FESTIVAL

“Chromosomes XX” spotlights 10 films that illustrate women’s creativity in genre. Nuanced performances and fine-tuned directing instil life into the perturbing themes of vampirism, metamorphism and mental disintegration, to name but a few. So get braced for toxic beauties and carnage-strewing ladies; they eclipse many a classic masculine horror-antagonist.

A psychotic Deneuve bludgeons and slices in Polanski’s Repulsion, as does a mad Adjani, crazed with insatiable desire in Zulawski’s Possession. Simone Simon may be sweet, but when angry she morphs into a killer leopard in Tourneur’s classic Cat People. But not to be outdone is De Palma’s brutal Sisters, a shrine to female destructiveness.

Trashy nomad bloodsuckers abound in Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark, but they clash socially with Kümel’s elegant, blood-fed countess in Daughters of Darkness. And mayhem knows no age limit in Séria’s Don’t Deliver Us from Evil: his heedless neophytes give it a try on school holiday.

On a (slighty) lighter note, try the crime-free Carnival of Souls, whose heroine’s only sin is to illuminate the screen (and haunt Lynch’s dreams) with her eerie strangeness. Then The Witches of Eastwick, whose upstanding ladies get hooked on demonic sex with Jack Nicholson, will further brighten things up. But above all, savour these xx-spiked treasures; many more of them await (re)discovery.

See the conference Women and Fantastic Cinema on 15 Sept. at 4 p.m.

https://strasbourgfestival.com/women-and-fantastic-cinema/