The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Necrophilia is the sexual attraction to corpses. Taboo (not to mention criminal) as the subject might be, it is one that turns up with some recurrence in genre cinema. Some films are brave enough to dive full-on into depicting such as a Sexual Fetish. These works are often uncompromising and usually end up mired in Censorship Controversies as a result.
In other works, necrophilia is one of a panoply of taboos delved into by characters pushing an envelope. It is sometimes practiced by Serial Killers, including real-life figures such as Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Reginald Christie.
In other films, it is something that exists as a Bad Taste joke. There are also peculiarly a handful of films about sex with zombies.
Oxide Pang, one half of the Pang Brothers. goes solo to make a film about an obsessive girl who enjoys photographing death and her journey into a very disturbed mental space
An outrageous gore-drenched version of the Frankenstein story that frequently ventures into bad taste. Despite his name in the title, Andy Warhol had nothing to do with the film
Italian horror cinema of the 1970s/80s had some of the most extreme material put on screen. Here Joe D’Amato directs a film about a young man with a necrophile obsession and pushes the material to extremes that take you back
Actor James Franco directs an adaptation of a novel about a necrophile serial killer by Cormac McCarthy. Any McCarthy adaptation is doomed by an inability to visually replicate his incredible prose but Franco tries valiantly
Amid the overused zombie genre, this hits in with a considerable originality. The story of teenagers who find a zombie girl and keep her imprisoned for sexual purposes soon enters a disturbing headspace
One of the better among several films based on the activities of the true-life body snatcher and necrophile Ed Gein. Roberts Blossom gives an amazingly creepy performance
The inevitable adult version of Count Dracula. Beyond the obvious, this is halfway watchable, having a sense of humour and even a story, which plays out as a straight version of Love at First Bite
A film based on true-life serial killer Ed Kemper. Director Chad Ferrin made the terrible Pig Killer, a true crime film that got everything wrong about its subject. Here however Ferrin gets it right and makes one of his best films yet
The film that made the world take notice of Alexandre Aja. Aja serves up a brutal and gore-drenched variant on the Backwoods Brutality film, although things fall apart in an absurd twist ending
Controversially charged Canadian film in which Molly Parker plays a mortuary assistant who develops an obsession with having sex with corpses. Played with more taste than synopsis would lead you to think
Whether we asked for it or not, director Bruce LaBruce gives us the world’s first gay pornographic zombie film in which a zombie finds it can revive the dead by having sex with them
An obscure but fascinating 1970s film where Mary Wilcox is an heiress who has an obsession with necrophilia who is then drawn into the activities of a strange cult
The directorial debut of Mario Bava’s son Lamberto, a supposedly based on true life tale about a woman who keeps her late lover’s severed head in the fridge
An eight-episode tv mini-series based on true-life necrophile/grave robber Ed Gein. This expands the story out and considerably embellishes the facts but is one of the most outrageously out there pieces of tv watching you will ever come across
Intended as a horror riff on the phenomenally popular Police Academy series, this sets a series of gags in as bad a taste as possible around the locale of a mortuary
Drawing very clear influence from Clive Barker and Saw, this is a delve down into perverse fetish, gateways to Hell and bizarre hallucinations. After watching the film through twice, I still remain confused to what it was all about
Jörg Buttgereit’s sequel to his shocking necrophilia film
From German director Jörg Buttgereit, a shocking and full-on film about necrophilia that defies all taboos and holds little back. This has a raw, in our face shock value that hits direct to the gut
Nicolas Winding Refn makes a horror film set in the L.A. modelling world. A film of hypnotic surfaces that glitter with a troubling undertow, the result is like Valley of the Dolls as remade by Dario Argento
Film about a zombie-creating sexually transmitted disease that feels like it was made by a bunch of drunken adolescents trying to out-gross each other after an all-weekend beer party. A film that is readily ventures into bad taste and is prepared to offend
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level
Anthology of tales adapted from Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo. The various directors push the stories into an admirably perverse and disturbed space
This is possibly the worst haunted house (or in this case apartment) film ever made. In a genre where the effect is heavily dependent on mood and atmosphere, the filmmakers make the brave attempt to shoot the entire thing with natural lighting and by eschewing any effects
Possibly the most extreme film ever made, a venture into the underground of Serbain snuff filmmaking. A film that holds back from breaking no taboo and ventures into exceedingly disturbing places
Brazil’s Jose Mojica Marins became a cult figure for his Coffin Joe films; this is an anthology sold under the Coffin Joe banner. Without the Coffin Joe presence, all we have is a series of not very well directed pieces that linger on perversity, although the final segment does stand out memorably
One of the best true crime films, a chillingly good account of British serial killer Reginald Christie with an excellent Richard Attenborough in the role
One of the key films in the cult of Takashi Miike that has been frequently banned for its taboo-defying outrages in which a mysterious visitor causes a family household to descend into perverse extremes
There are few films that you can accuse of crossing over taboo lines and keeping going without compromise. This Mexican film has been construed as a catalogue of depravities; on the other hand, the lack of even a nominal plot soon causes this to lapse into repetitive tedium