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The chief imaginative trend among Experimental or avant-garde filmmakers is action as a dream and the actor as a somnambulist… the world in view becomes that of poetic action pure and simple: action without the restraints of single level consciousness, everyday reason, and so-called realism. - Parker Tyler, The Three Faces of Film, New York; Yoselhoff, 1960
On the eve of commencing production on what will be not only my first horror film but also my first genre film of any kind – a no-budget, 15-or-so-minute vampire allegory called Dead Time – it is perhaps inevitable that my mind should take to wandering through the haunted and haunting cinematic visions responsible for gradually engendering my conviction that creating a horror film of my own would be a worthwhile endeavour. My interest in the form developed late and I make no claim to being an authority on the subject. Yet over the two-and-a-half to three years since I began watching horror films, two dozen or so eccentric, innovative, often neglected and always magnificently surprising masterpieces – among them Polanksi's The Tenant (1976), Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932), Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932), Jean Rollin's Fascination (1979), Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), Bava's Lisa and the Devils (Lisa e il Diavolo, 1972), Richard Stanley's Dust Devil (1992), Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) and, above all, Dreyer's Vampyr (1931) – have enriched my conception of cinema's potential and the sometimes subterranean riches of its accomplishments to a degree I would not have believed possible. These great films also managed to make up for some of the mind numbing garbage that I inevitably encountered on this voyage of discovery, which sometimes tempted me to abandon it altogether.
No filmmaker was more important in ensuring my perseverance with the horror film than the Spanish director whose name unites the totems of Church and repressive state and who, in 1971, shared with Buñuel the distinction of being denounced by the Vatican as the world's most dangerous filmmaker: Jesus Franco --http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/jess_franco.html [May 2004]
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