A surgeon's smock replaced the customary tux or evening gown at this year's Cannes Film Festival as the most appropriate attire, so drenched in blood and gore were many of the major entries. To walk the red carpet became a wade in viscera, film after film offering all manner of mutilation and dismemberment. The once disreputable horror genre was everywhere, crossing over into the rarefied realms of the art film, whether to reflect the dire state of the world, or to capture a fast disappearing audience with a version of torture porn.

So sanguinary were the proceedings that one fully expected Jane Campion's "Bright Star," an account of the romance between poet John Keats and neighbor Fanny Brawne, to breach its tone of genteel fervor with a great geyser of tubercular blood as Keats expires in Italy. (Blessedly, Campion left his demise off-screen, the effect all the more powerful for her discretion.)

Danish director Lars von Trier, ever the provocateur, worked his way out of personal depression by making "Antichrist," an intense and ultimately preposterous account of a marriage strained by the death of a child. The troubled couple retreat to an isolated cabin, none too subtly called Eden, to work out their problems, which soon escalate into macabre, and then gruesome, violence, the impaling and self-maiming enough to make fans of the "Saw" franchise flinch.