Arnold, which include all-too-queer high-camp surrealist works like The Liberation of the Mannique Mechanique (1967) and especially Luminous Procuress (1971). As a work that is drenched in psychedelic surrealism, darkly eccentric humor, and even a bit of cross-dressing, Speeth's film is probably the closest thing to a horror equivalent to the films of Salvador Dalí protégé Steven F.
Romero (Dietrich also appeared in Dawn of the Dead (1978) as ‘Givens’).
Assumed lost for about three decades until it was released on DVD in 2003 after being remastered at Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios, Speeth’s rather impressive debut was shot in Philadelphia in 1972 and is probably the most preternatural and phantasmagorical work of ‘horror’ cinema to emerge from the post-industrial bowels of the surely shitty east coast city aside from David Lynch’s masterful debut Eraserhead (1977) as a work that seems like a uniquely unholy marriage between Federico Fellini, Jack Smith, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Andy Milligan (notably, Daniel Dietrich of Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)) plays the eponymous villain), and George A. Of course, my dual love of antiquated carnivals and idiosyncratic arthouse horror is probably best personified in relatively low-budget early 1960s cult flicks like Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961) and Herk Harvey’s Cocteauian Carnival of Souls (1962), though the acid-addled late-60s and early 70s surely produced its fair share of truly ‘carnivalesque’ chiller cinema, with the once-lost and largely forgotten but thankfully now found psychedelic art-horror celluloid fever dream Malatesta's Carnival of Blood (1973) directed by one-time-auteur Christopher Speeth being arguably the most superlatively strange, shockingly rewarding, and conspicuously ‘cinephiliac’ of these works. Naturally, as a fairly obsessive cinephile that was bred on horror cinema but long ago gave up on virtually anything that slithers out of Hollywood, I also have an unhealthy obsession with offbeat, avant-garde, experimental, arthouse, overlooked and/or otherwise strange and singular genre flicks.
As someone who has lived in a beach resort area for about half a decade and spent most of my life before then visiting the same place on a monthly basis, I have a special nostalgic affection for carnivals and amusement parks, even if I have a very low tolerance for these places nowadays due to the multicultural mutants and miscreants that typically inhabit them, so naturally I am a sucker for strange films about strange carnivals.
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