The Dark Forest and the Lonely Village: Reimagining Centre and Margin in French Border Series, from Zone blanche (2017–2019) to La Forêt (2017)

Abstract

Over the past ten years, French, Belgian and Luxembourgish television screens have become increasingly green, grey and black. By contrast with French screen production’s traditional focus on urban centres, especially Paris, many of the most successful series commissioned by national television production companies and the Netflix France division are set in remote French-speaking villages in forested border regions, where horror lurks in the deep, dark woods. This article explores the rise of what Michael Gott calls the “forest-set border series” and its repeated portrayal of the isolated francophone European village and the wilds of the woods that surround it. Series such as Mathieu Missoffe’s Zone blanche (2017–2019) and Delinda Jacob’s La Forêt (2017) are set on the margins in a literal, geographic sense; perched upon the periphery of the nation state. Yet this article asks whether these villages are truly a marginal or central space; a fringe territory or a new transnational heartland that has come to dominate French, European and international screens.