It's Not Blood, It's Red: Inside (Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, 2007)

Heads up, friendo: This is the last week that you can pre-order the collected edition of Dead Teenagers, which will be out next Tuesday, October 6. The more you pre-order, the more likely it is that bookstores will mistake me for a real author and stock my books, so if you do – know that I appreciate you from the very bottom of my heart.

You can also still pick up Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #3 at comic shops and the usual digital platforms, and get ready for Issue #4 to drop on October 14.

Sometimes, no matter how hard I might try to resist this impulse, a horror film succeeds for me purely on the basis of having some really good gore. 

Inside, by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, is one of those movies. Bustillo and Maury have co-directed several horror films, and none of them are very good. Inside shouldn't be good, either. Its plot — a baby-crazy woman sneaks into a heavily pregnant woman’s house and tries to extract the fetus from her body by force — is exploitative, premised almost entirely on our ingrained, species-perpetuating reluctance to harm pregnant people or babies. Most movies, no matter how violent they are, won’t stab a nine-months-pregnant character in the stomach with a pair of scissors. This one will, and it’s the first thing that happens to her. Everything that follows is worse. 

Also: Although Inside is a female-led movie, and features a great performance from its female villain (more on this later) its actual gender politics are pretty rancid, and get worse the longer you think about them. Leaving aside the hysteria and baby-craziness of its villain, the protagonist — a single mother-to-be whose husband died early in her pregnancy, and who is thus not enthused about giving birth — is narratively punished for not “appreciating” motherhood in the most extreme and violent way possible, and her character arc depends on learning to value the life of the fetus over her own. 

I’m putting all these objections up front, so you can know this: The first time I watched Inside, the experience left me buzzing and euphoric, like a nine-year-old who’d just eaten a full pack of Skittles and chased it with a liter of Mountain Dew. Inside is a pure haunted-house carnival dark ride of a movie, one shock after another, one gross-out leading to the next and the next, and as such, it was wildly fun. It just worked.