Thanks in large part to the international success of films like Haute Tension and La Sheitan, it seems the floodgates have opened, making France the new hotbed of horror happenings. There’s just something exciting about the “new wave” of French horror cinema - a certain je nest cest qua, if you will – that makes them so delightfully oddball and so deliciously over-the-top, and no film demonstrates this quite as well as “À l'intérieur” (Inside).

Sarah (Alysson Paradis), a young pregnant photographer, loses the father of her child in an automobile crash, forcing her to carry her baby to term alone, and, understandably, sapping her of any of the usual joys of impending motherhood.  On the eve of her planned delivery date, a mysterious woman (the gorgeous and legendary Beatrice Dalle) forces her way into the Sarah’s home, tormenting and torturing her, and killing anyone who gets in between them, so that, ultimately, she can have what is inside of Sarah.

This deceptively simple plot has a few unexpected twists and turns, but the real attention getter here is the sheer volume of viscera on display in this film. Inside has got to be one of the most unbelievably violent and gory “non-comic” horror films I have ever squirmed my way through. This flick had me literally howling in disgust at some of the images on display, from scissors gouging into a man’s testicles to heads being vaporized by gunfire. If your DVD player had the ability to bleed, Inside would literally fill your living room with buckets of the stuff. We’re talking “Dead Alive” levels of blood, here, but without any of the funny bits to lighten the mood (although, admittedly, I was laughing out loud at the sheer insanity of it all, and I imagine other gorehounds may do the same). Of course, Inside isn’t all blood and guts – there’s some really solid filmmaking going on here, thanks to the duo of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who are both obviously huge genre fans (as well as the directorial team behind the new Hellraiser reboot), and equally as skilled in building up tension as they are in inducing nausea.  The performances by Paradis and Dalle are also top-drawer, with Dalle, especially, imbuing her nameless killer with equal parts cool, sexy, and scary.

Dimension Extreme presents Inside with a nice assortment of extras, including a very thorough making-of (in French with English subtitles), trailers, and more.

With Haute Tension, Them, Inside, and the upcoming Frontier(s) (which promises to make even the most extreme example of American torture porn look like an episode of Bob the Builder), French filmmakers have made it clear that they are ready to play their part in a bloody genre revolution. To paraphrase Stephen King, “I’ve seen the future of horror, and it’s chainsmoking and wearing a black beret.”