Category: Films

I watched Censor, a 2021 British psychological horror film directed by Prano Bailey-Bond. It received the Méliès d’Or for Best European Fantastic Film.

In my opinion, it is one of the best thriller-horror movies that has come out in the past couple years and this is why:

Most horror movies are over-amplified and over-stimulated. What I mean is that they try to overwhelm your senses with big flashing lights and intense sound imagery. Moreover in terms of sound, many horror movies tend to overuse transients, meaning that they use sound with an envelope that has a strong attack. It’s intended to play with the audience’s senses through disorientation. I normally find this really annoying and too in your face, too obvious. So, with Censor, I felt that its use of sound was far more guiding and psychological, helping to create more of an ambience and it better complements the story. I hope to see more of this used in horror movies because its a much better use of horror. I feel like the genre of horror is progressing.

Tscherkassky’s films are as much about light and darkness in their purest physical forms as they are about any of the action one sees on screen. Rather, it’s light and darkness that interferes and intrudes into the lives of the characters on screen. 

Tscherkassky looked to find a new direction for the Surrealist film tradition, by returning to Freud’s theories of  The Interpretation of Dreams and the aesthetic principles laid down by André Breton in his original manifesto. Specifically, Dream Work (the final CinemaScope film) adheres to Breton’s conceived exploration of “Psychic automatism in its pure state”, investigating “the actual functioning of thought”.

Dream Work’s footage was copied by hand, frame by frame, on to unexposed film stock. It opens with a woman falling asleep.