At the Frontiers of Women & Horror

“The horror is not merely among us, but rather part of us, caused by us”

– Dana B. Polan

Spoilers for Frontière(s) (2007) below.

          While not in the same park as Martyrs or Haute Tension, Ils or À l’interieur, Frontière(s)  is in the same tradition of new french body-horror. It aspires to be more than just a French take on Hostel, or the murderous-country-family genre.
               Carmen Gray condemns the film for more than one reason: stylistic lack of unity, and the apparent punishing of Yasmine for the choice of her fetus.  The film opens with her telling us that she doesn’t want to bring a child into a world like this: where right-wing extremism is taking over (in a possible French future). – and the take home message seems to be that, under a wild Nazi family, the world could be much worse.




          It is, admittedly, hard to draw any pro-woman (nevermind pro-feminist) messages from this film. Watching horror films from a feminist  woman perspective is odd, and problematic. While this movie doesn’t completely embrace the final girl trope, the idea of sexualizing the sole woman survivor is present. Yasmine is only kept alive so that she can procreate for the rural family, and various characters beg her to keep her pregnancy. This focus on women’s reproductivity is also present in the daughter-character, who has given birth to children that are hidden away and not accepted.
          Nevertheless, this film does try to break our race assumptions about horror movies. With the protagonists being French of North African descent, or “beur”, the screaming young white woman is not precisely the issue. But this goes largely un-examined in the film.  Yasmine has to cut her dark hair in order to appear more racially acceptable for the family. It touches on questions of race and immigration, but doesn’t delve deeply enough into them: issues of contemporary France as it stands are dropped throughout most of the second half.
          Frontières means not only the pastoral unexplored plains, but the borderlands, the area so close to the border that you could cross over immediately. Escape is always just within reach, and your own being is on the edge of something, in an identity crisis.  The horror of the family in the borderlands is a reflection of the horror of the city; that is within us, not far away and extreme but present in everyday life, bifurcating our experience.


Read more:

• McCann, Ben. “Pierced Borders, Punctured Bodies: the Contemporary French Horror Film.” Australian Journal of French Studies.
• Gray, Carmen. “Frontier(s).” Sight & Sound 18.3, 2008.
• Wikipedia – the Final Girl.