Journey with award-winning documentarian and author Laurent Bouzereau through acclaimed director Brian De Palma’s renowned—and controversial—horror and thriller films that redefined cinema in the 1970s and early 80s with new interviews and fresh takes.

Among a crop of fresh filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola in the 70s, Brian De Palma—a director from Philadelphia with a few small comedies under his belt—charted a cinematic path unlike any of his peers. At times he was unfairly dismissed as a Hitchcock copycat; other times he was misunderstood for his peculiar mix of sexuality, humor, music, and violence. But, over the course of ten years, he created a new cinematic language, melding his signature themes with specific filmmaking techniques that are now synonymous with his name.

Drawing from his lifelong love of De Palma, years of research, and new interviews, acclaimed documentarian Laurent Bouzereau explores the seven films that came to define The De Palma Decade—Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out. He combines film analysis, detailed history of the films’ productions, and interviews with De Palma himself, his casts, and collaborators to present the definitive record on this unrivaled period of cinematic creativity and the emergence of an auteur who would continue to influence filmmaking in the decades that followed.

Bouzereau, whose previous books include The De Palma Cut, The Cutting Room Floor, Spielberg: The First Ten Years, and Hitchcock, Piece by Piece, among several others, has been making behind-the-scenes documentaries surrounding films by De Palma, Spielberg, and countless others for decades now. He is also working on a documentary about film composer John Williams.

The career-spanning Baumbach/Paltrow doc is terrific, of course, but if you really want to go in-depth with De Palma discussing his career, the Blumenfeld/Vachaud book is the go-to source. As we know, there are several great books about De Palma and his work -- this one fits in with something like Hitchcock/Truffaut, or Matt Zoller Seitz's comprehensive conversation books with Wes Anderson and Oliver Stone. There really should be an English-language translation -- hopefully someone will look into that and make it happen.

In addition, a book will be published ahead of the festival, also titled De Palma vs De Palma. El Terror Tiene Forma's Jesus Marti provides a nice rundown of the book:

El Festival de Cine de Terror de Molins de Rei (TerrorMolins) and Editorial Hermenaute collaborate for the third consecutive year in what will be its 37th edition with a book about the career of the North American director Brian De Palma. The veteran festival, which will be held from November 9 to 18, this year has as its central theme the director of Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise.

The book reviews the extensive film career of the director of Carrie and Carlito's Way among other essential films. It is a collective essay around the work of the great filmmaker, the great protagonist of the 2018 edition of the Terror Film Festival of Molins de Rei.

Under the title of De Palma vs. De Palma, the book explores many of the essential concepts of the work of De Palma from the personal vision of six authors, each of which focuses its individual analysis on one of these constants. Keith Gordon, actor in two films by Brian De Palma and American filmmaker, contributes with an emotional forward.

De Palma vs. De Palma is a book that deals with formal duality, split identity, aspects such as the split screen and the methodical amplification of Alfred Hitchcock's legacy. A book that avoids the hackneyed chronological analysis and offers an interesting discourse about the work of the New York based director in six complementary articles. De Palma vs De Palma gets, from the analysis of the filmography of the director of Dressed To Kill, make us rethink the discourse of his work and discover new theories. A book that vindicates the figure of one of the best and most controversial filmmakers in history; an essential essay for every movie buff and any curious reader interested in psychology, art, sociology and other fields intimately related to the seventh art, the thriller and the fantastic.

Coordinated by Albert Galera, the book has the signatures of Antonio José Navarro, Gerard Fossas, Jordi Batet, Jaume Claver, Ignasi Juliachs and the same Albert Galera, artistic director of TerrorMolins, writer and film historian.

Cover design: Marta Torres.

One of the new Hollywood cult filmmakers in an exceptional interview book! Published in 2001 and very quickly exhausted, the mythical book of Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud will be released on November 11 in a new revised version and updated with unprecedented interviews with the director, on his films made since then! Also included in the box: 6 film star films in DVD (Phantom of the Paradise, The Fury, Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, Body Double and Scarface).

Keesey has taken an unusual approach to his subject. Rather than lay down a biographical foundation at the outset, he introduces elements of De Palma’s private life as they crop up in his movies: 29 in all, which Keesey summarizes and analyzes in chronological order. (To avoid plot spoilage, save Keesey’s chapter on a given film until after you’ve seen it.) This works better than one might expect because, more than most directors, De Palma pours his psyche into his work. “When you’re making a movie,” he has said, “you think about it all the time — you’re dreaming about it, you wake up with ideas in the middle of the night — until you actually . . . shoot it. You have these ideas that are banging around in your head, but once you objectify them and lock them into a photograph or cinema sequence, then . . . they no longer haunt you.” De Palma has also written the scripts for many of his films, but Keesey could have done a better job of helping us keep track of who did what. The book cries out for a filmography.

As it turns out, De Palma has a highly charged past to draw on. When he was in his late teens, his father, an orthopedic surgeon in Philadelphia, allowed the boy to watch him in action. “I was standing right next to him in front of the operating room table,” De Palma recalled of one episode. “He cut off a patient’s leg and then gave it to me!” When Dr. De Palma had an extramarital affair, Brian found out about it, sided with his mother and got busy gathering evidence on her behalf with a tape recorder and a camera. And for all his eventual success, Brian was not the standout among the offspring. That honor went to his mathematically gifted older brother Bruce, with whom Brian had to compete as a kid. (Bruce later descended into what Keesey calls “a kind of hubristic madness.”)

De Palma works out that sibling rivalry in Sisters, in which the eponymous women — both played by Margot Kidder — were born as conjoined twins and then surgically separated. De Palma’s harrowing experience in that operating room helps account for the dismemberment in Body Double. As for using a tape recorder to gather incriminating evidence, look no further than Blow Out...

One more thing about Blow Out. Although it obviously owes something to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (as even the titles suggest) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, I think Blow Out outclasses both forerunners in sheer entertainment value. In any case, that seems to be the way with De Palma: He is one of those artists whose forte is spinning variations on themes pioneered by others. And what’s wrong with that? What contemporary mystery writer hasn’t been strongly influenced, at least indirectly, by Wilkie Collins and James M. Cain? What writer of romances doesn’t owe a big debt to the Brontë sisters and Daphne du Maurier?

Hollywood has shamefully neglected De Palma; he’s never even been nominated for a best director Oscar. Brian De Palma’s Split-Screen announces that it’s time for a reassessment of his unjustly slighted oeuvre.