Fascination: The Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin is a 2016 book by David Hinds, published in the UK by Headpress.
Press release:
May 1968. Parisian streets are awash with violence and public unrest. In a small cinema, a surreal vampire film causes a riot: The audience smashes up the auditorium, tear out the seats, and chase the film’s director onto the street with violent intent. This is the premiere screening of Jean Rollin’s feature debut, The Rape of the Vampire.
An outsider of French cinema, Rollin’s films are unique and dreamlike. They offer tales of mystery and nostalgia – of love, childhood, obsolescence and seductive female vampires with a thirst for blood and sex. Rollin made strange, evocative and deeply personal horror films. But he was also at the heart of the French pornographic revolution after the abolishment of censorship (discovering porn queen Brigitte Lahaie, later to star in many of his films).
Funding his own projects, Rollin defiantly made the films he wanted make and in so doing created a fantastique genre unlike any other. Films like The Nude Vampire, The Living Dead Girl, Fascination and The Grapes of Death are now celebrated as the work of an auteur, one who confounds preconceived notions of what constitutes ‘Eurotrash’ cinema.
This book is devoted to the director and all his films, across all genres. Written with full co-operation from Jean Rollin, shortly before his death in 2010, it contains exclusive interviews and archive material.
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