New book on the films of French erotic horror maverick Lost Girls to be penned entirely by women writers
The sensual, melancholy dream-poetry filmmaking of iconic director Jean Rollin has a primarily healthy male following, due to the fact that the naked female form is almost universally highlighted in all of his work. Now, Canadian micro-publisher Spectacular Optical is pleased to announce a new book focused on the fascinating career of Rollin that is — uniquely — penned by exclusively by notable women critics, scholars and film historians.
Set to be released in the summer of 2017, Lost Girls is a collection of essays that cover the wide range of Rollin’s career from 1968’s Le Viol Du Vampire through his 2010 swansong, Le Masque de la Meduse, touching upon his horror, fantasy, crime and sex films—including many lesser seen titles. The book closely examines Rollin’s core themes: his focus on overwhelmingly female protagonists, his use of horror genre and exploitation tropes, his reinterpretations of the fairy tale and fantastique, the influence of crime serials, Gothic literature and the occult, as well as much more.
Lost Girls is the third book in Spectacular Optical’s ongoing series of limited run film and pop culture books, which includes Kid Power! (2014) and Satanic Panic (2015) and will precede the previously-announced Yuletide Terror, which will be released in fall of 2017.
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Curated and edited by Samm Deighan (Diabolique), contributors to Lost Girls include some of the most important critical voices to emerge over the last decade of genre journalism: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Senses of Cinema), Kat Ellinger (Diabolique), Virginie Selavy (Electric Sheep), Alison Nastasi (Satanic Panic), Marcelline Block (Art Decades), Rebecca Booth (Diabolique), Michelle Alexander (Cinemadrome), Lisa Cunningham (The Laughing Dead), Heather Drain (Dangerous Minds), Erin Miskell (That’s Not Current), Gianna D’Emilio (Diabolique)—and more to be confirmed.
More details, including cover art, full table of contents, and information about the book’s forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will be announced in April 2017.
Owned and operated by film writer and programmer Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women) with managing editor Paul Corupe (Canuxploitation.com), Spectacular Optical is a Canadian indie press that specializes in film and pop culture books, in addition to featuring articles, essays and interviews on the Spectacular Optical website on a year-round basis.
