French Horror : Industry, Society and Media

One of the first major works on French horror cinema as an industrial and theoretical entity.

French Horror: Industry, Society and Media provides an overview of French horror film and television of the 21st century, exploring the particularities of the genre on both an industrial and a theoretical basis to identify an essential ‘Frenchness’. The book argues that there are a number of distinct production, formal and socio-cultural characteristics present in these works that mark them as uniquely French, including, among others, critical suspicion of homegrown horror and a corresponding lack of industrial support, attempts to evoke auteurism in certain creative figures, reference to key moments of French history, the framing of body horror and violence and the use of the banlieues. Through a series of close readings of both major and lesser-known texts, French Horror: Industry, Society and Media illustrates a rise in horror in the 21st century that is distinctly and unapologetically French.