10 great French horror films

France was the birthplace not only of cinema but also of horror tropes appearing in embryonic, pre-20th-century form. The French themselves prefer to regard horror as the fantastique, a broader category of fiction that includes science fiction and fantasy. Fantastique tends to exist along a liminal borderline where the natural meets the supernatural, and realism is unsettled by the imaginary and the uncanny.

Certainly, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage, 1960) – which is now being released as a 4K UHD – belongs to this category. It may begin like a standard noir thriller, with a woman’s body being driven to and furtively dumped in a river by another woman, but composer Maurice Jarre’s accompanying hurdy-gurdy three-step immediately introduces a note of jauntily menacing absurdity. Later, the charnel-house realism of the facial surgeries performed by respectable but sociopathic Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) will be offset by the fairytale imagery of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), dressed in white coat and featureless white mask, as she wanders the grounds of his castle-like country manor (with its modern laboratory underneath). Released in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, this too would stretch beyond the bounds of what it was then possible for horror to imagine and to show.

More recently, the national cinema’s latest horror movement – first termed the ‘New French Extremity’ in 2004 by disapproving critic James Quandt – has few qualms about the sexual assaults and corporeal depravities it so explicitly conjures, using visceral shocks to explore political and psychological terrains.

Director: Georges Méliès

Georges Méliès’ silent short – though innovatively long, at just over three minutes, for its time – is the world’s first horror film, coming at the very dawn of cinema, mere months after the Lumière brothers exhibited their first 10 short films. Less a narrative than a series of optical tricks, this is set in a castle – a conventional horror location ever since Horace Walpole’s pioneering 1764 gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. It is populated with a devil, his impish servant, witches and a skeleton, all of whom variously materialise and vanish by the Satanic power of the occult – or at least of editing.

The devil appears (twice!) as a flying bat before metamorphosing into human form, and is ultimately driven away by a crucifix, making him also a contender for cinema’s first vampire – although perhaps what clinches the film’s status as horror is that a remake emerged a year later.

Director: Luis Buñuel

With its power to defamiliarise, to unsettle, and to reduce reality to an unnerving dream, the surrealist movement will always share space with the horror genre. A case in point is Luis Buñuel’s first short film, co-written with Salvador Dalí. For while one can certainly discern the stuff of nightmares in its free-associative cavalcade of one severed hand, another (non-severed) pouring ants from its stigma, intimations of rape, and a human mouth transformed into a tangle of armpit hair, it is its opening sequence that indelibly fixes this work as horror.

Here a man whets a cut-throat razor, looks up for inspiration at a slivery cloud passing over a full moon, and then passes his blade graphically across the eyeball of a seated woman. This direct, explicit assault on the organ most essential to cinema’s reception is pure horror, inspiring a subsequent obsession with eyeball destruction in the genre, from Lucio Fulci on.

Director: Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau’s feature is loosely based on his own 1926 play, which was in turn a modern-day adaptation of the ancient classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As the celebrated, arrogant poet Orpheus (Jean Marais) sees a younger rival killed by two motorcycle-riding henchmen of Death herself (María Casares), he will venture twice into the Underworld, to reclaim first his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) and then himself, even if really he is just obsessed with his art, poetic immortality and Death.

Certainly operating in the register of the fantastique, and arguably of horror, Cocteau deploys a wide array of in-camera and trompe l’œil effects to conjure an abstract, infernal world parallel to our own (and accessible only through mirrors). Meanwhile Orpheus’s passage to the Underworld, shot amid the wartime ruins of Saint-Cyr military academy, are a nightmarish merger of the real and the surreal, ruled by laws neither physical nor rational.

Director: Jean Rollin

Despite his prolific output, painstaking mise en scène (miraculous given his low budgets) and surrealist aesthetic, Jean Rollin remained an underground figure in the late 60s, 70s and 80s when it was practically impossible to get horror produced or seen in France. Indeed, in order to secure independent financing for his horror features, mostly about vampires, Rollin had to raise money from far more lucrative porn shoots.

In this film, a pesticide used in the vineyards of a rural village quickly infects the wine-drinking population, transforming them into zombie-like killers. Impulsive and insane, but also articulate and able to use tools, some exult in their murderous rampages, while others are remorseful. Rollin mixes his own poetic vibe and eerie atmosphere into materials otherwise familiar from George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973), and the relocated result is a blank-eyed allegory of France’s collective shame over the divisive toxicity of wartime collaboration.

Director: Jean-Pierre Mocky

Following an acting career that included an uncredited cameo in Orpheus and the lead role in Franju’s La Tête contre les murs (1959), Jean-Pierre Mocky would go on to a career as a prolific outsider filmmaker. In his Litan, he plays a geologist residing temporarily with his girlfriend (Marie-José Nat) in the eponymous fictive town (in fact Annonay). During this community’s annual Day of the Dead, as the town’s very foundations shake, a masked ritual turns menacing and deadly glowing worms appear in the river, the panicky couple wonders if they can ever make it out alive.

Beginning with a literal nightmare, and quickly assuming the paranoid proportions of folk horror, Mocky’s film turns a provincial town into a disorienting labyrinth where a carnivalesque masquerade is played out, and where the metempsychotic boundaries between the living and the dead become fluid.

Director: Alain Robak

Taking a cue from Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage (1988), while altering the protagonist’s sex, Alain Robak’s ur-child of the New French Extremity concerns a parasite (voiced by Robak) that has lived and will continue living for millennia, carried by successive hosts and hoping to become Earth’s dominant species. Now it has entered the body of circus performer Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou), instructing her telepathically to commit murder so she can nourish it with human blood until it is big enough to be (re)born. Or alternatively, under the pressures of constant unwanted male attention and her own telepathic inner voice, Yanka goes on a slashing spree.

Either way, this offers an internal examination of birth’s messy Darwinian processes – for even if Yanka’s pregnancy is of the phantom variety, and the parasite is more in her head than in her womb, here life itself is conceived as an eternal battle of the sexes.

Director: Marina de Van

When Esther accidentally cuts her leg, not even noticing the bleeding wound for some time, the strangeness of the sensation will lead her to a dissociative break from her own body. In trying to relive the fascination and repulsion of her experience, she will engage in worsening acts of self-harm that become an erotic, narcissistic obsession. For this is, ultimately, another French film about amour fou, except that the ‘other’ with whom Esther is having her regular sadomasochistic affair is her own utterly alienated, ever more irrevocably injured self.

Marina de Van is divided between writer, director and lead actor in this film about a woman divided from the outside world, her friends and even herself, conducting a clandestine tryst with her own trauma. The film’s cold, clinical style matches its protagonist’s own detachment, investing Esther’s harrowingly destructive gestures with an intimacy as aloof as it is uncomfortable and alarming.

Directors: Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

It begins with death finding its way inside. A foetus, shown in 3D ultrasound, is distressed by a sudden irruption of blood into the womb as, outside, the mother Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is involved in a head-on car crash that kills her husband immediately. Four months later, scarred, heavily pregnant Sarah is at home alone waiting for the following day when her overdue birth will be induced, feeling ambivalent about the baby. Then, like death itself, a woman in black (Béatrice Dalle) comes knocking, determined to claim the unborn child as her own.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s vicious home invasion slasher turns the body itself into a viciously bloody fighting arena, with scissors, knitting needles and improvised spears the weapons of choice. Here maternal urges are pushed to their extremes, and insides will out, as two women, not for the first time, come into violent collision with each other.

Director: Pascal Laugier

When Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) comes to a suburban home seeking revenge and respite from a trauma that has assumed terrifying physical form, she and fellow orphan Anna (Morjana Alaoui) will find only greater suffering, leading, in a manner that defies easy articulation, to a kind of transcendence.

Born out of its writer-director Pascal Laugier’s suicidal depression, this is a feature with a focus on the unspeakable. Martyrs opens with distraught little Lucie running near naked from ineffable childhood horror, and ends with words whispered to an audience of one (and unheard by us) that lead to an act of utter despair. In between, it offers a grand guignol of extreme acts and domestic depravities, which come with such wrenching desultoriness that we struggle even to give a name to the film’s genre, let alone to know where to place our sympathies. This difficult, disorienting but sublime film puts everyone through the wringer.

Director: Julia Ducournau

Virginal, vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier) follows her older, more experienced sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) to veterinary college – the alma mater of their parents (Laurent Lucas, Joana Preiss) – where, amid bloody hazing rituals and new sexual experiences carried out far from the nest, she will test the limits of her identity and appetites on the rocky path to adulthood and independence.

Julia Ducournau’s astonishing feature debut is an allegorical family saga whose protagonist’s coming-of-age is expressed through the carnal idioms of cannibalism – an errant, inherited impulse which she both relishes and resists, and so uses to define her individuality. This ‘average’ young woman is surrounded by other students who are all similarly engaged in their own adolescent experimentation (reoriented sexuality, eyeball licking, monkey rape) and finding their own freak, even if these tentative acts of self-realisation, once over-indulged or allowed to get out of hand, can leave lasting damage.

Eyes Without a Face is released on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and digital from 20 October.