Modern body horror suffers from a profound lack of anatomy. When blood and viscera are generated in a computer, they lack weight, viscosity, and consequence. They become fantasy. In Raw, Julia Ducournau refuses to let the audience escape into fantasy. She anchors her horror in the clinical, undeniable reality of the physical body.
Human Blood is Human Blood
To achieve a sense of tangible dread, Ducournau strictly avoided CGI. She collaborated with French special effects master Olivier Afonso to design and fabricate detailed practical prosthetics for the film’s grotesque moments. Her mandate was clear: “human blood is human blood.” There is no stylized, theatrical spraying. The gore is treated with a clinical, almost documentarian lens. When a body is degraded on screen, you believe it because the prosthetic is physically displacing space in front of the lens.
The Architecture of the Non-Space
This commitment to the clinical is mirrored in the film’s visual language. The veterinary college is not shot like a traditional, nostalgic campus. Cinematographer Ruben Impens utilized erratic, “down and dirty” framing to strip the location of any warmth, turning it into a bleak, emotionless non-space.
Against this sterile backdrop, Ducournau deploys a highly deliberate color palette. The sickly yellow interiors of the school oppress the characters, while violent splashes of primary red—both literal blood and symbolic lighting—signal the protagonist’s primal urges. The horror of Raw is not that a monster is hiding in the dark. The horror is that the monster is standing under a fluorescent light in a yellow hallway, and it looks entirely real.
Insights regarding Julia Ducournau’s strict avoidance of CGI, her collaboration with Olivier Afonso on practical prosthetics, and the symbolic use of primary colors were synthesized from interviews in The Guardian and Collider.