Frontier poetry: new adventures in contemporary French horror cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT Until the twenty-first century, the horror genre was a relatively marginal factor in French filmmaking. But in recent years the format has permeated the French media ecosystem. This article studies this phenomenon by way of a vital modern French cultural conversation ― that of frontier horror poetry, espoused by Claire Denis, influentially advocating for ephemeral beauty to be studied alongside savagery, for musicality and artistic expression to flourish on-screen in even the direst of horror genre situations. Exploring this paradoxical frontier horror poetry idiom, this article finds its manifestations in many leading French horror case studies, such as Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), Robin Campillo’s Les Revenants (2004), Gaspar Noé’s Climax (2018), and Dominique Rocher’s La Nuit a dévoré le monde (2018).