Cinema Scholars is back at Fantastic Fest 2026, where we chat with The Ones Who Grieve director Quarxx about his grisly period piece. The Ones Who Grieve celebrated its North American Premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 18th, and will have additional screenings on Thursday, September 24.
Introduction
It’s tough to come up with an original story about zombies. Once a nearly forgotten subgenre, tales of flesh-eaters have dominated screens (big and small alike) for the past couple of decades. Just when it seems like every possible gory scenario has been depicted, along comes a fresh tale ready to horrify in new and unique ways. In the case of the new French chiller, The Ones Who Grieve, the well-worn subject matter gets a glow-up with slightly revised undead dogma and a setting in idyllic late-19th century France.
Zélie is a young woman in a remote part of the countryside. She lives with her oppressively religious father, Jacob, and her obedient mother, Emilie. As Zélie starts to express her own desires and opinions, Jacob becomes bent on keeping her in line by all means necessary.
Further complicating things, a “Black Veil” has swept the region, leaving its victims with an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the dead. As a result, a legion of “Maskers” carry out the gruesome task of maiming the afflicted and fitting them with a locked wooden mask/helmet to effectively starve them to death instead of a direct kill.
As if he couldn’t be more unlikable, the hyper-religious Jacob also happens to be one of these duty-bound Maskers. While Zélie is forced to assist her father with his grisly calling, she begins to question not only the humanity of the practice, but also her father’s intentions as well.
Cinema Scholars’ Rebecca Elliott sat down with director Quarxx to talk about The Ones Who Grieve. The two discuss when the old world meets the new, making the awful look lovely, and using as many practical effects as possible.
Interview
Rebecca Elliott: I love stories that are set at the confluence of two eras, and I love that you decided to set a story about flesh-eaters at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. What inspired you to set the story in that time period?
Quarxx: I didn’t really have a specific movie or book or something that inspired me. I just had the desire to make a costume movie, something that takes place in the past. I thought it was the right project to do that. Talking about the beginning of electricity, I wanted to talk about a family that was disintegrating into a world that was itself changing. And I thought of The Thing, also, you know?
I also wanted to speak about this period of industrialization, when there were great changes, when religion and science were colliding because of all these new advances and discoveries. There were religious people who didn’t see these developments with very good eyes, so there was a conflict between them. I thought this period was very interesting for setting up a story, and it was also very cinematographic. So, yeah, it was more of a goal than really an inspiration.
Rebecca Elliott: I love that. And I also understand that filming any sort of period piece comes with its inherent challenges. Tell me about working with your team on the accuracy of capturing the time period- from the clothing and farm equipment to the housing. What was it like working with your production design team on all of that?
Quarxx: That was also a very conscious choice. I didn’t want to do too much investigation into the historical accuracy of the period in which the story takes place. Because my movie is what you call a Uchronia, you know? You take real facts and then you take them somewhere else. You’re adding facts or science-fiction elements that didn’t exist into a historical time frame. Then you change it a little bit to fit your own story. I love European and French history, so I already had some baggage coming into it.
But I didn’t want to make too much of an investigation because we’re talking about a war that didn’t actually take place at that time. For me, that was not a problem. We had to invent some costumes that didn’t exist. We couldn’t pinpoint exactly what war we were talking about because we didn’t want people to think that we had made a mistake. It was voluntary. I wanted to have some freedom with my storytelling. But I didn’t want to be stuck in the facts of what was really going on at that time. So I wanted to mix the two. There are things that are very accurate and historically accurate, but I wanted to have my freedom with that.
Poetic License and Homages
Rebecca Elliott: Well, that’s one of the fun things about genre filmmaking. It gives you a little bit of poetic license. This kind of exists in its own universe. A universe based on some historical facts, and it’s also about flesh-eaters.
Quarxx: Exactly. And that was really also a desire for me to pay tribute, to pay homage to the genre films that followed me as a kid. All the films from the Romero franchise—the first zombie films, Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead. There’s also a little tribute to Bub, the famous zombie in Day of the Dead.
That’s the parallel I wanted to make with my character Henry in the film. I really had Bub from George Romero in mind. I like to pay a little homage in every one of my films to filmmakers or films that I loved when I was a teenager. In my previous one, Pandemonium, I was really paying tribute to Lucio Fulci when he did The Beyond. That was my depiction of Hell. In every film, I like to place a little homage here and there.
And I didn’t want to make a zombie movie. That was not my point. But I wanted to revisit the myth of the zombie and make it my own. The ghouls aren’t really zombies, you know? They’re not dangerous. They’re not attacking people. And I think they’re pretty much the only good people in my movie. I also wanted to pinpoint that sometimes evil is not exactly where you think it is.
Making Ugly Look Pretty
Rebecca Elliott: Yeah. It can depend on perspective and whatever your point of view is. That’s why I hesitated to call them zombies, because it’s more like you have your own special dogma in this film, which I appreciate. But you also capture a whole lot of awfulness in a really beautiful, lovely way. Can you tell me about working with your cinematographer on making something awful look beautiful?
Quarxx: I’ve been working with my DP (Antoine Carpentier) for 10 years already, so we really know each other, and we work a lot prior to the shoot. We design every shot. It’s hours and hours and hours of work and preparation before shooting. We had a decent budget. I mean, I had a budget to do my film. Honestly, I didn’t miss anything, but it was still a very tight budget. In order to make things look perfect, to make them look really good, we couldn’t have the time to ask each other questions when we were shooting. We had to be super prepared.
I’m coming from painting, as you can see behind me. I’m a painter myself. My DP is also a very, very talented artist. He was working for Studio Harcourt, which was doing all these very famous pictures of the stars and everything in very special light. So he is a light magician. I also really enjoy working with light, so it’s a huge collaboration that we have together.
And this is exactly what you said that is very, very true: I like to depict the ugly in a very beautiful way. This is really my signature, I think, because it’s pretty much like that in all of my films. I wanted to make a very radical movie, and I wanted to create a villain—like the highest level of villainy, you know? Someone that you really enjoy hating, someone that doesn’t have any spark of light inside him. He’s pure evil and darkness.
But he’s not also a silly villain, like Jason or Freddy Krueger, who just wants to kill, kill, kill. This guy has an inner fight inside of him also. I think writing a villain and giving him some psychological interest, not making him a cartoon character, is very interesting. That’s what we tried to do with The Ones Who Grieve in Jacob. We tried to really write this character as the most despicable possible, but also, you know, he has this complicated way. He’s not a simple character. So I had great fun doing that.
Strong Female Lead
Rebecca Elliott: You definitely created quite the villain. In a way, he sort of represents a modern version of the male-oppressor trope. But you also have all these fanciful horror and sci-fi elements while touching on modern themes of female agency. There are a few moments throughout the film where she asserts herself. That would have been rare in that era, but it also feels very relevant today. What drove you to include that commentary?
Quarxx: I understand what you mean. I just didn’t want to make a submissive woman who’s just taking all the pain herself, and that’s it. I really believe that the characters have an arc throughout the film because she’s very resilient. She actually seems weak at the beginning, but she’s the strongest of them all. She’s always confronting her father throughout the film, even though she knows that her father is pure evil and very dangerous.
She’s poking him a lot, and she’s making the tension rise. And the more she suffers, the stronger she becomes. Until the point where she has the strength to overcome her father’s tyranny and switch back the power. She’s going to take control at some point. I thought that was interesting, not to make her just a victim. She’s being victimized a lot in the film, but at the end, you understand that she’s a very strong woman and a strong character. I thought that was interesting to say and to depict.
Rebecca Elliott: We don’t have that much longer, but I wanted to ask you about the effects. I definitely saw some digital effects in there, but it seemed mostly practical. Without getting into spoilers, from the craniotomy to the sort of wormy, animatronic-looking situation, what was your favorite effect, and what was the most challenging?
Quarxx: I’m very old-fashioned when it comes to SFX, so I try…I mean, I don’t have a choice sometimes, but I use VFX. But I really try to use them when I have no choice. Of course, we didn’t have the time or the budget to recreate a real Tesla tower. This thing is like 80 meters tall. So, okay, when we really have no choice, I go VFX. But I’m always using practical effects as much as I can.
Even throughout the shooting, if we’re not talking about VFX, I’m always choosing to shoot in real locations and never in the studio as much as I can. Again, when I have no choice, okay, I’ll do it. But this is always Plan B. Studio or VFX is Plan B or Plan C, you know? I want to feel reality. I want to feel something real. I’m attracted to the films that were made in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, when there was no VFX. There was this sort of primordial VFX that wasn’t too much. I don’t like it, and it ages very badly. When you watch a film from 10 years ago, you think it was amazing, but then you watch it now, and it feels totally old-fashioned.
That doesn’t happen when you shoot for real on location or when you shoot practical effects. I’d say 80 to 90 percent of the effects are practical effects. And my favorite was probably the surgery at the school of medicine, of course. That was a fun one. And it’s the same: we rehearsed so much, and we worked so much beforehand, so we were sort of ready during the shooting.
Rebecca Elliott: Yeah, that was a really cool sequence. I can’t wait for audiences to see it too! Well, we probably should wrap it up. I just want to thank you for your time today, and I wish you good luck at the festival.
Quarxx: Thank you so much. Have a great day
The Ones Who Grieve plays one more time at Fantastic Fest 2026 on Thursday 9/24. No word yet on distribution, so be on the lookout for this gory little period piece.
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