A Deeper Guide is a new monthly column from pop-up cinema club Deeper Into Movies, where actors, directors and other creatives share their most inspiring cinematic pleasures. For more information about upcoming screenings, visit their website.

Four Chambers is an independent, creative porn studio making cinematic short films influenced by technology, literature, film and art history. Originally based out of Leeds, the studio is now working all over the world. Founder Vex Ashley started the project with her partner back in 2013. Their aim was to expand the possibilities of what sex on film could be, say and do, as well as how it could find its audience: their films can be watched at home, in art galleries and at film festivals and porn cinemas. With a focus on self-taught editing and videography, as well as an emphasis on collaborative, DIY practices, Four Chambers sits among a new wave of creators making contemporary pornographic work from a new perspective.

In their latest release Rites of Spring, the resurgence of folk horror is explored through a surreal, ritual orgy. It’s soundtracked by musician Andy Gibbs of metal band Thou. To coincide with its release, Ashley took us through the uncanny inspirations behind her films – from Portishead music videos, to Polish nunsploitation, to A24 art horror.

POSSESSION (1981, ANDRZEJ ŻUŁAWSKI)

“Isabelle Adjani’s incendiary, gasping, pulsing, wide-eyed and manic performance as Anna encapsulated something about the experience of womanhood for me: a simultaneous fear and desire to be seduced and destroyed by the monstrous, aching potential of your sexuality.

“Anna bursts out of the grey, utilitarian backdrop of East Berlin with a blood-stained mouth, howling and coming apart at the seams. She wrestles with her husband, with the idea of God, and with her role as a wife and a mother, before eventually giving herself up to the monster. For years, I’ve thought about trying to make a porn homage to it – I think me and the guys from Boy Harsher even talked about it – but it’s such a perfect film that I don’t think anything could do it justice. I did manage to go to the U-Bahn station in Berlin one Halloween and do my own recreation of the miscarriage scene. That definitely confused a lot of commuters.”

MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS (1961, JERZY KAWALEROWICZ)

“I couldn’t believe there are two completely beautiful, weird and deeply horny films about the Loudun possessions [a notorious witchcraft trial from 1643]. There’s Ken Russell’s The Devils in 1971, and this from Kawalerowicz made 10 years earlier.

“I love sexy nuns as much as anyone, but there’s something so deeply erotic about the lack of traditional ‘sex’ here. It’s just sweat, self-flagellation and inner mental turmoil that’s walking the line between purity and sin. Shame, after all, is the keenest erotic instrument. The sets and cinematography are impeccable and the wide-eyed white horses and priest with the axe at the end might be one of the most visually arresting and genuinely scary few seconds of film that I’ve seen in a long time.”

THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019, ROBERT EGGERS)

“I watched this in the cinema with absolute wide-eyed abandon. Filth! Violence! Friendship! Chaos! Shanties! Desperate, aching horniness! It’s somehow both an epic retelling of the Prometheus myth through a stark investigation of the male psyche and my favourite buddy movie. It’s just two lighthouse keepers isolated on a remote island drinking, grunting and almost fucking themselves deeper into madness. Time bends and stretches with their sanity until you don’t know how long they’ve been trapped there. Every frame is a perfectly composed, grainy, grimy and claustrophobic masterpiece, too. 

“For me, film – porn included – should be a sensory experience. With The Lighthouse you can physically feel the dirt, cold and weight of sodden clothes. You experience the dreary, endless ‘boredom that becomes creeping insanity’ right in your gut. Apparently, Robert Pattinson is always teasing that he wants to do ‘art-house porn’, so I’d like to state on the record that my inbox is open.”

THE OPERATION (1995, JACOB PANDER, MARNE LUCAS STUDIO)

“When I first saw The Operation at a porn film festival years ago, I flat-out refused to believe it was made way back in 1995. It looks like something transmitted to Earth from a future civilisation. Shot entirely on an infrared camera, a surgeon in a hazmat suit is probing, examining, penetrating and then fucking a patient. The heat of their bodies glows in this vivid, psychedelic black-and-white infrared. 

“The clinical operating room (that could just as easily have been taken from an alien abduction flashback) contrasts with the way their warm flesh leaves these ghostly traces of white heat on every surface. It’s all luminous fluids, white-hot holes and limbs swirling and merging, blurring the boundaries between internal and external. It’s the body as an energy conduit and sex as the transmitter. If you ever imagined what fucking in the core of a nuclear reactor, or the centre of a black hole felt like, this is probably as close as you can get. It’s so strange and hot and captivating. I had to go and get an infrared camera to do a Marne Lucas homage when we made our film Orgone Theory.”

UNDER THE SKIN (2013, JONATHAN GLAZER)

“Under the Skin is pure hypnotic and pulsating strangeness. To call this a ‘loose’ interpretation of the source text is pushing it. Jonathan Glazer went entirely off-script making this visually stunning, eerie and dense feature about an alien called Laura (Scarlett Johansson) that’s been sent to hunt for prey. 

“You watch Laura’s glacial, detached seduction of random Scottish men in suburban Glasgow; she lures them into an oil slick void where they pop like flaccid balloons. The scenes of completely alien weirdness then meet intimate moments of human empathy. It touches on the strangeness of inhabiting a body, of isolation, detachment and the desire for connection. If you’re looking for an explanation or even a basic plot, Under the Skin doesn’t provide in abundance. But the open-ended vastness, for me, only makes it more bewitching. 

“Mica Levi created this incredible pulsing, snake-charmer of a soundtrack that lures you in like Laura’s victims. My unsuspecting friend who saw this at the cinema with me said that she’s still creeped out anytime she hears it. Levi’s work even inspired our own discordant porn soundtracks.”

THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988, KEN RUSSELL)

“Corny, completely ridiculous and camp as hell, but I loved it: it’s basically a bunch of silly British people running around in the countryside with all the phallic imagery you could ever hope for. A blundering archeologist unearths a mysterious giant skull which he is convinced confirms the local legend of the d’Ampton worm. The skull vanishes and is discovered in the possession of the serpentine Lady Sylvia who appears to be using it for strange rites in her mysterious mansion. There’s a young Hugh Grant looking like a clueless piece of meat, a barbed snake strap-on and a bizarre, horny Ken Russell religious dream sequence (just in case you didn’t already get the very subtle ‘women tempted by snake as the root of all sin’ imagery yet). All in all, there’s genuinely nothing more I could ask for.

“It’s a folk horror about the unknown mysteries that lay deep beneath the earth. Essentially, though, it’s an excuse to let a leather-clad Amanda Donahue chew chunks of scenery in a femdom fantasy.”

HIGH LIFE (2018, CLAIRE DENIS)

“For me, Claire Denis makes the most romantic films. Atmosphere is always more important than narrative; you have to just give in and let the mood, sensation, texture and feeling of the film wash over you. 

“High Life is delicate and strange. An incarcerated crew aboard a doomed space mission stare into the galactic abyss while Juliet Binoche, a mad scientist, harvests their fluids with a device called a ‘fuck box‘. There’s a palpable tension between all the characters and you can never tell if they want to fuck or fight each other; sometimes it’s both. It’s a film that says a lot about the all-consuming human drive to sustain and create life in the face of oblivion and the prison industrial complex: dehumanised bodies are positioned as incubators and donors, workers and meat. There are moments of visceral violence and tenderness. It ends up being a deeply hopeful, human film.”

PORTISHEAD, ‘ONLY YOU’ (1998, CHRIS CUNNINGHAM)

“I grew up watching music video compilations on a VHS that my friend recorded off the TV for me. I’d still say that music videos are one of the biggest influences on what we make and do at Four Chambers. There’s something about the magic of having a limited time: it leads to a more ambiguous narrative that allows you to build a world of atmosphere outside of specific explanations.

“I had a DVD collection of Chris Cunningham’s work that I watched all the time when I was younger. Being dropped in a surreal world for a few minutes, I saw the creative potential of short, weird films. The video for ‘Only You’ opens in an industrial basement bunker with Beth Gibbons of Portishead and a young boy floating in mid-air. They’re somehow underwater, with tendrils of hair, their clothes and shoelaces weightlessly drifting out around them. It feels like a lucid dream or a strange trip. Their movements speed up and slow down with the scratches on the track and there’s this symbiotic relationship between the movement of the bodies and the audio that really inspires the way we shoot and edit sex. Music and sound gives life to visuals: it’s the beating heart.”

MEAT JOY (1964, CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN)

“My first inspirations for thinking about how fucking on film could be art were the feminist and action artists of the 1970s. Artists were using their own bodies as an artistic medium, pushing back against how sterile and detached modern art had become. Carolee Schneemann made work deeply connected to the erotics of the body, embracing the potential of flesh as form and symbol. She revelled in mess, texture, emotion and sex, things that were considered pretty crass and lowbrow by the ‘serious, respected’ artists of that time: the same is kind of true for porn today. She’s unashamedly expressive.

“Meat Joy was performed live and recorded on grainy 16mm. As an orgy of naked bodies writhes on the floor, they are progressively covered in paint, sausages, raw fish and chicken. Pop music repeats in the background. It’s somewhere between a sex magic rite and an ecstatic Dionysian orgy: it’s excessive, indulgent and completely joyful and disgusting in the most irreverent way. It’s jouissance! The thin line between hot and gross is one that I like to walk too; playing with disgust can be a powerful sexual button pusher. The film, like the performance, is confusing chaos, harnessing the reckless abandon of the sensual delights of the flesh. Honestly, after many years of shooting porn, Meat Joy still captures something about the reality of sex for me: the total joyous, ridiculousness of it all. Maybe we’re all just sacks of meat smashing into each other.”