Macabre Motherhood

The Brood

Dark Water

Good evening, good morning, and good mommy issues to you, dear reader. As we creep deeper into October, I search far and wide for niche, diverse, and all-around horrifying horror movies to expand my knowledge and my fears. After overcoming my fear of dubbed Italian horror movies last week, I’m now conquering another niche of the horror genre: something I call macabre motherhood. I’m so close to my mom that one of the absolute worst things I can imagine is not having her around, or having a strained relationship with her—a reality that I realize many people deal with. Mommy issues are perhaps not discussed in the glossy/sexy/weird way that daddy issues are discussed, but they’re just as prevalent, in real life and on screen. In theory, our mothers are our first protectors and nurturers—a safe, trusted place in the form of a human woman—and to turn that notion on its head and make a mother figure less-than-nurturing is a frightening concept. Then there is the other side of this—the mother’s side—which, as I get older, seems to hold even more potential for fear. Not only because kids can be scary, but because the cultural and societal pressures that are placed upon motherhood can be enough to suffocate and stifle any parental figure. I am very privileged to have a great mom, and a great relationship with her, but that doesn’t halt my curiosity toward the stories surrounding mothers that aren’t so great—or, at the very least, mothers who are placed in not-so-great positions. Motherhood is often at the center of the horror genre—from Mrs. Voorhees to Mrs. Bates to the queen from Alien, from Mrs. Sutphin to the creature from Barbarian—monster moms and their monster offspring can capture a level of terror that anyone who’s been born can identify with. Macabre motherhood is the subject of both of tonight’s films, as well as divorce, nasty custody battles, cycles of abuse, and the sacrifices mothers make for their children. Up first is an early project from the Canadian captain of creepy, grotesque, varying-levels-of-feminist films, David Cronenberg’s 1979 classic: The Brood. I’m obviously a big fan of David Cronenberg’s catalogue of disgusting, disturbing cinema, but The Brood has been a blindspot of mine for far too long. The Brood opens on a bizarre, therapeutic demonstration, where psychotherapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed of The Devils fame) of the fictional Somafree Institute is guiding a patient through a technique that he calls “psychoplasmics”—where patients with mental disturbances are encouraged to let go of their suppressed emotions through physiological changes to their bodies. It mostly sounds like yelling through your mommy/daddy issues, but as we’ll soon find out, this rage therapy can have some very strange physical manifestations. Among the shocked audience members is the rightfully-skeptical Frank Carveth, a man who’s wife was once a patient of Dr. Raglan’s but now seems to be something more. Frank is battling his wife Nola (Samantha Eggar) for custody of their young daughter Candy, but Nola is so enamored with Dr. Raglan and his exciting ideologies to really put up a fight. But as Frank’s lawyer warns him—"the law believes in motherhood." When Frank notices bumps and bruises on Candy’s arm after her visitation with her mother, he is furious and demands to see his wife to confront her. But Dr. Raglan is insistent that Nola is at a critical point of her rage-therapy, and disturbing her now would only worsen things. Desperate to find a solution, Frank drops Candy off at Nola’s mom’s house, and finds a man named Jan Hartog who was once a patient of Dr. Raglan’s, but now is suffering from lymphona that he believes was caused by this doctor’s questionable methods. Meanwhile, back at the luxurious Somafree Institute, Dr. Raglan is working with the elusive Nola who shares that her trauma stems from being physically and emotionally abused by her self-pitying, alcoholic mother. We then see said self-pitying, alcoholic mother, Juliana, caring for little Candy safely at her home—sharing stories about Nola’s difficult childhood and how she’d often have to be hospitalized for the unsettling cutaneous bumps and bruises that would appear on her body. Juliana gets up to replenish her brandy in the kitchen just in time for an odd, small, childlike figure to emerge out of seemingly nowhere to attack and kill her with a meat tenderizer. It is a feverishly frightening moment that feels reliably jarring for a Cronenberg tale, and once this vicious attack takes place, the pace picks up significantly and the mysteries just keep materializing. Where did this strange, short creature donned in a chic child’s ski suit come from? What is happening to Nola and Dr. Raglan’s other patients at the Somafree Institute? Is Candy being abused by Nola, just as Nola was abused by her own mother, or are they both marked with a genetic alien curse? In typical Cronenberg fashion, all of these questions are answered, but not without bringing up several more. As the baron of body horror, Cronenberg curiously captures the discomfort and fear that is living in a decaying, ever-changing, continuously-shamed human body. And with the body horror of The Brood, he takes this discomfort and fear to a new, maternal level. While I take some issue with the way this film wrapped up, I was, unsurprisingly, really into The Brood. To center a fucked-up family unit in the midst of this morbid story felt painful and believable, and with the backdrop of the new-agey, pop psychology of the 1970s, this film made way more sense than you’d think. This film comes from Cronenberg’s less-than-feminist era, with dialogue like “I got involved with a woman who married me for my sanity, hoping it would rub off”, but I can forgive the muddied male characters and a somewhat frustrating ending because the overall package of The Brood is too entertaining and too freaky to pass up. The same could be said for the next film that I watched—where my grievances came not from an underdeveloped ending, but rather a sad one. This was Hideo Nakata’s 2002 film: Dark Water. This film, from the director of The Ring (Ringu), wasn’t obvious-cutaneous-legions horrifying, but very subtly chilling, in a way that I didn’t expect to like so much. Dark Water follows Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) amid an unfriendly and frustrating divorce, struggling to rebuild her life and find a new place for her and her daughter Ikuko to live. Yoshimi and Ikuko stumble upon an apartment complex that, despite its many red flags and bad vibes (like a useless building manager, a desperate landlord, and severe water damage), the two find themselves moving into. As if it weren’t stressful enough for Ikuko to be starting kindergarten and for Yoshimi to be looking for a job and persistently fighting for full custody, there are some very strange happenings at this new apartment. In addition to a growing, graying, dripping water stain that looms over Yoshimi’s bed, Ikuko and Yoshimi have both respectively spotted a little girl all by herself in this big building—even though the manager claims that there are no other children currently living there. Yoshimi finally seeks to confront her upstairs neighbor, but there is no answer at the door. And when Yoshimi learns that this apartment above her once belonged to a family that was torn apart by their missing little girl, she is understandably concerned. Confused and anxious and fighting for custody against a cold, uncaring ex-husband, Yoshimi begins to lose it just a little—especially when strands of thick, black hair begin appearing in their drinking water. Ikuko begins sleepwalking, Yoshimi begins to panic, this mysterious little girl without a face keeps appearing all over the building, and all the while there is an unrelenting and violent rain that won’t let up. Dark Water builds a fierce sense of unease and fear, long before any little ghost girls or strange happenings present themselves. It achieves a tenderness and an emotional depth that is not uncommon in the horror genre, but harder to find these days. I won’t give away the ending of Dark Water, but I will say that its impending sense of doom does lead toward a tragic direction—which we all know is my least favorite direction to go. But this didn’t ruin Dark Water for me, my emotions just proved how invested I was in these characters—who were all brought to visceral, palpable life by the talented cast. No spoilers here, but quite frankly what I found most eerie about Dark Water is the fact that over ten years after its release, after a no-doubt-shitty American remake, some of the horrifying events of this fictional movie would occur in real life, to Elisa Lam. Some sources have drawn this comparison, but it sends a chill straight down my spine to think of the uncanny similarities between certain details in Dark Water, and the death of this real-life person. Of course, if I had the option to not have my heart broken by a movie, I would take it, but I was so impressed by this film and the way it instantly creeped me out that I cannot fault it for sparking a bit of emotional turmoil. Well, that’s all the time I have for macabre motherhood and mommy issues this week, but I do appreciate you stopping by to share in the terror, tragedy, and trauma. Join me next week for more cinematic scares, boos, ghouls, and slay/they/thems! Ta ta for now!