Revisiting a film like Alain Robak’s Baby Blood (1990) is a strange experience in this current moment when its specifically splattery strain of body horror, once largely relegated to nth-generation bootleg tapes of movies like Guinea Pig 5: Mermaid in a Manhole (1988) and the pages of Gorezone magazine, has fully ascended to the mainstream with a film like The Substance (2024). In a way, it makes sense. With horror movies suddenly needing to “Mean Something” or “Explore Trauma” in increasingly boneheaded ways so that traditionally lowbrow genre fare is more palatable to discerning highbrow audiences and, more importantly, awards voters, the horrors of having a body (and there are many) easily lend themselves to a wide range of allegories, from transness to AIDS to the myriad pressures that society places on women. From Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to It’s Alive (1974) and Alien (1979)—and all of their respective rip-offs, spin-offs, sequels, and prequels—fears surrounding pregnancy have been especially (I’m sorry) fertile ground for body horror over the years, but few are as visceral—or twistedly empowering—as Baby Blood.
In the film, a female tiger-tamer at a French traveling circus named Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou) finds herself unwillingly becoming the host body for a mysterious snake-like creature with an unceasing hunger for human blood. At first horrified by both her nocturnal violation by the creature and its telepathic orders for her to kill for it, she soon finds something of a sexual liberation in hooking up with and then dispatching a procession of shitty men. In its subversion of the standard rape-revenge narrative, it’s a little bit Liquid Sky (1982) and a little bit Hellraiser (1987), only filtered through a profoundly and unmistakably French lens. It’s so French that none other than the bull terrier star of the previous year’s Baxter (1989) even makes a cameo appearance.
Eventually, the creature orders Yanka to take it to the Pacific Ocean so that it can hibernate before finishing the job of decimating humanity several billion years down the line. The road trip that the two undertake, as well as Yanka’s pregnancy itself, becomes representational of the trajectory of French horror cinema—from the circuses of Jean Rollin’s fantastique into the gauzy psychosexual mania of Walerian Borowczyk and eventually toward the icier and much more visceral New French Extremity that emerged at the turn of the millennium with films like In My Skin (2002) and Trouble Every Day (2001). Perhaps Baby Blood’s overwhelming Frenchness is the reason why the film never received a proper North American release. Despite featuring the voice of Gary Oldman as the creature in the English dub, the film was dumped directly to video under the wildly misleading title The Evil Within in a drastically re-edited form that both shuffled around various scenes and, most egregiously, trimmed much of its juiciest gore. Not until STUDIOCANAL’s recent 4K restoration has the film finally begun to receive its due—and the timing, with reproductive rights in the United States in shambles, couldn’t be better. It’s time to feed the baby.
Baby Blood screens tomorrow evening, Thursday, October 31, at L’Alliance New York as part of the series Version Restaurée.
