With On the edge of the abyss: where is French horror cinema?Léa Lahannier undertakes an inventory of the French horror genre. She unearths the cinematographic memory, the motifs, the contradictions and the metamorphoses. It can be discovered by LettMotif editions.
Readily relegated to the margins and back rooms, French horror cinema is suspected of everything: impure, sanguine, too popular for scholarly criticism, unnecessarily violent for a country fond of French comedies, psychological naturalism or distinguished auteurism. However, it is this poorly lit filmic space that Léa Lahannier explores in On the edge of the abyss: where is French horror cinema?a broad and passionate essay, which attempts to understand what gender is in its essence and what it says about us.
Léa Lahannier considers horror as a total cultural form, crossed by history, bodies, social fears, foreign models, censorship, production frustrations and desires for rupture. Gender is not just a matter of monsters: it is a way of giving form to what, in a given society, is not necessarily formulated otherwise.
French horror cinema was not born through late imitation of the American model. Of course, America is there, immense, obvious matrix, with Night of the Living Dead, Massacre à la tronçonneuse, Halloweenthe slasher, the survival, the figures of the killer, the isolated house or even the hunted victim. But Léa Lahannier shows that horror, as soon as it changes ground, also changes temperature. In France, she takes on Grand Guignol, naturalism, and a taste for dirty reality. She understands the body as a scandal, the social as a trap, the countryside as a territory of fantasies and contempt…
Before the bloody wave of the 2000s, there were ancestors, source films, works which opened up gaps and to which the author returned extensively. The Faceless Eyes by Franju gives the macabre a clinical poetry, where horror emerges less from the spectacular than from an operation of beauty turned nightmare. The Old Gun shifts violence towards historical memory and trauma. Trouble Every Day et Irréversible announce a cinema of the flesh, of unease, of sensory aggression, where the border between horror, auteur cinema and borderline experience becomes porous. Everything goes back by capillary action, from the aesthetic and moral traditions that French cinema already had within it.
Then come the 2000s, which Léa Lahannier sees as a true opera of violence. Haute Tension, Inside, border(s), Martyrs : so many films which suddenly bring to light a bloodied France, eager for strong impact, less attached to fantasy than to human brutality. This moment crystallizes the idea of a French horror which reappropriates American codes to derail them towards something else: a terror of the close, the familiar, of the real body. The monster is no longer necessarily supernatural. It can be a man on a farm, a woman in a house, a beloved face, a family, a community, an impulse.
In Haute Tensionthe author sees much more than an exercise in American style: a pivotal film, at once slasher, survival and nihilistic manifesto. Alexandre Aja’s film translates the models of Hooper and Carpenter onto a French territory where the threat is less mythological than moral. What’s frightening isn’t just the killer; it is the collapse of the benchmarks which still made it possible to distinguish Good from Evil, the victim from the executioner, love from possession, protection from destruction.Â
Léa Lahannier does not hesitate to invoke Nietzsche, nihilism, the death of values, the superman, sometimes at the risk of loading the films with a very dense conceptual apparatus. But this also has its beauty: it testifies to a desire to take horror cinema seriously, by accepting its excesses. Gore is a way of saying that the world no longer holds together, that the body is the last place where catastrophe takes place.
The question of empathy is addressed in the essay. In Haute Tensionthe first part builds a bond with Marie and Alex before turning him against us. In Insidethe maternal closed space becomes a space of profanation. In Martyrsthe suffering becomes almost metaphysical, tending towards an impossible revelation. The shock produces a moral experience.
The last part of the journey opens towards the years 2010 and 2020, where horror changes face. With Grave, Teddy, Titaniumthe genre becomes feminized, hybridized. It becomes less frontally gory, more porous and mutating. Horror changes texture, involves contamination, or a way of disturbing the learning story, the social chronicle, the family melodrama, the cinema of the body. Julia Ducournau naturally occupies a major place in this transformation: with her, horror becomes auteurist without renouncing the flesh, intimate without becoming wise, monstrous without losing its emotional power.
The essay sometimes has the impulses of his passion and wants to connect everything: the Grand Guignol and Nietzsche, Canal+ and nihilism, Aja and the superman, Ducournau and the future of the genre. But above all, this generosity makes us want to watch the films again, understanding them as symptoms of an underground history of French cinema. It is from this margin, from this “Bord de l’abîme”that we scrutinize a genre far from having said its last word.Â
On the edge of the abyss: where is French horror cinema?Léa Lahannier
LettMotif, 23 mars 2026, 300 pages
