Subscription

Fantastique

Incorporating fantasy, horror and science fiction, the French fantastique genre offers many weird and wonderful delights.

From the very first films by the Lumière brothers, French cinema has been perceived as tending towards the real; but there’s an alternative tradition that also stretches back to the dawn of cinema – that of the fantastique.

It incorporates elements of fantasy, horror and science fiction into bizarre, atmospheric tales in which the unexplained and the supernatural intrude into reality.

From the magical illusions of Georges Méliès, the fantastique flourished again during the German occupation, reached poetic heights in the films of Jean Cocteau and Georges Franju, and was revitalised in the post-New Wave 1970s and beyond.

Eyes without a FaceEyes without a Face

Horror195990 minsDirector: Georges Franju

Georges Franju’s gorgeous, poetic horror film about a surgeon’s dark obsession with restoring his daughter’s disfigured face.

Subscribe to watch

Successive Slidings of PleasureSuccessive Slidings of Pleasure

Drama1974106 minsDirector: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s serpentine erotic mystery presented as a surreal investigation into a woman with feared sexual powers.

Subscribe to watch

The Nude VampireThe Nude Vampire

Horror196985 minsDirector: Jean Rollin

Jean Rollin’s second vampire film is a mesmerisingly surreal art-horror, short on logic but steeped in gorgeously sensual imagery.

Subscribe to watch

Lips of BloodLips of Blood

Horror197587 minsDirector: Jean Rollin

Jean Rollin’s hauntingly poetic horror about a man trying to solve the riddle of a tormenting childhood memory.

Subscribe to watch

FascinationFascination

Horror197982 minsDirector: Jean Rollin

Jean Rollin’s best-known film is the most full-blooded of his vampire tales, teeming with sex and lavishly filmed gore scenes

Subscribe to watch

Shiver of the VampiresShiver of the Vampires

Horror197095 minsDirector: Jean Rollin

Newlyweds visit their cousins at a remote rural chateau, finding them under the spell of two vampire girls.

Currently unavailable

Fantastic PlanetFantastic Planet

Animation & Artists Moving Image197372 minsDirector: René Laloux

René Laloux and Roland Topor’s surreal, psychedelic sci-fi animation imagines a world in which humanoid creatures are kept as pets by a race of giants.

Currently unavailable

The BeastThe Beast

Comedy197598 minsDirector: Walerian Borowczyk

An outrageous classic of erotic cinema, Walerian Borowczyk’s playful and subversive fantasy finds a horny heiress courting the ravenous desires of a wild beast.

Subscribe to watch

Eden and AfterEden and After

Animation & Artists Moving Image196998 minsDirector: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s sensual fantasy follows a group of students who enter a bizarre sado-masochistic realm after taking a mysterious drug.

Subscribe to watch

Celine and Julie Go BoatingCeline and Julie Go Boating

Drama1974194 minsDirector: Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette’s biggest commercial hit is an exhilarating combination of theatricality, paranoia and ‘la vie parisienne’, around an entrancing examination of making and watching films.