Making Films Fantastiques in the 1970s Czechoslovakia: Juraj Herz’s Testimony

This article explores how Slovak-born filmmaker Juraj Herz (1934–2018) created films fantastiques – a hybrid genre of gothic melodrama, horror, and fairy-tale stylization – within the state-controlled film industry of 1970s Czechoslovakia. Drawing on Herz’s autobiographical writings and interviews, it situates his work not as a heroic act of resistance but as a product of the contradictions and improvisations of the “normalization” era. Using key films such as Morgiana (1972), The Girls from a Porcelain Factory (1974), The Beauty and the Beast (1978), and Ferat Vampire (1981), the article examines how Herz’s sustained collaboration with a close creative team enabled him to maintain a coherent neo-baroque aesthetic despite censorship, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and political pressure. It argues that Herz’s self-mythologizing testimony – though unreliable as historical record – offers unique insight into the informal networks, aesthetic negotiations, and contingent freedoms shaping cultural production under late socialism. Ultimately, the study reconsiders the binary between “official” and “oppositional” cinema, proposing instead a more nuanced understanding of artistic persistence and stylistic continuity within the complex and often absurd ecosystem of the Czechoslovak film industry during the long 1970s.