20 Socially Conscious Horror Movies
By Jenn Reid
Frontier(s) (2007)
The Issue: Neo-Nazis, Islamaphobia
The Movie:
A conservative candidate has won the presidency in France and people are rioting in the streets of Paris. A group of Muslim teenagers — Alex (Aurélien Wiik), Tom (David Saracino), Farid (Chems Dahmani), the pregnant Yasmine (Karina Testa), and her brother Sami (Adel Bencherif) — decide to use the chaos to pull off a robbery and escape to Amsterdam with the stolen money. One kid, Sami, is shot and the group splits up. Alex and Yasmine take Sami to the hospital while Tom and Farid head towards the border. They find a secluded bed and breakfast run by two women who try to seduce them and offer the boys a free stay. Tom and Farid agree and call the others to join them at the inn.
But it’s a horror movie, and creepy inns in the middle of nowhere are never a good sign. The couple that owns the hotel are deranged cannibal neo-Nazis who kill the boys and attempt to use Yasmine as a brood-mare to create the master race. She manages to kill her captors, including a former SS leader, and escape the bed and breakfast.
What It’s Saying:
Far-right political leaders in France, anti-Muslim sentiments, Neo-Nazis? At the time of the films’ release, reviewers thought the politics of the film were unsubtle and over the top. “Far-right leader, Nazism, okay we get it, yeesh.” Now that far-right political leaders are mainstream again, people might not view Frontier(s) as so unbelievable.
Director Xavier Gens said he came up with the idea in 2002 after a far-right leader named Jean-Marie Le Pen polled surprisingly well. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because his daughter Marine Le Pen is a far-right candidate currently running in the 2017 French presidential election.