Editorials
Alice Kept Secrets: Cinematic Grief and ‘Lake Mungo’ (2008)
*mild spoilers for Lake Mungo below*
Grief and horror are often thought of as strange bedfellows. Grief is what comes after horror, when we begin to mourn what has been lost. Horror films deal with death, torment and pain but rarely explicitly with grief. Grief often has to do with the death of someone close to us. It can feel like an open wound, metaphorical bleeding that may never clot because that person is irreplaceable. We remember what they meant to us, our interactions and the elements that were unique to them. Grief is not something that necessarily makes us stronger or better but it does touch at the core of our humanity; our ability to mourn and remember is a large part of what makes us human.
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) are a few of the horror films that have used grief as a central thematic element. Each family unit in these films is dealing with the loss of an immediate family member and ultimately discovers how that loss turns upside down the reality they thought they knew. They are scared to accept the present lest it means a forgetting of the past, specifically of the loved one that they lost. Each of these films tackles in its own way the fear of a new reality, one in which the deceased is not part of and can never know.
The tricky thing about dealing with grief in film is that grief is loss; it is the absence of something or someone. Film is about showing something, as goes the great film adage: show, don’t tell. Here lies the tension between grief, an all-consuming human emotion, and film, one of our most accessible modern mediums for storytelling – how does a filmmaker depict the absence of a person to create emotional pathos for the viewer? How does someone *not* appearing create an understanding of grief? Cinema is filled with ghost stories, some horrifying, some tragic.
Joel Anderson’s 2008 Lake Mungo is a film which uses its medium to distance itself from its narrative, allowing the audience a rarefied view of a tragedy. Shot in a mockumentary style format which centers on the Palmer family whose teenage daughter Alice (Talia Zucker) died suddenly in a tragic drowning at the titular Lake Mungo in Australia, the film picks up with the family several months after the accident. It utilizes its format to speak with her immediate family and friends, setting up the various ways in which they deal with Alice’s death. The film develops a supernatural tone when Alice’s brother sets up video cameras around the house in hopes of capturing Alice’s ghost.
Often in paranormal/ghost narratives, the specters of the dead are unwanted presences, but in Lake Mungo, the Palmer family is desperate for some element of Alice to remain in their world. As they search for some element of proof of a ghostly presence, they discover more and more that they barely knew Alice while she was alive; in many ways, she was already a ghost to them. There is also a discovered videotape, a psychic and a chilling cell phone video, all of which serve to drive the narrative towards its haunting conclusion. The conceit of Lake Mungo is not that of a found footage documentary, but rather it is a heavily edited, ready for television effort. The rehearsed and controlled tone of it lends itself to the slow burn of the film, the sinking feeling of terror when the unexplainable elements remain unexplained.
Where Lake Mungo transcends as a film about grief is in its multiple reveals throughout the film, all of them leading to the conclusion that this family’s grief, which is felt so deeply throughout the film, is for someone they never truly knew; and in never knowing their teenage daughter Alice, they are mourning for an idea of her, rather than the young woman herself. Anderson explores the notion of grief by showing the variety of ways Alice’s death has affected those around her and how they tragically never understood her. Her death, while full of meaning, is not full of understanding. One of the great tragedies of grief is that eventually, people move on. They have to. This all-consuming feeling that can burn so brightly within us can often, quite suddenly, be extinguished. Lake Mungo is about the tension between the idea of Alice and the Alice that still haunts the Palmer family fading away with time. We the audience can still sense her, even though her family is moving on. The onus is put on the audience to remember Alice as her family moves on.
The mockumentary style of Lake Mungo presents an objective view of the events rather than the family’s subjective view. As an audience, we are able to sympathize and empathize with the Palmer family, maybe even relating to them at various points, but we are never truly them. The gaze of the film is similar to that of Alice’s – forever on the outside, unable to touch or affect them. While it is the Palmer family who narrates the story, they never see the full picture.
The horror of Lake Mungo not only comes from the creeping dread which Anderson so beautifully executes throughout the film in one of the slowest of slow burns of all time, but from an oft-repeated horror trope – you can never truly know another person. We’re not talking about in a Jack Torrance kind of way where a haunted hotel can make someone snap, but in the inverse, the idea that we will never know all the intimacies, hopes and dreams of those closest to us. This could be because of shame and fear of their desires or because of our own inabilities to see beyond our notions of them. Lake Mungo perfectly expresses the painful, devastating idea that we can mourn “wrong”. That in our attempt to accept and know someone, we can miss them when they are right in front of us, pleading to be heard.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
Looking for New Episodes of “Chucky” on Peacock? Here’s What Changed
‘Mountain Man’ – Joe Manganiello Will Battle Zombies in Upcoming Horror Movie
‘The Blair Witch Project’ – Original Stars Release a Statement Asking Lionsgate for Residuals & Recognition
‘Trap’ – Official Trailer Previews a Wild New Horror Experience from M. Night Shyamalan
‘The Exorcism’ – Russell Crowe Stars in Horror Movie Formerly Titled ‘The Georgetown Project’
You must be logged in to post a comment.