Raw · reception & legacy

How Raw has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

In 2016–17 the headlines were all about paramedics and fainting audience members at its TIFF Midnight Madness screening; once the smelling salts wore off, it settled in as a tender coming-of-age film in horror clothing — and after Ducournau won the Palme d'Or for Titane, Raw got retroactively canonised as the debut that announced her.

What's debated

Fans still argue that the fainting-and-barf-bag hype mis-sold it: is Raw really an extreme-gore endurance test, or a sisterhood/coming-of-age drama that squeamish headlines scared the wrong audience away from?

Its footprint

The fainting reports became the marketing — Alamo Drafthouse famously handed out branded barf bags at screenings, turning the film into shorthand for 'the movie people passed out at,' and it's now a fixture of every 'modern female-directed horror' list.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd-era staple of the elevated-horror and women-in-horror canon — the 'you must have seen this' entry point to Ducournau before Titane.

Named by the director

Influences Julia Ducournau has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• David Cronenberg — Ducournau repeatedly named Cronenberg as her formative body-horror influence in interviews around Raw's release.
• The Fly (1986) — She cited it as a favourite — a body-horror film she praised for being, at heart, a love story about a transforming body.