Alexandre Aja: A Postnational Genre Auteur?

Abstract

This chapter examines Alexandre Aja’s output across borders and explores whether questions of nationality are as important to understanding his filmography as is the issue of genre. It argues that by openly embracing a globally popular genre, working with culturally important horror figures and employing a highly allusive and intertextual style in his films, Aja’s international reputation is only truly attributable to his success with genre pictures. Aja has become known primarily as a genre director, with references to his French nationality largely downplayed, and although his work certainly engages with the national, his auteurial persona primarily frames him as the newest embodiment of an established and global popular mode. Aja, then, is a postnational auteur figure, whose generic associations have potentially superseded national identity.

In 2006, the French director Alexandre Aja was identified by Alan Jones of the magazine Total Film as part of a group he called the ‘Splat Pack’. This comprised independent directors making horror films with extreme violence and low budgets, all of whom would come to share a similar status as contemporary drivers of the shape of twenty-first-century horror cinema. The members of the group encompassed diverse global origins—as well as Aja, the Splat Pack also includes directors from the UK (Neil Marshall), Australia (James Wan and Leigh Whannell) and the USA (Eli Roth and Rob Zombie)—but all the associated filmmakers were united by generic and stylistic commonalities. Where national identity was evoked in discussions of the ‘pack’, it was largely in the critical analyses of their films, rather than in their directorial personas; the group was one in which the unifying identity of genre seemed to overshadow the relevancy of national origins. Yet, even within this group, Aja remains singular: for one thing, he is the only Splat Pack director to produce a non-Anglophone film, a detail that is particularly striking given France’s historical distaste for national iterations of horror.¹ Indeed, 2003’s Haute tension/High Tension, despite its use of the French language and Francophone actors, was essentially dismissed by French critics at the time of its release for being American, but it was a smash hit abroad among global audiences with a taste for its brutal representations of violence, kickstarting a wave of foreign interest in French horror as a result.² Thanks to the ensuing critical acclaim, Aja moved to the USA and began directing genre works in Hollywood. He took up the mantle of horror auteur and produced a slew of successful remakes and adaptations of horror-adjacent source texts, before directing a number of original films. However, now that Aja has become a renowned name in global genre cinema, his country of origin and the critical establishment that initially rejected his generic work seem to want to reclaim him as a significant French personality in contemporary filmmaking. Despite a clear uneasiness with reconciling an auteur status with the ‘low’ genre of horror and the fact that most of his films are of US origin, critics such as Vincent Gautier (2019) and Philippe Guedj (2019) have recently made the case for Aja as a French success story, both in relation to a specifically national cinema and against the backdrop of a global cinema economy.³ And yet, despite this sense of an ideological battle situating Aja between France and the wider world, it is striking how little national identity actually features in discussions of the director’s work and his auteurial persona; indeed, I argue that Aja has both been established and established himself as a genre figure first and foremost, with this aspect almost eclipsing questions of his nationality within the critical discourse and his work’s positioning for audiences. Paradoxically, Aja is known as both a French and a US filmmaker without fully being defined as either.

Consequently, despite (as I will show) clearly producing films featuring nationally resonant iconography and themes, and despite benefitting from the transnationalism inherent in a global film economy, it is my contention that Aja has essentially become a postnational figure in the world of filmmaking because of his wholehearted embrace of genre. The importance of the national markers in Aja’s texts, which he seems to both embrace and undermine in equal measure, has been almost entirely superseded in interpretations of his work by a focus on the conventions of the internationally popular genre of the horror movie that serves as the anchor to his global image. I suggest that certain genres are so globally prevalent, and their iconographical elements so widely understood by audiences all over the world, that the concept of genre identity can and does carry the necessary force to surpass national identity as a key locus of the film’s meaning, and Aja is a prime example of how that can be achieved. It is consequently more fruitful to think of Aja as a genre director than in terms of his national origin or in relation to the national contexts in which he works; thus, it is clear that the efforts to reclaim Aja as simply ‘French’, as it were, are missing the complexities of how nation is articulated and interrogated in his filmography. Aja is a highly relevant figure in terms of postnational filmmaking because he embraces the semantic and syntactic elements of genre to such an extent that any easy sense of national positioning in relation to either his work or his auteur status is drowned out. That is, he is a director whose auteurial stardom is based around genre; by the same token, he is not principally classifiable as a French filmmaker in any traditional sense.

This chapter will demonstrate how Aja’s stardom has been established through his genre filmmaker status, rather than primarily within the realms of either the national or the transnational, through an examination of the generic textuality of his films and external factors that have shaped his persona. I then discuss the extent to which Aja’s work nevertheless engages with the national, interrogating the cultural ideas and iconography that work to construct ideas of the nation in his remakes and adaptations, before poking at the limits of nation by analysing a fascination with borders that infuses his two most recent and original films, Crawl (2019) and Oxygène/Oxygen (2021). Through recourse to both theorising Aja’s borders and the overwhelming status of the globalising genre elements in his films, I demonstrate that the lens of the postnational is the most appropriate one for interrogating Aja’s mainstream success.

Postnational Genre (and) Stardom

Exploring Aja’s films first requires a discussion of the idea of genre stardom. The concept is not a new one: it is possible to cite a considerable number of actors (Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Robert Englund and Adam Sandler) and directors (John Ford, Wes Craven, Eli Roth and Michael Bay) whose careers and star identities are largely connected to and, in some cases, defined by their involvement with a particular genre, and whose presence may function as a form of generic shorthand for the informed viewer. In a Francophone context, a pertinent example is the actor Jean Dujardin, linked to popular comedy through both the Brice de Nice (2005, 2016) and OSS 117 (2006, 2009, 2021) franchises. However, in each of these cases, it is a generic stardom that is also strongly linked to national cinema; Bay’s action films or the comedies that provide vehicles for Dujardin’s talents are clearly rooted in their respective national film cultures, a national grounding that is both evoked and reinforced by relevant films and their reception by local audiences.⁴ What I suggest differentiates Aja’s genre stardom is that he is central to discussions of both contemporary US and French horror without being fully aligned with either national discourse. It is striking here that French critics read Haute tension as trying too hard to be American, with one discussion of his career framing him as ‘Aja the American’ (Laquittant 2016), while his success in the USA saw Aja positioned as ‘a Parisian in Hollywood’ (Perrello 2010, 15) and so implicitly outside the Hollywood stable. To compensate for this unusually marked lack of local grounding, as we shall see, the horror genre acts as a superstructural category of/for interpretability, transcending national frameworks when it comes to situating Aja’s auteurial persona.

Although different nations have their own particular forms and specificities when it comes to any individual genre, I contend that the semantic properties of popular genres such as horror are so internationally recognisable in a global media economy that they can effectively be liberated from the implicit confines of national genre and instead be framed in terms of the postnational.⁵ This sense of globally familiar genres has been examined in scholarship before as a consequence of transnational cinematic exchange, and it is certainly true that transnational media exchange has been responsible for the flow of generic paradigms around the world in the past hundred years. However, I suggest that a postnational framework is better suited to the evolving shape of the media ecosystem and the increased fluidity and lapsing of national identities today. Through the rise of streaming services (which can mitigate linguistic and national barriers), the internet and other forms of new media and visual communication (e.g. phenomena such as meme culture), the semantic properties of a genre can proliferate adjacent to (or even separately from) their source texts in other media forms. Defining a text as belonging, say, to the horror genre carries with it enough pre-existing meaning in its own right to obviate the need for national qualification; consequently, drawing on markers of a specific national culture serves as an extra descriptor that works to delineate the syntactic elements of the texts, those that imbue the semantic grammar with more explicit cultural and collective meanings, thus grounding the overarching postnational frame of the genre in specific narrative or formal properties linked to a particular nation’s interpretation of said genre.

It is important to underline the fact that such a reading does not suggest that Aja completely ignores the national in his work nor that adopting a postnational analytical lens implies minimising the impact of nationally inflected imagery; indeed, my construction of postnational genre leaves significant room for articulating the national on the dual levels of a text’s formal qualities and its audience engagement. On this point, I agree with Tey Marianna Nunn’s contention that ‘postnational, as a theoretical construct, does not mean that nationalism has ended. On the contrary, postnational coexists with the national. They are inseparable’ (2011). These national signifiers may be more general (the use of the French language and Gallic stars in Haute tension or Oxygène) or they could draw on specific markers associated with the relevant national context: it would be impossible to watch a film like Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes (2006) without feeling a tangible sense of Americanness, evoked by details from disputes between a Republican father and his Democrat son-in-law to the inclusion of shots of the desertscape customary of the US Western genre, complete with swelling musical cues and low camera angles to accentuate the heroism of the character who emerges as the central focus. The Hills Have Eyes, then, is clearly intended to be understood as a US horror film, wherein the formal characteristics of the text work together with the common cultural knowledge of genre provided by audiences that this is what a horror film should look like: knowledge that represents a constitutive part of the multidimensional construction of genre (see Tudor 1974; Ryall 1975/1976). Acknowledging the national resonances of the text does not preclude the use of the postnational as another scholarly framework for illuminating the film’s textual construction and address. My conception of postnational genre invites drawing on the national even at the syntactic level as a means of further discussing a text: it frames the label horror, for example, as one master identity that transcends the national and then the specific national label of ‘French horror’ or ‘US horror’ as a more distinctive identity explicitly contextualising the genre product on a local level (through details such as language, geography, references to cultural and historical events, etc., which lend specific resonance to the semantic elements of the film).

Similarly, discussing Aja in terms of both the national and postnational context does not imply ignoring the inherently transnational nature of the director’s work. Despite my argument that scrutinising postnational positionality and signification offers the most useful way to interrogate Aja’s filmmaking practice, his movement between nations and the ways that his work clearly engages with other cinema cultures invites reference to Mette Hjort’s (2010) characterisation of various forms of transnational identity. Hjort describes transnationalism as a scalar concept that allows for manifestations of the identity linked to both texts and their production contexts, and which may be strong and/or weak in its different forms. Aja’s work and his directorial persona certainly correspond (if uneasily) to a number of Hjort’s classifications of transnationalism, from the more formally driven epiphanic transnationalism (the cinematic articulation of elements of national belonging that overlap with other national identities [2010, 16]) to the contrasting and financially driven opportunistic transnationalism (which is fuelled by economic factors and opportunities arising in relation to funding partners [2010, 19]).⁶ It is also tempting to cite Aja as an example of auteurist transnationalism, as he is certainly a figure who ‘decides to embrace a particular kind of collaboration beyond national borders’ (2010, 23), although Hjort’s description connects this to auteurs who are both established and iconic in relation to their own national cinema; this complicates the classification, as Aja’s auteur status has followed a different trajectory, suggesting the need for alternative terminology. Indeed, the paradoxical ease and unease of defining Aja in relation to these categories is illustrative of the potentially limiting aspects of transnationalism in itself as a descriptive framework. Thus, I turn to notions of genre and the postnational to analyse his filmography, with the caveat that these keep open dialogue with questions of both nation and auteurism.

From Nation to Genre in Aja’s Oeuvre and Brand

Beginning with the endurance of the national in connection with Aja’s films and persona, his first feature to receive mainstream attention was Haute tension, a slasher film with an infamous twist ending in which the Final Girl and central character turns out also to be the killer. It draws on numerous US horror conventions and references many US horror texts, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and William Lustig’s Maniac (1980), Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). These references are highly allusive, placing the film in conversation with other canonical texts to help define its place within the genre (Fig. 1). It is important to note that, at this point in time, horror was not considered a French genre at all, apart from a few key examples (most famously, Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face [Georges Franju, 1960]), and the film is actually credited with initiating a turn in horror production that would continue to a limited degree in the 20 years that followed.⁷ This detail helps explain the negative critical reaction to the film in France, and it places Aja in an unusual position in relation to his national cinema—by embracing this particular genre, a genre that was widely believed to be predominantly American, he was effectively working against what was understood to be popular in French filmmaking at the time, thus situating himself at one remove from his national film culture and reinforcing the generic identity of the director almost in opposition to the interests of his national cinema.

Fig. 1

Bathroom chase sequences in Haute tension and Maniac

Due to the international success of Haute tension, Aja moved to the USA, where he was recruited by horror auteur Wes Craven to direct a remake of The Hills Have Eyes—a move that can clearly be read in terms of one genre auteur effectively giving his blessing to the next generation. Aja then remade or was involved with the remakes of a number of other US and Asian horror texts, such as Mirrors (2008), Piranha 3D (2010) and Maniac (Franck Khalfoun, 2012), before adapting two books in 2013 and 2016, respectively, Horns, a gothic romance by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill, and The 9th Life of Louis Drax, a supernatural narrative adapted by Aja with distinctly Hitchcockian inflections. Another level of engagement with the genre emerges in Aja’s casting choices, bringing in stars who have featured in significant canonical texts: Ted Levine was cast as the patriarch Big Bob in The Hills Have Eyes, his casting and the alliterative name evoking his role as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), while Kiefer Sutherland assumed the lead role in Mirrors, returning to the genre after appearances in The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987) and Flatliners (Schumacher, 1990). In press tours, Aja actually expressed his intention to bring Sutherland back to the genre, positioning himself carefully as a kind of gatekeeper of horror and implicitly further cementing his generic ties in the process.⁸

These remakes and adaptations all play with their source material, and it has long been suggested that the very nature of remakes and adaptations speaks to a sense of the fluidity of identity and meaning in themselves. I contend that Aja’s work revises these texts in such a way that each film can be read as undercutting and undermining some of the values and institutions that make up US national identity, thus drawing attention to the fallacy of fixed national markers in an increasingly globalised world. Aja’s version of The Hills Have Eyes makes the mutant enemies the consequence of the US atomic age, and one of the final confrontations sees a hero character battle a mutant in a house whose set is modelled to look like a typical 1950s home. The villains are, then, a monstrous nuclear family, a direct counterpoint to the dysfunctional Carter family of The Hills Have Eyes. In the ultimate subversive statement, the head of the mutant family is killed with a model of the US flag. Released two years later, Mirrors is set within an abandoned department store, pointedly called the Mayflower in a reference to America’s founding; the building is hidden away by scaffolding, suggesting a country literally striving to cover up the less than appealing parts of its history. Both this setting and the premise of the film—a demon that lives in reflections—invite us to read it as a metaphorical exploration of a consumerist society excessively concerned with appearance. For Alexandra West, using national imagery in this way evokes ‘an Americana spirit that has fallen into disrepair’ (2016, 167), with the narrative refusal to condemn the building implying the possibility of its resurgence. However, Aja’s pessimistic conclusion, in which the building is blown up and the main character is forever trapped in the mirror world himself, seems to strip away this option. Indeed, it draws links between consumerism and US history, and frames them as an almost fatalistic combination. By cuing this reading, the film shares certain commonalities with Piranha 3D, in which the threat comes from the titular literal monstrous consumers, their targets in this case young, attractive US teenagers who would otherwise embody free-spiritedness in a beach movie. The most threatening consumer is, however, a monstrous porn producer who, like the piranhas, targets the bodies of the main characters (although his motivation is making a film). The promotional posters for this movie were largely based around the bikini-clad body of a spring breaker and the possibility of seeing it in 3D, so this criticism of unbridled consumerism actually functions on both a textual and an extratextual level; the film’s narrative renders monstrous the consumption of young, attractive bodies, yet its promotion works to implicate the viewer in this practice. In Piranha 3D, Aja sells a flagrantly consumerist film (a summer blockbuster featuring a nubile young cast) in a manner deliberately concerned with criticising such ‘American’ practices.

This nationally inflected critique even extends to Aja’s non-horror texts, with Horns and Louis Drax presenting a less than flattering image of the small American town and of the dynamics that govern family life, respectively. For my purposes, it should be noted that while these latter two films depart from horror scripts, horror was nonetheless the lens through which the critical establishment understood them, accentuating the fact that genre is central to Aja’s directorial persona.⁹ Indeed, as Guedj (2019) writes, a return to the horror genre was necessary ‘to reinforce Alexandre Aja’s reputation as a reliable craftsman in Hollywood, where he was beginning to attract disapproval after the poor results of his two previous films’, further cementing the relationship between Aja and the genre that made his name.

My discussion of the important role played by Aja’s name in the promotion of these films bears comparison with Timothy Corrigan’s (1990) work on the commerce of auteurism: the idea that, rather than being some unseen hand that exists behind or implicitly within the text, the role of the auteur is one of ‘commercial performance’, granting them and their name an economic and cultural value that is of use for marketing and promotional purposes. Thus, the auteur can be considered another one of the film’s stars, and their presence preconditions how a film is perceived prior to its reading. If a film is linked to a certain auteur, Corrigan suggests that there is a certain pleasure ‘in being able to know already, not read, the meaning of the film in a totalizing image that precedes the movie in the public images of its creator’ (50). Aja has frequently been discussed as a figure who approaches the film industry in terms of both its cultural and economic capital—as Guedj [2019] asserts, ‘Aja accepts the business part of “show-business”’—making the economic auteur label pertinent to his persona, and it is clear that this tag is in the director’s case intrinsically linked with his genre identity. In recent years, Aja’s films have been associated with and at the forefront of dominant trends in popular horror genre filmmaking, from gritty remakes of 1970s/1980s horror classics (The Hills Have Eyes) to J-horror remakes (Mirrors) to horror summer blockbusters (Crawl). In each case, the connection of Aja’s work to a moment in the industrial cycle suggests that he is in tune with the economic forces that underpin the genre as well as its semantic/syntactic elements, implicitly underlining his simultaneous position as a custodian and driver of the genre. Aja has discussed the fact that his initial success with The Hills Have Eyes led to him receiving offers to direct big-budget Marvel blockbusters and films that were not connected to the horror genre, and that all these offers were turned down in order to both work within horror and alternatively put forward distinct film projects and screenplays shaped by the director’s interests and instincts (Laquittant 2016). This interview and the work ethic to which it attests speak to Aja’s auteur qualities and his own apparent awareness of his primordial association with the horror genre.

It is important to stress that as Aja’s status has grown due to the continued success of his horror films, so too has his name as a marker of generic pedigree. The Gallic director has been discussed in terms of contemporary and economic auteurism—the sense, to quote Tyson Wils (2013), that auteurism now ‘exists as doxa, as a type of knowledge that is shared by the community at large, which accept it as a normal way of speaking about and representing film and other cultural texts’.¹⁰ This connects back to the concept of economic auteurism as articulated by Corrigan and leads to a virtuous circularity within Aja’s career; each subsequent horror text reinforces his status within the genre, but at the same time, Aja’s status within the genre serves as a marker of horror when promoting these films to audiences. To speak of an Alexandre Aja film indicates to the informed audience that the result will be a genre product. Not only that but the way that marketing often puts Aja’s name in conversation with key figures in genre history (Craven for The Hills Have Eyes, Sam Raimi for Crawl) further reinforces both the generic pedigree of his films and the strength of the Aja brand. That brand has proven significant for Gallic filmmakers linked to Aja, and the director has used his commercial success to facilitate the production of further horror films in the USA; thus, just as the connections to existing genre figures have worked to cement his name in the horror genre in trailers and promotional material, Aja too engages in a process of generic patronage for his collaborators Franck Khalfoun (P2 [2007]; Maniac) and Grégory Levasseur (The Pyramid [2014]). Each time Aja’s name is referenced by horror publicity, it both evokes and further strengthens the generic connotations of his auteurial identity.

Crawl and Oxygène as Postnational Genre Texts

Although it is clear that national and transnational dialogues are at play throughout Aja’s work, it is useful here to demonstrate how his films both showcase overriding generic identities and engage with nation (and its limits). I therefore turn to Aja’s two most recent films, Crawl and Oxygène, which perfectly encapsulate his subsumption into the realm of postnational genre. They are interesting and relevant case studies because they mark the director’s first foray into original stories since Haute tension; thus, the films do not rely on prior knowledge on the part of the audience to the same extent as Aja’s remakes or adaptations, meaning his directorial persona is likely to be more influential in conveying their properties to potential viewers. The two films are set predominantly in confined locations—a house crawl space and a medical unit, respectively—and their narratives are concerned with escape. In Crawl, young swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) attempts to save her father from the basement of his house as a hurricane moves in. Soon, they both find themselves trapped in the basement as the flood waters rise and several alligators start to hunt them. Meanwhile, Oxygène sees a woman named Liz (Mélanie Laurent) wake up in a cryogenic chamber with no memory of how she got there. Soon learning that the pod is running out of air, she attempts to reconstitute her identity, and either restore the airflow or escape the pod before she suffocates. She discovers that she is a clone, and part of a project by the original version of herself to rebuild humanity on a far-off world after Earth has been struck by a deadly virus.

The ultimate driver of the two narratives is the desperate need to break free from these claustrophobic cramped spaces, confined areas that will soon become uninhabitable due to external forces, by shattering fixed borders. The idea that horror and other genre texts explore different types of border as a figure for those of the nation-state has been seen as a major impetus of French horror cinema. More specifically, this national genre has been read—as Marc Olivier (2007) notes in a review of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s A l’intérieur/Inside (2007)—in terms of the threat emerging from the vulnerability of borders to fracture, be they the borders of the body, the home, the nation or some other kind.¹¹ It is certainly the case that evocations of borders hang over Crawl and Oxygène, both because the threats emerge from the dangerous piercing of an external border and also, more curiously, as we shall see, because the ultimate resolution stems from a positively framed internal border fracture (or at least the promise of such) effected by the main character. We thus encounter a number of borders in the films. Crawl largely takes place in the house, with the first half occurring in a crawl space where borders are both a threat (the main characters are trapped as flood water rises) and guarantors of safety (the alligators are unable to pass by the pipes and brickwork that constitute these borders) (Fig. 2). Meanwhile, in Oxygène Aja’s tendency to isolate the confined structure of the pod in the frame, surrounded by black in order to underline Liz’s lack of knowledge of the space outside, invites the viewer to share the character’s disorientating confinement. Both the pod (as the result of a collision with a meteor) and Liz’s body are also punctured or threatened with puncture throughout the film: in Liz’s case, by the machinery designed to sustain her bodily functions during the journey (a fracture constructed as a positive development by the narrative), and then as the pod attempts to euthanise her after determining she has no ability to survive with the oxygen leaking (a combination of two negatively charged fractures, in narrative terms).

Fig. 2

Borders that threaten and protect in Crawl

The concern with border play in both Crawl and Oxygène extends to their own positioning in both national and transnational spheres of reference. Both films are distinctly national products in a number of ways. Crawl is a typical US horror blockbuster and the dual threat of the hurricane and the alligators heavily connote Florida, where the film is set. Aja also invites reference to a historic US tradition of creature features through the man-vs.-animal narrative (most famously dating back to the canonical King Kong [Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933]). Oxygène most immediately references France through language markers and in the form of two big-name French actors: Laurent and Mathieu Amalric as the voice of the pod, both multiple César winners and recognisable figures in contemporary French cinema.

In this way, Aja’s undermining of borders subtly invites the viewer to consider the limits of nation even as he evokes it. Indeed, in the case Oxygène, the presence of two French stars known for their transnational work outside France and the film’s release on Netflix, a platform that enables viewers to employ subtitles and/or change the language via dubbing, complicate the process of reading the film in relation to a specific national context. As a result of Aja’s involvement with the streaming service and his choice of globally recognisable stars, Oxygène is a film that exists in a liminal state, both markedly national and consciously transnational at the same time, and these are some of the factors that recommend postnational paradigms for interrogating it. Similarly, the fact that the film takes place entirely in space and is concerned with a journey to a new world, both settings clearly liberated from the shackles of national grounding, subtly evokes the spectre of the postnational.¹²

Crawl does not obviously exist in such an extreme state of in-between-ness when it comes to geo-cultural affiliations, instead clearly belonging to the Hollywood blockbuster mould. Indeed, with Crawl marking Aja’s first US foray into a totally original horror film benefitting from a wide cinematic release, liberated from the potentially limiting relationship necessitated by the remake, and Oxygène clearly a French sci-fi product on a streaming service, their status as high-concept popular genre texts appears to be one of the only immediate similarities between the two works.¹³ Yet although the two films are superficially aligned with different genres, it is clear that Oxygène occupies a similar space to Aja’s other horror-adjacent works. Many of the formal and narrative properties that work to qualify Crawl as a horror text are also present in Oxygène: the films both prominently display a strong female character who is the victim of corporeal distress throughout the narrative; and these female characters are positioned as effective reflections of the villain (Haley is a swimmer who has been trained by her father to think like an ‘apex predator’ in the water; the original Elizabeth is the pioneer of the clone programme and thus the initially unseen reason the clone Liz is in the pod), echoing the intrinsic self–other binary that has often characterised readings of horror texts. That Aja employs the female body as a marker of his unifying generic identity is particularly interesting given that gendered corporeality has also historically been positioned as constitutive of the nation and national(ist) values/ideals (see Yuval-Davis 1997). The corporeal focus on these two female characters could seem at first blush to invite national readings, but I suggest Aja deliberately complicates this on the level of casting (Scodelario is an English actress playing an American woman) and narrative (Liz’s identity must be rebuilt through the film, so despite the obvious Frenchness of Laurent, the character’s status as a clone means she is effectively nationless). By clearly invoking the associations of the female body with nation only to destabilise them, Aja invites the informed viewer to instead consider the films predominantly through other conceptual frameworks, notably those of genre and auteurism. The seeming nationlessness of Liz and the outer-space setting of Oxygène, both filtered through the lens of French identity, invite comparison to Aja himself and his own ambiguous relationship with conceptions of nation and its geo-cultural specifiers.

It is striking that Aja’s recent return to France and the world of French filmmaking with Oxygène serves as the perfect example of the delocalising and postnationalising effect of genre on his directorial practices, in that it is turning back to national semantics that renders the postnational syntax of his films so difficult to ignore. Along with his Splat Pack contemporaries, he is emblematic of a genre-focused auteurism that, if not entirely novel, has certainly been raised to a new level by an increasingly transnational film industry, new modes of production and distribution, and a streaming era that has facilitated the spread and acceptance of ‘lowbrow’ genre products among global mainstream audiences. If the figure of the author is, as Rosanna Maule argues, ‘mainly the expression of nationally over-determined film practices and discourses’ (2008, 273), then the postnational genre stardom exemplified by Aja appears to indicate a potential new phase in the understanding and articulation of contemporary European auteurism, one that addresses the global development of media through the use of genre to mitigate and, crucially, in so doing facilitate the endurance of the national trappings of a text. Although Aja’s success is singular in the particular field of French horror filmmaking, his case study serves as an invitation to interrogate the career trajectories of other directors, both French (such as Michel Hazanavicius) and more widely European, and examine the ways that their films are both specifically local yet, thanks to drawing on popular postnational genre modes such as comedy and horror, remain accessible and familiar to an international audience.