Culture
Now Playing: Surviving Through Your Siblings: A look at horror films that revolve around brothers and sisters
By: Gordon Briggs
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Now Playing is a column by film scholar Dr. Gordon Briggs. This installment in the series corresponds to the Now Playing column that ran on Tuesday, June 10 about Bring Her Back.
An isolated house, a malevolent caretaker, two terrified siblings. These are some of the components of the new horror film Bring Her Back. Not only does that film echo the folk story of Hansel and Gretel, it shares similarities with a series of recent horror films that revolve around the relationship between a brother and sister. These films range from fighting modern fairy tales to twisted horror comedies where siblings must fight for their lives against a parental figure who wishes them harm. Here are three highlights.
The first is The Black Phone (2021) a eerie and effective horror about a abducted child held captive in a basement, who discovers he can hear the voices of his abductors previous victims. I ask a few things from my horror films:I want some good scares: Black Phone sports more than a few nerve-racking scenes that made me literally jump in my seat. I want a creepy setting: Both its 1978 location and its kidnapper’s basement prison are filled with tiny details.I want characters I care about: where most kids in horror flicks annoy me, the brother and sister in Black Phone are smart, resourceful, and, in the end, stronger than they realize. A spooky boogeyman: Ethan Hawke’s masked kidnapper is unnerving because he isn’t some supernatural figure, but an embodiment of the fears we all have towards our parents. Rating: ★★★1/2
The second is The Visit (2015). In all honesty, I haven’t been the biggest fan of movies directed by M. Night ShyamaIan. Sometimes he confuses having a clever premise with having a fully fleshed-out story. With that idea in mind, I went into The Visit fully expecting to hate it. However, much to my surprise, I actually liked this one. Here, we meet a brother and sister whose visit to their elderly grandparents’ family farm becomes sinister. The siblings start to notice increasingly strange behavior from the seemingly charming couple. What works are its two leads playing the brother and sister, which are a pair of smart-ass kids that pepper the creepy story with some real laugh- out-loud moments. Plus, unlike with other ShyamaIan films, the “twist ending” actually makes sense and doesn’t feel manipulative. Rating: ★★★
The last is the original brother sister in danger story, Gretel & Hansel (2020). In a cinematic landscape filled with ditzy tween romances and pointless Disney remakes, Oz Perkins’ film crafted a fairy tale flick that embraces darkness and tries to disturb you. The film is visually specific. Rather than telling the story from an omniscient perspective, this film links our vision to Gretel’s POV (we mostly see only what she sees). More specifically, the film uses the motif of triangles and triangulated perspective to tell its story, drawing attention to the subjectivity of the character’s vision and making us question the truth of what we are seeing. Furthermore, the film’s use of landscape is unique. Here, the traditional fairy tale woods appear desolate and skeletal and are haunted by demonic apparitions that appear in the distance. This gives the film a look that resembles what one critic called ‘’a Terrence Malick movie on shrooms. Plus, Alice Krige is a creepy villain, but her witch is more complicated than mere child-eating. Her character actually forms a complex mother/ daughter relationship with Gretel and even attempts to turn the child to ‘the dark side’. Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1⁄2