Do movies have the ability to scare us anymore?
This is not a question of whether they can disturb us. The early 2000s evolution to violence-based endurance cinema via Saw, Hostel and The Human Centipede proved we still cringe at the worst depictions of gore.
The more recent turn to cultural commentary via horror metaphor — as seen in The Substance, Sinners and The Invisible Man — proves we are still at least passingly interested in horror as a vehicle for something deeper. After all, what’s more cutting than to suggest that racism, colonialism and misogyny are the actual boogeymen of today — and that these, unlike vampires, are shockingly real?
But for those films that still try to achieve the genre’s original goal of making us shudder at what goes bump in the night, perhaps their work is cut out for them.
That includes Michael and Danny Philippou’s new A24 production, Bring Her Back. The follow-up to their 2022 viral smash Talk To Me, it’s a visually beautiful and cinematically stylish outing, though it may be better viewed as a blood-drenched drama rather than pure horror. Another supernatural thriller à la The Exorcist, its slick excesses are sure to garner critical and audience approval, even if one can effectively guess at the general beats of its possession plot about 15 minutes after its unfortunate stars amble in together.
WATCH | Bring Her Back trailer:
That’s because, like its recent predecessors, Bring Her Back isn’t among the meta-fictional outcropping of horrors. Those offerings — like Ready or Not, Cabin in the Woods or Happy Death Day — eschew fear entirely, to instead cleverly point out, and joyfully subvert, just how formulaic the genre has become.
Instead, as its marketing would suggest, Bring Her Back goes for something closer to horror’s increasingly elusive original promise. Following blind teen Piper (Sora Wong) and step-brother Andy (Billy Barratt) shortly after the death of their father, the “her” of Bring Her Back‘s title takes a bit of doing to get to. First, we’re greeted by manically kind foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins), her creepily mute foster son Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) and her deeply unsettling stuffed dog.
But as Laura bristles at Andy’s plan to apply for guardianship of his sister when he turns 18, the foreboding atmosphere quickly ramps up.
There’s something wrong with Oliver; his dead-eyed stare and attempts to wrestle with their cat can’t be right. There’s something off with Andy; his bed-wetting, dead-to-the-world drooling sleep and hallucinations of his dead father suggest as much.
And most of all, there’s something worrying with Laura; her thinly disguised obsession with Piper — and even less disguised disapproval of Andy — is clearly covering something more sinister. There is a creeping, malevolent wrongness in that house, bubbling up from just barely beneath the surface.
Though, again, all but the most horror-averse will likely piece together what’s hiding under that surface no longer than about 10 minutes after the character archetypes establish themselves. There is the innocent lamb here, the penitent but sin-stained martyr there, and the ill-advised deals with the devil that can only ever go one way for those foolish enough to enter into them.
That’s compounded by an ending that feels like a step back from the edge, an at-once predictable yet vaguely disappointing finale that undercuts its own message. This kind of failsafe turn, while something of a relief from the unrelentingly dour atmosphere up until then, also feels like the Philippous are unable to trust that their audience knows what kind of movie they’ve agreed to.
But this type of ending is not rare for mainstream horror, a genre that isn’t quite willing to alienate all but its most die-hard fans. And it also isn’t enough to ruin what has come already, predictable as it may be. It at least occasionally shocks through the gore, namely through its blood-drenched, toothy crunches — almost more horrifying when you hold your hands in front of your face to be assaulted solely by the sound.
Unsettling cinema
However, overall — through both its atmosphere and the dare-you-to-watch marketing — Bring Her Back means to unsettle.
It is overwhelmingly the strategy of the modern, “straight-scary” movie. Films that, at least on their face, exist solely to push us to imagine things that make real life pale in comparison — that are so awfully, bitterly, shockingly unsettling we check under the bed before going to sleep — are vanishingly few now. Or more accurately, vanishingly effective.
That’s likely due to the same reason that flashing ankles or showing married couples sleeping in the same bed is unlikely to titillate or provoke nowadays. We are so inundated with real-life stories of horrors — and so used to the once-new medium of cinema that our cognition is evolving with it — that actually scaring adults who are looking for fear has become a virtually impossible dragon to slay.
That doesn’t mean conjuring fear is forever out of filmmakers’ reach: There are always the infrequent watchers, still spooked easily enough to increase the hype around new releases. And the trite jump scare — of which Bring Her Back thankfully is mostly absent — is an easy gimmick to make most watchers flinch.
But for the vast swaths of other mainstream straight horrors, there’s really only one strategy going forward. Oz Perkins used it in his bait-and-switch crime drama Long Legs, as did Kyle Edward Ball for the ingeniously confusing Skinamarink: It’s to openly lie in your ads.
To use viral marketing and social media to promise the most unsettling theatrical experience of your life; to assure audiences that they’ll scarcely be able to sit through the stunningly suspenseful agony without screaming, passing out or running for the exit.
Audiences aren’t the delicate, ankle-sensitive viewers they once were. So filmmakers have to instead aim to trigger similar — though still distinct — emotions in them to at least pretend to deliver on their marketed promise. Whether shame, disgust, pity or just general discomfort, more and more, true horror movies opt to act as violation simulators to elicit the visceral reactions that draw people in.
That is overwhelmingly true of Bring Her Back, a horror touted as eminently scary, but which is more eminently unsettling for how forcefully it makes its audiences sit through the various violations of social contracts and basic trust. Piper, our blind character, is repeatedly lied to about her surroundings by those she relies on to tell the truth. Andy’s hulking masculinity is routinely used against him, as characters purposely misrepresent his behaviour as violent and threatening.
And the most basic social contract — that adults should protect children — is so consistently and totally violated it becomes the uncomfortable thesis upon which the entire narrative rests.
It’s a dominant and unrelenting theme that, while not triggering fear, makes you squirm nonetheless. It is a strange but common thing, then, to say that though it is not really frightening, Bring Her Back is one of the best modern horror movies in ages.
