Red Nights (French title Les Nuits rouges du Bourreau de Jade) is a 2010 French–Hong Kong giallo directed by Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud. Its makers describe it as a Hong Kong giallo built from mystery, sadistic murder, fetishism, and women: an erotic horror thriller. It screened in the Midnight Madness section of the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.
The hook is a legend. An executioner invented a poison that kills through absolute pleasure. The myth comes back in the present. A French woman kills her lover, steals an old artifact that holds the poison, and flees to Hong Kong. She crosses paths with a Taiwanese mobster and with an epicurean, sadistic killer of women. The film does not say that killer is a woman. All of them are hunting the same toxin. Murder, fetish atmosphere, and a treasure hunt share the frame. That is genre plot. It is not a recipe for a poison and it is not a method for killing anyone.
Unlike a club documentary or an explicit BDSM instruction film, Red Nights puts sadism and fetish styling inside giallo machinery: stylish violence, erotic dread, and a MacGuffin that makes “death by pleasure” literal. It does not show how to make the poison or how to commit the murders. On Hong Kong streets, with French co-directors, the jade-executioner legend turns climax into a kill. The film is for adult viewers. It does not claim to teach the community how to play.
