Page 234 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

years of German film, 60 years of Italian comedy, 60 years of Fantasy films. Already in those
days we were adding several activities and exhibitions in the margin of the film happening.
Each event drew an audience of about 10,000. These retrospectives created a public demand
for a genuine festival. As a matter of fact the public and the film distributors were immediately
enchanted by the concept. There were more problems convincing the press and the powets
that be (a few small exceptions notwithstanding) of our credibility. Only after it became
absolutely clear that our festival was indeed a success, were they 'forced' to change their
opinion. But I believe they will always maintain a hint of their initial disapproval.

GENRE: EVERY ERA PRODUCES THE HORRORS IT DESERVES

Clone: C'est moi l'original! C'est moi!
— La cité des enfants perdus, 1995

Fantasy is a house with many rooms: imagination, fairytales, the supernatural, the unconscious,
dreams. It is a popular genre that can pride itself on a long and rich tradition, ranging from folk
legends, saga's and fairytales (the Grimm brothers, for example) to nineteenth-century Gothic novels
like Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but also Goethe's Faust, Hoffman's
tales, Baron von Münchhausen, Don Quixote and Tijl Uylenspiegel. Furthermore, we could include
the paintings of artists like Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Goya, and movements like German
expressionism, psychoanalysis and surrealism.
In light of its rich, cultural tradition, it is a crying shame that the genre had to wait so long for
recognition and was ignored by the critics and the cultural and political establishment. If there is one
genre that is fiddled with prejudice, it has to be the fantastic. If already in the 1930s, and up until
the 1950s, most of the fantasy movies were labelled by the studios as B-movie products, the 1960s
definitely gave voice to a growing protesting choir of concerned parents, priests and politicians, when
the genre, especially in America, targeted a new segment of the audience: the lucrative teenage market.
The World War Two baby boomers, who were the first to grow up with television and reruns of the
horror and fantastic output of the 1930s and 1940s (the Universal horror cycle with classics such as
Dracula and Frankenstein), turned out to be very fond of an entire series of independently and more
than often cheaply produced fantastic films by Roger Corman et al, which they went to see en masse
in drive-in theatres and second-run theatres.
But this was nothing compared with the ferocious attacks (a final desperate grasp to preserve
something like a moral majority?) the genre had to endure in the 1980s, the founding days of this
Festival and an era not exactly renowned for its taste. The coming of the V C R , creating a never before
seen availability of hard to find extreme viewing material (take, for example, the so-called 'video
nasties' phenomenon) and the boom in 'slasher' and 'gore' movies, created an image that did not
necessarily fall well with private let alone public sponsoring. The softening of censorship rules and
the progress in the domain of special make-up effects allowed for a more graphic depiction of many a
gory scene. The formula (innocent teenagers being chased by a psychopath with a knife, axe or other
gardening tool) was soon milked to the bone with Halloween, Friday the 13th and dozens of other spin-

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