Genre Comedy

Flaming Creatures (1963)

Item: Flaming Creatures
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Flaming Creatures (1963)

There are films that arrive quietly and find their audience decades later, and then there are films that arrive like a lit firework thrown through a window and spend the next sixty years being argued about. Flaming Creatures, made in 1963 by the New York underground artist Jack Smith, belongs very much to the second category. Shot on reclaimed, expired 16mm stock, the film runs to just 42 minutes and was described by Smith himself as "a comedy set in a haunted movie studio." That framing tells you something useful: this was never meant to be straight-faced provocation. It begins with something resembling a spoof advertisement for lipstick, before drifting into scenes of gender-fluid figures, a mock orgy, an earthquake sequence, and a vampire resurrection that ends in dancing. Whether any of that adds up to a coherent piece of work rather than a series of provocations has been debated ever since the film first screened in New York in 1963, where it was promptly seized by police and Smith found himself at the centre of an obscenity case that wound its way through the American courts and attracted the attention of writers, critics and filmmakers who saw it as a free-speech cause célèbre.

Jack Smith was a photographer, performance artist and filmmaker working on the fringes of the New York avant-garde scene, and Flaming Creatures was the work that put him, however unwillingly, into film history. He had no studio backing in any conventional sense, and the film's production circumstances were as rough as its visuals: borrowed equipment, a loft space, performers drawn from his downtown circle rather than any professional pool. The cast includes Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez and Arnold Rockwood, most of them figures from the same underground world Smith inhabited. Montez in particular would go on to be something of a recurring presence in the New York underground scene. Smith's approach to filmmaking owed more to collage and performance art than to anything resembling conventional cinema, and he was openly influenced by the old Hollywood glamour of stars like Maria Montez, whose aesthetic he was simultaneously worshipping and sending up. The film sits alongside other 1963 releases like Winter Light and Persona's director's earlier body of work in being very much a product of a decade that was testing the limits of what cinema was allowed to be, though Smith was operating at a considerably more chaotic remove from any mainstream tradition than most of his contemporaries.

The film's reputation has been kept alive largely in academic and curatorial circles, where it is treated as a foundational text of queer cinema and underground film, a precursor to the work of Andy Warhol and a marker of how far transgressive art was prepared to push against the censorship culture of early 1960s America. The question of whether reputation and watchability are the same thing, of course, is one that every viewer has to answer for themselves. If you have spent any time with other horror-adjacent or genre-defying films from this era, such as the folk-horror traditions explored in Viy or the body-horror anxieties of Tiger Stripes, you will arrive at Flaming Creatures with some sense of how provocative filmmaking can find genuine power through form and feeling. Whether Smith's film delivers on that front is, to put it diplomatically, a matter of perspective.

Flaming Creatures (1963) is less a film and more an endurance test disguised as transgressive art. Jack Smith's underground experiment (shot on degraded 16mm with murky, overexposed visuals and near-inaudible sound) presents a series of languid, ambiguously gendered figures writhing in what appears to be a sand-covered loft. There's no narrative, no discernible structure, and barely any dialogue beyond moans and whispers. What little "action" occurs (a simulated orgy, slow-motion posing) feels less provocative than tedious, a relic of 1960s shock-for-shock's-sake that hasn't aged into insight, only inertia. Yes, it was banned. Yes, it pushed boundaries. But historical notoriety doesn't make something compelling to watch. The technical roughness (grainy to the point of abstraction, poorly lit, poorly framed) reads less as aesthetic choice and more as amateurism. And while the film's LGBTQ sensibility was radical for its time, the viewing experience today offers little beyond academic curiosity. Without context, it's alienating; with context, it's still boring. A landmark of underground cinema in textbooks, a chore to actually sit through. Some films age into relevance. This one aged into a footnote best appreciated in description, not duration. Not everything that was once scandalous deserves our time now.

I find myself somewhere I don't always expect to land after watching a film that comes carrying this much critical luggage: relieved to have an honest reaction rather than a dutiful one. The received wisdom around Flaming Creatures has been polished so thoroughly over sixty years that it can feel almost rude to say that the emperor's wardrobe is looking a bit thin. Historical courage is real and worth acknowledging, but it doesn't put warmth in the room. Some films demand you feel grateful rather than genuinely moved, and that gap between the two is where my patience tends to run out. If you're curious about the underground tradition, there are probably more rewarding places to start than 42 minutes of overexposed murk. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a landmark is: glad it exists, glad it's over.

Rating: ★ | Year: 1963 | Watched: 2026-03-17

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