Elena Anaya in THE SKIN I LIVE IN (Photo: José Haro/Sony Pictures Classics)

The DVD and Blu-ray release earlier this month of Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In is probably causing few ripples in the perennial, if quietly implicit, debate on the merits of the highbrow vs. lowbrow culture. In fact, I’d guess that it’s stirred up little concern on this front except among folks like me, who spend far too much time thinking about such things.

Almodóvar, of all filmmakers it seems, would be among the least likely to surprise audiences with an artful blend of, er, art, and juicier, more populist themes. His early works were often casually iconoclastic farces that riffed on sex or gender, or both, and he officially became “controversial” with the exploitation-esque Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Later, entering a kind of personal Golden Age where his sheer masterfulness as a filmmaker could no longer be denied by critics and festival juries, Almodóvar chose to make a film about a coma patient impregnated by her nurse and a far pulpier one about transsexual fratricide and blackmail.

So why not eventually tackle horror and its tropes head-on?

The problem, however, is that with The Skin I Live In he doesn’t tackle them head-on. Or rather, all he truly seems to care about are the relevant tropes, not the dark, authentically frightening heart of horror itself.

Admittedly, Almodóvar can create an unsettling atmosphere. When coupled with a handful of shocks that feel like a mild flirtation with transgressive cinema, the overall air of dread gives the illusion of a fully formed work of horror. And in fact during a first viewing of The Skin I Live In, its sense of mystery and all those free-floating tropes may fool one into believing for certain stretches that it really is a horror film. Yet when the houselights come on, it becomes evident that at its best the film has been a wildly opportunistic exercise resulting in a tonal clash—and at its worst, a dishonest bait-and-switch: come for the sexy horror, leave with an oddly upbeat allegory about the persistence of personal identity.

To be clear, I’m not commenting on the degree that the source text, a novel by Thierry Jonquet, does or does not fall within the confines of the horror genre for the simple reason that I haven’t read it. Certainly its central premise, involving a forced modification of the human body on a very fundamental level, is disturbing. To this, Almodóvar adds an upper-class mad scientist in the James Whale vein, albeit updated slightly via the beauty-is-only-skin-deep theme of Georges Franju’s classic Eyes Without a Face. For the younger crowd, there is a pronounced element of imprisonment and torture à la countless B movie box office successes of the past decade.

In the end, though, Almodóvar’s quotes of horror are all that remain with us— he has not made his own quote-worthy contribution to the genre.

Now, why should any of this matter?

Because the marketing of the film, as well as its critical reception in many quarters, would lead to one believe that Almodóvar has done a great service to movie culture, showing what an artiste can do with the same raw material as the schlockmeisters. I’d maintain that the opposite is true: The Skin I Live In does a disservice to horror films and art house films—and I say this as a fan of both.

The family of WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Photo: IFC Films)

That’s not to suggest that making effective “art horror,” to use a somewhat clumsy phrase, guarantees that you’ll be a winner with both audiences. A good case in point is We Are What We Are, a hit on the festival circuit in 2010, but received rather tepidly upon its limited U.S. release in 2011. The film is accomplished on just about every level—it’s wonderfully shot, edited, and acted. In fact, one can discern this just by checking out any five-minute stretch of it. And the premise, which involves a group of cannibals in a present-day urban setting, is both compelling and original.

Moreover, We Are What We Are accomplishes what a horror movie should primarily do—it horrifies. But if that’s true, why wasn’t Jorge Michel Grau’s debut feature embraced more warmly by horror fandom?

Well, that’s where the “problem” referenced in this piece’s title crops up. That’s because Grau’s achievement in the context of genre expectations is precisely what’s so problematic. Did he “elevate” what could have been a lurid (but fun) quasi-exploitation flick into highbrow respectability, or did he do an admirable job of injecting horror into what was basically an art-house parable? The difficulty in answering this question reflects what I suspect is the ambivalence of both camps—horrorhounds and cineastes—to the film itself. The real problem, then, is that the film’s perceived neither-fish-nor-fowl status caused it to be dismissed by the very groups whose members stood to gain much from embracing it.

Ah, but unlike Almodóvar, Grau directs horror as if it is already art—which, of course, it is. In fact, the strength of this conviction is probably, and sadly, what causes him to lose points with some horror fans: the writer-director doesn’t self-consciously try to woo genre audiences. For example, there’s not much attention paid to the actual act of cannibalism. Nor is there much conventional suspense around when and where the family of people-eaters will strike next, or whether the cops (or any other adversary) will stop them.

Instead, the quartet of actors at the center of We Are What We Are—all excellent, all intense—spend most of their time (perhaps too much of it?) embroiled in a domestic power struggle. The fact that they are murderers and cannibals is almost beside the point… and it’s actually this matter-of-fact approach to the monstrous that fuels the tremendous horror at the film’s core. Sure, there are a few moments in Skin that are quite repulsive, and yes, I’d argue that creating dread and mystery, which Almodóvar achieves, is not only necessary to the genre but actually harder to pull off than horror and terror. But “necessary” is not the same thing at all as “sufficient,” which his film vividly proves.

A better counterexample to Skin, then, because it was justifiably heralded by both audiences under discussion, must be Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In.

And, while we’re at it, here’s a more recent film that I admire much more than Almodóvar’s but which falls into some of the same traps involving the appropriation of horror elements: Lynn Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. I brought up some of these issues in the course of my review, so I won’t dwell on them here. Bottom line, I found the film to be an uneasy mix of pulp and non-pulp.

But on the other hand, this is the very thing to which so many people responded to so favorably. It wasn’t stated outright but between the lines of some critics’ reviews was the notion that We Need to Talk About Kevin was a kind of “thinking person’s” horror film.

I guess I can’t get too upset by the assumptions in such a response, particularly the implication that horror even needs to be elevated in some way. If that were true, what would one say of films such as Hour of the Wolf, Ugetsu, Dreyer’s Vampyr, and so on? These are art-house classics but also formidable, uncompromising horror flicks.

So if you’re a filmmaker who’s not really contributing to horror, if you’re instead merely using the genre for pastiche, or as a color palette for a particularly nasty thriller or a lurid psycho-drama, then why should those who appreciate authentic horror be grateful for the nod you’re giving them? After all, anyone who makes a horror film with lasting power, real vision, and genuine creepiness is already creating art.