Baby Blood

aka The Evil Within
1990 / Dir. Alain Robak / Written by Serge Cukier and Alain Robak / Starring Emmanuelle Escourrou, Christian Sinniger, Jean-Francois Gallotte, and Roselyne Geslot

We’ve seen the killer/demonic baby theme so much, it can stand alone as its own horror subgenre – Rosemary’s Baby, It’s Alive, Grace, The Brood, etc – in fact, “evil children” is one of my tags on this site to sort those films from the rest. What’s refreshing is that every now and then a killer baby movie comes along that is inventive, compelling, and departs from many conventions of the subgenre in interesting ways. Baby Blood (perhaps more commonly known as The Evil Within, but titled Baby Blood on American DVD) is one of those rare films that had me sitting up and taking note when things take a dramatic shift from the conventional all the way out to left field – and that’s where I like it. Emmanuelle Escourrou stars as Yanka, the beautiful yet disturbed wife of a circus Ringmaster, who uses any available opportunity to abuse her – though she is newly pregnant. The circus setting is eerie and eccentric in itself, and presents a creative stage for the evil “other” to enter the film – as an unseen entity that bursts out of the body of a captive leopard and inserts itself vaginally into Yanka’s uterus, thus taking over the body of her growing fetus. Are you still with me? Good, because it gets even better. Soon the baby begins to communicate with Yanka through her thoughts, demanding that she kill the men in her life that mistreat her – in exchange for a feast of their blood, which sustains the baby’s growth. This is the impetus for a barrage of over-the-top, gore-drenched murder sequences as Yanka reluctantly then tenaciously butchers every man who comes across her path (each possibly serving as an extension of her abusive husband), while simultaneously developing a maternal instinct to nurture the parasite growing inside her. Some truly remarkable camera work and deftly acted by Escourrou, the film is also refreshing because it is men who fight for their lives against a determined woman, turning the “exploitation” film on its ear. Dark and gruesome yet never taking itself too seriously, Baby Blood is an underseen gem in French horror that earns a high place amongst the greatest of all the “wicked children” fare. **** ½