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6 Utterly Traumatizing French Horror Films To Watch On Halloween

The first time I sat down to watch a French horror movie, it was a film called Switchblade Romance (which would later get the name change High Tension for American Audiences), and it fucking floored me. It was, in a word, relentless. The movie pretty much gut-punched you in the first ten minutes, and never allowed you the chance to catch your breath again. While I have some definite issues with the ending of that movie (as most rational people do), there is no arguing that it opened the door for horror fans to sit up and take notice of the French.

[h2]Frontier(s)[/h2]

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Frontier(s) may be  my most well-known movie on the list, but I still wanted to extol upon its virtues, as it seems to get less love than Inside and Martyrs. Frontier(s) is pretty much the French version of Texas Chainsaw meets Hostel. Some (bad yet not really bad, just forced to be bad by their circumstances) people rob a bank and after, they find a nice little inn in the French countryside to stay at and lay low for a couple days. As it turns out, their luck is shitty (a running theme for French extreme cinema) and this particular inn is run by neo-Nazi cannibals.

As if you couldn’t tell from the rest of the entries, Frontier(s) is fucking brutal. You know those horror films that are so cruel and so torturous that you actually feel yourself aching for the people in the movie, begging for the sickos to just put them out of their misery? Yes, this is one of those movies.

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Also, a quick warning regarding all of these films. Not to be too spoilerific or anything, but if you come at French extreme cinema (how is it that I sound even more pretentious every time I write that?) expecting a happy ending, you are going to be sorely let down. These movies do not have idealistic, happy endings. Any of them. Ever. It may help to know that going in.

No, these movies make it their goal to find what little hope you have and beat it to death in front of you, and Frontier(s) is no exception.