Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress: The Golden Age of Italian Cult Cinema 1970-1985

Bodies of Desire and Bodies in Distress is a volume that fully explores the emergence of 1970s Italian cult film genres in light of the wider social, political and cultural anxieties that dominated during the decade. As part of this consideration, the volume provided the first theoretical readings of a range of key Italian directors, performers and cycles associated with 1970s Italy.Through these considerations, the volume situated 1970s Italian cinema against the toxic backdrop of political violence and terrorist activity that shocked the nation. The volume also considered why the iconography of the sexually liberated female became recast as a symbol of fear and violation in a range of Italian cult film narratives. In addition, the book also analysed how longstanding regional distinctions between Italy’s urban North and the much maligned rural South fed into a number of film cycles produced between 1970 and 1985

Beneath Still Waters: Brian Yuzna’s Ritualistic Return to Indonesian Cinema

This article offered the first academic consideration of American director/producer Brian Yuzna’s recent films in Indonesia. Since the mid 1980s, Yuzna worked across the USA, Europe and the Far East, pioneering a distinctive international brand of horror cinema combining social critique with explicit imagery. Despite these transnational credentials, Yuzna’s work in Indonesia was largely been ignored by those critics interested in reclaiming 1970s/80s genre entries as ‘legitimate’ symbols of Indonesian cinema. By considering Yuzna’s 2010 title Amphibious, I argued that the film contained elements of hybridity and generic impurity that critics such as Karl G. Heider have long attributed to Indonesian film traditions. As well as considering these transnational elements, the article explored connections between abject constructions of the transformative female body in both Indonesian film and Brian Yuzna’s wider cinema. The article also featured exclusive interviews with Brian Yuzna and screenwriter John Penney discussing the reception of the film

Ginger snaps back: generic permutations of porn performance within the films of Ginger Lynn Allen

Chad Ferrin’s 2023 film Pig Killer provides a dramatization of Robert ‘Willy’ Pickton, who murdered 49 women during the 1980s and 1990s. The film is notable for unnerving performances by cult actor Jake Busey and former adult star Ginger Lynn Allen (aka Ginger Lynn). It cements Allen’s status as a porn performer whose career rebirth has been filtered through a range of horror film roles. These performances remain notable for the ways in which they subvert and often critique Lynn’s status as an object of erotic spectacle. This article comprises an interview with Ginger Lynn Allen alongside a contextual analysis of her wider career. It situates Allen’s casting as a horror matriarch against her extensive profile in 1980s and 1990s pornography. Through these comparisons, the article charts possible gender and genre permutations between these narratives whilst offering new ways of understanding the changing status of adult performers within genre cinema

She Kills in Ecstasy and Drives at Dangerously High Speeds: The Death Cult Stardom of Soledad Miranda

This chapter analyses the legacy of the late Spanish actress Soledad Miranda, who up to her violent death in 1970 was considered as a ‘dark star’ of European popular cinema. She is best remembered for titles such as Eugénie de Sade, She Killed in Ecstasy and Vampyros Lesbos, which paired her with the jazz musician turned director Jesús Franco. In these films, Miranda was cast as either an undead, dying or revenge driven heroine who recounts past transgressions involving sex, violence and retribution. For an actress whose onscreen career was devoted to the macabre, perhaps such a violent demise, (met speeding along a Lisbon highway in a near identical manner to the finale of her last film) seems inevitable. The article explores how collaborations between Franco and Soledad Miranda function as a bridge between her fictional and the fatal last performances, as well as considering the dead star’s subsequent reception by film critics and online fans

The allure of otherness: transnational cult film fandom and the exoticist assumption

Academic scholarship addressing transnational cult fandom, particularly Western cult fans forming attachments to films outside their cultures, has frequently addressed the issue of exoticism. Much attention has been paid to how Western fans are problematically drawn to artefacts outside of their own cultures because of exotic qualities, resulting in a shallow and often condescending appreciation of such films. In this article, I critique a number of such articles for merely assuming such processes without proffering sufficient supporting evidence. In fact, I argue that a number of such exotic-oriented critiques of transnational cultism are actually guilty of practising what they preach against: an insufficient contextualization of fandom and a tendency to downplay the messiness of empirical data in favour of generalized abstractions. Further, I argue that the constant critique of fans as avoiding contextualization has not only been overstated but stringently used as a yardstick to denigrate fan engagements with texts as improper. As such, fans are often ‘othered’ within such articles, a process mirroring the ways they are accused of othering distant cultural artefacts

Zombies Need Houses Too: A Film and Regeneration Project (We Do Exist)

This film is an output from a National Lottery funded project entitled Zombies Need Houses Too: A Film and Regeneration Project. This study paired BCU staff and students with external filmmakers, local housing residents and Lottery facilitators in order to create a series of films that used zombie film motifs to document social change on an urban housing estate. The project ran from July 2017 until August 2018, with Mendik acting as lead facilitator, as well as overseeing the creation of the films outputs (the two which he directed/co-directed are presented here for REF review). The study comprised of 3 stages of project activity and evaluation, which drew centrally on theoretical debates around marginal communities in both horror film and urban society, inflecting these debates into short fiction, mock documentary and documentary film formats. Project findings were subsequently disseminated in both National Lottery policy and film festival contexts