Michel Gondry doesn’t do horror. Or at least, he didn’t.
The French filmmaker who gave us soft melancholy in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and DIY charm in Be Kind Rewind is turning his lens toward something altogether darker. Les Petites Peurs—his first foray into psychological horror—isn’t just a pivot. It’s a reckoning.
Two young girls. A garden. A human skull.
That’s all it takes to pull us under in Gondry’s upcoming film, a project that seems to sit on the haunted border between fairy tale and fever dream. The discovery of the skull sparks a mystery that uncoils through a small French town, led by a cop (played by Gilles Lellouche) whose calm demeanor likely won’t last long. Bastien Bouillon, who just turned heads at Cannes, joins the cast as the girls’ father—another man caught in Gondry’s new spiral of dread.
Production is scheduled to begin in France from January to March 2026. That’s confirmed. And no, Golden, Gondry’s Pharrell Williams collaboration, still hasn’t seen daylight. Not even a leak.
So… why horror? Why now?
Maybe it’s less of a shift and more of a reveal. According to longtime collaborator Georges Berman, the film will mix the surreal anxiety of Gondry’s 1993 Björk video Human Behaviour with the stark, symbolic dread of The Night of the Hunter. If that sounds like a fever dream shot through lace curtains—good. That’s likely the point.
Let’s be real: Gondry’s career hasn’t exactly been coasting. After Eternal Sunshine, which won him an Oscar and our collective hearts, it’s been a slow drift into smaller, stranger waters. Mood Indigo had moments of magic but drowned in its own style. The Green Hornet was a studio misfire. And while his 2023 film The Book of Solutions tried to tap into creative chaos, most barely noticed it existed.
Now? He’s exhuming something deeper.
There’s something primal about horror told from a child’s eye-level. The garden isn’t just a place of innocence—it’s where things are buried. Forgotten. Until they claw back up. Gondry, with his knack for visual poetry and off-kilter rhythms, might be uniquely suited to this. Think cardboard ghosts and shadow puppets, yes—but also think trauma wrapped in tinsel, fear layered under fantasy.
And maybe Gondry understands this moment better than we think. Post-pandemic, post-truth, post-wonder—we’re all dealing with little fears. Some of us just pretend better than others.
Will this be his comeback? Too soon to tell. But it’s his first risk in a long time.
And honestly? That’s scarier than any skull in a garden.
