An Unwanted Heirloom

There's an old interview with director David Cronenberg that has stayed with me in which the interviewer asked Cronenberg what scared him. Cronenberg said, "When I go to pick up my kids at school and they're not there waiting for me." That something so mundane would scare a man whose business was scaring people is telling. Most of the things people fear are in the everyday of their lives, not big sweeping things like zombie apocalypses or robot uprisings or mutagenic television signals. Most really good horror movies connect with something that real people actually fear from day to day. Sometimes, they do it in abstract ways. Sometimes they do it pointedly and on the nose. The challenge is in finding something that enough people fear to pull it off and in making that fear real for an audience. A surprising number of horror movies fail at this, either from a failure to face that fear head on or by burying it too deeply under the tropes of genre. This isn't a problem for Relic (2020, directed by Natalie Erika James). It puts its finger on a set of existential terrors that real people face every day that are close to universal, then follows them to their logical conclusion. It's an unsettling movie.

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