fantastique

Fantastique is a critical term used in Francophone literature and film to describe works in which the boundary between the rational and the supernatural is unsettled. In a fantastique narrative, events that seem to be explainable by ordinary means eventually resist a definitive natural explanation, or the narrator remains uncertain whether the phenomena are due to chance, illusion, or occult forces. The effect is to provoke hesitation in both characters and readers about what is real.

The concept was theorized in modern literary criticism by Tzvetan Todorov, who in The Fantastic: A Structural Analysis of the Short Story (1970) defines the fantastic as a mode that hinges on this hesitation. In Todorov's framework, it stands between the marvelous (where the supernatural is readily accepted) and the uncanny or the rationalization of the inexplicable; the particular work asks the reader to choose between belief and disbelief.

Historically, the fantastique has roots in 19th-century French Gothic and Romantic prose and has persisted into modern and postmodern Francophone fiction and cinema. It is also discussed as a transnational concept, appearing in diverse contexts outside France, where authors and filmmakers explore dreamlike or eerie atmospheres, ambiguous phenomena, and the intrusion of the extraordinary into everyday life.

In film and media, the label cinema fantastique or fantastique cinema is used for European horror and fantasy works that emphasize mood, ambiguity, and the suspension of naturalistic explanations.