Here Be Monsters

French horror master Xavier Gens talks his beguiling new horror Cold Skin

- Anton Bitel

With the borderland butchery (and cutting-edge politics) of his 2007 feature debut Frontier(s) (2007), Xavier Gens was on the very crest of the ‘French Extreme’ new wave. His latest, Cold Skin, a creature feature set in the Antarctic Circle during the Great War, is a film of edges – between land and water, between human and beast, between wilderness and civilisation, between love and war – which comes with the troubling suggestion that these boundaries are being forever pushed and tested, making progress a mere illusion.

SciFiNow caught up with Gens shortly after the European première of Cold Skin at the Glasgow FrightFest.

You’re associated with the ‘new French extremity’ of the Noughties, is this a departure from that?