French Body Horror ‘In My Skin’ Is a Masterpiece Over 20 Years Later

In the early 2000s, at the same time directors like Eli Roth and Rob Zombie were pushing the limits of violence in American cinema with “Cabin Fever” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” a parallel movement emerged in France. Dubbed cinema du corps or “New French Extremity,” the trend was characterized by extremely confrontational horror films (“High Tension,” “Martyrs,” “Inside”) that assaulted the audience with their combination of filmmaking skill and visceral gore.

Many of these movies no longer feel quite so shocking, their tropes now absorbed into mainstream horror. Marina de Van‘s “In My Skin,” however, retains its power to disturb 23 years after its release. The story of a young woman (played by de Van herself) whose addiction to self-mutilation escalates in increasingly graphic body horror set pieces, “In My Skin” remains profoundly unsettling because there’s no barrier between the audience and the filmmaker’s subconscious — de Van invites us into her darkest obsessions and fantasies and presents them without apology and without mercy.

The movie’s impact unquestionably comes from de Van’s personal connection to the material. Although she sidestepped the movie’s autobiographical elements in interviews in 2002, she now admits that she was addicted to self-mutilation in a manner similar to her protagonist when she made the film.

“I had a very clear vision for the film, because it came from my life,” de Van told IndieWire. “I just had to take the sensations and emotions and memories that I had experienced and mix them with the fiction parts.”

Those fiction parts include lead character Esther’s job and boyfriend, whose understandably mystified reaction to his girlfriend’s self-mutilation shifts to something more self-absorbed and egocentric as he badgers her to explain what he did wrong. The job, in which Esther is kept largely subservient even as she advances, implies that her addiction to self-harm serves her need for control — slicing off parts of her body is the only thing she can do in her life that is completely autonomous.

What’s particularly disturbing about all of this is de Van’s style, which isn’t that of the typical French extremity horror film — a movement with which she claims no particular affinity and to which she says she never belonged — but a more lyrical, calm approach. The imagery is horrific, the treatment poetic. The desire to avoid portraying her character’s actions as simply disgusting led de Van to play the lead role herself, in spite of the challenges that created for her as a first-time feature director.

“Another actress who hadn’t experienced what I did or felt what I felt in those moments would have expressed a kind of self-hatred and a desire for destruction and violence,” de Van said. “I wanted to show someone who is very sweet and in a state of grace, and I didn’t trust any other actress to do that. I wouldn’t have been able to guide her with words to play what I felt in my body. The transmission wasn’t possible.”

De Van worked with an acting coach on her performance, and prepared for the film by shooting an entire version on mini-DV with the cinematographer before production. During that period she conceptualized the film’s many interesting visual ideas, including a split-screen sequence that serves as a metaphor for Esther’s experience. In the sequence, Esther removes her skin, but we don’t see the knife making contact because De Van uses the split screen itself as a kind of ellipsis. “The cut takes place at the exact point between the split screens,” she said. “I wanted to underline the fact that it doesn’t take place on camera.”

Making the film proved to be cathartic for de Van, who says she stopped cutting herself once the movie was done. “It stopped, because now it was in a box. It was in the movie,” she said. “Once it was a fiction released in cinemas, I would have felt like an imitator of myself if I had continued to self-inflict injuries, so I couldn’t anymore.” The director says she was very surprised by the positive response the movie received from both critics and her friends and family, who loved it.

De Van herself has never felt the desire to revisit the film, which is now available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Severin with a gorgeous new transfer scanned from the original negative. “I never watch the movies when they are done,” de Van said. “The last time I saw ‘In My Skin’ was in 2002, and I will never see it again.” She bristles at the description of the film as horror, explaining that shock effects were never what she was after.

“A horror movie is meant to frighten you and make you jump in your seat and see unbearable things,” de Van said. “It’s like pornography. Pornography is meant for you to masturbate, so you add things to create a certain effect on the viewer. It’s the same with horror; you want to create something precise in the viewer, which is fear and surprise. There is none of that in ‘In My Skin.’ I didn’t make a horror movie; I made a psychological drama.”

‘In My Skin’ is now available for pre-order on limited edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Severin.