The Necessity of Unsophisticated Art

As Roger Corman's 'entertainment' films are just as important as his serious ones, and the director Ed Wood Jr is more famous than many of his talented peers, I think there is something to be said for the dash-off, the pot-boiler. A book that is fun to write and, perhaps, read. A vernacular, unsophisticated book.

Not much is known of Barbara Jones, an artist and writer who influenced many other artists and writers. Her wonderful book The Unsophisticated Arts is a real breath of fresh air against the sometimes too-precious and stultified World of Art. She puts across in one paragraph the attraction of fictional horror, not the modern, nasty, gratuitously-violent stuff, but the more intellectual, eerily beautiful yet shocking worlds of It Follows and The Babadook, films which are the offspring of Rod Serling's original The Twilight Zone (1959-1964).