Night Of The Hunted

Jean Rollin, 1980, 91 mins

I don’t even know my own name…

A man driving home is suddenly confronted by a woman (Brigitte Lahaie) in a nightdress running wildly in the road. He stops to help her and finds that she has no recollection of who she is or why she is there. He takes her home and one thing leads to another, but it is also apparent that she is very ill and rapidly losing her memory. He traces her immediate past and finds that she has escaped from a sinister building known locally as the The Black Tower” where people accidentally exposed to nuclear contamination are being taken.

Night of the Hunted (1980) is far removed from director Jean Rollin’s more familiar vampire films and is instead, a stark, often brutal, and sexually sadistic sci-fi film; with scenes that are in many ways reminiscent of Cronenberg’s early films and George Lucas’s THX 1138.

“astutely captures the existential horror of being reduced to a mindless vegetable state”

“interesting, erotic, surreal, atmospheric… oddly poignant”