In a recent Film Comment interview, the madcap Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin describes the different movie genres he’s re-creating in The Forbidden Room. There’s the “virgin sacrifice volcano movie,” a submarine picture, a Western, the “Japanese shamed-father genre,” and of course “a lot of different vampire films, because they’re radically different from culture to culture.” Even this sampling—there are more—doesn’t hint at this gleeful mishmash, which presents a series of fever-dream glimpses of Maddin’s imagined world of old movies. This thing is either for straight-up surrealists or fans of long-gone movie styles. That’s a narrow margin, but within it, Maddin thrives.