Glenn Ward
University of Sussex
Pulp Perversity: Sadean Discourse in Jess Franco’s Gothic Exploitation Films
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Described by the BFI Companion to Horror as a “hyperactive presence” in European cinema, the Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco Manera (AKA Jess Franco) (1930 -) has directed something in the region of 200 films. While having some presence on the horror film circuit through fanzines and websites devoted to the genre, Franco has remained for most part disreputable, marginalized both by overviews of popular European cinema and by most surveys of horror and fantastic films. The critical ‘illegitimacy’ of Franco’s output stems in part from the fact that, while much of it is classifiable as fantastic or gothic, it is also often a hybrid of fantastic/gothic and erotic/pornographic conventions. Moreover, for most viewers even his ‘best’ films (e.g. Diabolical Dr. Z; Female Vampire; Dr Jekyll’s Mistresses) are jeopardised by low budgets, ‘bad’ performances, clumsy editing, ‘poor’ camera work, and ‘incoherent’ narratives.
Yet many restored and enhanced Franco films have become available internationally on DVD, and a growing ‘cult’ audience is gathering around his films. Although there is no significant body of academic work on the director, a very small number of scholarly texts on specific Franco films has been published within the last decade (Pavlovic, Mendik, Hawkins), suggesting that the expansion of academic interest in various forms of oppositional taste, exploitation and ‘schlock’ cinema has begun to lead to an engagement with his work. Meanwhile, Pedro Almodóvar has acknowledged him as a kindred spirit, for his embrace of disreputability and taboo.
Concentrating on Franco’s films of the early to mid 1960s (specifically Gritos en la Noche/ The Awful Doctor Orloff and Diabolical Doctor Z), this paper frames Franco’s free-style gothic in terms both the libidinal politics of exploitation cinema of this period and their mediation of Sadeian/surrealist discourse. Franco’s films arguably use the narrative and iconographic convention of fantastic cinema - and the sensationalism inherent to exploitation - as a discursive field in which to explore notions of transgression, fantasy and desire. Their use of excess, hybridisation, parody and reflexivity foregrounds the ‘perverse’ sexuality of the European post-war gothic, and in so doing renders a certain decentring of desire.
