The controversial horror movie that inspired Julia Ducournau: “I wanted to do the opposite”
Julia Ducournau is renowned in the film world for being the second woman to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and for her stomach-churning horror visuals. Before winning the prize for her body horror Titane, Ducournau had impressed critics with her first feature film, Raw.
A coming-of-age body horror, Raw follows Justine, a vegetarian entering her first year of veterinary school. Following a brutal hazing from older students, including her older sister, in which she’s forced to eat raw meat, Justone develops a craving for human flesh. Ostensibly a cannibal horror movie, it’s unsurprising that cannibal exploitation flicks of the 1970s are the presumed inspiration for Ducournau’s film.
Speaking to HeyUGuys, Ducournau explains that those films inspired her, but not in the way we might expect, “They influenced me in the sense that I wanted to do the opposite”. Cannibal flicks from the 1970s were predominantly made by Italian filmmakers and usually focused on the cannibalism of primitive natives deep in Asian or South American rainforests. Growing out of the modo film genre, they were often heavily censored and are seen by many as being racist and colonialist in their depiction of native peoples.
For Ducournau, it was this othering of cannibalism that she wished to avoid in her own film. “In the ’70s, when you see [cannibals], they are always treated as ‘they’, from far away like they’re a group of creatures and they come down like zombies, and it’s like we kick them out of humanity.”
There is one film in particular, Cannibal Holocaust, which was so convincing in its portrayal of cannibalism and violence that the director was arrested for the murder of his main cast. Using found footage techniques and instances of real animal cruelty to create gritty realism, the film follows a rescue mission into the Amazon to track down a film crew who have gone missing while shooting a documentary on local cannibal tribes.
But while the violence was realistic, it is one of the main films that Ducournau saw as depicting this alienation of the cannibal through the supposed ‘savagery’ of native peoples. “What interested me was how cannibals were treated in the ’70s in films like Cannibal Holocaust… Cannibalism amongst three taboos in humanity with murder and incest is the only taboo that is treated like it doesn’t exist.”
Ducournau’s Raw, then attempts to be an antidote to this treatment of the taboo, humanising it through the lens of a teenage girl. Instead of taking the point of view of a victim of the cannibal, the viewer is forced to see through the eyes of the cannibal and to empathise with her. The audience is forced to see the human face of the taboo, to witness just how close to home these urges can become.
To her, cannibalism is a way of exploring the meaning of humanity and what makes us human. Ducournau has made it clear in interviews that she would much rather the discussions around Raw focus on what it means to be human than on the shocking or brutal depictions of violence.
