The director of The Vourdalak, Adrien Beau recommends six horror favorites.
Family is the ultimate encapsulation of society. It offers us a taste of the whole world, but at a molecular level – and is very convenient if you want to destroy the world via your storytelling. The Greeks knew it with their tragedies, and we’re still using it to this day.
The tale of The Vourdalak is about how a monster can destroy their relatives from within, feeding one by one on those they love the most. In our case it’s a fatherly, patriarchal figure who has transformed into something inhuman… but the horrible threat can come from elsewhere in the family unit.
Here, I share my five favorite horror films about that very topic…
HORROR FEATURING… THE FATHER AND MOTHER
Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, of course, is my definitive pick when it comes to fear of one’s father. Even if there’s nothing left to say about this masterpiece, it still deserves to be brought up. We are all somehow both Danny and Jack Torrance, even as our protagonist completely loses his mind.
Similarly, there is so much to love about Peter Jackson‘s iconic family-centric gorefest Braindead / Dead Alive, wherein an overbearing mother, killed via a poisonous animal bite, returns from the dead, transforms into a giant rat creature, and begs her doting son to “come to mommy.”
In this sneakily-smart film, the Oedipal dynamic between mother and son has never been wilder — or gorier.
HORROR FEATURING… THE SISTER
I’m absolutely fascinated by the character of Baby Jane Hudson, played by the great Bette Davis, in Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. From her performance and detailed costuming to the song she repeatedly sings (“I’ve written a letter to daddy!”), this middle-aged woman dressed like a little girl, living almost solely in her memories while ghoulishly torturing her sibling, is just as shocking now as she was when the film was released back in 1962
I’m so grateful she has become such an icon of cinema – and I really hope I’m going to be like her when I get older.
HORROR FEATURING… THE DAUGHTER
When discussing horror films focused on the horror of one’s daughter, there’s nothing more terrifying than William Friedkin‘s masterpiece, The Exorcist.
A Catholic nightmare for women and mothers in particular, its story wisely focuses its first act on a modern woman who works full-time as a successful actress while raising her daughter on her own. She has very little time left to spend with her daughter, even though she loves her very much. But on the rare occasion that her attention is elsewhere, conservative Christian mythology sees that her baby girl cruelly transformed into something unsettlingly evil.
HORROR FEATURING… THE BABY
Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby has a simple, perfectly effective message: The devil is here… in your building… in your neighbors… in your husband… and in your belly.
And nothing could be scarier.
AND FINALLY, HORROR FEATURING… THE EMBRYO
Ridley Scott‘s Alien is one of my favorite films of all-time, and a very eloquent and clever pro-choice manifesto. Forget the sequels and dive into the original’s message: It’s a brilliant feminist manifesto, sensitively depicting the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. Those eggs… those creatures, growing in the bellies of their hosts… that all-encompassing ship, which everyone refers to as “Mother”… and the blood of android Ash, which could very easily be interpreted as spilled mothers’ milk.
Even in the 70s, we already knew that some of us were just better off with cats.
The Vourdalak opens this Friday, June 28th, at New York City’s IFC Center with writer/director Adrien Beau in attendance. Limited tickets for the screenings are still available HERE.
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