Channeling his deepest libidinal desires and darkest fears into films, with no apparent concern for narrative convention or the boundaries of mainstream taste, Jess Franco is a cinematic iconoclast. Six films by Franco, including the long-lost Nightmares Come at Night, are streaming during the month of October.
Jess Franco • France • 1962 • Curses and bloodlines, Franco-style.
A series of grisly murders in the remote village of Holfen convinces the locals that the town is still cursed by the spirit of a 17th-century baron who maintained an elaborate torture chamber in the dungeon of his estate. Undaunt...
Jess Franco • Spain-Autralia-France • 1964 • The film that launched a cult career.
Generally considered the first horror film produced in Spain, The Awful Dr. Orloff launched the career of cult cinema's most colorful figure: Jess Franco. Cloaking the story in the visual style of the British got...
Jess Franco • Spain-Autralia-France • 1964 • Perverse eroticism, science fiction, smoky jazz.
The follow-up to Franco's career-launching film The Awful Dr. Orloff, Dr. Orloff's Monster is a modern gothic thriller, injected with moments of perverse eroticism, science fiction, and smoky jazz. When...
Jess Franco • France • 1970 • A sultry evolution of Franco's cinema.
A sultry dancer falls under the hypnotic control of the sinister blonde Cynthia and begins to suffer terrifying hallucinations, from which not even a gifted psychiatrist can save her. Meanwhile, a pair of jewel thieves hide out...
Jess Franco • Spain • 1973 • An erotic, dreamlike husband-and-wife collaboration.
Franco’s highest-regarded collaboration with his wife, Lina Romay, Female Vampire follows the mysterious Countess Irina Karlstein, a beautiful vampiress who feeds on victims at their moments of sexual climax. Becau...
Jess Franco • France • 1972 • A melding of Franco's fondness for classic horror with sex and violence.
After the death of Victor Frankenstein, two figures vie for control of his metallic-skinned monster and the radical technology that created him: the scientist's daughter, Vera, and the immortal...
