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

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, polished lies of professional cinema. He wasn’t interested in making “better” films; he was interested in making truer ones – films that moved like memory and fever, films that refused to behave.

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There are filmmakers who drift to the margins – and then there’s Jess Franco, who practically built a city there. With over 200 films to his name, many of them shot in frantic succession, under multiple pseudonyms, and across scattered genres, Franco’s legacy has long been dismissed as disposable sleaze. But this reputation obscures something more provocative: Trusted by Orson Welles as a second-unit director on Chimes at Midnight and even admired by Fritz Lang, who once called Succubus “the first erotic film I’ve seen all the way through because it’s a beautiful piece of cinema” – Frano’s early promise was quickly eclipsed by his own prolific excess. He began as a virtuoso technician and classical composer; he ended as a ghost of cinema, exiled from serious discourse yet never ceasing to create. What if his descent into erotic horror, surreal softcore, and what some called “Euro-trash” was not a fall but a refusal? A rejection of cinematic respectability in favor of dream logic, ambient decay, and anti-commercial freedom? To watch Franco is not to rediscover a hidden master, but to confront a body of work that has always resisted being found.

Disobedience, for Franco, wasn’t a pose, it was a method. He seemed to understand that legitimacy in cinema had little to do with expression and everything to do with control: the invisible rules that dictated what was “coherent,” “respectable,” or “marketable.” The system rewarded discipline, not delirium. So he stepped outside of it, and in doing so, redefined what freedom could look like for a filmmaker. His cinema became the opposite of institutional filmmaking; impulsive, unstable, alive. Each film was an experiment in surrender, a wager that instinct could outthink intellect. He was testing how far form could bend before it broke, how much desire could warp a frame before it lost its meaning. The imperfections weren’t flaws but fingerprints, traces of a filmmaker refusing to conceal the process. 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, polished lies of professional cinema. He wasn’t interested in making “better” films, he was interested in making truer ones – films that moved like memory and fever, films that refused to behave.

Franco didn’t care about taste, continuity, or prestige. What he cared about was momentum; getting the shot, capturing the atmosphere, chasing whatever obsession or fantasy lit up his brain that week. For some, that made him a hack; for others, a pornographer. But for those willing to look past the surface, past the budget constraints, the repetitions, the grainy prints, there is something else entirely: a cinema of drift and trance, built not on story but on mood, sensation, improvisation. Franco’s films don’t ask to be interpreted; they ask to be surrendered to. That refusal to conform – not just aesthetically but economically, institutionally, canonically – is what makes him one of the most radical filmmakers of the 20th century. He wasn’t outside the system, he was under it, moving fast, filming faster, and refusing to stop.

Franco didn’t just make a lot of films; he made filmmaking itself a form of revolt. With over 200 features to his name, many of them shot back-to-back in borrowed apartments or hotel lobbies, he broke one of the unspoken rules of auteur cinema: that greatness is tied to scarcity. Canonical directors are praised for taking their time, for crafting singular masterpieces every few years. Franco did the opposite. He flooded the system. He shot when he had money, when he didn’t, when he had actors, and when he barely had light. The result is a body of work that can’t be contained or even catalogued. To most critics, this was proof of carelessness. But it was something else entirely: a refusal to play by the metrics that defined legitimacy. For Franco, repetition wasn’t laziness, it was rhythm.

Franco’s productivity wasn’t unique, but it was uniquely punished. Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed over 40 films in just over a decade and is hailed as a genius for it. Warhol turned repetition into a philosophy. Godard, during his Dziga Vertov Group years, released one radical video after another – work critics now call “restless experimentation.” The distinction exposes cinema’s class bias as much as its aesthetic one: whose excesses get canonized and whose get dismissed? But Franco? He’s treated like a joke. The difference lies in perception: those directors had the right aesthetics, the right politics, the right proximity to high culture. Franco trafficked in nudity, zooms, and pulp. He worked with sex workers and cult actors instead of theatre-trained leads. He made films that looked like they were shot through gauze and dubbed in a bathroom. But that was the point. Franco didn’t want polish, he wanted movement. He wanted to shoot and keep shooting, chasing the hallucination that cinema could be made on instinct alone. His pace wasn’t about exploitation; it was about freedom.

There’s a reason Franco’s films rarely make it onto syllabus lists or curated retrospectives, even now. They break too many rules; of pacing, continuity, tone, genre, and above all, taste. But what those rules actually protect is the idea that art must look a certain way to be taken seriously. Franco’s cinema says otherwise. It says art can be ugly, improvised, disreputable. It can be stitched together with dubbed dialogue and ambient noise and still carry a kind of truth. His films weren’t meant to impress critics; they were meant to follow an instinct. And that instinct – toward sensation, eroticism, repetition – became his language. Franco didn’t just reject the canon; he made a language it couldn’t translate.

To call Franco’s films “sleazy” is both accurate and entirely beside the point. Yes, there’s nudity – endless nudity. There are lesbian vampires, sadomasochistic countesses, voodoo orgies, slow zooms on oil-slicked bodies; but to stop there is to miss the deeper current running through his work. Franco wasn’t interested in pornography or titillation. He was chasing atmosphere – something drifting, dreamlike, trance-inducing. His films aren’t built on plot or logic; they’re structured like jazz: themes introduced, repeated, warped, dropped, picked up again in another key. Scenes circle back on themselves. Dialogue disappears. The camera floats. In films like Vampyros Lesbos or Venus in Furs, sex becomes a kind of hypnosis, less erotic than ritualistic. Desire isn’t the destination – it’s the haze that makes everything else unreadable. Laura Mulvey’s idea of “visual pleasure in narrative cinema” helps illuminate what Franco disrupts here: He refuses the male gaze its expected payoff, converting voyeurism into repetition and fatigue.

Franco’s camera doesn’t observe; it drifts. It lingers on faces, then loses interest. It zooms in and out not to clarify, but to destabilize. These aren’t technical flaws; they’re part of his syntax. Where other directors cut to create rhythm, Franco lets the image hang, wobble, dissolve. The result is a kind of visual hypnosis: scenes that feel less filmed than remembered through a haze. His use of music only deepens the trance – improvised jazz, droning organs, ghostly melodies that loop like corrupted lullabies. In A Virgin Among the Living Dead, sound and image barely sync, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is texture. Mood. That humid, narcotic feeling that seeps into your skin if you let it. Franco’s best films don’t seduce in the traditional sense; they infect.

There’s a moment in almost every Franco film where you realize you’ve stopped trying to follow it, and that’s when it starts to work. Narrative slips away. Cause-and-effect feels optional. You’re not watching a story unfold, you’re drifting through heat, color, sound, flesh. It’s cinema as fever dream. For most viewers, that’s the breaking point. For others, it’s the invitation. Franco wasn’t trying to guide you anywhere. He wanted you lost, floating, weightless. His films don’t open doors; they melt the floor.

Franco’s career didn’t just slip through the cracks of cinema history; it was pushed there. The films were too cheap for prestige, too strange for porn theaters, too sexual for arthouses, and too poetic for exploitation fans who wanted their thrills straight. He fell between every category that critics knew how to talk about. Distributors chopped up his work, retitled it, redubbed it, added inserts he never shot. Censors blocked some films outright and mutilated others. Eugenie might appear on a shelf as softcore erotica. Succubus might show up in a horror box set. Venus in Furs might be sold as jazz-soundtracked Eurotrash. And Franco himself didn’t fight it. He didn’t preserve negatives or defend director’s cuts. He just kept making movies. That disinterest in legacy, what some see as sloppiness, was its own rebellion. Franco didn’t serve the market; he used it. And when it no longer served him, he disappeared into it.

That disappearance was never total; his films kept circulating, passed between collectors, bootleggers, and cult distributors. But Franco himself faded into something like myth. Critics treated him as a curiosity at best, a pervert at worst. Even now, he’s often spoken of with an ironic distance: the guy who made hundreds of movies and no “real” films. But that dismissal reveals more about the gatekeepers than it does about Franco. He broke the rules that maintain critical authority, about coherence, prestige, taste, legacy. He didn’t give interviews where he explained his intent. He didn’t leave behind manifestos or statements of purpose. His body of work is his only argument. And it’s slippery, inconsistent, hard to canonize, which is exactly why it matters.

Franco never stopped working. Even when his films were butchered, dismissed, or buried, he kept moving, filming on boats, in brothels, in living rooms, in empty hotels where the echo on the audio was never fixed. There’s something haunting about that persistence. He knew the world wasn’t watching, or worse, was laughing, and he did it anyway. Not out of delusion but devotion. Devotion to process. To rhythm. To making. If most filmmakers chase perfection, Franco chased presence. And in the end, that’s what makes him more dangerous than any polished auteur: he was never trying to be remembered. He was just trying to stay alive in the image.

Franco didn’t fail to join the canon; he was never invited. Even now, when cult cinema is more accepted than ever, he remains an uncomfortable figure: too prolific, too inconsistent, too erotic, too earnest. The discourse makes room for exploitation when it can be aestheticized or laughed at, but Franco resists both. His films aren’t clean enough to reappraise and not ironic enough to meme. And so he gets left behind, not as a controversy but as a punchline. That’s the cruelty of cinephilia: It’s not always exclusion by outrage. Sometimes it’s silence, sometimes it’s forgetting.

But Franco’s work endures, not because it was perfected but because it was never polished into submission. It remains messy, repetitive, instinctive, and alive. Watching his films means letting go of taste, letting go of form, and stepping into a cinema that doesn’t care whether you get it. That’s what makes him dangerous. And that’s what makes him worth returning to, not to elevate him into the canon but to ask what the canon still can’t hold. Jess Franco didn’t belong to cinema history. He was its shadow, its echo, its refusal. And that refusal – fierce, unrepentant, and alive – is why Jess Franco still matters.

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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.