Thanatomorphose
Cinema is a screen onto which we can project our fears, torments and the monstrosities of the world. The screen protects us from what we see, but cinema has also permanently anchored our nightmares around a few powerful images (empty houses, hostile attics and basements, demonic masks, bloodcurdling grimaces, disturbing postures). Throughout the summer, the Cinémathèque québécoise will be presenting a series of films encompassing more than one hundred and twenty years of horror, reminding us that what scares us most is to make the deepest of our fears tangible and credible.
In the presence of the director
One morning, the young and beautiful Laura inexplicably and inexorably begins to rot... A Kafkaesque tale of sexuality, horror and bodily fluids...
Éric Falardeau
Eric Falardeau holds a Master's degree in Film Studies from the Université de Montréal. He is a filmmaker, lecturer, author and teacher. He curated the exhibition Secrets and Illusions, the Magic of Special Effects (Cinémathèque québécoise, April 2013 to April 2018). He has written several books on the body in cinema and special effects, as well as a large number of conferences on eroticism and pornography. He is also a musician and has shot video clips. His short films have been screened in a multitude of festivals around the world, where they have won numerous awards. Among them, the astonishing animated film Crépuscule, the referential and cinephilic La petite mort, the traumatic Coming home or the palmist Elégie nocturne. His first feature film, Thanatomorphose, an extreme but strangely beautiful film about the slow physical decomposition of a young living woman, was released in 2012 and has since been distributed in a dozen countries. Internationally recognized, Eric Falardeau has thus become the most important Quebec genre filmmaker of his generation.
