The Nocturne Group is an online cine-klatch (some say coven) of thirteen like-minded film enthusiasts who came together through a shared interest in the history, preservation and restoration of cinema and its related arts. For the past five years The Nocturne Group has been dedicated to researching, writing and compiling an illustrated history of cinema from the inaugural experiments of Eadweard Muybridge in 1872 until a mutually agreed cut-off point of 1999.

Between us we visited over thirty national film archives in countries around the world, ranging from the Far East (Beijing, Tokyo) to the Americas (New York, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Rio de Janiero) to Europe (London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest) and many others. The project grew increasingly in-depth, with more and more films, research and images, until by the end of 2019 it became apparent that to create and publish the original concept at this new scale would be impossible. Therefore a new cut-off date of 1949 was agreed. Even then, the history will run to more than 12 volumes and 3,000 pages, and include around 4,000 film stills, posters and other visual material. The series will commence publication in 2022.

That left just one question – what to do with the draft texts and images we had collectively amassed on films released after 1949. And so Black Gas Entertainment was born. On this site we will post occasional snippets of film information, reviews and photos which would otherwise remain unpublished. Some posts will be just images, some just text, some both. We hope that the material, as raw as it is, may be of interest to readers.

We will also be publishing an occasional series of auxiliary books showcasing high-resolution film stills from the more than 20,000 items we now have in our combined collections.

The Nocturne Group: Captain Nightshade, Cyanide Queen, Moonchild Zero, Nightcrawler-X, The Purple Gas, Lycanthrope, Lady Belladonna, Cryptomaniac, Graf Mitternacht, Tomb Star, Venus Vex, Neuro-Toxx, and Rictus-23.