The Fourth Night of Halloween: Inside

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Inside (2007), a French “new extremity” horror flick by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. It’s about a stubborn woman’s quest to become a mother. She has decided the best way to do this is to extract an overdue baby from another woman’s belly with a pair of scissors. The story is based on a real phenomenon called fetal abduction. The first recorded case occurred in 1974 when an assailant hacked an at-term pregnant woman to death and performed a crude cesarean on the body with a butcher knife. The infant survived. Since then, there have been at least 23 more cases-- two in 2020. Many of them involved the mother being first lured by the kidnapper to the abduction site with promises of free baby supplies. 

So, fetal abduction would provide pretty rich material for an artful, serious work of horror, particularly if made in the excruciatingly intimate tradition of French cinema, right? Yes, but that’s not what this is. Despite rave reviews and continued high estimation alongside the other new extremity films, like the far superior Martyrs (2008) and In My Skin (2002), Inside is a fairly silly, predictable slasher. I enjoyed it, the over-the-top practical gore effects are really fun (and the terrible digital effects, including a particularly egregious womb’s-eye view of a CGI fetus, are hilarious), but it’s not the meditation on the trauma of childbirth I was expecting. 

Is sympathy for the protagonist elicited through the death of a spouse whom we never actually learn anything about? Naturally. Does the antagonist just so happen to be the mysterious person who was caused to miscarry in the opening scene's head-on collision? Of course. Most aggravating to me is that it’s glaringly obvious the cute moments spent introducing the bulging hero’s pet cat only exist to set up an impending cat murder scene, so as to demonstrate how bad the villain really is. This would be a great opportunity to subvert that trope and have the killer for once be a cat-lover-- which in this context would make sense as an interesting character beat, showing that she really is driven by maternal instinct, despite having ruthless disregard for mature human life. Nope! I was angered. 

But again, it is a fun slasher movie with some clever kills, and it’s worthwhile if you go into it with that expectation. Meanwhile, a great and resonant work of horror cinema remains to be made on the topic of fetal abduction.