‘Bring Her Back’: How loss and grief fuel horror movies
In Bring Her Back, there’s a lot more than meets the eye. Possession, the occult, cannibalism, violence, abduction, so many horror movie traits are at play in what is potentially this year’s most hypnotic fright flick. But really, what it all comes down to, is grief.
At the centre of Danny and Michael Philippou’s new movie is a series of intense griefs. The film opens with a move as visceral as siblings Andy and Piper find their father dead in the shower, and the directors are not shy about lingering. It is purposefully sickening as they ensure the images stay with the viewer as they do with the characters.
However, that’s not so much down to the actual visual horror of injury or death. It’s the disorienting horror of intense, traumatic grief; losing a parent, losing their home and being pulled from all sense of an emotional foundation in one fell swoop of a staggering loss. That’s more violent than any injury or blood spill, and Bring Her Back is focused right onto that.
The siblings’ grief unknowingly collides with that of Laura, played by Sally Hawkins in a masterful casting move where her typical mum-sy approachability is exactly what makes her so tense and terrifying here. If you haven’t seen the film, pause here before spoilers. But if you have, you’ll understand. There is something so scary about her sweetness. She’s the perfect mum really, beyond the fact that she’s kidnapped a kid and she’s keeping him possessed with a demon with the intention of him killing Piper.
As with every horror movie, it’s easy to get bogged down by the particulars. It’s easy to focus on the experimental occultish behaviours Laura is dabbling in, or the more obvious horror of the training videos she’s watching. It’s also easy to get bogged down with the whole plotline of the demon growing inside Oliver, the boy she’s kidnapped, and the body horror of him eating a knife. But below it all, and what the Philippous understand expertly is that while all those things are scary, human emotion is scarier. Grief is terrifying.
The fuel of the film is Laura’s sheer desperation to bring her own daughter back, and the way that the overwhelming weight of her human grief leads her to dabbling with the devil. The scary thing is how relatable that is in a lot of ways, as I’m sure anyone who has lost a child would be able to understand the willingness to do absolutely anything to have them home again.
What Bring Her Back does isn’t new, though. If you boil down so many horror films, it’s grief at the heart of the matter. So often, that’s the context, like Midsommar beginning with the death of Dani’s family and having her sobbing forms some of the loudest sounds in the movie. Personal Shopper is another great example, with the film being a ghost story on the surface but truly stemming from a deeper place and being, at its core, another story about the desperation masking grief.
There is nothing scarier than a loss, nothing more violent than the way it changes your life in an instant when a loved one is torn away. Sure, demonic rituals and gory scenes might be frightening as they are shocking, but everyone knows that real-life desperate pain is the true horror that can only be captured in abstraction.
