Julia Ducornau’s favourite horror movie: “It’s a Greek tragedy”
Julia Ducornau is an interesting rising star in the horror scene. While she may not be a household name, it’s easy to see how she could easily become one in the future and venture into the realms of stardom frequented by the likes of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster.
To date, she has made two feature films – Raw and Palme d’Or winner Titane. Within just two projects, Ducornau has shown herself to be a director of considerable technical skill and someone very happy to cross boundaries and broach taboo subjects.
Other directors would’ve shied away from making films about cannibalism or serial killers who have sex with cars, but not Ducornau. She does not, in any way, shape or form, hold back, but importantly, like most of the best cinematic provocateurs, her films aren’t outrageous just for the sake of it. They use shocking content to explore thought-provoking concepts, and while both of her films will cause a lot of squirming, they’ll provoke a ton of thought, too.
Raw and Titane were two very different films, but they were unmistakably the work of the same director. Both were cinematically vibrant, completely messed up, and very much fell into the body horror subgenre. Ducornau has acknowledged that this is the main focus of her particular brand of scary movies, and she believes that her fascination with flesh stems from her childhood. Both of her parents were doctors: her mother was a gynaecologist, and her father was a dermatologist. They spoke about the human body and death in upfront yet distant ways, which she believes is characteristic of those in medical professions.
When she listed her favourite horror film, it was no surprise to learn that it was a body horror flick, nor was it a shock to see that it was made by none other than cinema’s master of body horror, David Cronenberg. The film she selected was Dead Ringers, a 1988 psychological horror flick which stars Jeremy Irons as a pair of identical twins.
During a press tour for Raw, she spoke enthusiastically of the film: “The way he filmed bodies and the themes he tackles — with mortality and the human condition, and identity as well — are themes that I have always been interested in, and that I treat in my own work I think as a filmmaker Dead Ringers would be my favourite one because for me it’s like his opera. It is an opera in five acts. It’s a Greek tragedy.”
Given that Cronenberg is making fewer films these days, it seems entirely possible that Ducornau could soon take his place as horror cinema’s premier maker of body horror flicks. As always, time will tell.
