House of Horrors

When Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James’ Relic premiered at Sundance this year, a number of critics likened the film to both The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) and Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018).^[1]See, for example, Jessica Kiang, ‘Relic: Film Review’, Variety, 6 February 2020, <https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/relic-review-1203473969/>; Rafael Motamayor, ‘Relic Review – a Terrifying Horror Movie About Dementia’, GameSpot, 31 January 2020, <https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/relic-review-a-terrifying-horror-movie-about-demen/1900-6417400/>; and Tasha Robinson, ‘The New Horror Movie Relic Is a Perfect Bookend for The Babadook’, Polygon, 28 January 2020, <https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/28/21111308/relic-review-emily-mortimer-bella-heathcote-sundance-2020>, all accessed 28 July 2020. Beyond the surface similarities – they’re all horror-themed feature directorial debuts with female leads – what unites these releases at a more substantial level is the intimate nature of their horror: how it originates within the characters’ families and affects their lives and relationships. For James, Relic is nothing if not personal; her grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and the filmmaker witnessed the emotional toll this placed on family members, particularly on her mother.^[2]Debbie Zhou, ‘Relic: Australian Director Natalie Erika James on Dementia, Horror and Her Sundance Hit’, The Guardian, 8 July 2020, <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jul/08/relic-australian-director-natalie-erika-james-on-dementia-horror-and-her-sundance-hit>, accessed 3 August 2020. This cross-generational understanding of dementia is reflected in the familial conflict that takes centre stage within the film. 

In Relic, horror begins in the home. When octogenarian Edna (Robyn Nevin) disappears from her residence in Victoria’s rural north-west, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) are called up from Melbourne to investigate. As a police search gets underway, Kay and Sam notice that all is not well within the house: locks have been changed, furniture has been rearranged and handwritten reminders with messages like ‘take pills’ and ‘don’t follow it’ are scattered throughout. Somewhat miraculously, Edna reappears after a few days, unable or unwilling to explain her whereabouts. However, Kay and Sam’s immediate relief soon gives way to further concern: Edna doesn’t appear to be herself, the cause of which might be either medical or something more supernatural in nature. As the narrative steadily unfolds, questions regarding ‘What to do with Gran’ are quickly superseded by more pressing matters related to a dark presence that has taken up residence in the home. Utilising multiple forms of horror (psychological, Gothic and corporeal), Relic delivers a rare and absorbing depiction of grief, mortality and the impact of dementia upon family.

The horror of the mind

Given both horror’s longstanding preoccupations with existential threats and wider social anxieties surrounding Alzheimer’s disease, it’s surprising how few explicitly dementia-themed horror films have been produced. There are notable examples, however. Though stylistically distinct from one another, The Taking of Deborah Logan (Adam Robitel, 2014) and Dementia (Perci M Intalan, 2014) each revolves around an ageing woman whose cognitive decline is woven into a plot involving spiritual possession and haunting. In each case, the supernatural provides the filmmaker with an indirect means of exploring the very real fears provoked by a dementia diagnosis, engaging themes related to memory, past traumas and the potential loss of subjectivity. In spite of the intriguing possibilities afforded by this genre framing, such horror films have largely been overlooked within academic studies of cinematic representation of dementia.^[3]Raquel Medina’s 2018 book Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease, for instance, one of the more comprehensive cross-cultural studies of dementia in film, contains no mention of any horror films. 

Relic’s debt to melodrama reveals itself in and through the film’s doubled mother–daughter dynamic, in which the characters’ expressions of trauma, guilt and questions regarding parental responsibility repeatedly resurface.

Unsurprisingly, studies of on-screen dementia have tended to focus on more commonly occurring representations within romance or melodrama works such as Iris (Richard Eyre, 2001), The Notebook (Nick Cassavetes, 2004), Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006), The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007), Still Alice (Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, 2014) and The Roads Not Taken (Sally Potter, 2020). Notably, however, the focus in this type of film is often less on the individual living with the disease than on the family members tasked with caring for a parent or partner in an advancing state of neurological decline. While there is an obvious emotional impetus for this – it’s easier to generate pathos by focusing on the experience of lovers or caregivers – what’s often left out of such representations is an attempt to identify or connect with the experience of the person living with dementia.  

Though Relic has its genre feet firmly planted within the realm of horror, the film also shares certain similarities with these melodramatic counterparts, in particular the emphasis on suffering.^[4]Film scholar Linda Williams details various points of intersection between horror and melodrama, describing them both as ‘body genres’. See Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991, pp. 2–13. As film academic Tony Williams argues, ‘The melodrama is a sister genre to family horror because it has a specific relationship to it in terms of depicting family trauma.’^[5]Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film,Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, NJ,1996, p. 17. This is certainly the case in Relic, wherein the initial focus is on the effect of Edna’s condition on her daughter and granddaughter. In one of the film’s more emotionally revealing moments, Kay is shown weeping alone inside her car, having just toured an aged-care facility. The prospect of relocating Edna is far from simple, however, and only exacerbates tensions between Kay and Sam. When Kay pleads with her daughter, ‘You need to be on the same side as me for this,’ Sam shakes her head and snaps back, ‘Does Gran even get a say?’ Relic’s debt to melodrama, a genre traditionally seen as a ‘woman’s film’,^[6]See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1987. reveals itself in and through the film’s doubled mother–daughter dynamic, in which the characters’ expressions of trauma, guilt and questions regarding parental responsibility repeatedly resurface.^[7]In Relic, the genres of melodrama and horror converge in other ways. With its dual mother–daughter relationships, the film foregrounds the experience of women within the narrative while male characters are absent or remain on the outer. Edna’s husband is deceased; Sam’s father is unsighted; father–son next-door neighbours refuse to enter Edna’s house; and Kay’s grandfather, who once lived in a smaller residence on the property, is equally removed from the female-only space of the family home.

By contrast, for much of Relic’s running time, the traditional stylistic elements of horror (shadowy figures, unexplained noises, etc.) remain largely on the periphery of the narrative, even as they shape our connection to on-screen events at a sensory level.^[8]This is also a trademark of James’ impressive short films Tritch (2011), Creswick (2017) – itself a direct precursor to Relic – and Drum Wave (2018), in which familial conflict is framed by supernatural (or potentially supernatural) forces. But as the darkness gradually comes to the fore, encroaching on the film’s emotional conflict, it’s possible to interpret a deeper purpose for these horrors, one that indicates a significant departure from more traditional representations of dementia. In Relic, the tropes of the horror genre serve to convey not only the traumatic experiences of family members but also, more importantly, the terrifying prospect faced by the sufferer of losing their sense of self. With Edna forced to confront loss and mortality, the true horror in Relic belongs not only to Kay and Sam but to her, too.

The horror of the home

One reason that dementia films have traditionally tended to shift focus away from the patient may have to do with the challenge of representing psychological deterioration on screen. It’s difficult for cinema – or any medium, for that matter – to adequately convey a loss of interiority in a manner commensurate to the experience of the individual. In Relic, however, James and co-writer Christian White partly circumvent this representational dilemma by expressing Edna’s condition as a physical manifestation embodied by the family home.

With its debt to both literary and cinematic texts (particularly the stylistic tropes of Japanese horror cinema^[9]Relic specifically evokes elements of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002) and Ring (1998–1999) films, and James has acknowledged her interest in Asian horror cinema in a number of interviews. See Haleigh Foutch, ‘Relic Director Natalie Erika James on How Her Personal Sundance Pic Taps into Universal Horrors’, Collider, 23 January 2020, <https://collider.com/relic-sundance-interview-natalie-erika-james/>; and Stuart Kemp, ‘“The Landscape for Horror Is Changing”: Natalie Erika James on Debut Feature Relic’, Screen Daily, 2 April 2020, <https://www.screendaily.com/features/the-landscape-for-horror-is-changing-natalie-erika-james-on-debut-feature-relic/5148714.article>, both accessed 28 July 2020.), Relic riffs on the Gothic tradition, in which the physical residence doubles as a projection of the inhabitants’ psychological state.^[10]See Dale Bailey, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1999; and Barry Curtis, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film, Reaktion Books, London, 2008. The Gothic credentials of the family home are firmly established in the film’s opening moments, in which James lends the familiar household imagery of pulsing Christmas lights and running bathwater an uncanny sensibility.^[11]The word Sigmund Freud uses to describe the uncanny, ‘unheimlich’ – which literally translates as ‘unhomelike’ – seems particularly appropriate to the representation of the house in Relic. As the scene progresses, the water spills over the side of the tub, making its way down the stairs, where it pools at the feet of Edna, who stands semi-naked and transfixed by an as-yet-unseen object in the darkened lounge room. And then, on the far right of frame, a darkened figure can be glimpsed standing, partially obscured by a windowed door. James immediately cuts away, sowing doubt in the audience as to what they’ve just witnessed. 

The association between mind and body provides a potent visual signifier of Edna’s decline, inscribing her fears surrounding both mental incapacitation and the physical symptoms of ageing directly onto her flesh.

This oddly disturbing opening sequence, which at first seems unrelated to the main events of the narrative, is later referred to during Kay’s interview with the police officer handling her mother’s disappearance. Asked about Edna’s state of health, she explains, ‘She’s in her eighties. She forgets things. She managed to flood the house last Christmas.’ What at first seems like an offhand remark becomes more telling as the film plays out. Edna’s psychological state (specifically, her ‘forgetfulness’) is bound to the state of the house. It is also relevant that this incident – perhaps an early sign of her decline – resulted in flooding. When Kay and Sam arrive at the residence, they discover a black mould that has taken up within the closets and walls. Reinforcing the film’s Gothic association between mind and home, the mould spreads at an alarming rate as Edna’s psychological deterioration worsens, eventually weakening the internal structures of the house. It’s difficult to watch the disintegration of the home, with its carefully observed clutter, family photos and keepsakes, without being reminded that what we’re really witnessing is the loss of Edna. 

This is certainly the case for both Kay and Sam, who, in the film’s latter stages, are forced to confront the trauma of that loss from within the home’s rapidly decaying walls. In this respect, Relic recalls a characteristic that scholar Tony Magistrale ascribes to the Gothic haunted house in which ‘the protagonist(s) appear trapped within its recesses especially as the house “awakens” to assume an infernal biology of its own’.^[12]Tony Magistrale, Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film, Peter Lang, New York, 2005, p. 90. In the film’s concluding act, Sam and then Kay are effectively imprisoned within a house that betrays standard principles of space and time. Far from a gimmick intended to heighten a sense of claustrophobic horror – although it certainly achieves that – the disorientation experienced by mother and daughter in the film’s climactic moments is cleverly conceived, propelling them into a confusion and terror that mirror Edna’s fracturing sense of self and understanding of the world. The haunted house, though terrifying, functions as a large-scale memento mori, empathetically connecting the audience with Edna’s experiences.

The horror of the body

Beyond this connection to the home, Edna’s psychological state is externalised in another, more intimate manner throughout Relic: it’s etched upon her body. When Edna first reappears, the only sign that she has come to any harm is a small, unexplained bruise on her chest. However, as Edna’s deterioration intensifies over the course of the film, the bruise spreads – much like the mould taking over the house – until it eventually festers into an open wound. Here, the horrors of the mind are inseparable from the horrors of the body. The association between mind and body thus provides a potent visual signifier of Edna’s decline, inscribing her fears surrounding both mental incapacitation and the physical symptoms of ageing directly onto her flesh.

In charting a narrative trajectory that opens with a troubled psyche and concludes with peeling flesh, Relic recalls in no small part the body-horror cinema of David Cronenberg, whose films of the 1970s and 1980s largely redefined the subgenre for a generation of filmmakers. For Cronenberg, the body occupies a fundamental place in understanding human subjectivity specifically as it relates to questions of death. In an oft-cited interview, the director observes, 

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence.^[13]David Cronenberg, quoted in Rob Blackwelder, ‘Metaphor Man’, SPLICEDwire, 14 April 1999, <http://splicedwire.com/features/cronenberg.html>, accessed 28 July 2020.

In Relic, the notion of embracing mortality is transformed from a philosophical ideal and made manifest on screen. In its bold and emotionally impactful climax, the film resists the typical tendency of turning away from the terrors of dying and instead confronts the horror head-on, meeting it with a tender and compassionate embrace. But, in doing so, the film also challenges the gendered associations of the ‘disintegrating ill or dying female body’, which, as researcher Elizabeth W Markson has convincingly argued, ‘provides a model against which spectators can perform a self-assessment, reassuring themselves of their own wholeness by projecting their fears of aging and death outward’.^[14]Elizabeth W Markson, ‘The Female Aging Body Through Film’, in Christopher A Faircloth (ed.), Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA, 2003, p. 95. In the film’s final moments, as James brings together three generations of women, Relic offers little in the way of reassuring closure, trading away our desire for the comforting disavowal of death and replacing it with a poignant and unequivocal reminder of our own mortality and that of our loved ones. More than just a confirmation of the film’s intimate family origins, it’s an ending that leaves little doubt about what we’ve just witnessed: the emergence of an exciting and distinctive new voice within genre cinema.