My final Knop, which is fitting as it’s both the title I was first made aware of, and also his most atypical release. Filmmaking as a construct serves as the narrative base, building a frame of soap opera theatrics in the low budget film world around the expected lingerie killing vignettes. Everything presented via Brace’s camera recasts the rules Knop has established for his own work and interests within the narrative itself, presenting himself with a stand-in. For the first…
Genuinely forward-thinking video art that is worth several watches. Layers and a new sort of film logic reveal themselves, and details may not always become clearer, but they do stick with you that much more. Worth revisiting as you'll find plenty is revealed, also worth seeing on a big screen if you can.
Update 10/20/2025: Here's a link to a more extensive piece on this film and its current state: www.splittoothmedia.com/les-proies-du-mal/
Les Proies du Mal is a slow-moving exercise in atmosphere and mood, laden with signifiers of terror—dolls, cherub statues, paintings, cursed diaries. Seemingly every surface bleeds. Pellissier outdoes himself for hazy tungsten lit isolation, the poor picture quality of the available excerpt melding with the score to create something genuinely hypnotic. On display are the director’s usual intrusive close-ups, the camera’s gaze…
Jon Christian Møller’s debut short is a film that gets down and dirty, from the sheer physicality of the victims and killer rolling around in the dirt and leaves, to the ample blood spurting throughout. His most infamous film may be a bloodbath, but there’s little of the pornographic offal fixations of likeminded German efforts; the film is nasty and occasionally juvenile, but not as single-minded as would be suspected from its title. At the same time, it’s as much…
