“When asked at the post-premiere Cannes press conference if Trouble Every Day had any precedent, Denis cited Dario Argento as a filmmaker whose work she admired and used as a model. Clearly, then, Denis consciously drew on Euro horror as a source of inspiration for her extreme art film. And she is not alone. Exactly ten years after the debut of Trouble Every Day on the Croisette, Almodóvar’s latest film, The Skin I Live In, had its premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. [...] While the film was partly inspired by Thierry Jonquet’s 2002 novel, Mygale, it also obviously represents a reworking of Georges Franju’s classic Euro horror movie Eyes without a Face – something that Almodóvar readily acknowledged at the press conference following the film’s premiere. [...] Almodóvar is merely the latest internationally acclaimed European auteur whose recent work has manifested a debt to Euro horror cinema; he joins an august company whose ranks include not only Denis, but also Michael Haneke, Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Lars von Trier. I recognize that is quite possible– likely, in fact –that not all of these filmmakers are as cognizant as Denis and Almodóvar are of the parallels between their work and that of Euro horror directors like Rollin and Franju. The point is that these parallels exist regardless, revealing a lineage that stretches from the arthouse cinema of today back to the grindhouse cinema of yesterday. My goal here has simply been to demonstrate that ancestry. Perceiving the trajectory that takes us from Euro horror cinema to contemporary extreme art cinema gives us, I believe, a greater appreciation not only of the historical importance of Euro horror, but also of its continued relevance to discussions of European cinema”.
Ian Olney, from “Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture”, 2013.
