Alien + Germinal: This bold bet attempted a French horror film!

What is it about? In 1956, in the north of France. A group of underground miners are forced to take the professor to collect samples a thousand meters below. After a landslide prevents them from going back, they discover a crypt from another time and unknowingly awaken something that should have remained dormant…

A horror film in a mine: it’s Gueules Noirs, directed by a professor of the genre!

Claustrophobia from another perspective

After Hostile (2018) and Méandre (2021), Guules Noirs is the third part of a trilogy focused on the theme of survival. Director Mathieu Tour confides: “It’s both the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. I wanted to explore claustrophobia, but from a different angle – and unlike Meander, where the whole story is based on the claustrophobia of one character, here we’re dealing with a gang.”

“I also wanted to focus on a hero who joins a supposedly united group and show how it falls apart when placing the story in the context of the mine. And finally, I wanted to explore the monster movie, about it. In the American cinema of the 80s – which favors physical effects – and identified We will invite French actors, whom we will find in the new register for them.”

Why the 1950s?

Mathieu Toury chose to set the story of Guules Noirs in the north of France in the 1950s to mix the world of the American writer Lovecraft (known for his horror and fantasy stories) with the world of the mine: the context behind GerminalAt a time when workers were beginning to use hammers and mines were attracting waves of migration from North Africa.

“I realized it was almost a military and very cinematic setting, with specific language, hangmen’s halls, footbridges, etc.The filmmaker specifies.

Valuable help

The Blackface creature is reminiscent of Alien, and its many arms recall the figure of a deity. However, its basic design derives from a sculpture by the Japanese sculptor Yoneyama Keisuke, whose style Mathieu Toure admires: “He himself was inspired by the space jock from the first alien, with a bony and very dry side of the face and a god with several Shiva-like arms.”

“He agreed to collaborate on the film and I approved the necessary changes. We also have a scene that evokes a Gorgon and representations of Greek sculptures. I wanted to share influences and civilizations – it was interesting for me to take a Japanese design. A French film with mostly American references, with a touch of Greek sculpture!”

filming locations

Even before the film’s pre-production, Mathieu Toure went on location scouting and found out Arenberg creative mine, the former mining site where Claude Berry’s Germinal was filmed. He recalls: “It’s a space run by a young team who maintain the place and show it off and have turned it into a film studio!”

“There are two more studios, dressing rooms, a projection room, a drone school, logistics, an electrical system for connecting equipment, a canteen. “Once we found this location, we realized we had all the outdoor sets we needed, except for the engine room, which we shot in another mine.”

“Then we lacked basements because they were all concreted after the mining was done. So we found a solution thanks to an “image mine”, in other words, a covered area on the surface where miners used to train. We were able to go to the mine and film the daily life of the miners there.”

“For the prologue, which is set in 1856, we shot at Creative Mine in the space used for the Claude Berry film. We were able to shoot with authentic 19th-century oil lamps, with a small crew, in a very short time. With firemen. Everything was authentic: the lamps, engine room, place’.

“on the verge of cliché”

Very quickly, Mathieu Tour wanted to articulate the story around the gang, as in some westerns and war films, playing with the edges of cliché: “There is the big joker, the one who blows everything up with his explosives, the youngest with racist tendencies, the newcomer through whom we discover this world, the leader who only thinks about saving his men, etc. C This is what allows us. Identify characters and create a coherent group where everyone has a function, even if they are not only functional!

“Everyone had to find their place and the actors helped us with the first reading, for example, the gate exploded quickly between. Thomas Soliveres and Mark Riso And I used that to maintain the dynamic between their characters.”He confides.