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Film Features

Outer Space: Hexus Journal Pick An Experimental Horror Bakers Dozen
The Quietus , October 13th, 2017 10:06

To start our run up to Halloween, Thogdin Ripley and Philippa Snow of avant-horror publishers Hexus Journal pick thirteen films that blur the worlds of horror and the avant-garde to frightening, funny and sometimes shocking effect

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Sombre – (Philippe Grandrieux , 1998)

Never has romance and menace looked more charged, or more interchangeable: Sombre deliciously toys with expectation as it unfolds like the blade of a knife from its handle. Vicious, unwaveringly intense and bleak, Grandrieux’s stuttering close-up shots recall the amateur realism of on-the-ground disaster footage — pregnant with seizure and fury — while his shifting storyline (which follows a killer stalking a young woman through the Alps during the Tour de France) indiscriminately spits uncertainty and blame.

Sombre mixes a straightforward narrative with a filmic intensity – that's as unforgiving in its clarity as it is loaded with the potentiality of threat – to tell the diametric opposite of a love story in which each shot is an atomic pile of implied violence and trauma.

TR