Guest commentary by essayist and noted film critic, Stefano P. Morrocchi) This week’s pictorial, though certainly not as long as the average ChloeWorld photo set, has a bizarre force that needs less pictures to tell its story. Any one of the photos here could have been a poster for an Italian Gothic horror movie from the 1960s. Does anyone remember the British actress Barbara Steele from such crepuscular films as Nightmare Castle (1965)? Or the lascivious films of Spanish horror king, Paul Naschy, such as El Espanto Surge de la Tumba (Horror Rises From The Tomb-1972)? There is unintentional homage to the lurid covers of horror comics like Creepy, and of the paperback thriller novels of Italy known as “gialli” with its scantily clad damsels-in-distress. In this splendid pictorial, the themes of male domination, female subjugation, phallus worship and subservience run riot in as stark a setting as possible. Chloe’s metallic mesh mini-dress is an eye-opening costume as it form-fits to her lush, beautiful curves, the spaces between the metal chain allowing those magnificent brown nipples to poke through. The leash of servility leading to the suit of armor and her binding wrist bands completes the effect of surrealistic moodiness. Chloe is quite a fine actress as this buxom chained maiden enthralled to the sinister “Knight.” But where? In some rank dungeon or torture chamber of a forbiddingly dark castle of the middle ages, where beautiful busty slave girls are held captive by horrible villains? One can only fantasize what Chloe would have been like as an actress-heroine in those older Gothic supernatural films. These images were photographed at the studio of an artist/photographer friend of SCORE lensman Peter Wall. It was also the same studio in which Chloe was body painted for the pictorial called Air Brush. The suit of armor is an authentic piece, part of the artist’s personal collection, not a modern-day copy. Peter and Chloe saw the “Knight” and thought that it would lend an otherworldly air to an unusual series of photographs, possibly Chloe’s most darkly forbidden pictorial ever.
