Movies: Viva le difference.

Over at PopMatters, critic Marco Lanzagorta discusses the traditional American dominance of the fright flick game and the recent rise of France as the go-to nation for high-gloss scares.

After giving a very cursory outline of the international ebb and flow of horror films, tropes, and styles, Lanzagorta runs down a nice list of recent French flicks that would serve as a decent checklist for anybody looking to explore the recent French boom.

In the past few years, French filmmakers have delighted us with films such as I Stand Alone (1998), The Crimson Rivers (2000), The Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), Irreversible (2002), High Tension (2003), The Ordeal (2004), The Crimson Rivers (2004), Sheitan (2006), Them (2006), Frontier(s) (2007), Inside (2007), and Martyrs (2008).

Some would debate whether Noe's flicks are best understood as "horror" films, but I think somebody interested in the broader trend would do well to get a taste of the New French Extreme's poster boy given that movement helped reclaim extreme violence as a viable subject matter for French cinema (unlike America, where sex is the big taboo, French films have traditionally been more comfortable shedding clothes instead of blood).

The critic then goes on to ask just what the heck is going on in France to fuel this new bloodlust:

Similarly, even though news reports do not show France going through a crisis tougher than any other country nowadays, can we use their cinematic output to conclude that the European country is going through a tough cultural crisis? That is, if the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes were a reaction to the social ills of the era, can we make a similar assertion regarding Frontier(s) and Martyrs?

If you think about it, such questions are not trivial at all. On one hand, the past 30 years have witnessed volumes of academic papers attempting to explain how horror films accurately reflect the cultural climate of the era. On the other hand, we can observe a clear trend of gruesome French films that do not appear to correspond to a troubled social landscape as predicted by modern film theories. Thus, we can ask, is film theory inaccurate on this specific instance? Or better yet, are we failing to see a deep sentiment of anguish and fear in the French consciousness outside their cinematic productions?

In this regard, the problem with film theory in particular, and cultural studies in general, is that they suffer from perfect hindsight and zero foresight. That is, in this field, all the theories and conjectures are based on correlations that have been deduced from observations of past events. Every time a new trend surfaces, cultural theories are modified accordingly to take these social changes into account. As such, to date, their predictive power has been close to nil. But then again, social and cultural effects form complex networks of interactions that are extremely difficult to model and simulate outside the scope of very general trends.

While Lanzagorta is certainly right that France is not bogged down in the protracted, disastrous military misadventures that marked the American horror booms of the late 1960s or the modern era, I think the idea that "news reports do not show France going through a crisis tougher than any other country nowadays" is a bit off. France is currently undergoing the greatest re-evaluation of it identity as a people in nearly 40 years. And the traces of this profoundly painful transformation can been seen throughout many of the flicks the critic lists. Martyrs hinges on a surreally brutal inversion of France's official secularism. Frontier(s) and Inside both explicitly touch on the issue France's uneasy and frequently violent relationship with its Arab and Muslim minorities. The former also evokes France's recent political turn to the right. I Stand Alone deals with, among other things, the difficult problem of economic disenfranchisement in an allegedly socialist nation. This in not to say that all these films are particularly insightful on these topics. I personally find that the intelligence of France's new horror flicks is profoundly overstated. Still, the presence of the themes is overt.

I think it is worth noting as well that, even if you add a few more flicks to the list of French horror highlights, we're talking about a relatively tiny numbers of films. Even at it height, the "boom" amounted to no more than two notable horror flicks a year. Though this certainly reflects an increase in the bandwidth French flicks take up in the attention of the average horror hound, it still represents a very tiny segment of the overall horror world.

Movies: Ils communication.

Them, the 2006 francophone home invasion shocker (Ils in its native tongue) and not the 1954 classic about giant mutant ants attacking Los Angeles (though both flicks do feature extensive tunnel systems in their final scenes), is film whose modest ambitions pay off in effective and pleasing ways. Using really brilliant sound design, a wonderful cavernous mansion set, an elegantly simple plot, and a couple of game actors, the director/writer duo David Moreau and Xavier Palud deliver on of the best of the recent crop of French horror flicks, and they do it without clumsy bids for sociological relevance (I'm looking at you Frontier(s)) or needlessly "arty" inscrutability (and now I'm looking at you: last fifteen minutes of High Tension).

The story is simple. A young French ex-pat couple, writer Lucas and French teacher Clementine, spends the weekend in their large, but decaying country home. Before they get in even one good night's sleep, a gang of mysterious evil children begins terrorizing them. For next hour (the film clocks in at a svelte 77 minutes), Lucas and Clementine run for their lives, pursued relentlessly by these faceless attackers through home, forest, and what appears to be an abandoned underground bunker.

That's it. Pretty simple.

The pleasure of watching Them is similar to the pleasure one gets watching the performance of a great athlete: you're watching excellence within a well known and narrowly defined field of endeavor.

Despite title cards that warn viewers the film is based on a real story (and, apparently, is was loosely inspired by an actual crime), the plot is ruthlessly focused on Lucas and Clementines' long, brutal night, avoiding any exposition or tangents that produce drag. Even the characterization is economical. There are a few scenes that quickly establish Lucas and Clementine as a happy, functional couple and that is that. What more do we need to know? Even the overall narrative structure is bare bones. There's a disposable prelim round kill – a mother/daughter team gets dispatched pre-credits to establish that the villains are no joke – and then we get down to business. At the end of the flick, there's a close out scene with a couple of title cards to sort of tie up some lose ends, and then that's all folks. In a way, the film's structure reminded somewhat of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not that the plots are similar or there's any theme or tone connections – in fact, if children didn't play such as sinister role in the film, it would barely score a PG-13 – instead, one gets the sense that the film gives us a little prep, then shots through the scares, and then says, "Hey, I'm done." It doesn’t conclude so much as just stop. I don't mean it as a negative criticism. It's actually refreshing. In fact, I think the movie could even have done without the last title cards filling in some details.

Visually, the film is a slick production. It has the richly textured feel that has become the dominant visual style of contemporary horror. Somebody recently described the style as "dreary," but I don't see it that way. In contrast to the bright, high-contrast colors of '70s Euro horror or the muted we-know-we-end-up-on-VHS palette of '80s slasher flicks, the colors in films like Them form deep pools of warmth or darkness covered over in an a subtle gloss – like the worlds depicted in these films are always just seconds away from a thunder storm. This gives the sets an anxious beauty that heightens the sense of detail rather than dulls it. Combined with an almost obsessive eye for set design, it gives the viewer the impression that the characters in these films live in world of accumulated detail, rather than a world designed to make a single artistic statement. It's Hergé by way of Se7en rather than the seductive 1970s art-house nightmares of the Euro set or pseudo-verite of something like TCM. The direction is confident, though the characters sometimes get lost in murky lighting and the result is not tension but eye strain. I would also add that there were some scenes in which the spatial relationships within the house were lost on me: Are we on the roof now? Is this the greenhouse we saw earlier? Overall, though, the directors manage to keep everything lucid, which is no small task considering that this movie is pretty much a 60 minute long game of cat and mouse.

The real technical achievement is the film's sound design. For most of the movie, the kiddie cult that brings our protagonists so much woe exists mainly as a series of slashing flashlight beams and a web of shouts, clicks, whistles, and other signals. It turns them from a gang of kids into a sort of airborne toxic threat – they don't surround the house so much as settle on it. It is genuinely brilliant. Possibly the best use of sound in a horror flick I've seen since Cloverfield (though considerably less deafening). The effect was slight dampened by my lack of a home theater, though viewers with the full-on sound set-up are in for a treat.

Them is arguably too slight a film to be a classic. It won't shift how you feel about the genre and it's not likely to haunt your dreams. But it is solidly suspenseful and delivers fully on everything it promises. It's hard to find fault with that.