The French Fantastique Canon

The French have a word the English language lacks, and the absence explains a lot. Le fantastique names a mode where the impossible enters an ordinary world and the story refuses to resolve whether it was real. Tzvetan Todorov defined it in 1970 as the hesitation itself — the moment before the reader decides between a natural explanation and a supernatural one, held open for the length of a book. Anglophone criticism has no equivalent, so it files the same material under horror, sees the lack of monsters, and shrugs.

That definitional gap is why French genre cinema keeps getting described as art-house by people who mean it as an insult. The tradition runs from Feuillade’s serials through Cocteau and Franju to Rollin’s beaches and the New French Extremity, and it is continuous. What binds it is a specific temperature: the horror is delivered calmly, often beautifully, frequently by someone in a white coat who is being very reasonable. Ten films, chronologically, and each one earns the next.

The silent root

Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915-16). Ten episodes, nearly seven hours, made in wartime Paris under blackout conditions, about a criminal gang that terrorises the city while the police achieve nothing. There are no vampires. The gang simply calls itself that, and Musidora’s Irma Vep in a black bodystocking became the first great icon of French genre cinema — the anagram in her name is the film telling you it knows exactly what it is doing. Feuillade shot on real Paris streets in long static takes, so the fantastical intrudes into documentary space, which is precisely the fantastique mechanism arriving fully formed in 1915. The surrealists worshipped it. Everything downstream begins here.

Un chien andalou (Buñuel and Dalí, 1929). Sixteen minutes, French-produced, and the eyeball is only the first thirty seconds. What matters is the film’s grammar: intertitles announcing times that mean nothing, a room that becomes a beach, causality abolished without apology. Buñuel and Dalí wrote it by agreeing to reject any image either could explain. That rule — the image is admitted only if it resists interpretation — becomes the operating principle for half this canon, and Jean Rollin would build an entire career on it.

The poets

Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950). Cocteau puts the Orpheus myth in postwar Paris, makes Death a woman in a Rolls-Royce with motorcycle outriders, and sends his hero through mirrors into an underworld of bombed rubble. The mirror effects are mercury baths and reversed film, achieved in-camera, and they remain more convincing than most digital equivalents because they carry weight and resistance. Cocteau’s underworld is a bureaucracy — Death has superiors, and has to explain herself in a tribunal — which is a far stranger idea than any monster.

Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960). The centre of the canon, and the film every subsequent French horror director has had to answer. A surgeon abducts young women to graft their faces onto his disfigured daughter; Edith Scob spends the film behind a smooth white mask, acting entirely with her hands and her walk. Franju shoots the surgery in a long, flat, clinical take that got the film banned or cut across Europe, and then shoots everything else like a fairy tale, with Maurice Jarre’s carnival waltz playing over a car full of a doctor’s crimes. My longer case for it is Eyes Without a Face, the most beautiful horror film ever made, and Franju’s whole strange career is in Georges Franju, the poet of the gentle macabre.

Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955). The most conventionally satisfying film here and the one that proves the tradition can build a machine. A wife and a mistress conspire to drown the man they share, and the corpse declines to stay put. Clouzot bought the rights out from under Hitchcock by a matter of hours, which is a fact worth savouring. The bathtub scene is famous; the reason it works is the fifteen minutes of drab provincial-school realism preceding it, in which Clouzot bores you deliberately so the impossible has somewhere to land. Full argument in Les Diaboliques, Clouzot’s bathtub shocker.

La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962). Twenty-eight minutes of still photographs and a narrator, a postwar Paris in ruins, a man sent through time toward a memory of a woman on a pier at Orly. One shot moves. That single blink is the most famous cut in French genre cinema, and it works because Marker has spent twenty minutes teaching you that motion is impossible in this world. Terry Gilliam remade it as 12 Monkeys, covered in 12 Monkeys, Gilliam’s time loop of despair, and lost the one thing that made it unbearable.

The dreamers

The Shiver of the Vampires (Jean Rollin, 1971). Rollin is the tradition’s problem child and belongs here regardless. A honeymooning couple arrive at a château to find the bride’s cousins have become vampires, a servant woman emerges from a grandfather clock, and a rock band plays over the credits. Nothing coheres. Rollin’s films are the surrealist rule from 1929 applied to Eurohorror economics — images admitted because they resist explanation, funded by a market that wanted nudity and got reverie. The full case is in Jean Rollin, the dreamer of vampire reverie and the watchlist in the Jean Rollin canon.

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974). Three hours and a genuine haunted-house film wearing the costume of a whimsical comedy. Two women discover a house where the same melodrama replays endlessly, and gain access to it by sucking a sweet, and eventually decide to interfere. Rivette makes the ghost story literal — a loop, a script, characters who cannot deviate — and then lets two ordinary Parisians walk into it and start improvising. Every haunted-video-tape film of the last thirty years is downstream of it and almost none of them know.

Delicatessen (Jeunet and Caro, 1991). Post-apocalyptic Paris, a butcher who sells his tenants, a tone somewhere between Gilliam and a music-hall routine. Jeunet and Caro filter everything through a bile-green grade and choreograph the building’s noises into a rhythm, and the celebrated sequence — a bedspring squeak setting the tempo for every other activity in the block — is a cartoon idea executed with total precision. The fantastique’s comic register, rarely used and startling when it arrives.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001). The tradition arriving in the present, at maximum severity. Denis takes a virus that turns desire into consumption and refuses to explain any of it — no origin, no cure, barely a plot — while Agnès Godard’s camera dwells on skin with an intimacy that curdles as the film proceeds. It was booed at Cannes. It is the direct parent of the wave discussed in New French Extremity, shock with a thesis, and the harder titles in it are listed in the New French Extremity canon.

Three at the border

The canon has a frontier, and it is worth naming what sits on it. Daughters of Darkness (Harry Kümel, 1971) is Belgian, shot in French and English on the deserted Ostend seafront, and is the most elegant vampire film the tradition produced — Delphine Seyrig playing Elizabeth Báthory as a couture ghost drifting through an empty grand hotel. The case for it is in Daughters of Darkness, the most elegant vampire film of the 70s. Kümel’s Malpertuis the same year is the deeper cut: Orson Welles in a house where the Greek gods have been sewn into human skins and kept as tenants, an idea so good it survives the film’s incoherence.

The Beast (Walerian Borowczyk, 1975) is the one I would talk anyone out of using as an entry point and would defend to the last if pushed. Borowczyk was a serious animator who drifted into erotica, and the film is an eighteenth-century fever dream about a woman, a wolf, and a family fortune, staged with the compositional care of someone who had spent a decade on frames. It was refused a British certificate for years. It is also, once, genuinely funny, which almost nothing else in this canon manages on purpose.

And Baxter (Jérôme Boivin, 1989), a film narrated by a bull terrier who is dissatisfied with his owners and takes steps. The premise sounds like a comedy sketch. The execution is flat, patient and quietly appalling, and it is the purest demonstration on this list of what the fantastique actually does: one impossible fact — the dog thinks in sentences — dropped into a completely naturalistic French suburb, with everything else left alone.

The technique that runs through all of it

Watch these in order and one method recurs: the horror is staged in wide, held, unhurried shots. Franju films the transplant flat and frontal. Clouzot leaves the bath in the frame. Denis holds on a face far past comfort. Anglophone horror cuts on impact — the shock is manufactured in the edit, three frames of the knife and a stab of strings. The French tradition puts the camera down and waits, which transfers the work to the viewer. You are made responsible for looking, and there is no cut to release you.

The second recurring choice is the score. Jarre’s fairground waltz over a surgeon’s crimes; Cocteau’s underworld rendered in silence; the incongruous prog rock in Rollin. The tradition consistently scores against the image, which is a way of refusing to tell you how to feel, and it is why these films unsettle people who can watch a slasher with a sandwich in hand.

And the third is the face. Scob’s mask, Musidora’s hood, the loop of the same performance in Rivette. French horror is obsessed with the face as an object that can be removed, copied, borrowed or worn, which connects the whole canon back to a country that spent the Occupation learning what a neighbour’s face was worth. Franju was in the Resistance’s orbit and made a documentary about an abattoir before he made anything about a surgeon.

Start with Eyes Without a Face and Les Diaboliques, both in print from Criterion. Then La Jetée, which costs you half an hour. If those land, the rest of the tradition is waiting, and the border between it and the disreputable end of Eurohorror is thinner than either side likes to admit — the Eurohorror canon picks up exactly where this list gets nervous.