Last October, an article in Rolling Stone magazine hailed “the rise of the modern female horror film-maker”, charting a course from The Babadook to Raw via Karyn Kusama’s 2015 chiller The Invitation, and arguing that a new wave of “horror films helmed by women… have helped elevate the genre by opening it up to stories that unsettle audiences in new and different ways”. That such genre-refreshing films were directed by women has not gone unnoticed. Drawing on sources ranging from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1934 oddity Crime Without Passion to Jonathan Glazer’s uncategorisable Birth, Prevenge managed to be maniacal and melancholy, creepy and funny – often simultaneously. Grief and transformation are also at the heart of Prevenge, a homicidal antidote to What To Expect When You’re Expecting, written and directed by leading lady Alice Lowe while herself heavily pregnant. In 2014, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook had been my pick of the year – a spine-chilling fantasia which drew on folk tales and silent film techniques as it subtly unpicked the grief and paranoia of a single mother, habitually projecting her fears onto her lonely child. At the end of 2015, my yearly Observer list of the 10 best films released in UK cinemas featured both Carol Morley’s eerie The Falling and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, an electrifying Iranian-American vampire western which writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour described as being the love-child of Sergio Leone and David Lynch, with Nosferatu as a babysitter. As all great horror films should, it touches a nerve – simultaneously repelling and seducing its audience, sucking us in and spitting us out.įor horror fans, Raw is the latest in an encouraging wave of genre-bending movies which have twisted familiar tropes to new and unsettling ends. Like Claire Denis’s controversial 2001 shocker Trouble Every Day, Raw takes an intimate approach to the taboo subject of cannibalism, sinking its teeth into the sins of the flesh. It’s a deliciously horrifying vignette, squirm-inducingly squishy, yet somehow bizarrely sensual. There’s a moment in French film-maker Julia Ducournau’s prize-winning feature debut Raw in which a young vegetarian (ethereally played by Garance Marillier) finds herself unexpectedly ravenous at the sight of a severed finger.
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