In 1972 a group of British experimental film-makers performed Horror Film 2, a 'shadow action' film performance by Malcolm Le Grice, at the London Filmmakers' Co-operative cinema. The striking tableau they presented incorporated the simple theatrics of shadow play and elements of playful performance enacted behind a screen, producing illusory effects with coloured light beams cast across objects, including a vase of flowers, a table, chairs and even a plastic skeleton.¹ The audience viewed the performance from the other side of the screen with the aid of 3D glasses, in reference to the 3D-movie experience popular in Britain in the 1950s and 60s, where the illusion of three dimensions, rendered by red-and-green light filters, was intended to make on-screen monsters viscerally present in the space of the auditorium. But despite its use of 3D glasses, Horror Film 2 produced the opposite result. Rather than bringing an illusion of concrete form to the immaterial film image, the shadowy projections of the performers - fellow Co-op film-makers Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson and Roger Hammond - created shifting discrepancies of scale and perceptual ambiguity as they moved between the objects behind the screen, alternatively illuminated and cast into shadow by Le Grice, who orchestrated the array of light sources.

Yet what makes this little-known example of British Expanded Cinema so mesmerising is not just its interactions of performance and coloured shadow, now glimpsed only in photographs or brief descriptions of the period. As this text considers, the use of shadow play in Horror Film 2, and other examples of British Expanded Cinema such as Eatherley's Aperture Sweep (1973), opens up a host of interpretative connotations that go beyond the chronologies