Mama: Review

Yep, that horror movie that came out relatively recently. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro, who directed the utterly FANTASTIC foreign movie Pan's Labyrinth (and who also helped with a book called "The Strain" that I never finished reading). The concept was cool, Guillermo Del Toro had no problem scaring me to death with Pan's Labyrinth, so, needless to say..... I was kinda excited for this movie.

A brief summary:

A man murders his wife and kidnaps his daughters..... something about a murder/suicide, I'm not sure, but the point is as he's fleeing with his daughters he crashes the car. So they're wandering through the woods and they come to an apparently abandoned cabin (though the older daughter clearly tells him "There's someone in there") and basically the dad gets taken out of the picture by a strange ghost type phantom thingy. Five years later, people are still searching for the girls and they finally find them. Except they've gone feral. Eventually the oldest one, Victoria, who's nine years old, recovers her language and social skills, though for Lily, who was one when the incident occurred, and is now six, is obviously having more trouble. Anyway, Victoria tells the psychologist about someone she calls "Mama" who took care of them. The psychologist comes up with the brilliant theory that in order to survive on their own, the girls created their own, imaginary guardian/parent figure to keep them safe. They're put in a certain house for special cases like themselves with their uncle and his girlfriend. And then..... Mama followed them. Cue the horror.

Except, my first reaction? Not horror. At least not as I know it. I'm not sure what it IS, precisely, but it didn't seem like a horror movie, the same way that movies like The Woman In Black or Dawn of the Dead or Insidious or.... or even something like The Messengers (which is a crappy Kristen Stewart movie) seemed like a horror movie. I mean, it was scary..... and there were enough jump scares, for sure....... but it seemed that the movie was trying less to scare you and more to make you understand about the situation as a story. I'm not saying it's a bad thing - I really enjoyed that side of the movie -  I'm just saying it was a different tone for a horror movie to take. An interesting choice.

And that honestly surprised me. You've got your ghost, you've got your creepy children and creepy children's drawings, you've got the contorted bodies of ghosts and possessed people, insane asylums, don't look in the closet, incoherent whispers.... I mean, it was filled with things that horror movies do specifically to scare you, but it didn't FOCUS on those things, and that's what I find interesting. It focused on the relationships between the people in the movie - Lucas and Annabel, the girls and them, "Mama" and the girls, etc. Which again, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is an interesting choice.

I'm not gonna lie. I was scared. I yelped. I hugged my blanket pretty much the whole movie. They nailed the suspense, and the release. But I'll not be getting nightmares from this movie, I don't think, and that's what lacked.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but when I watch a horror movie, I want to be haunted by it. I want to be scared to be home alone again. I want to have to sleep with the light on for a week. I want to be terrified of things I see out of the corner of my eye, and of sounds that I probably wouldn't even hear if I wasn't so damn tense. The Woman in Black did that for me, no doubt. By the time my parents came home the day after I watched The Woman in Black I was sitting on the floor cuddling my dog because I was scared to go anywhere else in my house. Mama won't do that to me. I knew it as I was watching it that it wouldn't be doing that to me. And I thought about why.

And I realized that this is why:

The secret of horror movies is to exploit what we don't know. That's part of the reason why Alien was so succesful in its time - they never SHOWED the alien, in its entirety. What you saw were shadows, drool, people looking up with terror on their faces. That's why The Blair Witch Project is one of the "1001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die" - because those moments of pitch blackness where all you hear is screaming and panting? They feed on your imagination. And no movie can match the high def imagery of your own imagination. Most ghost movies show nothing more than silhouettes, shadows, blurred reflections, out of focus behind-your-back shots, maybe a real shot of the ghost, but from r e a l l y  f a r  a w a y. The vaguer you are, the more scared your audience gets. Hell, Paranormal Activity was insanely low budget and insanely popular because YOU NEVER SAW THE DEMON. You never knew where it was, what it was doing, only how it affected things in the house - a door slam here, a light flicker there, etc. Because the things that are scary about horror movies are not ghosts, or demons, or monsters or whatever - the scary things about horror movies are the things that we don't know. We don't know why ghosts are here, or why they do what they do, or what it'll do next, we don't know what demons are or what they'll do next - more than anything we fear the unknown.

Which is apparently something that Guillermo Del Toro did not account for. Because in Mama, we knew everything.

We knew her whole story. We knew her entire backstory, we knew where she was, we knew why she was doing what she was doing. I mean, we were even told what ghosts, for the purposes of the story, ARE ("bent emotions, doomed to repeat itself until it finally rights the wrong"). But what....... nagged at me the most is we knew EXACTLY what Mama looked like. I mean, no room for imagination. They showed her face almost as freely as one would show the face of the protagonist. And I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm just saying that it contradicts what the horror genre is based on. Because a flash of her face is scary enough - it's a frightening image - but when you see it as much as they showed it, it stops being scary, and you can't imagine something scarier because they've already showed it to you enough that you remember it.

I don't think Guillermo Del Toro is a horror director by trade. Pan's Labyrinth was very frightening, but it wasn't horror. It was the definition of a thriller. And what made that movie so scary was the insane detail with which they showed things, which is the exact opposite strategy you have to have when directing horror.

So, the final word? I liked the movie. Not gonna lie. I enjoyed it. But I find it difficult to count as horror. It's pretty good as what it is, whatever genre that may be. Let's leave it at that.

4/5 stars.