We’re in the heat of my favorite genre being overrun by “elevated horror” where the goal isn’t to scare us, gross us out, make us cringe, make us scream with glee, or cause us to throw our popcorn in the air with giggling nervousness. Instead, the objective is to establish that grief is a metaphor for horror…and I’m so damn over it.
Shudder is leading the charge in saturating the market with these types of movies that aren’t scary, just depressing. Hereditary did it. Hereditary did it best. Just watch Hereditary.
But if you simply live for the depths of darkness and despair in horror, here are the three latest films I checked out on Shudder that all revolve around grief.
WOE (2020)
Woe is me for sitting through so much grief porn when I could have been watching horror. I honestly can’t even tell you what the ultimate point of Woe is beyond it being a profile in grief.
A man dies. His son, daughter, and her husband come to the house afterward. The son spends all his time fixing things.
The daughter plans to sell the car in which the dad died without telling him.
The dad’s brother is somehow involved.
Eventually there’s a coffin in the woods and there’s a moment involving a scary face to let us know this was a horror movie.
MARTYRS LANE (2021)
It’s another movie Shudder presented as horror that’s actually about grief with some minor supernatural elements.
A little girl has a religious father, a mother that can barely function as she seems to be suffering from depression, and an older sister that tends to torment her.
She begins having encounters with a ghostly little girl who wears angel wings and regularly sends her on scavenger hunts to find a variety of objects hidden around her house.
The ghost girl gets progressively more aggressive and eventually malevolent.
The final confrontation with the ghost girl after the mother explains her issues is kind of sad and tragic, but at least the ghost girl is pissed and starts tossing shit around with her supernatural ghost powers.
AN UNQUIET GRAVE (2020)
Once again, there’s nothing scary here, although there is morbidity. Of these three films, this is my favorite in terms of the plot, however, it’s a tale that could have been told in 30 minutes as part of an anthology. Hell, most grief porn could be handled that way. Grief porn anthologies could be the next thing.
Anyway, a man grieving the loss of his wife convinces her twin sister to help him do a ritual to bring her back.
They go out to the grave at night to work their magic.
Once the wife is resurrected, she has to cope with being alive again and the sacrifice that was made in order for her to be there. Can her husband convince her to stay with him instead of going back to the grave?
It’s definitely a tale about grief and selfishness with a moral lesson, and there’s some “visiting a grave at night” atmosphere…just don’t expect anything frightening to happen.
