HALLOWEEN: Our Best Directors - 10. Pascal Laugier (Martyrs, The Tall Man)

Note:  Hot patootie, bless my soul.  I really love that rock and roll.

10. Pascal Laugier

(House of Voices, Martyrs, The Tall Man)

Horror is a way for me to express personal things. To escape from the irony and the intellectual misery public opinion has fallen into. The culture of “fantastic” is a good tool to feel far away from the dominating thoughts and the imperialism of the mass media. It’s a “counterculture,” free to express things that aren’t said.

- Interview With Shock Till You Drop, 2008

Where to Start?

House of Voices (2005)

What's cool about Pascal Laugier's first three movies is how they all push different approaches to suspense and terror... while keeping certain ideas intact.  House of Voices is an old-fashioned ghost story.  Martyrs is a slough of human suffering.  The Tall Man is a moody, plausible mystery.  All three are about strong women struggling against imposing social systems (a church, a cabal, an entire town).  All three pay careful attention to the victimization of children.  All three couch antagonism in older, matronly ladies.

Laugier's best known for his middle film, Martyrs, a film so grueling I fast-forwarded through the final 20 minutes, stopping only to pick up necessary plot points.  That may sound like a condemnation.  It isn't, not necessarily.  Martyrs centers on a woman made to suffer in the hopes that her pain will open her up to a transcendent, possibly divine knowledge.  Get it?  The film is literally asking what possible reward could justify the violence it contains.  Of all the films labeled "torture porn" in the States and abroad, Martyrs is the one that goes furthest toward defending its own excess.  Good on Laugier.  I wanted to puke.

Doesn't hurt that the film's gorgeous, with its candy-red gore presented in monochrome rooms of bright white and dull grey.  Laugier started this visual in the big white rooms of House of Voices, set at a defunct orphanage.  That film's premise calls to mind The Devil's Backbone and (go figure) The Orphanage.  House of Voices is slightly different, the only real child in the film being the unborn child of Anna (Virginie Leydon).  House of Voices wins few points for originality, but it works on a basic level, and Laugier adds some attention-grabbing style to his strong sense of craft.  One conversation features the camera floating around two women's heads against a black background.  Another neat shot compresses Anna's cleaning chores by superimposing three of her on the same space, one brooming, one dusting...

As mentioned above, these three films feature strong women.  Not the paradoxical type that horror films too often lean on (you know, the women that combine resilience with an uncanny ability to lose vital pieces of clothing and home in on trippable roots).  Notably, Pascal Laugier has the good sense to test Jessica Biel's tough girl image in The Tall Man instead of rewarding it, putting her through an emotional and physical ringer as she tries to help children survive.  I can't say I love all three of these films, but each one carries sincerity, forceful characters, classical style with deft touches.  I don't know if Laugier's films are always "horror," and I don't think they're unqualified successes.  But they feel imperative.

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Previous Entries:

11. Larry Fessenden (Habit, Beneath)

12. Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Stuck)

13. Franck Khalfoun (P2, Maniac)

14. Adrián García Bogliano (Penumbra, Here Comes the Devil)

15. James Watkins (Eden Lake, The Woman in Black)