The road to Halloween is paved with good films. Wherein we countdown to the spirited season with a hundred doses of horror. 60 days to go.
As well as space being ripe for horror movies – with fear of the unknown driving Alien, Event Horizon and Sunshine among many others, the sea is equally as fitting a setting for the horror genre. Its unexplored, murky depths have provided myths and legends for as long as humans have been around. From Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, through to leviathans, krakens, sirens, selkies, ashrays, grindylows, kappas, undines, water nymphs and sprites.
Of course, it is mainly islands or sea-faring nations where many of these myths originated, such as Japan, Scandinavia, the Greek isles and the Scottish isles. Recent movies with have featured sea myths include Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (heavily influenced by The Creature from the Black Lagoon from 1954) and Scottish folktale The Isle (Matthew Butler-Hart, 2018), which combines aspects of the siren and selkie myths.
In recent years, we have also had three European women directors take on sea myths. In two mermaid films; The Lure (Agnieszka Smoczynska, Poland, 2015) and Blue My Mind (Lisa Bruhlmann, Switzerland, 2017) and the much harder to categorise Evolution (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, France, 2015).
Blue My Mind and The Lure rightly demonstrate that merpeople are scary AF and the Disneyfication of them is not to be trusted. The razor-sharp toothed, green-gilled, shrieking merpeople of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are closer the original myth than the blue-eyed, red-haired Ariel. Both Blue My Mind and Evolution link puberty with changes in the body, which become mutations or body-horror. Whereas in The Lure, it is not sex or even cannibalism that is the mermaids’ downfall, but love.
Blue My Mind is about Mia (Luna Wedler), a 15 year old who is the new girl at school. She goes through normal teenage rebelliousness – dealing with smoking, drinking, drugs, stealing, being in a “girl gang” and losing her virginity. On the same day as getting her period for the first time, she notices that her toes have become webbed. Her legs gradually start to change colour and shed their skin and she develops a taste for the live fish swimming in their fish tank at home. Mia also starts to suspect that she is adopted.
Evolution is set on an isolated island, populated by a group of young women (who all look similar to one another) and their sons – who are all around the age of 12. The boys are given medicine by their mothers to stave off the effects of puberty. While swimming in the sea, the main boy Nicolas (Max Brebant) sees a dead body with a large red starfish on its stomach. The boys then go through some sort of rite-of-passage where they are operated on, which appears to impregnate them with some sort of fetus. Nicolas also discovers that the women have suckers on their back (like those on octopus tentacles) and that they go down to the water at night to perform a kind of mysterious ritual together.
The Lure is a genre-hybrid of horror combined with 1980s-set musical and is every bit as fantastically bonkers as that sounds. Sisters named Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszanska) emerge from the sea and start work at a nightclub as backing singers/dancers. The sweet-natured Silver falls in love and longs to have normal human genitals and legs, despite being warned by Tryton that she will lose her voice. Golden is more blood-thirsty than her sister and craves human flesh. Borrowing from the darker, lesser-known aspects of Anderson’s story – if the one Silver loves marries another, she must eat him by daybreak (of the wedding night) or she will be transformed into sea foam.
Among many other things, The Lure is a commentary on the exploitation of girls and young women – through sex trafficking or slave labour – which is a big problem in Eastern Europe. Evolution’s themes are opaque, but it seems a twist on the “isle of lost boys” story that we’ve seen in Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies and in the recent superb French film The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico, 2017).
However, here they are being experimented on by their “mothers” and nurses. Both Blue My Mind and Evolution feature the protagonists starting to think that their parents are lying to them and that they aren’t really their parents. Being turned on by parents or carers is a particularly effective form of horror – the dawning realisation that those who are supposed to protect and nurture are actually poisoning or controlling the protagonist is a trope that has been used countless times, particularly in Gothic narratives.
Blue My Mind is similar to Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) in that it equates real things that teen girls go through, particularly in their sexual awakening, with body horror. Puberty can feel like such a huge transformation, both internally and in how you are perceived, that conflating it with growing a mermaid tail or becoming a cannibal doesn’t seem that huge a stretch. Evolution views both puberty and childbirth as sources of horror. Fear of the fetus has been a long-running motif in horror, through Alien, Rosemary’s Baby, Prevenge and (lest we forget) Twilight: Breaking Dawn.
If you are a horror fan who doesn’t tend to expand your horizons to lesser-known European films, I would urge you give these three movies a go, especially if you enjoy Del Toro style fantasy mixed in with your horror. The Lure is one of the most unique films to be released in the last few years, which absolutely works as a musical, whilst featuring cannibalistic mermaids. Blue My Mind makes a great addition to the teen girl horror sub-genre (along with Carrie, Jennifer’s Body and Raw). Evolution defies categorization, but is mystical, haunting and will keep you thinking after the credits roll. In the US, The Lure is available on The Criterion Channel, Blue My Mind is on Amazon Prime and Evolution is on Hulu – give them a chance, you won’t regret it!
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