The Savage Eye
Los Angeles and its inhabitants are presented in the starkest of terms in this faux documentary written and directed by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick. Produced over a four-year period, Haskell Wexler was one of three cinematographers who followed the seemingly aimless journey of Barbara Baxley as Judith X, a divorcée adrift in the City of Angels. Critically acclaimed at film festivals, the movie has been compared to others as disparate as The Misfits and Juliet of the Spirits.
About Kier-La Janisse
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, programmer, publisher, producer and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012) and has been an editor on several books including Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s (2012) and David Gregory’s Tales of the Uncanny (2020), and is currently co-editing an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr. and writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. Her first feature as writer/director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror debuts at SXSW 2021. For more on her work see kierlajanisse.com
Kier-La, this is an outstanding essay on a film that I didn’t even know existed. Thank you.