In the early 2000s, while directors like Eli Roth and Rob Zombie Printed the boundaries of violence in American film with “cabin fever” and “The Devil’s Rejects”, a parallel movement arose in France. Called Body cinema or “new French extremity”, the trend was characterized by extremely confrontial horror films (“high tension”, “Martyrs“” Inside “) who attacked the audience with their combination of filmmaking skill and visceral gore.
Many of these films no longer feel so shocking, their tropes are now absorbed in mainstream horror. Marina de vanS “In my skin“However, retains its power to interfere with 23 years after the publication. The story of a young woman (played by the van himself) whose dependence on self-mutilation escalates in increasingly graphic body horror set, “in my skin” remains deeply disturbing because there is no barrier between the audience and the filmmaker’s subconscious-they van invites us to her darkest obsession and fantasies and currently them without compounds.
The impact of the film comes undoubtedly from De Van’s personal connection to the material. Although she went out into the film’s autobiographical elements in interviews in 2002, she now admits that she was dependent on self -mutilation in a way similar to her protagonist when she did film.
“I had a very clear vision for the movie, because it came from my life,” they used to indiewe. “I had to take sensations and feelings and memories that I had experienced and mix them with the fiction parts.”
These fictional parts include the protagonist Esther’s job and boyfriend, whose understandably mystified reaction to his girlfriend’s self -mutilation shifts into something more self -absorbing and egocentric when he digs her to explain what the did wrong. The job, where Esther is largely kept subordinate even when she is moving forward, means that her dependence on self-injury earns her need for control dismissal of parts of her body is the only thing she can do in her life that is completely autonomous.
What is particularly worrying about all this is the van’s style, which is not the one of the typical French extremity horror movie – a movement that she claims any special affinity and which she says she never belonged – but a more lyrical, calm attitude. The picture is horrible, the treatment poetic. The desire to avoid producing her character’s actions that simply disgusting led, they used to play the lead role herself, despite the challenges created for her as the first time function director.
“Another actress who had not experienced what I was doing or felt what I felt in these moments would have expressed a kind of self -hatred and a desire for destruction and violence,” they said van. “I wanted to show someone who is very sweet and in a state of grace, and I did not trust that any other actress would. I would not have been able to guide her with words to play what I felt in my body. The transfer was not possible. “
They van worked with an actor at her performance and prepared for the film by shooting a whole version on the mini-DV with the Kinematographer before production. During that period, she conceptualized the film’s many interesting visual ideas, including a shared screen sequence that acts as a metaphor for Esther’s experience. In the sequence Esther removes her skin, but we do not see the knife that contacts because they used to use the shared screen as a kind of ellipse. “The cut takes place at the exact point between the shared screens,” she said. “I wanted to emphasize the fact that it does not take place on the camera.”
Making the movie turned out to be catartic to the van, who says she stopped cutting herself when the movie was finished. “It stopped, because now it was in a box. It was in the movie, she said. “When it was a fiction released in cinemas, I would have felt like an imitator of myself if I had continued to self -introduce injuries, so I could no longer.” The director says she was very surprised at the positive answer that the film received from both critics and her friends and family, who loved it.
The van himself has never felt the desire to visit the movie, which is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Gripping with a wonderful new transfer scanned from the original negative. “I never watch the movies when they are ready,” they said van. “The last time I saw” in my skin “was 2002, and I will never see it again.” She brushes on the description of the film as a horror and explained that shock effects were never what she was looking for.
“A horror movie is supposed to scare you and make you jump in your place and see unbearable things,” they said. “It’s like pornography. Pornography is meant for you to masturbate, so you add things to create a certain effect on the viewer. It’s the same with fear; You want to create something exactly in the viewer, which is fear and surprise. There is none of that in “In my skin.” I didn’t make a horror movie; I made a psychological drama. “
‘In my skin’ is now available for pre-order on limited edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Gripping.
