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French films Horror
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For many film enthusiasts, Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher represents the pinnacle of artistic achievement in European cinema of the 1920s. Epstein was already an accomplished film-maker by the time he came to make this film, having distinguished himself for his bold experimental techniques in such films as La Glace à trois faces (1927)...
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One of the most chilling fantasy horror films made in France, La Main du diable is basically just an ingenious variation on the famous Faust legend. In this version, Faust is a struggling artist (Pierre Fresnay) who buys success at the expense of his soul, and the Devil is represented by an odious Vichy-style civil servant (Palau)...
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Jean Renoir’s first collaboration with French Television yielded this quirky yet faithful adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In contrast to previous cinematic adaptations of that novel, Renoir sets the story in a contemporary setting (France of the 1950s) and manages to make the good doctor (renamed Cordelier) more...
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Probably the one French film that is guaranteed to give you nightmares, Les Yeux sans visage is a magnificent blend of horror and romantic poetry which is also an exploration of the morality of scientific endeavour. It spawned a host of similar films involving crazed surgeons indulging in bodily mutilation, but it remains...
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Francis Girod made his directoral début with one of the most controversial French films of the 1970s – an eccentric yet supremely stylish black comedy in which two of the best-loved actors of the time, Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider, play two irredeemably nefarious crooks. The film’s notoriety was guaranteed by its worldwide distribution and some over-the-top (but probably...
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La Bête is the most notorious work from controversial Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, who came to fame as an animator in the 1960s, but who ended up directing tacky softcore porn films in the 1980s (including the utterly diabolical Emmanuelle 5). Before his sorry decline into mediocrity, Borowczyk established himself as the master of a new brand of surreal eroticism...
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Following Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Roman Polanski completed his masterful trilogy of social isolation and paranoia with The Tenant (Le Locataire) in 1974. In essence, all three films tell the same story – that of a seemingly well-balanced individual, a loner, who is driven to insanity through an increasing fear of those around him or her...
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As film censorship rules were relaxed in the late 1980s, early 1990s, cinema audiences would soon become accustomed to displays of graphic violence that would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier. American cinema was first off the mark with a series of increasingly horrific slasher movies, but Europe was not far behind...
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Given that monster movies and fantasy/horror films have (nearly) always managed to garner popular success, it is somewhat odd that France’s most celebrated true-life horror story hasn’t already made it into film. Much has been written of the Beast of Gévaudan , a wild creature which became a popular legend in France after killing over a hundred villagers in a remote region...
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Alexandre Aja’s blood-soaked homage to the kind of gratuitously gory horror films that earned cinema a bad name in the early 1980s is certainly not a film that will appeal to all tastes. Whilst it has exceptional production values and is actually a rather good film of its kind – certainly from the point of view of technical presentation...
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Madame Edouard is the first full-length film from successful Belgian writer Nadine Monfils, an inspired adaptation of the first in her series of popular crime novels featuring the unconventional detective Léon. The film’s strength lies not in its plot – which is pretty thin and unconvincing – but in its extraordinary array of characters...
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Supposedly based on a true story, Ils is a superlative example of the psycho-thriller/horror genre that first became popular in the early 1970s and gained some measure of respectability with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Director John Carpenter developed the genre into what we now term the slasher thriller by introducing graphic violence with his film Halloween (1978)...
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