Inside aka A l'intérieur (2007)

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's debut feature, and one of the films that formed part of the 'New French Extreme' cinema movement of the late 2000s, is getting a special limited edition Blu-ray release from Second Sight.

Four months after surviving a car accident that killed her husband, Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is heavily pregnant to the point that her doctors are planning to induce her. The night before that happens, however, she is visited at her home by a woman (Beatrice Dalle) who has plans to take Sarah's unborn baby for herself, even if it means drenching the house in the blood of numerous victims to do so.

All these years later, it's surprising to see how many of the French extreme films (including HAUTE TENSION, also release by Second Sight, Pascal Laugier's INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND and others) have a strong fairytale element to their gory proceedings. Here Dale's psychopath behaves like the evil witch who has been promised the heroine's baby and has now come to collect and even now, 16 years after it was released, the amount of blood and gore that's caused by her machinations may well be a bit much for some to handle. 

It's an intense and exacting watch for sure, and while Bustillo and Maury have made other movies, the best probably being LIVIDE and the worst possibly LEATHERFACE, INSIDE remains their most extreme contribution to horror cinema. Second Sight's Blu-ray is, as one would expect, a huge improvement on the old DVD release, and there is a bunch of new extras as well.

First off are two new commentary tracks, one from Anna Bogutskaya in which she contextualises the film within both French horror cinema in general and the cinema extreme movement in particular before moving on to the making of the picture. The other commentary by Elena Lazic, on the other hand, is considerably more scene specific.

There are new interviews with Bustillo and Maury (31 minutes), Paradis (15 minutes), DP Laurent Barès (19 minutes, producer Franck Ribière (22 minutes) and stunt coordinator Emmanuel Lanzi (15 minutes) as well as a 15 minute piece by Jenn Adams in which she describes how she was able to relate her own experiences with pregnancy and delivery to what happens in the film.

The limited edition also comes with a rigid box, a 70 page book and six collector's art cards.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's INSIDE is out from Second Sight on Blu-ray in both limited and standard editions on Monday 5th February 2024