Decade of Decay: MARTYRS / INSIDE

Has it really been 10 and 11 years respectively since MARTYRS and INSIDE turned the world of horror cinema, kicking and screaming, on its head? And 9 years since I was gushing and ranting about both films on this blog? Unbelievably, the answer to both questions is yes.

In that time we've seen the watered-down, sanitised US remakes come and go (into much deserved obscurity), as the careers of Pascal Laugier and Maury/Bustillo have sadly failed to live up to the promise of their early masterpieces (but I'm still rooting for Laugier's new one, GHOSTLAND).

Regardless of those negative observations, the impact of these two modern classics hasn't diminished a bit. In the decade since they were unleashed on the world, have we even seen another truly comparable film? Their blend of feminism and arthouse sensibilities, colliding head on with pitch black, extreme gore was, and still is, pretty unique.

To celebrate the occasion, here's a pulpy Spanish one-sheet for INSIDE that I don't think I've ever seen (above), and some nice MARTYRS tributes from Gary Pullin (top), Nathan Thomas Milliner (middle) and Trevor Henderson (bottom).

Srpski Film

It's probably lazy when writing about film to continually resort to comparison with other films, but I still find myself doing it a lot. Perhaps it's particularly hard to avoid when discussing horror, because it's a genre that's continually feeding off of itself for new ideas. To paraphrase something I read at Fangoria recently, horror cinema gets by for the most part by cyclically regurgitating popular tropes and cliches, delivering what the fans are perceived to be hungering for at the time. The industry toils along in this opportunistic fashion, becoming more and more predictable and stale, until the next fresh idea is introduced in a new groundbreaking and original film. Yet sometimes a movie is original enough to stand on it's own, while comparisons to previous movies are still impossible to avoid. One such movie is Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film.

A Serbian Film feels as if Spasojevic watched the Hostel movies, and rather than being insulted by Roth's exaggerated perception of the troubles in post-soviet eastern Europe, saw it as a challenge to up the ante as far as disgust and brutality.

Above a subtext about American ignorance and xenophobia, Hostel is about the potential for entrepreneurial capitalists to exploit the instability that has resulted from rapid social, economic and political changes in the region (former Czechoslovakia in Hostel). However, it does so using a premise that is absurdly far fetched, requiring a major suspension of disbelief to go along with.

A Serbian Film on the other hand is grounded in a terror that is all too real and which is frequently seen in the news and dramatised on TV - the burgeoning illegal sex slave trade. The only really unrealistic element of Spasojevic's film is the snuff-industry angle, an urban myth that has been shown to be just that - a myth (see David Kerekes' & David Slater's excellent Killing For Culture: An Illustrated History Of Death Film From Mondo To Snuff published by Creation Books). Beyond that though, the events depicted in A Serbian Film are believable and are all the more appalling for that realism. Compounded with that sense of reality, the explicitly depicted atrocities in A Serbian Film make the violence in Roth's movies pale by comparison, making the whole experience that much more visceral, disturbing and just plain vile.


Another recent movie that has to be mentioned when talking about A Serbian Film (and Hostel I & II) is Martyrs. Beyond the similarities in premise (highly organised secret societies with paramilitary elements; torture and killing for ideological and financial motives) the four movies share a similar visual aesthetic. They're all shot, lit and colour graded with a kind of hyper-real slickness (particularly Srpski and the Hostel movies), and in the production design of the secret institutions all four films share a clinical, futuristic look that is more akin to science fiction movies than horror.

Beyond that comparison with Martyrs though, the more obvious similarity between the two movies is that it's the current Euro-horror film that is both topical and utterly transgressive in it's violence. This year's most talked about cult film for hardcore horror freaks. So, I guess my final word on A Serbian Film is what I see as the differences in motivation for Laugier and Spasojevic.

Almost every review I've read for Spasojevic's disgust-fest mentions the almost impenetrable ambiguity of it's "message" about the current state of affairs in Serbia. Western observers are looking for a meaning beneath it's violence and coming up with an almost unanimous cry of "I can't work it out, I guess you have to be Serbian to understand it". I can't fault all of these reviewers for seeking that deeper meaning, because I strongly believe that in much the same way as T.F. Mous' notorious Men Behind The Sun, Srpski is posing as a message movie to give it more gravitas, but ultimately it's little more than a very well made, highly memorable exploitation flick. Perhaps in both cases there was an original "higher" intention that was eventually lost in the desire to simply be as nasty as possible.


Martyrs could also be criticised for having a dubious and ambiguous meaning, but what Martyrs has in spades that Srpski lacks... is heart. As mean spirited and hard to watch as it is, it's a deeply emotive and affecting movie because you care for Lucie and Anna and witnessing their fate is heartbreaking. The horrible fate of Milos and his family did not elicit that emotion in me, just a dull sense of shock and revulsion.

I think the difference in the two director's intentions is most evident in Laugier's widely publicised assertions that the writing of Martyrs came from a deeply heartfelt place within him, at a time when he was going through a difficult period of particularly black depression. When I watch his film, I can see and feel all that emotion up on the screen. When I watch Spasojevic's Film I see a cynical, sneering exercise in depravity lurking shallowly beneath a thin veneer of sociopolitical commentary about porn, the illegal sex trade and some dodgy allusions to the Yugoslav wars. Just another exploitation flick, albeit one of the most disgusting ones I've ever seen.

After all that you might think that I hated A Serbian Film...

... but I actually really liked it.

Why? Because - like you - I'm a card carrying sicko!

Horreur Française

The unwelcome prospect of a US remake of Martyrs has reared it's ugly head again, with Bloody Disgusting reporting recently that a screenwriter is attached who will no doubt do what he can to dilute and castrate Pascal Laugier's nihilistic, brutal masterpiece.

Meanwhile, what's going on with the burgeoning French horror new-wave? From '02 - '08 France produced a small handful of horror films that towered above the far more prolific output of most other major markets. While Hollywood greedily devours itself (and the film industries of the rest of the planet) like Ouroboros; Malefique, High Tension, Inside, Martyrs and the Belgian/French co-productions Calvaire and Vinyan proved that horror can still be artful (and beautiful), original, intelligent and genuinely shocking & disturbing. Even "second tier" French productions like Ils and Frontière(s) were better than 95% of the swill pouring out of the US.

In the wake of this recent legacy of great films, has the French horror juggernaut stalled? Recent entries have certainly failed to impress - from the underwhelming (Mutants), to the downright shitty (La Horde). So, what is the next great film screening at Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol? It could be writer/director Franck Richard's French/Belgian co-production The Pack (La Meute). Richard's debut (as both writer and director) has looked interesting and promising from the outset, and recently scored a very positive review over at Twitch that you can read here. Let's hope it delivers!

Outside...

...INSIDE!

Have a listen to the OST for Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's damn-near perfect shocker À l'intérieur (Inside). It is by genre regular François-Eudes Chanfrault, whose other horror credits include High Tension, Vinyan and some work on Aja's The Hills Have Eyes. When I first listened to this soundtrack it didn't really grab me, but hearing it again later in a more patient and receptive mood I was hypnotised by it. It's a subtle, understated horror score (a rarity in this age of in-your-face bombast), drenched in gloomy, sombre atmosphere and menace. As with Seppuku Paradigm's haunting soundtrack for Martyrs, this score is filled with a melancholy sense of pathos that perfectly mirrors the tragic destiny of the films characters... in this case: The Woman, Sarah and both their unborn babies...

trempée dans le SANG!

Soundtrack: Martyrs

Here's another soundtrack, this time from the bludgeoning, nihilistic French shocker Martyrs, directed by Pascal Laugier with an original score by Seppuku Paradigm.

A brief search of the web is all it takes to get an idea of how divisive this movie is amongst horror fans. It sounds like a cliche, but Martyrs really is a film that seems to be almost universally loved or loathed, with not many people reacting with ambivalence. That it elicits such strong reactions in people is a testament to the film's devastating power.

A lot of fans of really violent movies were angered and offended by the violence in Martyrs because it's not entertaining or cathartic. The final act in particular is a grim, prolonged and extremely unpleasant depiction of one of the main protagonists being tortured, humiliated and beaten, that is about as far away from "fun" violence as you can get. In this respect it succeeds at forcing the viewer to really feel empathy for the victim of this atrocity far more effectively than Michael Haneke's Funny Games, because it doesn't indulge in Haneke's childish manipulation and insulting condescension. I don't know if that was Pascal Laugier's intention when making Martyrs, but when a Toronto Film Fest attendee (at a post-screening Q&A) pompously asked him if he had seen Haneke's film(s) and then more or less called Laugier disgusting and morally bankrupt for making Martyrs, he responded by saying "I hate Michael Haneke, I hate Funny Games" and then went on to describe his film as the "Anti-Funny Games". He could go on to never make another good movie, and he'd still be heroic to me, just for saying that. I was intrigued by Games when it first came out, but on subsequent viewings have come to really resent it for the way in which Haneke presumes to indict all viewers for revelling in violence, without giving them any credit for being thoughtful or empathetic. A truly stupid and myopic generalisation. Honestly, who does he think he is?


Of course this is only one small aspect of what makes Martyrs the masterpiece that it is. The two central performances from Morjana Alaoui and Mylène Jampanoï are heartbreakingly good and it's obvious in every frame of their screen-time just how much they sacrificed of themselves for this little film. The cinematography and stark production design are excellent, as is Benoît Lestang's incredible and disturbing make-up FX (he was a great talent who tragically took his own life in 2008). A lot of people dislike the abrupt change at Martyrs' mid-point into kind of metaphysical SF, but for me it works perfectly, and the end (which Fangoria's Tony Timpone accurately described as "approaching Kubrickian transcendence") literally had my jaw agape and my eyes bugging.

The score, by Parisian experimental electronic/rock band Seppuku Paradigm (who had previously scored the low budget French SF movie Eden Log) is by turns somber, mournful, tense and haunting with a few good stings like At Night In The Dormitory. Once, in the track Crisis, it explodes into throbbing Goblin worship that makes a very powerful moment in the film even more potent. It's a great little track, but at under a minute long I really wish they'd expanded it for the soundtrack. Martyrs wraps-up with the languidly paced, dreamy-melancholy of Your Witness that is perfect over the end credits to allow you to just numbly stare at the screen and begin to recompose yourself after being pummelled into a state of twitchy shock.

MARTYRS