Even Jess Franco himself likely never thought he would the subject of three books released in roughly a year’s time, and yet, here we are, with Kristofer Todd Upjohn’s Jess Franco: The World’s Most Dangerous Filmmaker released last January, Stephen Thrower’s Flowers of Perversion due come Valentine’s Day, and now Wayne State University Press’ The Films of Jess Franco in between.

Isn’t it a great time to be alive?

In 2013, Ian Olney delivered the fine Euro Horror, an accessible book with an academic bent, and his Films of Jess Franco could be a spin-off, as it takes a similar approach and flies off with that spirit. Olney and co-editor Antonio Lázaro-Reboll present their case of viewing Franco as an auteur, despite his “amorphousness” filmography and tending toward “spectacle and excess over unity and logic” working against him. I’ll be damned if they don’t convince.

Franco forever tiptoed through the tulips of genre — including crackling crime pictures, which Sex, Sadism, Spain, and Cinema author Nicholas G. Schlegel contributes a terrific essay on — but among the dozen pieces that follow, most concern themselves with his melding of sex and horror: “horrotica,” as Tatjana Pavlović dubs it. For example, Aurore Spiers draws comparisons between the vampire cinema of Franco and Jean Rollin (Zombie Lake, anyone?), while Andy Willis uses the arguable breakthrough Awful Dr. Orlof as a benchmark, and Finley Freibert dares to tackle the “Politics of Monotony” in the man’s dreadful DIY efforts (à la Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula that formed the final chapter of the man’s career.

But all that is the expected route. Not as predictable — and, therefore, twice as engaging — are a pair of late-in-book essays, in which Xavier Mendik and Lázaro-Reboll respectively consider the postmortem cult of Franco muse Soledad Miranda and the role that zines like Thrower’s Eyeball and Tim Lucas’ Video Watchdog on championing Franco, if not outright fertilizing his brand-name status. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.