The Black Gate (2017)

When Sarah (Jeanne Dessart) and David (Nicolas Couchet) were children, their parents were murdered under mysterious circumstances, and the kids split up and thrown into different orphanages.

Now that they are grown-ups, their uncle, who is a scientist and an occultist has sent a mysterious occult tome to Sarah. Something suggests to her the book and her uncle may hold the explanation to the death of her parents. David is more than a little sceptical concerning Sarah’s ideas about supernatural shenanigans, but he’s accompanying her to the little village where their uncle lives all the same. He’ll get over his scepticism soon enough, too, for the uncle’s research has opened a gate to a hell dimension, and it will need Sarah and him to perhaps thwart inevitable doom.

Indie – in the sense of probably completely privately financed by non-millionaire enthusiasts instead of the one describing films made by production companies that just happen to not be Hollywood studios with decades of tradition – horror heavily inspired by the works of directors like the great Lucio Fulci like Fabrice Martin’s and Guillaume Beylard’s The Black Gate is a rather difficult proposition. It’s very easy for a film like this to end up feeling more like an amateur rip-off of Italian weird horror and its spiritual brethren than a homage, but the film at hand did convince me quickly it had not just a heart but cinematic instincts in the right place.

Now, it is still a film made on a budget of more of a semi-professional level, so to enjoy it, a viewer does need to meet it halfway from time to time, accepting that not everything here will look as slick as in a big or even mid budget production, that some set-ups and ideas have the whiff of the talented enthusiast, that the dialogue’s rough (and the English subtitles rougher), and that there are moments that are just a bit awkward. In The Black Gate’s case, however, all of these things are honestly not terribly important, at least not if the viewer does, like me, adore the Italian-style horror the filmmakers so clearly do, because they get many of its constituting elements so right, the whole affair doesn’t feel so much like a film made by fans of that part of the genre, but as if this were part of a hidden strand of European horror films still following these old ways today, now working cheaply with all the virtues and problems that come with digital filmmaking, after having found its way to France somehow.

I’m not, in general, a fan of films looking quite as digitally shot as this one sometimes, particularly in its beginning stages, does, but the directors actually turn this to their advantage, using combinations of digital editing tricks, the structure of the material, and what looks like practical as well as post-production effects, to create their own version of the gothic, sometimes mildly psychedelic weirdness of their predecessors. At times, this leads to moments and sequences that do not look “realistic” but unreal in the most delightful manner, properly suggesting a place where the borders between our world and one that works from very different rules have become thin, the laws of physics blurring into other kinds of laws we don’t have a name for. Adding to this effect is how clever and imaginative the production design is – with quite a few elements and creatures on screen that still carry a bit of the air of their inspirations but have become excellent grotesques belonging very specifically to this film. The film also has a great eye for locations – ones in the real world that look impressively gloomy on their own, as well as those that can feel outright otherworldly with a bit of digital magic.

Plotwise, this is of course a bit strange, a bit confusing, and does not always follow the logic of the real world, but it really isn’t supposed to do, nor do I see how the film would gain anything it actually needed by having a more conventionally structured plot when it really aims for a mood and a feeling, and reaches these effectively. The film is a bit faster and tighter than your usual Fulci movie, it has to be said, even including a handful of proper action sequences (most of them of course involving zombies of a kind), most of which are really rather nice if you don’t think too much about why David’s so good with a sword, or why Sarah (who doesn’t even like guns), is a crack shot under pressure.

The acting is certainly more than decent, sometimes showing a couple of weaknesses typical of indie horror, but in a film that’s not really about characters either, these little weaknesses do tend to matter little. And Dessart, who has the most traditional “acting” to do, is genuinely good.


But really, the point of this one is a mood of strangeness and doom, and a palpable love for the less rational side of horror cinema, and in this, The Black Gate turns out to be close to perfect.