Bizzaro Film Review: Grace

If you’ve seen this poster I think you pretty much get why I watched this movie. I mean seriously, that’s a baby bottle filled with blood. How are you gonna pass that up? And for once, the movie behind the visual lives up to every hint of weirdness and horror promised by the poster.

You can sum up Grace‘s premise in two words: Zombie. Baby.

Here’s the scoop: a mother conceives a child and carries it almost to term, but then a horrific car crash results in the deaths of her husband and the baby in her womb. The mother is devastated, but decides she wants to carry the dead baby to term. And when the baby is born she loves it back to life. Yeah, I know it sounds stupid, but trust me, somehow, in this movie, it works.

But as we’ve learned from the master himself “sometimes dead is better.” Because baby Grace came back…different. Outwardly she still looks like a normal human child, but instead of feeding off her mother’s milk she thirsts…for BLOOD.

What, too dramatic? Okay, I’ll back off a bit.

And not just any blood either. Baby Grace needs human blood. Oh, and did I mention that the flies are gathering in swarms around her crib?

But in spite of her thirst for blood, baby Grace isn’t the monster in this movie. She’s just a baby. She’s got no special powers, nothing noticeably unnerving about her nature. She just needs “special food.”

No, the real monster in this movie is motherhood. No you didn’t read that wrong. This film makes mothers in particular and women in general out to be something truly terrifying. The men who appear don’t seem to be much more than pets, weak willed accessories with slightly more status than a handbag, or slimy unlikable opportunists.

But the women…they cheat, lie, kill, lie some more and generally ruin the audience’s perception of an entire gender. With Grace’s mother at least some of this is understandable. She’s doing the terrible things she does to keep her child alive. But the rest? The scheming grandmother who is so obsessed with motherhood that she forces herself back into lactation, or the former lesbian lover who…well she’s a vegan. I mean she kills people too, but that’s not nearly as terrifying as veganism.

I do not know how such an anti-feminist film got made in the twentieth century.  But I’m glad it did. Because it works. It really works. Its that increasingly rare brand of horror that builds suspense through tone and pacing rather than splashing buckets of gore at the screen, a good reminder that little things can still be scary.

Little things like flies. Crawling into a baby’s nostril.

If that sounds like your cup of Earl Grey then give this movie a shot. It will unnerve you. But more importantly it will make you think.

Because of Allen Brewster

The first real book I have a clear memory of read was a children’s chapter book called The Strange Thing that Happened to Allen Brewster. It was about a kid who turned into a plant.

Better than it sounds. Trust me.

I’d like to think that this book is part of the reason I turned out the way I have both as a writer and as a reader. For one thing it was deep. I distinctly remember the scene where Allen’s grandfather is talking to him and he holds up an apple and he asks Allen what it is. Allen naturally responds that it’s an apple. At which point, Allen’s grandfather turns the apple and shows him that it’s really only half an apple. “What you see is not the same as what is,” the grandfather tells Allen. Deep stuff for a six-year-old.

It was also, unusually dark for a children’s book. Allen ends up turning almost completely into a plant. He stands out in the sun for hours on end and the roots in his feet start to grow down into the earth. In the end, Allen himself is saved, but his mean teacher who also takes the formula is implied to be stuck turning into a plant for good. The final page of the book is a picture of a tree with the terrified face of a woman forever trapped in the prison of her own body.

And I loved it.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I’ve always been measuring my fiction against the standard of The Strange Thing that Happened to Allen Brewster for my entire life. Or maybe not.

But I do believe that stories can change kid’s lives. Maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parenthood after my wife’s miscarriage last year, and a big part of that is trying to figure out what kinds of stories I want my kids to consume. There’s a part of me that wants to expose them to movies like The Secret of Nimh and Jan Svankmajer’s Alice fairly early on. And of course I want them to read The Strange Thing that Happened to Allen Brewster.

What about you guys? What book made the biggest impression on you as a child, and would you want your kids to read it too? Drop a line or two in the comments section and let me know what you think.