Exploitation films from France

Violent Naples

Merli takes his no-mercy cop routine to Naples. Fast, brutal, and politically incoherent as ever.

Requiem for a Vampire

Rollin at his purest. Two women in clown costume, a castle, almost no dialogue.

The Black Abbot

The standard-issue Wallace krimi. Hood, abbey, inheritance, fog.

The Nun and the Devil

Convent politics played as Renaissance power-drama. More Borgia than bondage.

Fascination

Rollin's best, and the one where the pretty dream logic finally grows teeth.

Lips of Blood

Rollin's most coherent, which is not saying a great deal. Gorgeous.

The Iron Rose

Rollin with the vampires stripped out, and his best film for it.

The Living Dead Girl

Rollin's best late film. Melancholy where the Italians were loud.

The Nude Vampire

A secret society, a Paris chateau, and dream logic all the way down.

High Crime

Castellari's breakout in the genre, and Franco Nero furious for ninety minutes.

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

The gadget-gunslinger spaghetti west arrives fully dressed in black.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Franco at his dreamiest. Distributors added zombies later without telling him.

Calvaire

Deliverance relocated to the Belgian mud, and just as unwilling to let anyone leave.

Cemetery Without Crosses

The French corner of the spaghetti cycle: gaunt, ritualistic, and dedicated to Leone.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure

A nouveau-roman novelist makes a nunsploitation film and refuses to let it mean anything.

The Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef, one three-way showdown, and the Bacalov theme you know from Kill Bill.

The Shiver of the Vampires

Rollin with a fuzz-guitar band and a vampire who lives in the clock. His most fun.

Women's Prison Massacre

Late Italian entry. Laura Gemser, and a body count instead of a plot.

Flavia the Heretic

Far angrier and more political than the packaging suggests.

The Grapes of Death

Rollin does an outbreak. A pesticide turns wine-country villagers into oozing killers.

Castle of Blood

Barbara Steele in a haunted house on a bet. Better than it sounds.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula

The killer paralyses you first so you feel it. A first-rank giallo nobody name-checks.

Trouble Every Day

Cannibal desire filmed like an art installation, and it will not hurry for you.

Daughters of Darkness

Delphine Seyrig as Bathory in an empty Ostend hotel. Genuinely elegant.

OSS 117: Mission for a Killer

The eurospy archetype, from a French agent who beat James Bond into print by four years.

Yor, the Hunter from the Future

Starts as caveman fantasy, becomes science fiction with no warning.

2019: After the Fall of New York

The last fertile woman on Earth, in a quarry outside Rome.

Cemetery Man

A cemetery caretaker shoots the returning dead and falls in love repeatedly. Beautiful and deranged.

The Awful Dr. Orlof

Where the entire Franco machine started. Everything he made for forty years is in here somewhere.

Danger: Diabolik

Bava doing pop art on pocket change. Genuinely one of the best-designed films ever.

The Whip and the Body

Bava and Christopher Lee doing sadomasochism the censors did not catch.

The Giant of Marathon

Reeves again, with underwater battle scenes Bava shot uncredited.

A Lizard in a Woman's Skin

Fulci does psychedelia. The dog scene got him prosecuted.

Frontier(s)

Texas Chainsaw with a French accent and a swastika over the door.

The Beast

An acclaimed animator's fairytale about a noblewoman and a well-equipped forest beast, banned on sight.

The Great Silence

Corbucci in the snow. The ending would never have cleared an American studio.

Black Sabbath

Three stories, one Karloff. The Wurdulak segment is the best thing Bava shot.

Inside

The French extremity wave stripped to one room, one night, and a pair of scissors.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet

Argento's third. Unavailable for decades, and worth the wait for the last shot.

Hercules Unchained

The sequel that turned one Hercules hit into an entire industry.

The Cat o' Nine Tails

Argento's least favourite of his own films. He is roughly right.

Blood and Black Lace

The template, and still the best-looking film on this list.

High Tension

Aja before Hollywood, at maximum brutality, with a twist that still starts fights.

Possession

On the nasties list by pure bureaucratic accident. An actual masterpiece about divorce.

Salon Kitty

Nazisploitation with a real budget and Tinto Brass's dirty fingerprints. Ilsa was the knock-off.

The Colossus of Rhodes

Leone's actual debut, three years before the westerns.

My Name Is Nobody

The spaghetti western attends its own funeral, cracking jokes. Fonda, Terence Hill, and Leone's fingerprints everywhere.

Martyrs

The New French Extremity's defining title, and the one that empties the room.

In the Realm of the Senses

The art film that shipped its own negatives abroad to beat Japan's censors. Unsimulated, and deadly serious about it.

Irreversible

Noe runs the night backwards so the horror lands before the love does, and half the cinema left before either.

Emmanuelle

The film that made softcore respectable at the box office. Glossy, empty, and enormously profitable.