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France has a rich history of horror. There’s the sadomasochistic novels of the Marquis de Sade as well as the blood and guts of Grand Guignol theatre. In cinema, the horror lineage runs deep. There’s Georges Méliès’ shorts and trick films (The Haunted Castle [1896], The Four Troublesome Heads [1898]); the eye-slicing of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929); Georges Franju’s nauseating documentary on slaughterhouses, Blood of the Beasts (1949), as well as his clinical and poetic Eyes Without a Face (1960); there’s Henri-Georges Clouzot’s nasty Diabolique (1955); and the rotting poetry of Jean Rollin’s collective work. Flash forward a few decades, to the mid-1990s and 2000s, where we find the intense and brutal "New French Extremity" films by Philippe Grandrieux, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, Marina de Van, and others. And there are the genre filmmakers creating work around the same time as the more...

The FilmmakerIQ.com videos posted over on Vimeo are quite fun and interesting to explore as they dissect everything from aspect ratios to lighting and their most recent video takes a look at the history of greenscreen techniques from the original black matte process to the green screen process we are all now so familiar with in today's films. The video takes a look at everything from Georges Melies' Four Heads Are Better Than One (1898) and F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) to last year's The Avengers. It runs right around 18 minutes and is well worth the watch just as are many of their other videos, which you can explore right here.