Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.

In the early aughts, France made a bold entrance in the realm of modern horror with a collection of transgressive, brutal films referred to as New French Extremity. These films, like High Tension, Inside, Martyrs, and Frontier(s), took a visceral approach to violence, sexuality, and horror. One of the more underseen entries in this collection is that of Marina de Van’s In My Skin, a gruesome drama slash body horror film that draws inspiration from David Cronenberg, particularly Crash, and may have even served as an influence for Julia Ducournau’s Raw.

Aside from writing and directing In My Skin, de Van also stars as lead character Esther, a successful woman on the cusp of a major job promotion. While attending a house party of colleagues and friends, she takes a breather outside and winds up falling on a pile of industrial supplies. It’s not until hours later that she notices the fall gave her one gnarly wound on her leg. The doctor is puzzled as to how Esther didn’t register the pain of the wound until hours later, but she’s unphased by delayed pain and potential for scarring. The event triggers a new fascination with her own body. First, it’s small things like uncomfortably pulling away at the folds of her skin while in the bathtub, but then it escalates when she intentionally exacerbates her leg wound with sharp objects. Despite the growing concerns of her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas, who also played Father in Raw), Esther’s self-inflicted wounds get more and more dangerous.

Like Raw, In My Skin sees its lead character on a path of self-discovery that also happens to cause pain and bloodshed spurned by social pressures. But whereas Raw’s Justine would bite and hurt her herself as a means of suppression, Esther revels in it. De Van gets uncomfortably up close and personal with Esther’s biting away at her arms, chewing and savoring her own flesh in her mouth, and basking in the blood from open wounds on her legs as it spills on to her face. Earlier moments of self-mutilation are mostly done off screen with disturbing sound left to fill in our imagination, but as Esther ups the violence, special makeup effects artist Dominique Colladant (Nosferatu the Vampire) lets loose with the wounds, blood, and excess fleshy bits.

There’s not really much in the way of a fully developed narrative or even a full character introspection in In My Skin; de Van would rather have the audience cringe from under Esther’s skin than inside her headspace. While she’s grotesquely tearing herself apart, her face remains impassive and somewhat serene. In that respect, it’s easy to see why this one slipped under the radar in the conversations about New French Extremity. But it’s also a new form of body horror that takes influence from the master of body horror, Cronenberg, and turns it into something that feels very different. There’s no shying away from Esther’s bizarre form of self-harm that evolves into primitive self-cannibalism. Not in de Van’s intimate closeups of it, nor in Colladant’s grisly makeup work.