Horror films are here to scare us on a very literal level, whether it’s through a chilling ghost story, a brutal and bloody slasher, or a mind-blowing creature feature. But horror can also be used to take something familiar to all of us, something mundane and real, and make it scary. By doing so, horror films can be, and are, used as metaphors for the very human anxieties and fears that surround that subject.
Two brilliant recent examples are the recent horror films Relic and Impetigore. The first is, on the surface, a haunted house ghost story about three generations of women: Edna, Kay, and Sam. The second is a story about a village curse and the cult-like villagers’ murderous way of life that is directly linked to the actions of lead character Maya’s father and his sins of the past. But underneath all of that, both of them are using the horror elements obviously present in their films to take on the same thing – familial inheritance. Inheritance is a normal part of life, but with it come some anxieties and concerns that both Relic and Impetigore amplify perfectly with the tools of their genre.
Relic, directed by Natalie Erika James, is the story of the aforementioned three generations of women: matriarch and grandmother Edna who suffers from dementia, workaholic mother Kay, and aimless granddaughter Sam. After Edna goes missing, the three eventually reunite and begin figuring out how they can best deal with Edna’s rapidly progressing disease. Kay and Sam eventually realize that something sinister is haunting Edna and now it’s also haunting them.
The monster in this case is dementia which is literally demonized and turned into a horror movie monster for these women to overcome. The story cleverly uses traits of dementia to create scares. In the film, Kay is attacked by Edna, who slowly becomes more monstrous throughout, in an example of how dementia changes people and makes them strangers to us. In addition to this, the daughter is trapped in a labyrinthine version of the grandmother’s house, unable to remember how to escape, a clever way to portray the degenerative loss of memory that can be caused by the disease.
These moments of horror are unsettling because of how seamlessly they incorporate the symptoms of the disease into well-recognized horror tropes. Relic has many unsettling moments throughout that subtly delve into the implications of dementia. There’s a distinct focus on the passing of time with overflowing baths, rotting fruit, and overgrown tennis courts all helping to depict yet another aspect of Edna’s decline — it’s only a matter of time until Edna is lost to the disease forever. It’s also worth noting that these images add to the gothic haunted house aesthetic that makes Relic so eerily spooky from the offset.
The presence of paranoia-filled Post-it notes covered in ominous warnings without explanation, only teasing at something more sinister and unseen happening is another excellent example of this, both literally and figuratively. In the literal sense Edna herself is aware of the demons that are haunting her and is desperately trying to remember them so she can fight them. But it also, again, functions as a metaphorical depiction of memory loss.These Post-it notes are also extremely important for showing how Edna is two things throughout the movie: a tragic victim who can’t trust her own faculties and is suffering from the horror of her situation and also the film’s monster, the thing that haunts and torments her family.
But it’s the finale that really drives the point home about the genuine fears surrounding dementia. We see Edna sporting an ominous black mark when she returns from going missing, which grows bigger and bigger as the film goes on. The mark itself, while steeped in horror connotations recalling an ominous threat like the growing mold we see in Dark Water or Haunting Of Hill House, is used as a physical manifestation of the disease itself, a tool so that we as the audience can actually see how Edna is deteriorating.
This all leads to the incredibly touching final moments in which Kay lovingly and reluctantly peels Edna’s skin away, revealing a black-skinned demonic creature underneath. Not only is this another allusion to dementia being a sinister force working under the surface, but it also connotes how it slowly strips away the human being and leaves something else behind. Kay’s part in peeling Edna’s skin away and leaving only the dementia to remain is also particularly poignant because it signifies her acceptance of her mother’s condition and of her own biological inheritance.
The black mark is then discovered by Sam on her mother as the three women embrace on Edna’s bed to close out the film, signalling that Kay will definitely suffer from dementia. It’s an extraordinary final image that truly encapsulates the love and devastation that someone dealing with a family member with dementia would feel. It also shows the threat of dementia that looms in the genes of the different generations of the women in this family.
Of course, there are clues throughout the film that Kay is already showing signs of dementia, or at the very least doing things to stave it off. She’s continuously writing lists, constantly involved in her work, and regularly makes plans for the future. That’s what makes Relic so effective, in the way it shows us the family unit dealing with this ‘demon’ together as a lens through which to effectively portray the concerns and anxieties the mother has of inheriting the illness. Despite the measures she takes to prevent it we also eventually see her acceptance of it by finding comfort in that family unit. Relic’s demonization of dementia as a literal curse that can be passed down generation to generation and tying it together with the horror genre seems so obvious in hindsight, because of how well it’s done here.
Joko Anwar’s Impetigore tackles a different aspect of inheritance. The lead character, Maya, is forced, through financial hardship, to travel back to, and claim the ancestral home of her parents that she’d left in mysterious circumstances as a young child. Not knowing who her parents are or the circumstances surrounding the rural village she finds herself in, Maya quickly realizes that the inheritance she had traveled to claim may not be the one she bargained for. It’s clever of Anwar to use the literal concept of inheritance, as a means to set up the real crux of the story: Maya has, unknowingly, inherited the sins of her father and is set to pay a heavy price as a result.
Anwar sets this up from the very beginning of the movie, long before we see Maya and her best friend travel to her father’s home. Impetigore opens with a brilliantly tense sequence that sees a machete-wielding man confront her at an isolated toll-booth and attempt to kill her, with the message ‘We don’t want what your family left behind.’ This shows Maya is being haunted by her family’s bloody heritage even if she doesn’t know why.
Maya’s father, a renowned shadow puppeteer, finds himself embroiled in a scandal that ultimately leads to the village being cursed with one of the more horrific horror elements I’ve seen in a film for quite some time — every child is born without skin and doomed to live a life of unimaginable pain or suffer a quick death. This is the grim past that Maya directly inherits. But the film makes the point of Maya overtly paying for the sins of her father as the villagers believe that the only way to rid themselves of this course is to kill her and use her skin to make shadow puppets. This naturally feeds into the horror of the movie as Maya slowly discovers that she’s isolated herself in a strange place full of people who desperately want to kill her.
But Impetigore also cleverly blurs ethics and morals as it is revealed that Maya’s father isn’t responsible for the curse and yet still, he did do something completely evil. He murdered three young girls and took their skin for Maya, who was born without any. We see that Maya benefited directly from the sins of her father, albeit against her will, so there is a moral dilemma that she struggles with where she grappled with the guilt for her unwitting role in proceedings.
It’s this revelation that reveals that Maya almost does have a moral obligation to resolve the curse, and the film certainly argues that she was the only one, both detached from the situation, but also intrinsically chained to it, who could have done so. This is evidenced by the repetitive appearance of the ghosts of the three young girls who haunt Maya throughout the film. They go on to help her uncover the secrets behind the village’s curse. This was the film’s way of suggesting that they understood she was as much of a victim of the circumstances and her father’s actions as they were, and shouldn’t be blamed.
Maya’s scenario certainly taps into real-life anxieties and concerns around people who never met or knew their parents, with the obvious fear being that they weren’t good people. But also, it taps into the same fears and anxieties of people who did know their parents and do know that their parents weren’t good people. It is unsettling to consider that we are all doomed to follow in the footsteps of our parents and that their darkness or criminality is something that can be passed down..
Thankfully, Impetigore gives us resolution where Maya is forced to face up to and acknowledge the darkness and criminality of her predecessors. We see how it directly leads to her very healthy existence. But, in the course of the film, she manages to overcome this legacy and doesn’t repeat the same mistakes of the past, actually proving that she is better than her father.
This specific parent-child sharing of guilt is also explored with the film’s actual villain, the elder matriarch, Nyi Misni and her son, the village leader, Ki Saptadi as the finale exposes that Misni is actually the one responsible for the curse. Saptadi, overcome with guilt, kills himself, serving as a more grisly and tragic example of how the actions of a parent affect the child, but also how a child is beholden to the worldview and beliefs of a parental figure.
Impetigore also comments on trying to fix something horrible, with something equally as horrible. Maya encounters the wife of the man who tried to kill her at the toll-booth, but despite being pregnant and on-course for her unborn child to suffer the same skinless fate as the children before it, she chooses not to try and kill Maya. This is the first instance of the film showing that we don’t have to carry out the actions we’ve inherited from others and can make our own choices. This scene also comments on the cyclical nature of inheritance, especially if children repeat the actions of their parents.
Both Relic and Impetigore are excellent horror films that take something we can all relate to and turn it into something horrific. One of my favourite things about the horror genre is how it can make ghosts of our secrets and demons of our worries. These two films take the relatively mundane subject of inheritance and contextualises it as a source of one of our deepest and darkest fears: living in the shadow of our parents.
