Female, Family, and Youth Horrors

 

Female, Family, and Youth Horrors

by Kristin Battestella

These feminine and international horror pieces offer an intriguing genre look at parental relationships, family breakdowns, and youths in peril amid grief, death, cults, and predators.

Blood Moon – Emma Tammi (The Wind) directs this 2021 Hulu/Blumhouse Into the Dark installment opening with snarling, cages, claw marks, and phases of the moon. Our waitress mother must protect her son Luna via unusual hardware purchases, tranquilizers, and remote real estate with a sturdy basement. She does her own sawing and welding amid home schooling, staying up at night, and avoiding the dogs at the bar. Certainly it's obvious what is what here. However the mountain skylines, desert nights, and dusty pick up trucks add western mood while past flirtations contrast the current on the road and always on edge frazzled routine. Although he's a nice kid with video games and bedtime stories, raw meat in the refrigerator catches his eye and it's essential mom has off during the full moon. Her pregnancy announcement was met with unique hereditary details, and now mom regales Luna with endearing stories about his father before the disturbing pains the child must endure. Our former lawyer loved her husband despite his condition, but we don't see any horrific special effects – just knowing they suffer is upsetting enough. Luna needs a bath the next morning and he's not hungry for breakfast, blending the family bonding, real world efforts, and underlying horror alongside racial profiling, fetishism, and predatory against which a single minority mother must prepare. Does this fearful little family risk putting themselves out there with one of the good guys and friendly convenience store connections? A seemingly innocent tooth infection means ducking out of the hospital once blood work is needed, and procuring fresh beef means there's no time to be pulled over by the nasty sheriff. The kid wants to be a kid but mom has rules for a reason, for work shifts and birthday parties on the night of the full moon cut the horror close. Subtle distortions and echoes add atmosphere as the calendar keeps pace – anchoring but not overtaking the characters struggling with lost in the night unknowns, incriminating smells when the meat's not fresh, well meaning but untimely guests, and interfering authorities. Some may be disappointed there are no awe-inspiring panorama fantastics or outright frights. However the camera remains on a helpless mother crying for her son amid growls and gunshots – keeping the instincts, fears, and relationships real. Mom has been forced to make terrible choices before, but one's true nature is nobody's fault in this well done little parable about what lengths a mother goes through for her son, horror and all.

Midsommar – Solemn forests, haunting vocals, no response messages, and disturbing goodbye emails open director Ari Aster's (Hereditary) 2019 US/Swedish co-production starring Florence Pugh (Black Widow). Sobbing and wailing blend with the distorted scoring as smartphones and technology are shrewdly used for negative communication – delivering the worst news and technically leaving our fragile Dani alone amid distant boyfriends, red emergency lights, and body bags. A friend invites everyone back to his isolated Swedish commune for the summer solstice pageant, and she latches on to the trip despite her boyfriend's scholastic goals and PhD research. In camera visuals reflect the couple's dissonance with talking to reflections and who's looming in the foreground or insignificant in the background. Arguments, weak apologies, and semantics on who said what or when acerbate the awkwardness over forgotten birthdays and culture shocks. Unique transitions, doors closing to change scenes, airplane to car window views, and upside down highways create an unnerving topsy turvy. Whispering trees and rippling visuals invoke unease while untranslated Swedish accents the peer pressure, disorienting mushroom tea, and midnight daylight off kilter. Despite rustic trails, quaint buildings, sunburst motifs, and festive music, there's an underlying weirdness to the skin the fool games, bear in a cage, love spells, foretelling tapestries, and white robes. Every shape, number, season, and position has meaning – yellow triangles, table arrangements, funeral pyres, and walking backwards are carefully coordinated. Chanting, processions, lookalikes, and slow motion ceremonies escalate with blood on the rune stones, suicide parallels, and ritual deaths. Violent blows and squishy gore mar the pretty as sacrificial red on white is said to be a joyful custom in the circle of life. Warped sounds and heavy silence set off temple break-ins and mutilation consequences as our appropriately named boyfriend Christian stands out among the dancing contests and flower crowns. Feasts and leafy visions contrast the sex rites and flesh in the garden as seeds are planted with drug trips and paralysis. Spirals, May pole montages, overlays, Dutch angles, and dizzying spins reflect the heady whirlwind, however the erroneous acceptance, disturbing made special, and bad boyfriend analogy could have been done in one hundred minutes or less. With repeated introductions, redundant dream sequences, too many characters, and local lore throwaways here already, I can't imagine what else is left to be said in the even longer director's cut. Although there's not a lot of repeat value in this overlong two and a half hours, perhaps it's worth two watches for the deft foreshadowing, unique touches, ironic exit music, and all consuming, broken cult mentality.

It Splits Itself

Intruders – Stormy Madrid nights and scary bedtime stories start this 2012 Spanish/UK production starring Clive Owen (Children of Men) and Carice van Houten (Black Death) off well before youthful witnessing and frightful figures on the balcony. The shadows are chilling, but the CGI monster is immediately silly, and the terror is erroneously dismissed as a dream fake out before London resets and grandma's countryside quaint. Bright, redundant UK establishing views jar with dark, dated quarters in Spain, and the dual storytelling isn't as meta voyeur as it thinks it is. Fine feline harbingers, gnarly tree hiding places, and ominous notes about Hollowface being woken lead to another storytelling switch as our too old for birthday parties and teddy bears twelve year old recounts the hooded peeping tom creeping at the window. Dad leaves his naked wife to comfort their daughter when she still runs to him over her nightmares, but any Electra opportunities or salacious subtext when she interrupts them is never explored because we're cutting away to placating church rituals and priests suggesting a psychiatrist instead. Devoid faces, creaking, light bulb pops, flashlights under the covers, and messy lipstick add tension, however visuals linking bleak London streets and dangerous Madrid concrete fail because of the disjointed narrative. Scarecrow effigies set on fire in the middle of the suburban night are silly – acerbating the fears our parents are trying to prevent amid useless police and underutilized security cameras. Repeat encounters and lame constructs stall any momentum as the back and forth undercuts the family drama. Our tween fears what she imagines will happen, yet she stops speaking and keeps writing about Hollowface's lair in her room. Doctors suspect this is a shared hallucination but nobody reads what the children have written and the adults are unable or unwilling to piece everything together. While dolly zooms shrewdly reflect the distance and separation from delusion, mirrors and notions on children being the division between parents fall prey to convenient clues. Telling the tale straight from the beginning would have been much better than delaying, teasing, and duping the audience with what we've already deduced. The youthful storytelling and rated R adult themes are unsure who the audience is as unnecessarily hidden information and faulty framework hamper the performances and any potentially provocative implications. Besides, his name is John and our daughter is Mia Farrow? Lolz.