Horrorfest 2016: Inside

Welcome to Horrorfest 2016. I'm going to try to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days to celebrate the month of October and Halloween. This year I sourced my movies from 5 different "best of" lists from Slant, Hitfix, Indiewire, Rottentomatoes and even Forbes. The lists ranged in theme from best horror movies of all time to best horror movies of the 21st century, so we'll have some old stuff and some new stuff.

This year we start with the 2007 French flick INSIDE, directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. This was a fairly gruesome flick to start with so my apologies, but here we go.

It's Christmas Eve and Alysson Paradis stars as a pregnant widow on the eve of her scheduled appointment to have labor induced. She lost her husband while she was pregnant in a car accident. There were no other survivors... OR SO SHE THINKS. Spoilers. Too late. Oh well.

She's understandably depressed, given the circumstances, but things get worse when a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) appears outside of her isolated home and starts harassing her. Our hero scores some points by calling the cops butt he cops lose some points by showing up after the intruder has left and deciding everything is cool and to leave our hero alone, again.

So, the intruder shows back up and that's where things get gruesome. Turns out, the intruder wants Paradis' baby, and is willing to cut her open with a giant pair of scissors to get it. Gross, right? Well, it gets even more gross. The rest of the movie is basically the crazy lady vs. the pregnant lady, with the pregnant lady spending most of the time locked in the bathroom and the crazy lady spending most of the time dealing with everyone who shows up at the house -- Paradis' boss (Francois-Regis Marchasson), her mother (Nathalie Roussel) and some more cops, this time with a handcuffed perp in tow (Ayman Saidi).

The central conceit is effective as both a taboo subject you don't expect to see in a movie, necessarily, as well as an inherently primordial skin-crawler -- threatening to the child, the mother, and violating the only thing we can really control, our own body. But it's also so outrageous that the movie is hard to watch at times, and even harder to enjoy.

The biggest misstep in the movie is the computer-generated shots from within Paradis' womb. We see the fetus reacting to the violence from outside. This is an ambitious and original approach, but the execution is a little lacking. The CGI is not great, and with something as weird as this, you need it to be perfect to avoid it being exploitative or unintentionally funny. The movie might have worked better if the filmmakers had backed it off a little bit and just made it a more conventional thriller.