Sanguine: The Return of Gen Z Body Horror at Sitges 2026

Marion Le Coroller’s feature debut takes a step forward in body horror and speaks directly to today’s youth, bringing their anxieties and fears to the screen.

Sanguine is the feature directorial debut of French filmmaker Marion Le Coroller, presented at the 2026 Sitges Film Festival in the “Official Fantastic Competition” section, where it won Best Feature Film. Vastly underrated at the recent Cannes Film Festival, the film is actually a step forward in the trajectory of contemporary body horror. The protagonist is Margot (brilliantly played by Mara Taquin), a medical graduate about to begin her internship at a large hospital. But before that, in the teaser preceding the opening credits, we observe a peculiar scene: inside a fast-food restaurant, a typically arrogant and loud-mouthed young influencer aggressively demands his food. The waiter, wearing a fixed, almost plastic smile, suddenly loses his patience and strikes him hard, then repeatedly beats the influencer as he lies on the ground. Perhaps an episode of sudden madness, perhaps something else.

Only after this do we meet Margot, who is assigned to a cruel senior doctor and a group of fellow male and female interns. At first, her biggest challenge seems to be enduring her supervisor, but soon patients with strange skin marks begin to arrive, starting with a pregnant young woman. Margot herself also begins to bleeding without any visible wounds, as if blood were coming out of nowhere. One night, she wakes up in a bed covered in blood. It is the beginning of a potential epidemic, but nobody believes the protagonist.

A generational divide is captured in the relationship between Margot and her boss, the cruel doctor played by Karin Viard, who is referred to as “The Devil.” She is a cynical woman, ruthless toward the younger generation, whom she expects to serve her submissively and get through as many patients as possible in the shortest time, as if the emergency room were an assembly line. Anyone who dares contradict her is kicked out of the internship. Margot, who possesses the strongest character among her peers, ends up challenging the Devil because she refuses to accept the “rule of the elders”.

The idea of transformation begins to take shape. Margot appears to have contracted a new disease—highly plausible in the post-Covid era—and breaks out in skin pustules that she attempts to remove through painful, makeshift methods. In her search for the truth, she traces her affliction back to patients who suffered from a similar pathology: we are witnessing a genetic mutation that will cause the infected to turn into something else.

To fully enjoy Sanguine, one must forget recent successful female-directed body horror films, particularly Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Le Coroller isn’t one for “art-house cinema”; her strength lies in maintaining a popular, accessible rhythm featuring punchy direction, fast editing, and a distinct flair for shocking images of skin lesions shown in close-up, in the best tradition of B-movies—which is a merit.

In short, the director isn’t challenging giants like Ducournau and Fargeat, but heading in a different direction. Although technically a millennial herself, hers is a horror film for Generation Z, young people who lack reference points and feel lost, much like Mara Taquin’s character, who struggles with emotional instability, workplace anxiety, and past trauma. She serves as the film’s compass: a girl undergoing a transformation into something else, resisting it perhaps only because she is the first in line and remains misunderstood.

We have seen seeds of body horror scattered throughout the 2026 Sitges Film Festival. There is an element of it in Norma Vila’s Salitre, in Competition, a mother-daughter story that, through the metaphoric use of crustaceans, leads to a transformation of both home and body. Animals are also used for body horror in Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Crawlers, in the Sitges Collection section, where the animals in question are spiders: in this powerful B-movie, arachnids assault the residents of an apartment building, causing mutations beneath the skin, leaving Matilda Lutz fighting for survival. Yet Sanguine remains the point of reference of this year’s edition.

In Le Coroller’s movie, the creation of a new species (Species is the international title) is drawn from science-fiction tradition, but here it’s rewritten and applied to youth in today’s world. In the final scene, we witness a social reversal: young people take over society while the elderly serve them, working as fast-food employees well past retirement age. In this way, the story delves into generational conflict and the anxieties and fears of Gen Z: a generation raised through Covid and lockdowns, ready to undergo a physical transformation if it means surviving. As always, horror remains the best way to understand the present.

Sanguine: The Return of Gen Z Body Horror at Sitges 2026