If you’ve seen Ma (read my review), you know all about “that” scene. The scene where Octavia Spencer does that thing, the one probably haven’t seen in a movie before. It’s disturbing and it’s grotesque… and we had to know everything about it.
Bloody-Disgusting sat down with director Tate Taylor and asked where the hell this moment came from, and you don’t want to know anything about it, or if you haven’t seen Ma yet, be warned… MAJOR SPOILERS are about to follow.
In the film, “Ma” has Ben, played by Luke Evans, strapped to her bed. He abused her in high school and he’s been threatening her now, and she always had a thing for him anyway. So although it looks for all the world like she’s going to castrate him, it’s a surprise when – instead – she makes a dog’s blood IV and pumps his veins full of it.
“Working with Scotty [Landes], the writer, I was like, I don’t want to just DO something mean. I want it to have meaning behind it, especially with all she does to the kids at the end,” Tate Taylor explained. “And Scotty goes, ‘Well, I know something. I’ve never seen someone put dog’s blood in someone’s body.’ And I go, ‘FUCK YES!'”
It turns out the original draft of Ma didn’t even go so far as the castration idea. “She didn’t even castrate him. She just killed him,” Taylor continued. “And so then I go ‘AND, on top of the dog blood, let’s do a misdirect! Where you think you’re going to cut off [his penis].’ Because that’s seemingly what Ma would do but she’s smart about it. ‘I’m not going to give the pleasure!'”
What, exactly, would pumping someone full of dog’s blood do to them? Tate Taylor knows, actually.
“They tried to do this in the 15th and 16th century. Your body has an allergic reaction to it, as one would of course imagine, and you get sick,” Taylor says. “I mean today you could treat it but that’s why she slits his wrist. It’s just symbolic. I had a line where she was like, ‘Out with the old, in with the new’ but it made it too funny.
What’s odd about the dog’s blood in Ma is that it’s not Ma’s dog, and it’s not Ben’s dog. It’s the dog belonging to Maggie (Diana Silvers) and her mother, Erica (Juliette Lewis), who was also a part of “Ma’s” trauma in high school.
“Because Louie [the dog], in my mind, represented stability for Maggie and her mother. He’s the man of the house. He’s there. I love dogs and I think they’re such a huge part of people’s lives and to use Louie bridges two of the conspirators, if you will, or the complicit person, with one unique thing. This is Maggie’s and Erica’s dog. This hurts Maggie and intimidates her, and it hurts Erica, and I’m just bringing it all full circle,” Taylor adds.
Ma is in theaters now.
