Genre
The best French fantasy films
The country of realism has also produced some of cinema's great dreamers, from Méliès to Cocteau and Jeunet.
By Eleanor Hale
French cinema is often associated with realism and conversation, but its very first star director, Georges Méliès, made magic films, and the line of fantasy runs through its whole history: the surrealists, Jean Cocteau's poetic myths, Georges Franju's horror, the visual worlds of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the body horror of Julia Ducournau. Here are the best, in chronological order.
Silent crime serialLes VampiresLouis Feuillade · 1915
Fantasy comedyLes Belles de nuitRené Clair · 1952Le Voyage dans la Lune (Georges Méliès, 1902)
Astronomers fired to the moon in a shell, which lands in the moon's eye. One of the most famous images in film history, by the stage magician who invented film trickery.
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915)
No vampires, but a dreamlike Paris of secret passages, disguises and impossible escapes that the surrealists adored.
La Chute de la maison Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928)
Poe's tale of a doomed house, filmed in slow motion and superimposition.
La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
The fairy tale with Jean Marais as the Beast, human arms holding candelabras and statues that watch. Pure enchantment.
Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950)
A poet follows Death through the mirror into the underworld, in a postwar Paris of motorcyclists and radio messages.
Les Belles de nuit (René Clair, 1952)
A composer's dreams carry him through the centuries. Fantasy as comedy.
Les Yeux sans visage (Georges Franju, 1960)
A surgeon steals the faces of young women for his disfigured daughter. Horror that is also poetic.
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
A short science-fiction film told almost entirely in still photographs: a man sent back in time from a ruined Paris. It inspired 12 Monkeys.
Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Lemmy Caution, played by Eddie Constantine, in a city of the future ruled by a computer. Shot in ordinary 1960s Paris.
La Planète sauvage (René Laloux, 1973)
An animated film about tiny humans kept as pets by giant blue aliens, designed by Roland Topor. Strange and beautiful.
Delicatessen (Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1991)
A butcher's building after the apocalypse, where tenants are on the menu.
La Cité des enfants perdus (Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, 1995)
A mad scientist who cannot dream kidnaps children to steal theirs. A steampunk world built in the studio.
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
A man spends a day in a limousine travelling to appointments where he becomes someone else.
Grave (Julia Ducournau, 2016)
A vegetarian veterinary student develops a taste for meat. Horror about growing up. Ducournau's Titane (2021) won the Palme d'Or.
Where to go next
For more films outside the realist tradition, see the 1920s avant-garde in the best French films of the 1920s, or browse the 100 best French films.