Shining Sex

Shining Sex is essentially a more carnal version of Franco’s 1965 horror film The Diabolical Dr. Z, in which a malevolent female uses mind control to force a pretty young nightclub performer to commit murders. The difference this time is that traditional horror imagery has been swept aside, leaving a series of slow, narcotically extended trance sequences, mainly erotic in nature, ranging from the faintly ominous to the alarmingly dysfunctional. Often wordless, bordering on abstract, minimal in the extreme, Shining Sex is hallucinatory in a very different way to Franco’s more celebrated work, casting aside the optical tricks of Venus in Furs and the cine-referencial conceits of Succubus and sailing into a mysterious realm between genres, a liminal space bordered by horror, sci-fi, psychedelia and pornography yet beyond the scope of each.