Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.

My wife asked me the other day to show her an older horror film “that’s actually scary and not just gross,” and I get her point. Since gore became part of the horror landscape, it seems like most filmmakers equate “gross” with “scary,” and that’s rarely the case. Gore can be fun, especially when it’s created by someone with a sense of humor, but when it’s a crutch to mask a really shitty film, it’s boring. It seems like it’s a pretty rare thing when you get filmmakers who are able to set up sophisticated scares and also deliver lots and lots of red, but it appears that Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury are indeed that uncommon blend.

As a result, I highly recommend you track down À L'INTÉRIEUR as soon as possible. It hits stores today on DVD thanks to Dimension’s EXTREME label, which is one of those words that has been completely devalued by marketing chimps. Normally, if something says EXTREME (or XTREME if you’re really sporty) on it, you can count on it being anything BUT extreme. However, in this case, Dimension is right. À L'INTÉRIEUR is balls-to-the-wall for most of its running time, and this is one of those cases where I can see why the MPAA didn’t even bother trying to give this thing an R-rating. Why should they? There’s no amount of cutting that would leave a coherent film while still fitting comfortably into the theatrical ratings system, so why not just put the movie out uncut and unrated?

Alysson Paradis stars as Sarah, a woman who is facing the last days of pregnancy alone thanks to a car crash that killed her husband and almost caused her to lose her baby. She’s practically a ghost as she moves through her daily life, counting down to Christmas, which is her due date. On Christmas Eve, she’s at home by herself when a strange woman comes to the door and asks to come in and use the phone. She claims there’s an emergency, but Sarah isn’t buying it, and within moments, the woman drops the act. She tells Sarah she wants her baby, and she won’t leave without it.

And when I say “strange woman,” I am being precise in the use of the term.

I remember when I first saw BETTY BLUE back in the mid-‘80s. I thought Beatrice Dalle was hot in the film, due in no small part to the nearly-constant nudity and sex, although she struck me as weird right from the start. As the movie wore on, though, I stopped thinking she was hot as the weird got more intense, and then finally just settled on “totally fucking insane.” Dalle has had a troubled off-screen life, and her work in films like TROUBLE EVERY DAY only further underlines just how bizarre she is. Finally, with this movie, she appears to have been given the perfect role, and as a result, she ends up becoming an iconic movie monster here as the woman without a name, a force of lunatic nature that is determined to end Sarah’s pregnancy one way or another. The last image we see of her in the film is one I won't forget, a classic conclusion to a great character.

What makes this film scary is the essential vulnerability of the situation and the unstoppable, unreasoning nature of the threat. This crazy woman offers no explanation for her actions, and there seems to be no end to what she’s willing to do in order to reach Sarah’s child. What makes the film disgusting is the way Bustillo and Maury practically push your face into the puddles of gore that they spill, and thanks to the phenomenal cinematography by Laurent Bares (check out the way this guy uses shadows in the film), it’s all quite beautiful, even when unspeakably upsetting. In particular, there’s a tableau in the film’s final moments that is one of the most wretched images I’ve ever seen in a movie, and it’s so beautifully composed you could hang it in a museum. The tension between those extremes is what kept me on the edge of my seat here. It’s pretty uncommon to find gorehounds who are also capable of crafting quiet moments and who find the beauty in even the worst moments of their film.

If you do go to rent or buy this, don’t get it confused with the also-worth-seeing INSIDE by Jeff Mahler. Jeff’s film, which stars Nicholas D’Agosto and Leighton Meester, is a psychological piece about a damaged kid who pushes himself into the lives of a family that may be more damaged than he is. It was released on DVD at the end of February, and will probably be on shelves right next to À L'INTÉRIEUR, provided you’re not at Blockbuster, where I assume they can’t even carry the French film at all.

For now, though, test yourself. My co-writer is unflappable during horror films, and he watches the most extreme stuff with a bemused smile on his face. With À L'INTÉRIEUR, he was groaning and hiding his eyes and even stood up out of his seat, freaked out at one point. It takes a lot to get through to him, and I’m hoping we see more original horror from Bustillo and Maury in the future, since they seem like they’re willing to gleefully smash taboos in their zeal to scare you and gross you out in equal measure.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles