Night of the Hunted

Jean Rollin’s stylish and futuristically surreal horror about patients at a mysterious clinic whose memories are disintegrating.

A woman is taken to a mysterious clinic whose patients have a mental disorder in which their memories and identities are disintegrating as a result of a strange environmental accident. Having made his reputation with works of vampire erotica, The Night of the Hunted finds Jean Rollin presenting an exercise in mood and stylised alienation that’s in some respects closer to art cinema.

With its atypically urban setting and focus on a strange clinic, it could be seen as the director’s attempt at a more cerebral horror in the vein of early David Cronenberg. But even so, Rollin’s style is very much his own. The theme around the dislocation of memory is one he regularly returned to throughout his career, and despite the change of milieu Rollin proves just as adept at finding haunting beauty in sterile clinics as in crumbling castles.