You are now listening to Postmortem with Mick Garrus, where the most influential voices

in horror cinema will spill their guts to the renowned horror director, writer, and producer.

Now here's your host, Mick Garrus.

From Nysky Productions World Headquarters overlooking the glamorous San Fernando Valley, I'm Mick

Garrus, and this is Postmortem. Horror is international. It always has been from the earliest silent

films like The Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to The Babadook and trained to

boost on. Outstanding original tales of terror have come from all over the world.

In recent years, one of the countries that has contributed their own brutalist, no-holds-barred

fright films is France. Modern French horror has even earned its own subgenre, with a name

and everything. New French extremity. Though it's difficult to generalize about a single

nation and its film exports, it's hard to dispute that some of the most extreme genre

films in recent history have come from France.

If you are familiar with movies like Calvare, martyrs, frontiers, eels, them in English,

high tension, revenge, raw, and the films of Gaspernoy, then you know how hard hitting

these films can be. What is it about the galaxy in a sensibility that leans into the explicit

violence inherent in their films?

The French have long been socially and artistically revolutionary, and their artists like the

pop the bubbles of social graces. Is there a pent-up frustration and social fury that

is invisible to the eyes of American observers? While in the United States, the studios primarily

aim their genre fair at a young and eager audience for date night, French horror films

are decidedly aimed at adults. They are sanguitary but deeply emotional overall. They go places

that not many others dare to travel.

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