Editorials
[Butcher Block] French Horror ‘In My Skin’ Gets Up Close and Personal with Self-Mutilation
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
In the early aughts, France made a bold entrance in the realm of modern horror with a collection of transgressive, brutal films referred to as New French Extremity. These films, like High Tension, Inside, Martyrs, and Frontier(s), took a visceral approach to violence, sexuality, and horror. One of the more underseen entries in this collection is that of Marina de Van’s In My Skin, a gruesome drama slash body horror film that draws inspiration from David Cronenberg, particularly Crash, and may have even served as an influence for Julia Ducournau’s Raw.
Aside from writing and directing In My Skin, de Van also stars as lead character Esther, a successful woman on the cusp of a major job promotion. While attending a house party of colleagues and friends, she takes a breather outside and winds up falling on a pile of industrial supplies. It’s not until hours later that she notices the fall gave her one gnarly wound on her leg. The doctor is puzzled as to how Esther didn’t register the pain of the wound until hours later, but she’s unphased by delayed pain and potential for scarring. The event triggers a new fascination with her own body. First, it’s small things like uncomfortably pulling away at the folds of her skin while in the bathtub, but then it escalates when she intentionally exacerbates her leg wound with sharp objects. Despite the growing concerns of her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas, who also played Father in Raw), Esther’s self-inflicted wounds get more and more dangerous.
Like Raw, In My Skin sees its lead character on a path of self-discovery that also happens to cause pain and bloodshed spurned by social pressures. But whereas Raw’s Justine would bite and hurt her herself as a means of suppression, Esther revels in it. De Van gets uncomfortably up close and personal with Esther’s biting away at her arms, chewing and savoring her own flesh in her mouth, and basking in the blood from open wounds on her legs as it spills on to her face. Earlier moments of self-mutilation are mostly done off screen with disturbing sound left to fill in our imagination, but as Esther ups the violence, special makeup effects artist Dominique Colladant (Nosferatu the Vampire) lets loose with the wounds, blood, and excess fleshy bits.
There’s not really much in the way of a fully developed narrative or even a full character introspection in In My Skin; de Van would rather have the audience cringe from under Esther’s skin than inside her headspace. While she’s grotesquely tearing herself apart, her face remains impassive and somewhat serene. In that respect, it’s easy to see why this one slipped under the radar in the conversations about New French Extremity. But it’s also a new form of body horror that takes influence from the master of body horror, Cronenberg, and turns it into something that feels very different. There’s no shying away from Esther’s bizarre form of self-harm that evolves into primitive self-cannibalism. Not in de Van’s intimate closeups of it, nor in Colladant’s grisly makeup work.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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