Hunger as a metaphor for sexuality in horror movies is as old as cinema itself. The 1896 French short The House of the Devil (Le Manoir du Diable) sees Mephistopheles summon a woman from a boiling cauldron. Then there’s the iconic image of Max Schrek’s vampiric Count Orlok feeding on both Thomas Hutter and his wife Ellen in F. W. Murnau’s iconic Nosferatu (1922), an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’sgothic novel Dracula.
Drawing on centuries of mythology depicting the demons that come to feed on us unguarded in the dark, predating writing itself, desire and death have long been bound with sexuality. This Halloween, gorge on the myth recast in Raw (Grave), the feature debut of French writer/director Julia Ducournau . In the vein of feminist theorist Barbara Creed’s monstrous feminine, as harnessed by Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween and , Raw upends the horror tropes of the beautiful young girl hunted and devoured.
A revelatory Garance Marillier plays young vet student and principled vegetarian Justine. Leaving home for the unruly university halls that are already home to her older sister Alex (Ella Rumpf), Raw fuses a coming-of-age narrative with its more sinister elements, and this time, our heroine is also the monster.
Hurled into a world where the patriarchal structures of violent hazing rituals run rampant, Ducournau captures the chaos with a disorientating visual beauty. Justine’s gay roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) appears in the middle of the first night, moments before a horde of hoodie-clad seniors force them both to crawl, animal-like, toward a heaving, sweat-soaked party where a dance floor eyeball lick is the first signal of a strange sexual thirst.
Unlike in Nosferatu, daylight brings no deliverance. Forced to feed on raw rabbit kidney after being doused Carrie-style with pig blood - with sister Alex watching on - Justine is ready to burn the frat house culture down.
Plagued by a furious rash that tortures her at night, the vampiric motif of transformation post-feeding echoes Dracula’s Mina Harker. Ducournau cleverly draws parallels with the monstering of gay men during the HIV/AIDS crisis during a canteen scene discussing the possible simian origins of the virus, angering Adrien. A debate also breaks out over whether the sexual abuse of an ape can be considered rape. Justine insists it can, as primates are self-aware. “What I’m saying isn’t crazy. Why are we at vet school?”
Soon, a bloody hunger kicks in. Justine first steals a beef burger in the canteen, its dripping juice staining her pristine white lab coat. Then she tears at the raw chicken in the fridge she shares with Adrien. Before long, the animals of the vet school become the subject of Justine’s increasingly lascivious gaze. Cannibalism follows, inexorably tied to Justine’s sexual awakening.
Marillier’s performance is staggering, holding our sympathy even as Justine’s monstrous hunger runs ravenous. There’s a fascinating scene held in the female gaze as Justine watches Adrien play football with the lads, artfully subverting countless similar scenes shot by men to objectify barely clad women.
Ducournau goes on to deliver taboo-destroying scenes that linger long after the end credits roll. The film is smart enough to recognise that at this age and this period in many people’s lives, sexuality is not necessarily set, and that sexual hunger can be as much about scratching an insatiable itch as it is about identity. The film’s most powerful moment features a confronting gender role reversal on sexual consent that re-writes a long line of cinematic rape scenes thrust on female characters by male writers and directors.
A multi-layered exploration of female agency and the monstering of feminine sexuality and strength that also stabs at the nature versus nurture debate, Ducournau’s Raw is an incredible debut and one of the finest films of the year. A genre-blending horror highlight that demands to be devoured this Halloween.
