Flesh is horror cinema’s stock and trade. Peeling back the skin on the genre takes us to places like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Tattoo. But what if it’s more of a personal skin problem? Like The Fly or The Believers (there are spiders in that zit!) or even Acne?
No, we’re looking at more skin than just that. These films ask you who you are and who that skin you’re wearing makes you.
5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
There have always been those who claim The Silence of the Lambs is not a horror movie. A tale of a man who eats human flesh helping the FBI hunt down a man who wears human flesh feels like horror to us.
It’s to director Jonathan Demme’s credit that Silence made that leap from lurid exploitation to art. His masterful composition of muted colors and tense but understated score, his visual focus on the characters rather than their actions, and his subtle but powerful use of camera elevate this story above its exploitative trappings. Of course, the performances didn’t hurt.
4. The Skin I Live In (2011)
In 2011, the great Pedro Almodovar created something like a cross between Eyes Without a Face and Lucky McGee’s The Woman, with all the breathtaking visual imagery and homosexual overtones you can expect from an Almodovar project.
The film begs for the least amount of summarization because every slow reveal is placed so perfectly within the film, and to share it in advance is to rob you of the joy of watching. Antonio Banderas gives a lovely, restrained performance as Dr. Robert Ledgard, and Elena Anaya and Marisa Paredes are spectacular.
Not a frame is wasted, not a single visual is placed unconsciously. Dripping with symbolism, the film takes a pulpy and ridiculous storyline and twists it into something marvelous to behold.
3. Clown
Sympathetic, surprising, and often very uncomfortable, Jon Watts’s horror flick, though far from perfect, does an excellent job of morphing that lovable party favorite into the red-nosed freak from your nightmares. Because clowns are terrifying.
Watts, who co-wrote with the talented Christopher Ford, weaves a fantasy of Nordic folklore turned modern nightmare. There are moments of grotesque brilliance and edgy horror as poor Andy slowly, painfully morphs into a monster who feeds on children.
2. Under the Skin (2013)
Light on dialogue and devoid of exposition, Under the Skin requires your patience and your attention, but what it delivers is a unique and mesmerizing journey, a science fiction film quite unlike anything else out there.
Early elements call to mind Kubrick’s 2001, and once the film falls into its pace it conjures last year’s brilliant Upstream Color, but Glazer’s effort is certainly its own artistic achievement. Though an almost relentless series of similar incidents, somehow he punctuates this weird monotony with a fascinating balance of perplexity and humanity, and slowly, themes, character and plot emerge.
1. In My Skin (2002)
One of the less-scene gems of the New French Extreme, In My Skin is a tough watch. Esther (writer/director Marina de Van) loses grip on who she is at her very core when she fails to notice a serious injury done to her leg. This alienation from her physical self becomes an obsession with her physical self.
As bloody and uncomfortable as any film you will ever see, In My Skin succeeds as a horror film and a comment on identity and control both mainly due to de Van’s laser focused performance. Introspective, never showy, and unrelentingly believable, the turn anchors all the wild behavior in a way that makes it simultaneously mesmerizing and revolting.
