[4] In its time, the festival was hailed as the premier fantasy film event in the world,[5][6][7] although recent assessments have ranked Sitges, which outlasted it by a considerable margin, as the genre's foremost gathering.

[10] Savvy promotion and strong corporate backing elevated the event to a level of relevance unheard of for a speciality film gathering,[11][12] with ample news and talk show coverage on the home country's most watched channels.

Unlike Sitges, Avoriaz actively courted celebrity jurors with art or mainstream cinema credentials, which was as much an effort to legitimize the genre as it was a nudge to mass media.

[17] By Chouchan's own retrospective admission, Avoriaz was an image-conscious and exclusive affair, with few members of the public allowed within the festival's perimeter, although it was partly due to the resort's limited capacity.

[20] While its palmares was generally regarded as being of a high quality,[16] the event's overtures towards cinema auteurs sometimes exposed a gap between the films it showcased and the expectations of the cultural establishment it courted.

Hollywood actress and Avoriaz juror Leslie Caron expressed outrage at The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which made its belated appearance at the 1976 festival due to censorship issues, calling it "beastly, vile and dehumanizing".

[13] The star-studded jury, which also included Sergei Bondarchuk, Eugène Ionesco, Agnès Varda, Jacques Tati, Iannis Xenakis and president Michaelangelo Antonioni, refused to award the Grand Prize that year on the basis on an excessively weak selection.

[22] By the second half of the 1980s, Brémond and Chouchan were growing uneasy about fantastic cinema's increasingly graphic nature amidst the gore boom of the time, which put the event at odds with Avoriaz's desired family friendly image[2][23] and ushered in the first rumors of its demise.

As the 1980s gave rise to bigger, high concept productions, the festival's handpicked juries of prestigious but subversion-prone auteurs clashed with the heightened commercial expectations such films generated, and strained its relationship with major distributors.

[29] While Columbia Tri-Star provided the 1992 Festival with its showpiece in The Addams Family, the film left empty handed, and the distributor refused to do the same the following year with the highly anticipated Dracula.

[14][33] Brémond cites the appalled reaction of former prime minister Michel Rocard, whom he had invited to a screening of eventual 1993 Grand Prix winner Braindead, and the failure of that film at the box office, as the final hint that the fantastic genre was not an appropriate vehicle for his real estate ventures anymore.