M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, Relic mine age for new horror movies

Horror trains us to face loss. There is a fine line between tragedy and comedy, and horror walks on that line choosing between each and challenging us to scream, cry, howl, laugh or let out our emotions. Don’t open that door! Don’t go downstairs! Don’t get lost in the night! Don’t summon ghosts or demons! We collectively respond to horror because of the exaltation of that cathartic release, and because the genre has instructed us to know what comes within the confines of its format. And what comes is something or someone that will take away from us and force us to have what is left behind and what remains of us.

The us-versus-them format is an integral part of almost all horror villains: serial killers, zombies, ghosts, demons, monsters, things that crash at night. And for a long time, the elderly have also been part of that “they”.

Several filmmakers have used older people as villains or scare providers: in Rosemary’s baby, Mulholland Drive, The visit, the Insidious franchise. And the elderly have their own agendas in many of these movies: control and fear, typically. (Or even hunger, as in the 1988 film Troma Rabid grannies, in which a pair of grandmothers eat their relatives eager for inheritance. Understandable!)

Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper write in the book Elder Horror: Essays on the Terrifying Images of Aging in Movies that the horror genre presents “a dark version of the familiar trope about the elderly: that their knowledge and experience extend into areas young people know nothing about.” That analysis applies to many films that play on psychological, surreal, and even comic horror. To Rosemary’s (Mia Farrow) neighbors in Rosemary’s baby, who help drug her, rape her, brainwash her and force her to have a demonic baby. Old travel companions Betty (Naomi Watts) befriends in Mulholland Drive, who assures her that she has what it takes to succeed in Los Angeles, and then shrinks under her door, sneaks into her apartment, and terrorizes her at night. To the old spirits of the Insidious franchise, including Bride in Black and Woman in White, who try to trap visitors in the Afterlife and return to the physical world so they can live again. And runaway psychiatric patients in The visit, who take advantage of the implicit trust that grandchildren place in their grandparents. (That film’s found-footage style “contributes significantly to the realism of fear and uncertainty surrounding the aging process of grandparents,” writes Stephanie M. Flint in her Old horror essay “The limits of the ‘sunset’: M. Night Shyamalan The visit and the horror of the aged body “).

With that “old people are creepy” trope in place, in recent years several movies have tweaked it suggesting that the process getting old is in itself a kind of body horror. On Relic, Old, Bingo hell, and The mansion, the fear of losing bodily autonomy through memory loss, illness and deterioration is amplified to disturbing extremes. Recognition of this transformation is key to our terror and to the persistent disturbance with which these films leave us.

In Natalie Erika James’s Relic, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) move in with their mother / grandmother Edna (Roby Nevin). Intergenerational relationships are strained and fear weighs as much as the black mold that has been growing in Edna’s home and on her body. As the black mold spreads, she becomes increasingly confused and violent – sleepwalking, walking away, and accusing Sam of stealing. Is the house causing Edna’s increasingly damaged body, or is this the natural shock of her loneliness? Either way, Relic emphasizes that aging is irreversible and that the decomposition of the body is a toxic process that spreads outward and affects our descendants.

Old, an adaptation of the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, and Shyamalan’s return to this trope after The visit – makes a similar point about how aging affects not only the individual, but also the people they love and who love them. In the thriller, three groups spend a (literally) life-changing day together on a tropical beach. Without their knowledge, they are visiting a place where they age one year for every 30 minutes they spend there, which means that regardless of the underlying medical conditions, they have become grotesquely obvious. The body of everyone in Old he begins to betray them through schizophrenia, epilepsy, hypocalcemia, and hemophilia. But the most tragic are the fates of the characters who arrive on the beach as children and then rapidly age into pre-teens and teenagers who have to face their mortality. Their jump from 6 to 11 to 15 years makes them figures that their loved ones, family and friends hardly recognize, and with the passage of time comes the loss of opportunities. “There are so many memories that we didn’t have. It’s not fair, ”says Kara (Eliza Scanlen), 15, and since Old came out during the COVID-19 pandemic, that line had a widespread relationship.

Photo: Universal Pictures

Not to be left out, modern horror masters Blumhouse Productions tapped into this theme with two films through their Welcome to the Blumhouse partnership with Prime Video: Bingo hell and The mansion. They both focus on the sense of isolation that can come with the aging process: Will you visit your family? Will they continue to be involved in your life? Or will they forget you?

Bingo hell sets these reflections in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying, and where children and grandchildren don’t come by as often as they should. Once the new owner, Mr. Big (Richard Brake), buys the local bingo hall, community elders fall under the spell of promised cash prizes, until Lupita (Adriana Barraza), a longtime resident For a long time, he realizes that Mr. Big might not be as generous as he seems. The mansion explores a similar message about despair and physical damage brought on by the feeling that second chances are running out. After suffering a stroke, Judith Albright (Barbara Hershey) enters a nursing home, to the surprise of her beloved grandson Josh (Nicholas Alexander), who does not see his grandmother so old. But once Judith is installed on the premises, she becomes nervous about how the staff does not listen to the complaints of the residents when they see strange things like a monster made of tree bark and teenagers running through the gardens at night. The uphill battle that Judith fights to be believed is a comment on the disrespect we can treat our most vulnerable with, and the frustration that Hershey captures regarding Judith’s brain / body disconnect is a reminder that eventually we will feel that way too.

All of these characters are monstrous versions of “respect your elders”, but they also serve another purpose. Depending on your belief in the supernatural, it is quite rare to imagine waking up one day possessed or lust for blood. But it is normal, natural and permanent to wake up a little older every day. The horrified old men will one day be us, and the aging process is the terror from which we cannot escape if we want to stay alive. And especially in the time of COVID-19, when staying safe means staying indoors as much as possible. Our helplessness in the face of the linear advance of time is a horror in itself.

Relic it is available through Showtime. Old is available for rental and digital purchase. Bingo hell and The mansion they are broadcasting on Prime Video.