Every year, as Halloween approaches, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute are forced to confront one of their greatest fears: horror movies. For this year’s festivities, they invited two horror experts—Violet Lucca, web editor at Harper's Magazine, and Maddie Whittle, Programming Assistant at Film at Lincoln Center—to inflict some scary movies upon them. Violet and Maddie selected a couple underground favorites: Mohammed Shebl’s bonkers 1981 Egyptian horror musical Fangs and Andy Milligan’s low-budget sleaze-fest The Body Beneath (1970). As it turned out, these vampire outings aren’t all that frightening, but they challenge and expand commonplace notions of horror cinema with their play with genre, sexuality, and political commentary. The group also talked about some other picks: Mahakaal, an ’80s Bollywood remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, Sandor Stern’s Canuxploitation classic Pin, and more.

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related