Viva La Fright!

As promised, the first thing I want to lift the lid on is the new wave of French horror that seems to have replaced the ghosties of Asian cinema as the next big thing. For years, now, we've been inundated with images of J-Horror staples like the pale chick with long hair and black eyes, or the pale kid with dark eyes, or whatever Ju-on or Pulse-inspired ghouls you care to name. Sure, there are some great works in that canon, and we'll look at those at another time, but I want to swing to the West, geographically speaking, for the next big thing.

I remember seeing the impressively moody pieces of Jacque Tourneur early on in my cultural development. Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and, especially, Curse of the Demon were all early masterpieces that followed the less-is-more philosophy while creating a funky mood with lighting and some genuinely interesting philosophical question riding beneath the scares. Since then, and do correct me if I'm wrong, the French have been fairly quiet on the subject of horror. Or, at least, it hasn't been in the fore of their exported cinema.
What the hell happened? I think, for me, it began with Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension. Although it clearly borrowed from Dean Koontz's Intensity, there was no question that something was going on in that film. A friend of mine always references the decapitated head/blowjob scene in the early going of that film as the moment when she realized that she was in the hands of a director who wasn't playing nice with his audience. Aja has since gone on to do some interesting work, but not with the same bravado that Haute Tension displayed. Still, chalk one up for the Gauls.

Then, the floodgates opened. Frontier(s) hit, Ils showed the world how to do a home invasion film, and A L'Interieur laid it down like no other movie in recent memory. Interestingly, both Frontier(s) and A L'interieur both use political upheaval as a backdrop for the more horrifying story in the fore to unfold. If all horror is a reflection of a culture, then the recent election of a more conservative government is rattling the usually free-wheeling French. These new films are showing a country on the brink of complete breakdown, where the horrors of the past, such as the French collusion with Nazis in WW2, reassert themselves, as in Frontier(s).

And, now, rumors are buzzing around Martyrs, supposedly even more extreme than the previous exports. Extreme doesn't necessarily mean good, but it's clear that the crop of filmmakers at the helms of these entertaining and exciting movies don't really give a good shit how comfortable their audience is, or what some may say about the violence in them. I respect that.