Editorials
Why ‘Mama’ Was a High Point For Modern Horror
As Andy Muschietti preps to adapt Stephen King’s It, let’s revisit his debut feature.
In less than three minutes, Andy Muschietti and sister Barbara Muschietti established themselves as forces to be reckoned with in the horror genre courtesy of the 2008 short film Mama. In the short, two young girls get out of bed and go downstairs to find a truly nightmarish entity in their home, and when he saw it, Guillermo del Toro was so impressed and terrified that he knew he had to help turn the simple concept into a feature. So he used his power to do just that.
Five years later, the del Toro-produced Mama opened in the top spot at the domestic box office, but three years after that, I can’t help but feel that the film has never quite gotten the respect it deserves from the horror crowd. And it deserves a whole lot of respect.
Dark even for a horror film, Mama begins in the wake of a man murdering his wife and business partners amid the financial crisis of 2008. Afterwards, he drives his two young daughters to a remote cabin where he intends on killing them too, but the horrific plan goes awry when a strange entity shows up and saves the girls. Several years later, the deceased man’s brother tracks down the sisters, who had been living in the woods all those years, and he and his girlfriend adopt them. Happy family, right? Not exactly. Because Mama wants the kids all for herself.
We eventually learn that “Mama” is the vengeful spirit of Edith Brennan, a mentally disturbed young woman who escaped an asylum in the 1800s and jumped to her death off a cliff, her own baby in her arms. As it turns out, the baby got caught on a branch on the way down, and so Edith entered the afterlife without her child in tow. After spending decades wandering the woods and looking for her baby, she came across sisters Victoria and Lilly, taking them under her wing as if they were her own.
And she’s not letting go without a fight.
Boiled down to its essence, I suppose you could call Mama a haunted house movie, but it’s because of the ambitious and emotionally-charged storytelling that it’s something more than just another spooky tale about just another haunted house. A custody battle by way of a supernatural horror film, Mama is primarily centered on the struggle between a living woman who doesn’t really want children and a dead woman who will stop at nothing to get them, and it’s this key idea that makes the film so very compelling.
On the living side, a pre-superstardom Jessica Chastain is Annabel, who has reluctantly agreed to play the mother role for feral sisters Victoria and Lilly. The character is immediately established as the sort of young woman who can’t even bear the thought of being a mother – in an early scene, Annabel’s day is made when she learns she’s not pregnant – making her the complete antithesis of everything Edith stood for in life and especially stands for in death. Annabel is a very interesting character for this sort of story, and her arc from budding rockstar to loving mother is the heart that beats at the center of the film.
And then there’s Edith Brennan, aka “Mama,” who is unquestionably one of the most unsettling horror villains to haunt the big screen in the past ten years. Looking more like a Xenomorph than a human being, Mama is visually stunning in the most nightmarish of ways, and that’s thanks in no small part to yet another creepy performance from Javier Botet. The distorted facial appliance, combined with Botet’s unnatural movements, proves to be the recipe for a tragic horror villain that will endure and continue to terrify for years to come. How many modern horror movies can stake that claim?
It sends chills up my spine just thinking about the sounds Mama makes.
If it feels like a traditional haunted house film during the second act, and indeed it does at times, Mama firmly establishes itself as the twisted fairytale it most definitely is when it comes time to wrap up the story. The finale, fittingly set on the edge of the very same cliff Edith jumped off of many years prior, boldly achieves a sort of fantastical beauty that calls to mind the work of both Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro, and with it Muschietti proves that he’s a visionary filmmaker of the highest order. He’s also a filmmaker who’s not afraid to see a story through to its logical conclusion, no matter how dark he has to go in order to do that – the film ends with Mama grabbing Lilly and jumping off the cliff, ending her own pain and killing the young girl.
When Mama’s body literally explodes into hundreds of black moths upon impact, there’s simply no denying that Andy Muschietti’s debut feature is less a run-of-the-mill horror film and more a striking piece of dark art. In more ways than one, it’s quite unlike anything you’d ever expect to see in a Hollywood-made horror film, and though there may be some familiarity inherent to the proceedings, Mama is altogether the sort of creative and boldly original genre effort that us fans are so often begging for. Backed by a compelling story and full of genuinely terrifying imagery, it’s a gem that more than deserves a second look from those who maybe didn’t appreciate it the first time around – I know I didn’t, and I sure as hell do now.
If Mama is any indication, we’re all in for a real treat with Muschietti’s It.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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