From the Old Testament to Edgar Allen Poe and utopian visions that turn into pure horror to old film material that is reworked as found footage and brought to new life: The material and motifs on which these films, which play with horror in its many variations, are based, are wide-ranging. What unites all these films is the focused concentration on their formal nature and, as a consequence, the intention on the medium of film itself. The elective affinity of these US-Americans to the French Surrealists is particularly evident in the early film by Orson Welles, a homage to Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau. Finally, however, also in Joseph Cornell's film, which oscillates between homage and obsession, distilling the gestures, facial expressions and posture of Rose Hobart, the heroine of the exotic Hollywood drama "East of Borneo", and freeing her from the burdens of cliché, stereotyping and narrative verbiage.