Folies Meurtrières (1984)

 

Director: Antoine Pellissier

Screenplay: Antoine Pellissier

Cast: Magali Bernard, Elisabeth Carou, Carole Chapus, Mireille Duruisseaud, Samya El Alaoui, Jean-Pierre Fonzes, Marie-Pierre Fosse

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

Looking like a 16mm family film I would have scanned through, for a volunteer period at a regional media archive, Folies Meurtrières is not that wholesome, be it the woozy synth to the starkness of the film, still retaining the dread of something found in someone’ attic as we establish a young woman being stalked by a masked figure as she is out swimming. An ultra low budget slasher film, Antoine Pellissier’s dazed old home portrait movie, in aesthetic, is told mostly in visuals baring some narrator exposition. It could have been told entirely as a silent film, which is a virtue to Folies Meurtrières. That it is not does not detract from the mood, where the sound and music is there for mood which adds to the material, and that the colour film here, not only being less expensive, embraces the fact it is also a splatter movie too. The blood needs to be red, starting from when it seeps from a wardrobe, where a male friend has been stabbed and chained up in, and progresses from there in the quantities seen.

You will need a taste for something deliberately sordid. This strips down the slasher genre to its barest, reduced down to just people being stabbed and killed until its ending reveals an explanation for what is a series of vignettes, the masked killer targeting multiple women over the length of a film under fifty minutes. The resulting film feels avant-garde as a result, following a killer on their merry murdering way, because Antoine Pellissier stripped out pointless exposition scenes and dialogue entirely from this sub genre. This tone is what, with further emphasis on experimentation, Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet would deliberately stylize further and amplify for Amer (2009) and their experiments in genre like giallo, only Folies Meurtrières is a rare piece of French horror cinema, from a period before the Millennium when more of them were more known globally, and from the no budget territory. This has its own distinct touch in just how grungy it is, the style in taking a slasher film, which were still quite lavish budgeted productions even as Canadian and American independent productions, and stripping even that further, to the point you are in a pure white mining area involving a left over chainsaw, stripped of any glamour or sheen, without any of the style of the eighties at all.

The biggest concern for anyone, whether they can appreciate this or not, is that this is a nihilistic splatter film, a string of murders where the victims are all women. There are also a lot, a comical amount in fact, of dead guys in white t-shirts who turn up already dead, so our killer is equal opportunity, but until the ending expands the film’s reasons for these scenes, this will be off putting for some for the peril of these women, very unlikely to survive. That this is a splatter film too, like a grimier Herschell Gordon Lewis production and more about the gore set pieces, is not going to be for everyone either. It is the tropes of horror even from before these genres reinterpreted, even having a cat jumping out scare, but Folies Meurtrières more than even the slasher template is about the scene with a vice to the head, or a chainsaw to the guts with fresh (animal) guts used, about the homemade prosthetics. Even in terms of a no budget genre film, this could be an acquired taste because of how ultra minimalistic the film is, a mood piece to an audience who may prefer the dialogue and playful fun of something shot in someone’s back garden which is more indulgent.

[Major Plot Spoilers] The twist is a sudden surprise, that our killer is a woman who is picking off the women her male lover cheated with after killing him. [Spoilers End]. The twist does not necessarily defend the content before, but in the heyday of the original slasher boom, where there were few films with this touch, it is a compelling choice and a subversive one in context, and the sudden turn to a supernatural ending, with an additional nihilistic streak of comeuppance, really does stand out. Antoine Pellissier would continue to make films, but with only a few over two decades, with Maleficia (1998) the last. That does seem a shame as, whilst there were genre films from France from before the Millennium, it would have been fascinating just as the boom in French horror cinema came for him to have taken his own interpretation from what he made before. An obscure film that is not readily available, Folies Meurtrières was, for those ready for it, an experience distinctly of its own.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Minimalistic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium