Palme d’Gore? How Sci-Fi, Horror and High-Grade Schlock Are Taking Over the Cannes Film Festival

Are genre films set to overtake the Cannes Film Festival like a zombie horde? As with the ominous music before a jump scare, things certainly seem to be trending in that direction. Two years after Coralie Fargeat’s grotesque, feminist fantasia “The Substance” shocked the Croisette and one year after Julia Ducournau’s body horror “Alpha” (following her equally gory, 2021 Palme winner “Titane”) and Ari Aster’s paranoid Western thriller “Eddington” vied for the festival’s top honors, this year’s line-up is stacked with genre titles like, well, bodies in a morgue. Across its various sections, the 79th Cannes festival features more than a dozen films that venture from science fiction to the supernatural to high-grade schlock and gore. In the main competition, Oscar-nominated “Shoplifters” director Hirokazu Kore-eda premieres his near-future-set sci-fi drama “Sheep in the Box,” while South Korean horror maven Na Hong-Jin competes with the sci-fi thriller “Hope.” Un Certain Regard, meanwhile, got off to an outrageous start with Jane Schoenbrun’s meta slasher “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” while “Sanctuary” director Zachary Wigon unveils his latest, the 19th century-set supernatural horror “Victorian Psycho.” Popular on Variety Before unpacking why the film world’s ultimate arbiter of taste is suddenly reveling in the revolting, it’s worth exploring why so many directors are dabbling with genre in the first place. Horror, science fiction and other cinematic genres have always responded to broader shifts in the culture, whether it’s geopolitical turbulence, social upheaval or the rise of frightful new technologies. Think how the existential terror unleashed by the atomic bomb led to “Godzilla” — a reptilian monster roused from its slumber by nuclear testing — and a wave of science-fiction movies in the 1950s. These days, it might feel like there’s no reason to rush to the movie theater for thrills and chills — just head to your daily doomscroll. Climate cataclysms. The AI apocalypse. War begetting still more war, like some deranged biblical prophecy. “There’s a lot of anxiety and a lot of uncertainty on a massive global scale that is unfathomable,” says Anna Bogutskaya, a film critic, programmer and author of “Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us.” It’s no wonder, then, that today’s filmmakers are just as scared as the rest of us — or that their dread is seeping into so many scripts. Take Palme d’Or winner Kore-eda, who found the inspiration for “Sheep in the Box” in dystopian headlines about Chinese companies using AI avatars to “resurrect” the dead. Or Catalan filmmaker Maria Martínez Bayona, whose Un Certain Regard-premiering debut “The End of It,” starring Rebecca Hall and Gael García Bernal, used the booming longevity industry as a starting point to imagine a world whose inhabitants — or, at least, its privileged few — can opt out on death. Rebecca Hall stars in “The End of It.” Courtesy of Lluís Tudela For these and other filmmakers, genre offers “a different way to sneak through ultimately moving and powerful stories to an audience,” notes “Victorian Psycho” producer Dan Kagan (“Longlegs”). Bayona’s film speculates on age-old questions of mortality and meaning: “What happens if we take death out of the equation? What happens to living? What actually makes us feel alive?” she asks. In the case of Kore-eda, the near future imagined in “Sheep in the Box” allows him to muse on how we live in the present. “It’s a way to think about what it means to be human,” he says. That question is, arguably, at the heart of why we make and watch movies, and no festival has done a better job of placing itself at the center of that conversation than Cannes. Genre filmmaking, after all, has a rich history on the Riviera, from the electrifying 1981 premiere of Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead” to the regular red-carpet feting of gross-out pioneer David Cronenberg and Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro. South Korea’s Park Chan-wook — the president of this year’s competition jury — won the Grand Prix in 2004 for his blood-spattered masterpiece “Oldboy,” a film that festival director Thierry Frémaux claims “legitimized the presence of genre cinema in the competition.” Still, it was Park’s compatriot Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Palme d’Or for “Parasite” that marked an inflection point. Suddenly, unabashed genre flicks could be celebrated on the same level as social realist dramas. Two years later, Ducournau triumphed with “Titane,” described by Variety’s Peter Debruge as a “nothing-to-lose body-horror shocker” that “dares to challenge the boundaries of sexuality and taste.” Five years on, all bets are off. The prizes and plaudits heaped on such elevated genre experiments make the programming choices even easier for future editions, notes Pablo Guisa Koestinger, executive director of the Marché du Film’s genre-focused Fantastic Pavilion. “It gives programmers and curators the permission — or perhaps the comfort — to champion these films without hesitation, even if they won’t always admit they’re programming genre, pure and simple,” Koestinger says. Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or in 2019. CJ E&M Credit the Marché, too, for making genre filmmaking a centerpiece, ever since it introduced the influential Frontières Platform in 2017 and launched the Fantastic Pavilion three years ago. “Genre is no longer a sidebar conversation at Cannes — it’s a pillar,” says Koestinger. “The Marché has realized that it’s really important — not only for audiences, but for buyers, for producers,” adds Frontières executive director Annick Mahnert. The market bears that out. Horror, for one, is all but bullet-proof at the box office, offering up a steady crop of movies that are “exciting and fresh and young and full of energy,” notes Kagan, “but can still be done at a budget that feels reasonable and is easier to finance.” This year’s Marché is loaded with horror and sci-fi packages pairing top-shelf filmmakers with our biggest stars, proving that genre has become world cinema’s lingua franca. “It’s beyond just the specialists or the fans,” says Bogutskaya. “It’s now a thing that’s unignorable.” Today the gross, the grotesque, the bloody and the macabre have become as much a Cannes fixture as red carpets and rosé, while walkouts from the festival’s edgier gore-fests are tracked as closely as standing ovations for its prized auteurs. But then, should anyone be surprised? Cannes, after all, has always prided itself on discovering and nurturing new talent — and pushing the envelope of what cinema both is and can be. As Kagan points out, “Cannes was always built on a spirit of rebellion.” And what could be more rebellious than sending a roomful of serious cinephiles screaming for the exits? “Find me the Sam Raimis that are making the truly wild shit. How are we going to screen it? How are we going to get away with it?” says Bogutskaya. “You can get away with it, because you’re Cannes.”