The Red Carpet Interviews for LIVID's Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury.

Here are the red carpet interviews with directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury. (Still photos by: Ian Goring)

The Intro/Q&A for LIVID

Sunday, September 11th saw the triumphant return of Julien Maury and Alexandre the directors of the Midnight Madness sensation, A' L'interieur with their follow up film Livide--which was four years coming, with various trials and tribulations of the film making business getting in the way. To say expectations were high would be an understatement.

Here is the Introduction and Q&A of the world premiere of Livid.

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness '11 Ep. 04: Livid!

Tonight sees the Midnight Madness homecoming of, in programmer Colin Geddes' words 'the Daft Punk of french cinema' - co-directors of the bloody À l'intérieur, Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo. This time they're here with Livid, a film that goes in a completely different direction. Plus, guest host Matt Brown talks to Hitfix.com's Drew McWeeny who tells us a pretty crazy story about his uncle's haunted house. All this and more in the fourth instalment of thesubstream.com's TIFF 2011 Midnight Madness coverage!

@thesubstream - Midnight Madness Review - LIVID

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's first film, À l'intérieur (Inside, 2007), was a jaw-dropping demonstration of precisely how much tension and horror can be wrung from a simple premise by two directors with a knack for gore. A woman with scissors wants in, a pregnant woman wants to keep her out. It was shocking and tense enough to be almost unendurable, all floated on the back of an exceedingly uncomplicated idea.

Their second film, Livide (Livid), is… more complex. To put it mildly. It opens with Lucy (Chloé Coulloud), a brooding young nurse-trainee with David Bowie eyes, waiting to be picked up by her trainer. She's taken to visit Mrs. Jessel, a profoundly old woman laying comatose in her enormously creepy, taxidermy-filled house. Jessel was a dancer and was fabulously rich, and her treasure is said to rest with her in the house (where she lays, having asked to be left to die, her dwindling life maintained by daily blood transfusions brought by the nurse).

When Lucy's boyfriend Will hears this tale, he enlists his brother and soon the three are crossing the moor (on Halloween, no less) to seek the treasure of the maybe-not-so-comatose Mrs. Jessel.


To describe Livide as a fairy tale, as many have, is to do it a kind of justice. It certainly has fairy tale elements - unnatural flames flickering in the forest, a catfish having tea with a deer (this is as terrifying as it sounds) - but while it shares the fable-like elliptical logic of a Grimm story, Livide is a fairy tale that's been pushed screaming through a bloody wire mesh of '70s Italian horror movies.

Focussing more on atmosphere than on linear A to B narrative, Bustillo and Maury augment the standard "three kids making bad decisions in a scary old house" structure with odd bits of geographic disorientation, sucking characters into hidden, secret spaces, and with odd, surreal flashbacks to Jessel's monstrous past. For every viscerally bloody murder (and there are a few) there are scenes that attempt to communicate a more intellectual type of thrill, some of which succeed and some of which... don't.

It's frustrating fare for folks not used to this kind of horror, and I have to admit that a lot of it went right by me, in the exact same way Dario Argento's work (which inspired Livide, to hear the directors tell it) did. It's not for everyone, but everyone is not everyone. While there are details and odd bits of the film that don't work (or were never supposed to) it'll satisfy fans looking for a little blood-red fairy tale dreaminess amidst the throat ripping and face biting.

2 Lovely LIVID Posters

Check out these beautifully creepy posters for Livid, the latest film from directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, who brought Inside/A L'Interieur to Midnight Madness in 2007 (via Bloody Disgusting).

LIVID screening times:

Sun., Sept. 11th, 11:59PM, RYERSON

Tues., Sept. 13th, 5:00PM, AMC 7

Torontoist Excited About LIVID

Torontoist.com named its top 11 picks for TIFF 11. Devoted midnight maniacs will immediately recognize four of the names on the list:

Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo who showed us all how much damage a simple pair of scissors could do in À l'intérieur (Midnight Madness 2007).

Pen-ek Ratanaruang who presented 6ixtynin9 at Midnight Madness 2000.

And Johnnie To who brought us the GREATEST. ACTION. MOVIE. EVER: Fulltime Killer (Midnight Madness 2001). That is an indisputable title which I am allowed to confer because I'm a blogger. Don't believe me? Go watch it... Now... See, told you!

Here's some of what they had to say about their films at TIFF11:

Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Livid ...promises some of the same claustrophobic indoors tension of Inside. And if it’s even half as tense and pants-shittingly gnarly, then all you sicko gorehounds out there are in for a treat.

Johnnie To’s Life Without Principle ...is a heist caper and mini–morality drama involving a bank teller, a small-time crook, and a cop. Sounds promising.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Headshot ...is about a cop who gets double-crossed and shot in the head, then wakes up three months later to find that he sees the whole world upside down. ...sounds amazingly trippy and inventive...

Livid Screening Times
Sunday September 11 11:59:00 PM RYERSON
Tuesday September 13 5:00:00 PM AMC 7

Life Without Principle Screening Times
Monday September 12 9:00:00 PM VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN)
Wednesday September 14 3:30:00 PM TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX 1
Saturday September 17 8:30:00 PM SCOTIABANK THEATRE 3

Headshot Screening Times
Sunday September 11 9:00:00 PM SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2
Monday September 12 5:30:00 PM SCOTIABANK THEATRE 2
Saturday September 17 3:00:00 PM TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX 1