"Mammy Water" is mother sea, source of food. Jean Rouch filmed this short documentary in the Gulf of Guinea, in Ghana, where is held a colorful festival, the Chama, in which the participants offer cassava, gin and tobacco to the spirits of water and sacrifice a white ox to thank them and express their gratitude and respect.
A party of archaeologists discovers the remnants of a mutant five millennia-old Sumerian civilization living beneath a glacier atop a mountain in Mesopatamia.
A testimony to the performance of ritual dances. Although they were performed only during the so-called “unbaptized days”, the 12 days between Christmas and Epiphany in the Orthodox Christianity, these dances are associated by some researchers with the Roman rosaries, the cult of the dead. Ritual clothing and the use of wooden swords to disperse the demons are important props in the dances that are believed to protect the folks from temptations and demons until they are baptized.
A well-respected drama teacher confesses to his housekeeper that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima has left him impotent. With the coming of spring, the sympathetic housekeeper suggests that the Master observe the Yobai , a custom in which the young men of a village steal into the bedrooms of susceptible women to have sex.
Every year, on June 27th, in a small village in New England, inhabited by no more than 300 people, a lottery is held in which a family is chosen as part of a ritual to ensure a good harvest.
Based on the plot of Euripides' Medea. Medea centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed her for another woman.
In 1825, English peer Lord John Morgan is cast adrift in the American West. Captured by Sioux Indians, Morgan is at first targeted for quick extinction, but the tribesmen sense that he is worthy of survival. He eventually passes the many necessary tests that will permit him to become a member of the tribe.
"Tourou et Bitti", an eight minute documentary concerning a ritual in Niger, is yet another example of Rouch's excellence in creating documentaries which surpass the conventional documentary format. Just as frightening and fascinating as "Les maîtres fous", this one goes straight into the roots of ancient African cultures, in which music has an hypnotic effect, being at the same time an exorcism and a public show. Both the female and the male dancers are almost deities about to be unleashed... Spectral and humanitarian.
Simon is a modern day warlock. Though he lives in a storm drain and sometimes talks to trees, he's deadly serious about his witchcraft. After being picked up for vagrancy, Simon spends a night in jail with Turk, a young hustler with connections to powerful people such as Hercules, an aging hipster who hires Simon to work one of his groovy parties. There he meets Linda, the DA's pill-popping daughter. In between romanic dallances and colorful sex magic ceremonies, Simon must contend with those who dare to challenge his magical prowess causing him to summon the dark world for his revenge.
A dying lawyer belonging to a cult, seeks to be reincarnated through a young artist with the ritual involving the sacrifice of a virgin. With limited time, he searches for someone to pass on his accumulated memories. His path crosses with a struggling artist, raising questions of destiny and a mystic ritual that may alter their fates.
Documentary film making at its best as it narrates very exotic and esoteric rituals of the primitive peoples of Africa.
Somewhere in upstate New York, a young woman is terrorized by a group of rural farmers primarily interested in a harvest of blood.
A coven of witches gather in Vermont in a feminist collective’s transporting short that shakes off patriarchal scrutiny during the women’s ceremony, where they’re free to remake reality before our eyes. TRANSFORMATIONS creates an intoxicating alchemy from the witches’ interactions with nature: an attempt, as Hirschfeld remembers, to “use the act of filmmaking to heighten experience.”
Young lovers John and Jenny decide to go for a drive in the countryside one day when they happen upon the remains of a long-abandoned resort spa. After doing some exploring, they find that an elderly woman, Agnes Abercrombie, is living in the crumbling building. As they learn the gruesome history of the place, involving cannibalism and a ghost bride, Jenny becomes the victim of violent attacks and supernatural visions. But no one will believe her and now she's stuck in the dilapidated resort overnight. Will she survive until morning?
Police sergeant Neil Howie is called to an island village in search of a missing girl whom the locals claim never existed. Stranger still, however, are the rituals that take place there.
Mondo-style documentary in which a movie crew travels to newly independent Papua New Guinea to capture the customs and culture of the cannibal natives. Prepare yourself for death rituals, war costumery, crude tattoos, animal killings, and cannibalism.
A notorious mondo film depicting unbelievable and bizarre rituals, animal killing and cruelty, and people being killed and eaten, all by either animals or humans against each other or themselves.
Mondo-style shockumentary about various aspects of the occult and paranormal. An investigation into the fringes of psychic spirituality with so-called experts, it includes demonic possession, exorcism, seances, Voodoo ceremonies, hypnotism, ESP, psychic surgery, and more. A warning bell alerts squeamish viewers to avert their eyes from the more graphic scenes.
An American occult novelist battles to save the soul of a young girl from a group of Satanists, led by an excommunicated priest, who plan on using her as the representative of the Devil on Earth.
A young girl is caught up in a devil cult run by her evil uncle and cousin. She can trust no one and even people she thought were dead comes back to haunt her.