Dreams Archives - Bright Lights Film Journal

a Dreams Archives - Bright Lights Film Journal

Category: Dreams

Cult Cinema · Dreams · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Gothic · Indies · Sex & Relationships

Jess Franco and the Cinema of Drift and Trance: On Time, Obsession, and the Hypnotic Pull of the Erotic Image

December 20, 2025

In Franco’s world, beauty existed only through risk. The rawness, the repetition, the obsessive zooms were not acts of carelessness but of liberation. They were his rebellion against the clean,[…]

Drama · Dreams · Essays · Russia

The Hidden Film: Sculpting the Double Narrative of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

October 25, 2025

“Poetry is untranslatable, like the whole art.” — Nostalghia (1983) * * * The Tomb Beneath There is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky that has haunted me for years. It is not his[…]

Drama · Dreams · Essays · French Cinema

False Positive: Talking Betty Blues

April 22, 2023

to Lyssa You either go mad, or you learn about metaphors. – Allie Light * * * fou (masculine): crazy, mad, madman; see l’amour fou folle (feminine): crazy, mad, madwoman;[…]

African American · Drama · Dreams · Horror · Urban Conflict

Candymen: Slumming, Scarifying, and Gentrifying in 1992 and 2022

February 22, 2022

Good mornin’, Mr. Benson, I see you’re doin’ well. If I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell. – Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, “Candyman,” 1970 * * *[…]

Dreams · Horror

Dreams and the Human Material in Night of the Living Dead

December 2, 2020

Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not the wise and[…]