Personal pain is woven into the years most despairing and disturbing horror movie yet.
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When Natalie Erika James was younger, her father got sick.
I remember feeling very distinctly disturbed, she says.
Theres a sense, once youre parenting your parents, that everything rests with you now.
That can bring your own mortality into sharp focus.
She thought someone was coming into the house.
And then Edna abruptly reappears the following day, offering no explanation as to where she went.
For Sam, the answer is simple Kay will just take her in.
Isnt that how it works?
Your mum changes your nappies, and then you change hers?
Relicis Jamess first feature, but it isnt her first film.
I love the idea of capturing the essence of something as opposed to being completely faithful to real life.
The term elevated horror comes with a certain amount of baggage.
I just was blown away.
Scattered, organic-looking wax formations aside, theres nothing traditionally eerie about the space, which is by design.
Theres something so great about the banality of grandmothers house, James says.
All the creams and the blushes in the main color scheme, turning that on its head.
Ednas deterioration through Alzheimers is decaying the house by extension.
Dementia is allowed to be the primary source of terror, on a realistic level and a heightened one.
Mortimers father, the writer and barrister John Mortimer, developed dementia toward the end of his life.
Personal pain is woven through the production.
after seeing which of her actual childhood photos had been used for set dressing in a climactic scene.
One was of her mother, who died when she was 12.
Relicstarts quietly and, almost imperceptibly, ramps itself up until its a cinematic shriek.
Its Edna who becomes the antagonist in the movies final showdown.
And then, abruptly, everything takes a turn toward the tremendously sad.
Maybe its the experience of Alzheimers itself, James says of the sequence.
It hurts because it matters, so it sharpens your view of your love for that person as well.
Horror allows people to touch on grief with a sense of detachment, she says.
Its a way of processing something simultaneously mundane and unimaginable, as she put it.
Its like youre grieving the loss of someone before theyre even gone, physically, from this world.
