Editorials
[Editorial] The Dark Horror of Female Siblings
One of the most tried-and-true relationships explored in horror is the bond between sisters. Bound by blood, for better or worse, female siblings make for a powerful dynamic in the genre. Whether meant as minor characters, like the creepy twins in The Shining, or the central focus, like Brigitte and Ginger in Ginger Snaps, sisters tend to steal the spotlight. What is it about this relationship that makes them so appealing in horror? Sisters can be both vulnerable and powerful; they can seemingly exist as one or their opposing personalities can make for intense rivalries. In horror, there’s no shortage of examining the love and hate connection between female siblings.
Twins
When it comes to cinematic twins, is there a more iconic pair than the Grady sisters in The Shining? They were minor characters, ghosts that terrorized Danny, but their monotone, haunting delivery of their lines in unison solidified them in horror memory. In horror, twins are creepy because they’re two separate people acting as one. There’s a foreign aspect to twins, who often seem to live in their own world, and their personalities are so entwined that to live without the other can drive them to madness. In Brian de Palma’s Sisters, Margot Kidder played both Danielle and Dominique, conjoined twins whose separation has driven one of them to homicide. They don’t know how to exist without the other. For these twins, the loss of that close connection proves fatal.
The Older Sister
The older sibling is often the one with the stronger personality of the two. Having to forge a path in life as well as assume the role of caretaker, the older sister bears the brunt of responsibility. The weight of it can drive the sister to madness, as it did Su-mi in A Tale of Two Sisters. Su-mi’s younger sister Su-yeon is the only one who understands her, and the love she has for her sibling is evident. Yet, there’s a strong sense of guilt over Su-mi’s inability to protect her sibling from the wrath of their father’s mistress. Su-mi’s guilt stems from tragedy and leads to a fractured mind; her only anchor to reality lies with Su-yeon.
In We Are What We Are, elder sister Rose struggles with her budding independence and familial obligations. Her younger siblings look to her when their mother’s death leaves them alone and fearful of their father. When Rose does finally choose how to navigate this cannibalistic family dynamic, younger sibling Iris instantly follows suit.
Sometimes, though, being the older sister means letting go no matter how much love exists for the younger sister. As was the case in Andrés Muschietti Mama. Orphaned and raised in the woods by creepy entity “Mama,” Victoria and Lilly struggle to live in the real world, especially when “Mama” follows them to their new home. Victoria, the elder of the two, adapts far more easily than her feral younger sister, which ultimately leads to heartbreaking sacrifice.
The Younger Sister
Hidden behind her sister’s shadow, the younger sister often struggles to get out from her older sibling’s dominating personality. Though the film might be called Ginger Snaps, the story is really about Brigitte learning to stand on her own, her strength fueled by her desire to save her sister’s dramatic physical changes brought on by lycanthropy and puberty. Though her sister continues to fight against Brigitte’s growth, going so far as to literally haunt her in Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, Brigitte paves her own strange way in life.
Julia Ducournau’s Raw depicts a very similar adversarial relationship between younger and older sibling, forgoing the werewolves in favor of cannibalism. For awkward Justine, her foray into her freshman year of veterinary school proves all the more difficult with the presence of her polar opposite older sister, Alexia. It’s through Alexia’s hazing that awakens Justine’s body changes and literal lust for flesh, furthering the antagonistic rivalry between the pair. Even though Justine and Alexia can barely stand each other, there’s no one better suited than each other in understanding what these cannibalistic urges mean.
Even when they’re at each other’s throats, sisters still love each other. Sometimes that love is absolutely frightening.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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