide quite the payoff you’re hoping for.
There are Australian films that attempt to explain Australia. There are Australian films that attempt to romanticise it. Then there is Dead-End Drive-In, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s magnificent, deranged vision of a country that has looked at its own future, shrugged, and decided the best thing to do is throw everyone into a drive-in, feed them cheeseburgers, give them drugs and make sure they never leave.
Forty years on, Dead-End Drive-In remains one of the strangest and most exhilarating films to emerge from the great Australian exploitation boom. Released in 1986, it is ostensibly a dystopian science-fiction thriller, but that description hardly begins to contain the thing. It is a car movie, a punk movie, a prison movie, a satire of consumer culture, a portrait of youth alienation, a social nightmare and, inevitably for a Brian Trenchard-Smith film, an excuse to launch increasingly large pieces of machinery through the air.
It is also one of those rare films that becomes more interesting the more seriously you take it.
Because beneath the outrageous costumes, the spectacular stunt work, the burnt-out cars and the general sensation that someone has spiked the national cinema with amphetamines, Dead-End Drive-In is asking an unnervingly serious question: what happens when a society decides that its unwanted people are easier to contain than to help?
The answer, according to Trenchard-Smith, is apparently to build a prison that looks exactly like a Saturday night at the movies.
THE MAN WHO NEVER KNEW HOW TO BEHAVE
To understand Dead-End Drive-In, you have to understand Brian Trenchard-Smith. Not because the film is some carefully controlled expression of auteurist intent, but because his career represents almost the exact opposite of the respectable model of Australian filmmaking. Trenchard-Smith has always seemed happiest when genre conventions are being thrown into the air and collided together at considerable velocity.
He could make martial-arts exploitation, horror, science fiction, children’s adventure, action cinema and television, often with the same gleeful disregard for the boundaries separating them. The Man from Hong Kong, Turkey Shoot, BMX Bandits and Dead-End Drive-In may appear to belong to entirely different cinematic universes, yet they share an unmistakable physicality. Trenchard-Smith likes movement. He likes spectacle. He likes bodies being thrown around spaces. He likes machinery being pushed beyond its sensible limits. Most importantly, he understands that exploitation cinema does not have to choose between being entertaining and being about something.
Dead-End Drive-In might be the clearest expression of that philosophy.
It is ridiculous, but it is not stupid. It is politically charged without ever becoming a lecture. It is visually extravagant despite its relatively modest resources. It is adolescent, lurid and occasionally uncomfortable, but beneath all that noise is a remarkably clear understanding of the social anxieties of the Australia that produced it.
Trenchard-Smith simply refuses to deliver those ideas politely.
He gives them a chainsaw.
WELCOME TO THE STAR
The premise is brutally simple. Jimmy “Crabs” Rossini and his girlfriend Carmen arrive at the Star Drive-In after suffering car trouble. They expect an evening at the movies. Instead, they discover that the drive-in has effectively become a detention centre for unemployed and socially unwanted young people.
The government does not need to execute them. It does not even need to rehabilitate them. It simply needs to remove them from the functioning parts of society and make their confinement sufficiently comfortable that they stop asking questions.
The Star provides food, entertainment, drugs and companionship. It becomes a world within a world, a brightly illuminated enclosure where the inmates are encouraged to consume themselves into submission.
This is where Dead-End Drive-In becomes considerably more sophisticated than its lurid surface suggests. The prison does not look like a prison. There are no obvious dungeon walls or endless corridors of concrete. There is a snack bar. There are cars. There is music. There are movies playing on a huge screen.
The inmates are not simply denied freedom. They are given enough distractions that freedom begins to seem unnecessary.
THE PERFECT PRISON IS ONE YOU DON’T WANT TO ESCAPE
That remains the film’s most disturbing idea.
The authorities have not created a traditional authoritarian nightmare. They have created a lifestyle. The inmates are surrounded by the very things that a consumer society tells them should make them happy. Food, television, entertainment, drugs, sex and material possessions become substitutes for employment, purpose and political agency.
The genius of the Star is that it doesn’t have to convince its inhabitants that they are free. It only has to convince them that freedom is inconvenient.
Why leave when there is food?
Why work when there is television?
Why build a future when the present is entertaining?
Why protest when you can get high?
The film’s dystopia therefore operates through distraction as much as repression. The system has discovered that the easiest way to control a population is not necessarily to terrify it, but to keep it occupied.
That makes Dead-End Drive-In feel remarkably prescient. Its junk food, consumerism and endless entertainment are not simply background details. They are the architecture of the prison.
THE DRIVE-IN AS AUSTRALIA
The choice of the drive-in is particularly inspired because the drive-in was itself such a recognisable part of Australian popular culture. It was a place associated with freedom, leisure, adolescence and the ability to temporarily escape the routines of everyday life.
Trenchard-Smith takes that cultural memory and turns it inside out.
The drive-in is no longer somewhere you visit to escape society.
It is somewhere society sends you when it has decided that you are no longer useful.
That reversal gives the film’s central location a strange melancholy. The Star feels simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic, like a discarded piece of Australian culture that has been repurposed as a holding pen for the future.
The cars remain. The screen remains. The food remains. The entertainment continues.
Only the audience has become the prisoner.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE CARS
Of course, this is Brian Trenchard-Smith, so the automobile cannot merely be symbolic.
The car in Dead-End Drive-In is a status symbol, a shelter, a weapon, an object of desire and, most importantly, an expression of mobility. Yet the film takes particular pleasure in turning that symbolism against itself. Cars are everywhere, but nobody is actually going anywhere.
The inhabitants of the Star sleep in their vehicles. They decorate them. They identify with them. They use them to establish status within the enclosed society. The automobile, traditionally one of the great symbols of freedom, has become another part of the prison.
That contradiction is everywhere in the film. The people have cars but no roads to freedom. They have entertainment but no meaningful future. They have food but no purpose. They have choices, provided those choices remain within the boundaries established for them.
The whole film can almost be understood as a gigantic metaphor for having the accelerator pressed firmly against the floor while the vehicle remains stationary.
Naturally, Trenchard-Smith eventually decides that the metaphor requires an actual vehicle to fly through the air.
THE GONZO AUSTRALIA OF BRIAN TRENCHARD-SMITH
There is something gloriously Australian about the film’s refusal to be subtle. Economic collapse becomes a wasteland of burnt-out vehicles. Youth alienation becomes a sea of punk costumes and leather. Government oppression becomes an electrified fence around a drive-in. Consumerism becomes junk food and television. Social exclusion becomes a population of young people deliberately abandoned inside a recreational complex.
The apocalypse is not presented as some distant future catastrophe.
It is the present turned up to eleven.
This is one of Trenchard-Smith’s great gifts. He understands that exploitation cinema can exaggerate reality until the exaggeration becomes a form of truth. Dead-End Drive-In does not seriously attempt to predict what Australia will look like. Instead, it takes the anxieties already present in Australian society and magnifies them until they become almost absurd.
The result is a kind of gonzo social realism.
Everything is too loud. Everything is too colourful. Everyone is slightly too grotesque. The cars are too damaged. The violence is too spectacular. The costumes are too outrageous.
And yet you can recognise the world underneath it.
That is where the satire bites.
A WORLD BUILT FROM JUNK
The Star itself looks as though civilisation has been put through a meat grinder and then handed over to a gang of teenagers with a spray can. Burnt-out cars, graffiti, concrete, rubbish, punk fashion and industrial decay transform the location into a junkyard version of the future.
The film’s production design is crucial because Trenchard-Smith does not need to build some enormous futuristic metropolis. He can find the apocalypse in the Australian landscape that already exists.
The apocalypse is a car park.
The apocalypse is a takeaway counter.
The apocalypse is an abandoned industrial space.
The apocalypse is a generation of young people who have been told that there is no future and have consequently stopped behaving as though one exists.
Most disturbingly, the apocalypse is brightly lit.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE POLITICS OF THE STAR
It would be easy to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In entirely on the basis of its aesthetic pleasures, but doing so would ignore some of the film’s more uncomfortable dimensions.
Its treatment of race, immigration and Australian identity deserves scrutiny. The film emerges from a period when anxieties surrounding immigration, economic decline and the changing nature of Australian society were deeply embedded in political and popular culture. Those anxieties find their way into the Star, where displaced populations are effectively contained and removed from the mainstream.
This is one of the reasons Dead-End Drive-In is more interesting than simply being an anarchic Ozploitation spectacle. The film does not merely show us a dystopian Australia. It shows us what that Australia is afraid of.
It is afraid of unemployment.
It is afraid of youth.
It is afraid of social disorder.
It is afraid of outsiders.
It is afraid of economic collapse.
It is afraid that the institutions supposedly responsible for maintaining order might themselves be incapable of solving the problems they have created.
Those fears do not necessarily make the film politically progressive. Some of its imagery remains troubling. But that does not make it irrelevant. Quite the opposite. The discomfort is part of what makes the film worth revisiting.
Dystopian cinema can reveal a culture’s anxieties as clearly as it reveals its aspirations.
JIMMY CRABS AND THE REFUSAL TO STAY PUT
Ned Manning’s Jimmy is therefore crucial because he refuses the bargain.
Everyone else has adapted to the Star. Jimmy hasn’t.
His rebellion is not particularly intellectual. He doesn’t deliver great political speeches. He simply refuses to accept that this is all there is.
That makes him strangely radical.
In a world where the system has convinced people to accept captivity as comfort, the simple desire to leave becomes an act of resistance.
Jimmy still believes that there is something beyond the fence.
That belief is the most dangerous thing about him.
CARMEN AND THE HORROR OF ADAPTATION
Natalie McCurry’s Carmen complicates the film’s simplistic notion of resistance. She begins to adapt to the Star, and that adaptation is both understandable and disturbing.
Because people do adapt.
They adapt to poverty. They adapt to confinement. They adapt to political instability. They adapt to bad conditions. They adapt because sometimes adaptation is the only available survival mechanism.
The Star does not need everyone to love it.
It simply needs people to stop imagining anything else.
Jimmy wants to escape.
Carmen learns how to survive inside.
Neither response is entirely comfortable.
THE MOVIES WITHIN THE MOVIE
The films being screened inside the Star provide another layer to Trenchard-Smith’s satire. The inmates watch exploitation movies while simultaneously living inside one.
Violence is entertainment.
Violence is fantasy.
Violence is spectacle.
Then violence spills beyond the screen.
The audience watches people watching movies, and those people are themselves watching images that reflect the world they inhabit. It creates an endless feedback loop between screen violence and social violence.
Trenchard-Smith’s answer to this complicated observation is, naturally, not to stop making violent movies.
He makes the violence bigger.
That is part of the joke.
Dead-End Drive-In is itself an exploitation movie critiquing a culture of exploitation.
It knows exactly what it is doing.
THE TRUCK JUMP
Eventually, all of this social commentary has to give way to the inevitable.
The truck jumps.
The climactic stunt remains one of the film’s great moments because it encapsulates Trenchard-Smith’s entire filmmaking philosophy. The film has spent all this time talking about captivity, consumerism, social control and the collapse of Australian society, and then suddenly a vehicle is flying through the air.
There is something almost philosophically perfect about that.
The truck is not merely escaping the Star.
It is escaping the limitations of the film itself.
After all the political anxiety, the satire and the symbolism, Trenchard-Smith simply says: enough.
Make it bigger.
Make it faster.
Make it fly.
That is not a failure of seriousness.
It is Trenchard-Smith’s definition of seriousness.
OZPLOITATION WITH A BRAIN
This is perhaps the mistake people make when discussing Australian exploitation cinema. They assume a film must either be trash or a masterpiece.
Dead-End Drive-In is both.
It is trashy.
It is intelligent.
It is adolescent.
It is politically loaded.
It is visually sophisticated.
It is exploitative.
It is genuinely interested in Australian society.
The contradiction is precisely what makes it work.
Trenchard-Smith understands that audiences might come for the cars, the punk costumes, the violence and the dystopian spectacle. So he gives them all of it.
Then he hides the political argument inside the popcorn.
A FILM THAT ARRIVED TOO EARLY
Perhaps Dead-End Drive-In was simply released at the wrong moment.
Australian audiences were still being encouraged to think of Australian genre cinema as something inferior to Hollywood. A film this strange, this aggressively Australian and this unwilling to behave itself was never going to fit comfortably into the mainstream.
Its initial commercial failure is therefore one of cinema’s more satisfying ironies.
The film depicts a society that has failed to recognise the value of its own discarded population.
Australian cinema subsequently spent years doing something similar to Dead-End Drive-In itself.
It was sitting there.
Covered in graffiti.
Surrounded by wrecked cars.
Waiting for someone to realise what they were looking at.
Eventually, the audience arrived.
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN ANARCHIST
Forty years later, perhaps the best way to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In is not to pretend that it is perfect.
It isn’t.
Some of its politics are uncomfortable. Some of its ideas are more fully developed than others. Its aesthetic is unmistakably tied to the decade that produced it.
But perfection would almost miss the point.
Brian Trenchard-Smith has never been a filmmaker of polite surfaces. His cinema is physical. It is interested in impact, movement and spectacle. The machinery matters. The bodies matter. The stunt matters.
His films want you to feel the physicality of cinema.
The car hits the barrier.
The engine screams.
The body flies.
The gate electrifies.
The world collapses.
And Dead-End Drive-In might be his purest expression of that sensibility.
It is a dystopian science-fiction film, a punk film, a car movie, a prison movie, a social satire, a romance, an exploitation picture and an Australian nightmare.
And somehow, against all reason, it is also enormous fun.
THE PRICE OF ADMISSION
The title is perfect.
Dead-End Drive-In is not merely a description of the place in which Jimmy finds himself trapped. It is a description of the society surrounding him.
Everyone has arrived at the end of the road.
There is no future.
So consume.
There is no meaningful employment.
So entertain yourself.
There is no escape.
So decorate the prison.
There is no hope.
So turn the music up.
And if anyone complains, give them another cheeseburger.
That is the genius of Trenchard-Smith’s dystopia. It is not controlled by some grand totalitarian mastermind. It is maintained by administrative indifference and the quiet acceptance of everyone who has decided that resistance is too much trouble.
The system does not need to explain itself.
It simply keeps operating.
People disappear into the Star.
The movies continue playing.
The food keeps coming.
The cars keep burning.
And outside the fence, everybody else carries on.
FORTY YEARS IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR
Forty years later, Dead-End Drive-In feels less like a relic than a warning that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Its anxieties about unemployment, consumerism, youth alienation, social exclusion and institutional neglect remain remarkably potent. Its punk aesthetic has become retro. Its cars have become objects of affection. Its drive-in has disappeared.
Its future, meanwhile, has arrived in fragments.
Perhaps that is why the film has endured.
It never really predicted Australia.
It exaggerated Australia.
It took existing anxieties and turned the volume knob until the speakers exploded.
That is what Brian Trenchard-Smith does.
He does not whisper.
He does not gently suggest.
He kicks the door in, sets the car on fire, throws the television through the window and then asks whether you’ve noticed what is happening.
THE GATES ARE STILL CLOSED
There is a moment in Dead-End Drive-In when the absurdity finally becomes clear. The prison isn’t simply the electrified fence. It isn’t the guards. It isn’t the government. It isn’t even the Star.
The prison is the idea that there is nowhere else to go.
That is why Jimmy has to escape. Not simply because he wants freedom, but because he still believes freedom exists.
And perhaps that is the film’s most enduring act of rebellion.
In a genre packed with nihilism, Dead-End Drive-In still believes that someone can look at the wreckage and say no. No, I don’t want this. No, I don’t accept this. No, this isn’t the future.
I’m getting in the car.
I’m hitting the accelerator.
I’m going through the fence.
And if Brian Trenchard-Smith is directing, there will probably be a truck flying overhead when you do it.
That is Dead-End Drive-In at 40: a film about a country staring into the abyss and deciding to install a snack bar; a film about capitalism, captivity and consumption disguised as a car chase; a film about a generation being told that the future has already been cancelled.
And a filmmaker who responded to that bleak proposition with the only reasonable answer he could think of.
There are remakes that attempt to improve upon their predecessors, remakes that attempt to modernise them and remakes that seem almost determined to prove that the original was never really the story we thought it was.
David Cronenberg’s The Fly belongs to the last category.
Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film and Cronenberg’s 1986 version share a title, a basic premise and a grisly fascination with the consequences of scientific experimentation. Both feature a scientist who accidentally merges his genetic material with that of a fly. Both involve a transformation that cannot be reversed. Both ultimately arrive at tragedy.
And yet, watching them side by side, they barely feel like the same film.
That difference is precisely what makes the two Flies so fascinating.
The 1958 The Fly is a film about scientific transgression. Cronenberg’s The Fly is a film about the body itself becoming the transgression.
One looks outward at the dangers of scientific progress.
The other looks inward.
One asks what happens when man plays God.
The other asks what happens when the person you love begins to disappear inside a body that is no longer human.
Forty years after Cronenberg’s film, the relationship between these two movies remains one of the great case studies in how a filmmaker can take the skeleton of an existing story and discover an entirely different horror film living inside it.
The Same Accident
The basic premise is remarkably similar.
In The Fly (1958), brilliant scientist André Delambre has developed a teleportation device capable of transporting matter from one location to another. During an experiment, an ordinary housefly enters the teleportation chamber with him.
Something goes wrong.
When André emerges, his atoms have been combined with those of the fly.
In Cronenberg’s film, Seth Brundle has also developed a teleportation system. His “telepods” are capable of transporting matter across space, although Brundle has yet to perfect the process for living organisms.
After a drunken night, Brundle decides to teleport himself.
A fly is already inside the pod.
The experiment works.
Except that it doesn’t.
The difference is crucial.
In Neumann’s film, the accident is essentially a malfunction.
In Cronenberg’s, the machine has worked perfectly.
That small alteration changes everything.
The horror of the 1958 film comes from failure.
The horror of the 1986 film comes from success.
That is one of Cronenberg’s most brilliant conceptual changes.
Seth hasn’t broken his machine.
He has demonstrated that it works.
The problem is what happens when technology does precisely what we ask it to do.
André Delambre: The Scientist as Victim
David Hedison’s Seth Brundle is perhaps the character most audiences associate with The Fly, but Al Hedison’s André Delambre—credited under the name David Hedison—is an equally fascinating creation.
André is a traditional 1950s mad-scientist figure, although the film is careful not to make him particularly mad.
He isn’t seeking immortality.
He isn’t trying to conquer the world.
He isn’t attempting to create a superior species.
He is a scientist fascinated by the possibility of instantaneous transportation.
His experiment is driven by intellectual curiosity.
That makes his transformation tragic rather than punitive.
André has not really done anything deserving of his fate.
He has simply gone too far.
That distinction reflects the anxieties of the era.
The post-war world had witnessed scientific achievements that once would have seemed impossible. Nuclear technology had demonstrated that scientific advancement could radically alter the human condition, while the Space Race and rapid technological development continued to expand the boundaries of what seemed possible.
The question wasn’t necessarily whether science could change the world.
It was whether humanity understood the consequences of doing so.
The Fly turns that anxiety into flesh.
Seth Brundle: The Scientist as Experiment
Jeff Goldblum’s Seth Brundle begins in a very different place.
He is younger, eccentric and almost charmingly socially dysfunctional. His relationship with science is not merely professional. It defines him.
When Veronica Quaife enters his world, she becomes fascinated by the telepods and by the man behind them.
Seth isn’t simply experimenting with teleportation.
He is experimenting with possibility.
And this is where Cronenberg radically alters the emotional architecture of the story.
André’s tragedy is largely experienced by those around him.
The transformation therefore isn’t simply something that happens to Seth.
It becomes something he is forced to experience from inside.
Cronenberg turns the scientist into both protagonist and specimen.
The Fly as Science Fiction
The 1958 film is fundamentally a science-fiction horror movie.
Its central invention—the matter-transmitting machine—is the story’s great technological marvel.
The horror comes from what happens when the technology goes wrong.
There is still a wonderful sense of wonder in the film. The teleportation device is treated as something extraordinary, almost miraculous. André has achieved something that could revolutionise transportation.
The tragedy is that his breakthrough becomes his undoing.
The film therefore maintains a certain optimism about scientific progress even while warning about its dangers.
Science is powerful.
Science is dangerous.
Science must be respected.
It is a very 1950s conception of technological horror.
Cronenberg has almost no interest in preserving that optimism.
By 1986, the machine is no longer the miracle.
It is simply the mechanism through which the body becomes corrupted.
The technology is cold, clinical and increasingly irrelevant once the transformation begins.
The machine gets Seth into trouble.
His body is what keeps him there.
The Fly as Body Horror
This is where Cronenberg’s The Fly ceases to be a remake in the conventional sense.
It becomes a body-horror film.
The transformation isn’t merely a special effect.
It is the narrative.
Seth begins losing his fingernails.
His skin changes.
His teeth fall out.
His hair disappears.
His body becomes increasingly insectoid.
His physical strength increases while his humanity diminishes.
Eventually, his body begins literally coming apart.
Cronenberg doesn’t allow the transformation to remain abstract.
We see it.
We hear it.
We watch Seth touch the things that are falling away from him.
The famous vomiting sequence is not simply grotesque comedy. It is a declaration of intent.
This film is going to make biological transformation unavoidable.
The body isn’t a metaphor placed on top of the story.
The body is the story.
And that is arguably the defining difference between the two films.
The Fly and the Fear of Ageing
There is another significant difference hidden inside the transformation.
The 1958 film is concerned with scientific catastrophe.
The 1986 film is also concerned with ageing.
Seth’s transformation is horrifying partly because it accelerates something all human beings experience.
His body begins changing without his consent.
His appearance deteriorates.
His physical abilities alter.
His body becomes unfamiliar.
He becomes increasingly aware that he cannot stop the process.
There is something brutally human beneath the science-fiction premise.
We are all, eventually, forced to confront a body that changes without asking our permission.
Cronenberg simply makes that process immediate, grotesque and impossible to ignore.
Seth doesn’t gradually age.
He metamorphoses.
And in doing so, he becomes a grotesque embodiment of the fear of losing ownership over one’s own body.
The Fly and Sexuality
Cronenberg also makes sexuality central to the transformation.
Seth and Veronica’s relationship begins with attraction and curiosity.
Their sexual relationship becomes one of the film’s most important emotional anchors.
Then Seth changes.
His sexuality changes with him.
His confidence becomes aggression.
His desire becomes increasingly animalistic.
His relationship with Veronica becomes complicated by his transformation.
This is a crucial departure from the 1958 film.
The earlier movie is concerned with scientific catastrophe and the destruction of a family.
Cronenberg’s film is concerned with intimacy.
What happens when the person you desire begins transforming into something you can no longer recognise?
What happens when attraction becomes repulsion?
What happens when love survives longer than the body it was attached to?
These questions make The Fly profoundly uncomfortable because the horror is not happening somewhere distant.
It is happening between two people.
Veronica Quaife Changes Everything
Patricia Owens’ Helene Delambre is central to the 1958 film, but Veronica Quaife serves a very different dramatic purpose.
Geena Davis isn’t simply an observer of Seth’s transformation.
She is emotionally entangled in it.
Her relationship with Seth gives Cronenberg’s film its human centre.
The horror is not merely that Seth is becoming a fly.
The horror is that Veronica is watching someone she loves disappear.
That distinction becomes crucial in the film’s final act.
The question is no longer:
Can Seth be saved?
It becomes:
What does love mean when there is almost nothing left to save?
The 1958 film ultimately remains a tragedy of scientific accident.
Cronenberg transforms it into a tragedy of intimacy.
And that is a far more painful proposition.
Two Different Monsters
The two films also offer radically different ideas of the monster.
In the 1958 film, the monstrous form is externalised.
André’s head and arm become fly-like while his body remains recognisably human.
The famous white-headed fly becomes a separate object of horror.
The audience can look at the monster.
There is a degree of distance.
Cronenberg destroys that distance.
There is no separate monster.
Seth is the monster.
The fly is inside him.
The fly is becoming him.
And eventually, the distinction between the two becomes meaningless.
This is one of the reasons Cronenberg’s creature effects remain so effective.
The audience isn’t watching an actor in a monster costume.
We are watching a human body progressively cease to obey the definition of human.
That is far more disturbing.
The Question of Identity
The transformation in both films raises the question of whether the transformed scientist remains the same person.
But Cronenberg pushes the question much further.
At what point does Seth stop being Seth?
Is it when his body changes?
When his behaviour changes?
When his thoughts become increasingly insect-like?
When he begins referring to himself as “Brundlefly”?
Or is Seth still present right until the end?
The film never provides a comfortable answer.
That ambiguity is essential.
If Seth simply dies and a monster takes his place, the story becomes straightforward.
But that isn’t what happens.
There is still a consciousness inside the creature.
There is still memory.
There is still love.
There is still recognition.
And that makes the final stages of the transformation so devastating.
The monster remembers being human.
The Tragedy of Progress
Both films ultimately contain a warning about progress, but they express it very differently.
The 1958 film essentially says:
Be careful what science makes possible.
Cronenberg’s film asks something more troubling:
What if progress works?
The telepods are not a failure.
They function.
Seth has genuinely solved teleportation.
The discovery could change civilisation.
It could revolutionise transportation.
It could transform medicine.
It could fundamentally alter the relationship between humans and physical space.
And that is precisely why the film’s horror works.
Seth’s catastrophe doesn’t invalidate his invention.
It proves its potential.
The machine has done exactly what it was designed to do.
It simply wasn’t designed to understand what a human being actually is.
1958: The Horror of the Machine
Kurt Neumann’s film therefore remains fascinating because its horror is ultimately technological.
The machine represents a threshold.
André crosses it.
He cannot come back.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about the film’s anxiety.
The scientist has opened a door that should perhaps have remained closed.
It is the same basic fear that runs through countless science-fiction stories of the period.
We discover something extraordinary.
We use it before understanding it.
The consequences are catastrophic.
Yet there is still a sense that the technology itself is morally neutral.
It is the human error surrounding it that creates the disaster.
1986: The Horror of the Body
Cronenberg is much less interested in whether the technology is morally neutral.
He is interested in what happens once technology enters the body.
The telepods are almost incidental.
They are the catalyst.
The real horror is biological.
This is what makes The Fly such an important film in the development of modern body horror.
Cronenberg understands that the human body is already a terrifying thing.
It grows.
It changes.
It heals.
It decays.
It produces fluids.
It breaks.
It ages.
And eventually it dies.
The science-fiction premise simply gives him permission to accelerate all of those processes.
The fly is therefore less frightening because it is an insect than because it provides a mechanism through which Seth can lose control of his own physical existence.
Two Films About Death
Ultimately, both The Fly films are about death.
But they arrive at death from opposite directions.
The 1958 film begins with science and ends with tragedy.
The 1986 film begins with science and ends with dissolution.
André’s transformation is a horrible accident that must be reversed.
Seth’s transformation becomes an irreversible process that must eventually be accepted.
That difference changes the emotional impact of the endings.
The 1958 film offers a conventional horror resolution.
The 1986 film offers something much closer to mourning.
Veronica doesn’t simply lose Seth.
She watches him disappear.
Piece by piece.
Cell by cell.
Memory by memory.
The horror lies in being forced to remain present for the process.
A Remake That Became Something Else
Perhaps the greatest achievement of Cronenberg’s The Fly is that it doesn’t require the 1958 film to be inferior.
The two films simply operate on different frequencies.
Kurt Neumann’s film is an elegant piece of 1950s science-fiction horror, built around the anxieties of technological progress and scientific experimentation.
Cronenberg’s film takes the same premise and turns it into something more intimate, sexual, biological and existential.
One is about a machine that goes wrong.
The other is about a body that goes wrong.
One is concerned with the danger of discovering something humanity isn’t ready to control.
The other is concerned with the terrifying possibility that we may never have been in control of our bodies in the first place.
That is why the 1986 film doesn’t feel like an attempt to replace its predecessor.
It feels like an excavation.
Cronenberg finds the body horror buried underneath the science fiction.
He finds the tragedy buried underneath the accident.
He finds the love story buried underneath the monster movie.
And then he drags all three into the light.
Which Fly Is More Frightening?
The answer depends entirely on what frightens you.
If the idea of scientific experimentation escaping human control is your nightmare, the 1958 film remains remarkably effective.
If your fear lies in bodily deterioration, disease, ageing, sexuality, loss of identity and watching someone you love become something you can no longer recognise, Cronenberg’s The Fly is in another category entirely.
But perhaps the most interesting way to view them is not as competitors.
It is as a conversation across generations.
The 1958 film asks what happens when science moves too quickly.
The 1986 film asks what happens when science moves inside us.
The first fears the machine.
The second fears the flesh.
And between them, the two films chart a remarkable shift in the language of horror itself.
The Fly at 40
Forty years after Cronenberg’s film arrived, it is tempting to talk about The Fly as though it simply perfected an existing story.
It didn’t.
It reinterpreted it.
That distinction matters.
The original The Fly remains the foundation. Without Neumann’s film, there would be no telepods, no André Delambre and no basic story of a scientist whose experiment merges him with an insect.
But Cronenberg understood that a remake becomes worthwhile when it discovers something the original could not—or did not—say.
His The Fly takes a Cold War-era science-fiction cautionary tale and turns it into an existential horror story about the body, identity, love and mortality.
It is a film about progress, but it is also a film about regression.
It is about scientific achievement, but also about biological inevitability.
It is about becoming something new.
And it is about losing everything that made you who you were.
That is why the two Flies remain so fascinating together.
1958 asks what happens when man becomes a monster because science fails.
1986 asks what happens when science succeeds—and the human body is the price.
The first Fly gave us the accident.
Cronenberg gave us the transformation.
And forty years later, it is the transformation that still refuses to let us look away.
Some horror films are designed to frighten us. Others want to disgust us, disturb us or leave us questioning what we have just witnessed. Then there are films like Night of the Creeps, which seem to have been made by someone who simply couldn’t decide which kind of horror they loved most.
Fred Dekker’s 1986 feature debut is an exuberant collision of science fiction, zombie cinema, body horror, slasher movies, teen comedy and police thriller. Its premise alone sounds like an entire video store condensed into 88 minutes: extraterrestrial parasites invade human hosts, transforming them into homicidal zombies, while two college students and a world-weary detective attempt to prevent the infestation from consuming their campus.
On paper, it should be a mess.
Instead, Night of the Creeps remains one of the great cult pleasures of 1980s horror.
What makes the film endure isn’t simply the sheer number of genres it references. It is the sincerity behind those references. Dekker isn’t mocking the horror films that inspired him. He is celebrating them. Beneath all the jokes, gore and knowing nods to genre history is the unmistakable enthusiasm of a filmmaker who has spent his life watching horror and simply wants to throw everything he loves into the same film.
Forty years after its release, that enthusiasm remains infectious.
A Monster Made From Other Monsters
The film announces its intentions almost immediately. Night of the Creeps begins in 1959, with a young couple encountering something falling from the night sky. An alien parasite escapes, enters a human host and establishes the chain of events that will eventually lead to the film’s main story in 1986.
The opening deliberately evokes the science-fiction films of the 1950s: the mysterious object from space, the unknown organism and the threat that has arrived from somewhere beyond our world. Then Dekker jumps forward nearly three decades and deposits us into the familiar world of 1980s college comedy.
That transition is funny, but it also tells us exactly what kind of film we’re watching. Dekker understands that the history of horror is interconnected. Science fiction fed into monster movies, monster movies influenced body horror, zombie cinema developed its own conventions and the slasher absorbed elements of the detective thriller. Rather than choosing one tradition, Night of the Creeps happily embraces all of them.
The result feels less like a parody of horror than a cinematic mixtape assembled by someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre.
The Film That Refuses to Pick a Genre
The sheer variety of Night of the Creeps is remarkable. There are alien parasites, zombies, fraternity pledges, a serial killer, a police investigation, romance, body horror and a steadily escalating series of increasingly grotesque deaths.
Yet Dekker never allows the film to become entirely dependent on its references.
That is important.
There is a difference between a film that recognises the conventions of horror and one that genuinely understands why those conventions work. Night of the Creeps falls into the latter category. It knows that the audience understands what is coming, but it also knows that recognising a convention doesn’t necessarily make it less enjoyable.
The film isn’t asking us to laugh at horror.
It’s asking us to laugh with horror.
That distinction gives it its warmth.
The characters aren’t merely pawns being moved around a genre board. Chris and J.C. have a genuine friendship. Their relationship gives the story an emotional foundation, while their outsider status makes them easy characters to invest in. The horror works because we care whether they survive it.
The Horror Nerd’s Dream
Dekker’s screenplay is littered with references to horror history, including character names that pay tribute to filmmakers such as George Romero, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Sam Raimi.
For a committed horror fan, the references are part of the fun. Yet Night of the Creeps doesn’t require an encyclopaedic knowledge of genre cinema to work. Someone who has never seen a Romero film can still enjoy the zombies. Someone unfamiliar with 1950s science fiction can still understand the alien-invasion premise.
The references are rewards rather than requirements.
That is one of the reasons the film has aged so well. Its intertextuality doesn’t overwhelm its basic pleasures. The jokes may operate on several levels, but the film itself remains accessible.
Dekker knows that horror can be clever without becoming smug.
Enter Tom Atkins
And then there is Tom Atkins.
Detective Ray Cameron is one of the great characters of 1980s cult horror because he seems to have wandered in from an entirely different movie.
Atkins plays him with complete conviction. Cameron is a hard-bitten detective carrying the weight of a past that the younger characters cannot possibly understand, and the actor gives him an extraordinary sense of history.
That seriousness is essential to the comedy.
If Cameron treated the alien parasites and zombie infestation as ridiculous, the joke would become obvious. Instead, Atkins behaves as though this is simply the latest nightmare in a long career of nightmares.
His presence also gives the film a surprisingly melancholy dimension. Cameron isn’t simply the grizzled police detective archetype. He is a man who has already encountered the darkness and has been waiting for it to return.
The fact that Tom Atkins is clearly having enormous fun with the role only makes the performance more enjoyable.
Ray Cameron is funny because he never thinks he is funny.
The Heart Beneath the Slime
For all its genre playfulness, Night of the Creeps has a surprisingly sincere emotional centre.
Chris and J.C.’s friendship is particularly important. The film could easily have reduced them to generic teenagers whose primary purpose was to stumble from one horror set-piece to another. Instead, their friendship gives the story genuine stakes.
That sincerity becomes particularly valuable as the body count rises.
The film is funny, but it doesn’t pretend that death is meaningless. The characters can be frightened, hurt and traumatised. The monsters may be ridiculous, but the consequences of encountering them are not always treated as a joke.
This tension between genuine emotion and outrageous comedy is one of the film’s greatest strengths.
It allows Night of the Creeps to be affectionate without becoming sentimental and funny without becoming weightless.
The Creeps as Body Horror
The alien slugs remain one of the film’s most memorable inventions.
Their simplicity makes them effective. They crawl, they squirm and they invade the human body. Once inside, they take control of their hosts and turn ordinary people into something else entirely.
That is a classic body-horror anxiety: the fear that our bodies may not entirely belong to us.
The difference is that Dekker refuses to treat the idea with complete solemnity.
The slugs are disgusting, but they’re also absurd. Their movements are inherently comic, and the film repeatedly exploits the contrast between our instinctive disgust and the sheer ridiculousness of what we’re watching.
That balance is quintessentially Night of the Creeps. The film wants us to recoil from the creatures and laugh at them at the same time.
It is horror operating through contradiction.
1986: The Perfect Year
It is impossible to discuss Night of the Creeps without considering the remarkable horror landscape of 1986.
This was the year in which David Cronenberg’s The Fly transformed body horror into a tragic story of love and identity. James Cameron’s Aliens demonstrated how effectively science fiction could merge with action and horror. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 took the mythology of its predecessor and pushed it towards grotesque black comedy.
Horror was becoming increasingly conscious of itself.
Audiences knew the conventions. Filmmakers knew that audiences knew the conventions. The genre had accumulated enough history that directors could begin playing with it in increasingly self-aware ways.
Night of the Creeps is perhaps one of the purest expressions of that moment.
Dekker doesn’t simply reference horror history.
He invites all of it into the same room.
A Cult Movie Nobody Planned
The film’s eventual reputation is made even more interesting by its initial reception.
Released theatrically in the United States on 22 August 1986, Night of the Creeps failed to make much of an impact at the box office. Its audience would arrive later, through home video, television screenings and word of mouth.
That trajectory seems almost perfectly suited to the film.
This is the kind of movie that feels made for discovery.
You find it unexpectedly on a video-store shelf. You watch it late at night. You discover Tom Atkins. You realise how many references you’ve missed. You tell someone else about it.
Then they discover it too.
Cult cinema is often built this way. Not through enormous opening weekends, but through accumulation. One fan tells another, and eventually a film that initially disappeared into the cultural background becomes something approaching a secret handshake.
Night of the Creeps became precisely that kind of film.
The Dekker Double
The film also makes more sense when considered alongside Dekker’s later The Monster Squad.
Both films share an affection for the monsters of classic horror and a willingness to approach them with humour without reducing them to jokes. Both are fundamentally films about people who love monsters.
There is a generosity to Dekker’s genre filmmaking that can be easy to overlook.
He doesn’t want to prove that he is cleverer than horror.
He wants to invite us to enjoy it with him.
That quality gives both films their lasting charm.
The Night Horror Learned to Have Fun
There is something wonderfully adolescent about Night of the Creeps.
Not immature.
Adolescent.
It has the energy of someone discovering horror movies for the first time and immediately deciding that one monster isn’t enough. Why have zombies when you can also have aliens? Why have an alien invasion when you can also have a slasher? Why have a slasher when you can also have a grizzled detective?
The answer, according to Fred Dekker, is apparently: why not have all of them?
That enthusiasm is the film’s secret weapon.
It is impossible to imagine Night of the Creeps being made with cynicism. Its very existence depends upon a genuine affection for the films it borrows from.
Even when it is being knowingly ridiculous, there is a sense that Dekker wants us to have a good time.
And forty years later, that generosity still matters.
A Cult That Found Its Audience
The subsequent reassessment of Night of the Creeps has transformed its reputation.
What initially looked like a modestly successful genre experiment has become recognised as one of the more distinctive horror-comedies of its decade. Its later home-video life, restorations and continued presence within horror culture have ensured that Dekker’s debut is now considerably better remembered than its theatrical performance would suggest.
There is something fitting about that.
Night of the Creeps is a film about things that refuse to stay buried.
The aliens return.
The parasites multiply.
The dead rise.
And the movie itself somehow kept crawling back.
The Prognosis:
The temptation with a film this steeped in references is to spend an entire retrospective cataloguing them.
But that would miss the point.
The references aren’t the reason Night of the Creeps has survived.
The reason is that the film has personality.
It is funny without being smug, gory without becoming cruel, nostalgic without becoming sentimental and self-aware without allowing its irony to consume it.
Most importantly, it genuinely loves horror.
Fred Dekker didn’t make Night of the Creeps because he thought the genre was ridiculous.
He made it because he thought the genre was wonderful.
He wanted the aliens, the zombies, the monsters, the detectives, the teenagers and the gore. He wanted the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s and the new horror cinema of the 1980s to coexist in one gloriously chaotic story.
And somehow, it works.
Forty years later, Night of the Creeps feels less like a parody of horror than a celebration of everything that makes horror such an endlessly adaptable genre.
It reminds us that being a horror fan doesn’t always have to mean taking the genre seriously.
Sometimes it means loving it enough to throw everything you have into the same movie.
The creeps are still crawling.
Tom Atkins is still waiting for the call.
The slugs are still hungry.
And Fred Dekker’s wonderfully strange debut remains exactly what it always wanted to be:
Surgeons of Horror 