Beneath the romantic avenues of the world’s most famous necropolis lies a history of decay, ritual and spectacle. In this episode, we step away from the tourist maps and navigate Père Lachaise Cemetery by means of Situationist psychogeography.

We trace the origins of the cemetery to the 18th-century Parisian hygiene crisis, exploring how its founders used the exhumed bones of Molière and La Fontaine as a macabre marketing stunt to sell burial plots. From there, we conduct a dérive (a drift) through the graves of three phantoms who anchor the dark ecology of the French Weird: Allan Kardec: the founder of Spiritism, whose dolmen-shaped tomb remains a site of active occult devotion; Victor Noir: The martyred journalist whose bronze effigy has transformed into a bizarre fertility shrine; Berthe de Courrière: tyhe occultist, muse, and rumored black magician who blurred the lines between the physical and the spectral.

By applying the urban theories of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, we read the cemetery not as a static graveyard, but as a living text—a spatial manifestation of alienation, memory, and the non-human earth.

Suggested reading

Chtcheglov, Ivan [Gilles Ivain]. "Formulary for a New Urbanism." Libcom.org, 2006, libcom.org/article/formulary-new-urbanism-gilles-ivain. Originally written in 1953.

Debord, Guy. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography." Bureau of Public Secrets, translated by Ken Knabb, 2006, bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm. Originally published in Les Lèvres Nues #6, 1955.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Marxists Internet Archive, 2005, marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm. Originally published in 1967.

Debord, Guy. "Theory of the Dérive." Bureau of Public Secrets, translated by Ken Knabb, 2006, bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm. Originally published in Internationale Situationniste #2, 1958.

Kardec, Allan. The Spirits' Book. Translated by Anna Blackwell, Colby and Rich, 1875.

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In this episode of French Weird we recall holiday travel to Brittany and explore Korriganed, a 2016 French "docufiction" film by Gaël Bizien that plays like a Celtic The Blair Witch Project.

With your host Russell Williams, examine the Korrigan myth through Robert Kirk's 17th-century writing on fairy abductions, bizarre pop-culture crossovers like a 2011 Batman comic set in the Paris catacombs and traditional Breton folk tales of tricksters and night dancers. Finally, we embrace into the weirdness of Arthur Machen’s Welsh fairy horror, tracking an unhinged conspiracy theory from Colin Wilson and the Illuminatus! Trilogy that links Machen's fiction to the Parisian occult underground of the 1880s.

Suggested reading

Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow.

Hine, David, et al. Batman Annual (Issues 12.1, 12.2, 28.1, and 28.2). 2011.

Hodgson, William Hope. The House on the Borderland.

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (À rebours).

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Là-Bas.

Keel, John. The Mothman Prophecies.

Kirk, Robert. The Secret Commonwealth. 1692. Reissued by New York Review Books, 2019.

Lovecraft, H.P. Essay on Supernatural Fiction.

Luzel, François-Marie. The Midnight Washerwoman and Other Tales of Lower Brittany. Translated by Michael Wilson, Princeton University Press, 2023.

Machen, Arthur. The White People, The Shining Pyramid, The Red Hand, A Fragment of Life, and Out of the Earth. (Referenced via the Penguin Classics edition edited by S.T. Joshi).

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. The Erasers (Les Gommes).

Shea, Robert, and Robert Anton Wilson. The Illuminatus! Trilogy. 1975.

Wilson, Colin. "The Return of the Lloigor." Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, 1969.

Films & Television

An American Werewolf in London.

Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Ghostwatch. Broadcast on BBC One, 1992.

Hellier. Created by Karl Pfeiffer, Greg Newkirk and Dana Newkirk, Planet Weird.

Korriganed. Directed by Gaël Bizien, 2016.

Rabbit Trap. Directed by Bryn Chainey, 2025.

The Blair Witch Project.

The Borderlands.

The Fly. Directed by Kurt Neumann, 1958.

The Wicker Man.

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In this episode of French Weird, host Russell Williams explores the fascinating, myth-laden life and fiction of Franco-British author George Langelaan (1908–1972). Best known as the author of "La Mouche"/"The Fly" (1957), the short story adapted into David Cronenberg’s iconic 1986 body-horror film, Langelaan lived a life that rivalled his most eccentric fiction.

We unpack his World War Two career as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, the bizarre claim that he underwent facial reconstruction surgery as a undercover disguise, his decades spent as an unsuccessful ghost hunter and a legendary anecdote involving occultist Alistair Crowley performing bathroom rituals during a Paris chess tournament.

Beyond "The Fly", we explore Langelaan's 1962 collection Nouvelles de l'Anti-Monde (Out of Time), examining forgotten masterpieces of "time horror", reincarnation, cold war television anxieties, and autonomous chess-playing automata.

Suggested reading

The images I mention of Langelaan - and a telling of the Crowley anecdote, can be found here: "Les Chesseurs Britanniques de Paris: Part 4 The Beast." The Streatham & Brixton Chess Blog, 26 Feb. 2016, streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.com/2016/02/les-chesseurs-britanniques-de-paris_26.html

Works by George Langelaan

"La Mouche" ("The Fly") — First published in French in Paris-Match (1957) and translated in Playboy (1957).

Nouvelles de l'Antimonde — Short story collection published by Éditions Robert Laffont (1962, reissued 1966 & 2018 by L'Arbre Vengeur). Translated into English as Out of Time (1964). Featured stories include "Récession" ("Recession"), "La Dame d'outre-nulle-part" ("The Woman from Nowhere"), "Le Miracle" ("The Miracle"), "L'autre main" ("The Other Hand"), "Robots pensants" ("Thinking Robots"), and "Temps mort" ("Dead Time").

Un nommé Langdon / Le Masque d'un agent secret — Two-volume war memoirs published by Club des Amis du Livre (1963). Published in English under the titles Memoirs of a Secret Agent, The Masks of War, and Knights of the Floating Silk.

Treize Fantômes — Collection of ghost-hunting anecdotes and folklore (1971).

Other Books, Anthologies & Publications

Planète magazine, edited by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (with Jacques Mousseau et al) (1961–1969).

Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960).

Promethean Horrors: Classic Stories of Mad Science, ed. Xavier Aldana Reyes (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2019).

Danse Macabre: Strange Stories from France, ed. Mike Ashley (British Library Tales of the Weird, 2026).

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère (2020).

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890).

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886).

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818).

"Special operations: a hidden chapter in the histories of facial surgery and human enhancement" by Roderick Bailey (Medical Humanities, 2020).

"The secret scalpel: plastic surgery for wartime disguise" by Roderick Bailey (The Lancet, 384, 1421-1422)

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