An Unquiet Grave and 10 More Horror Movies about Grief
Ava: “You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen. If you ignore it, you end up hurting people.” All horror is about more than just the ghost or the demon or the slasher serial killer, and some of the most intricate and masterful examples of the genre are those that deal with a feeling that’s stalked us just as long as fear of the unfathomable, or of an unsafe family, or a callous society. We’ve always, always lived with grief. We’ve always made horror movies about grief. And we’ve always, always struggled to reckon with the seemingly impossible truth that on a day we can never predict, we’ll see a loved one for the last time.
An Unquiet Grave’s incredibly simple setup is another perfect examination of the lingering sorrow that follows a dearly beloved person’s loss. With just two characters, it sets up a thriller about two people who are struggling with losing the same person, even as each is experiencing a different loss and failing to cope with it: As grieving husband Jamie and his sister-in-law Ava (who is a twin to his deceased wife, Jules). Jacob Ware and Christine Nyland pull off the incredible feat of making an extremely limited setup captivating. It’s the rare horror movie that could almost be a stage play, the drama is so tight and elemental.
Jamie and Ava both want Jules back, and both have committed themselves to a truly unnatural act to accomplish this. But, it quickly becomes clear, Jamie has not told Ava the true extent to which she’ll be part of this ritual. He certainly hasn’t told her that it requires blood. By the end, it’s very clear that what she told him about failing to cope with loss is completely literal. Ignore it, pretend it isn’t there, and somebody is going to get hurt.
In honor of a wider release in the United States for the film as it hits Shudder this week, here’s a look at 10 other unsettling horror movies about grief:
1. A Quiet Place
A lot of entries here will focus on a grieving father in particular. A Quiet Place makes the choice, right from the beginning, to be a family affair. In a world where super-strong, super-fast, thoroughly implausible monsters attack anything that makes more than a few decibels of noise, the Abbott family scrapes by in the post-apocalypse. We get the impression they have such an easy time communicating because their daughter is deaf, and the whole family therefore already knew how to sign when the shit hit the fan. Unfortunately, in the opening scene, the family is reduced by one when the youngest child makes a noise at the wrong moment and gets snatched. The film is just as much about John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s guilt at the momentary lapse that gets their child eaten by a sound-monster as it is about their surviving daughter and son’s coping with living in a world where constant crisis and deprivation literally silences their ability to talk about the trauma. As we know they must, what remains of the family only comes through once they’ve united … and Blunt has racked a shotgun.
2. Hereditary
There are times when, hate yourself for it though you may, you can’t bring yourself to feel sorry for a family member’s passing. That is another kind of trauma entirely, and in the case of Hereditary’s Annie (Toni Collette), it causes her to question everything about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her deceased mother, and that she has apparently failed to keep from passing on to her own children. In the days following her mother’s death, Annie loses her daughter to what appears to be a freak accident. Implicated in the gruesome death is her son, and herself. As the family hurls recriminations and retreats into their personal guilt, it becomes clear they’re being stalked by an insidious cult conspiracy. Director Ari Aster has made his mark with two movies where cults are the boogeymen following an unfathomable grief. Both Midsommar and Hereditary grapple with how grieving makes us vulnerable, but it’s Hereditary that evokes a feeling of being trapped in the cycles of abuse long after the abuser has left.
3. We Are Still Here
It’s been said that while a spouse who loses a spouse is a widow or widower, a child who loses a parent is an orphan, but that there is no word for a parent who loses a child, as it is just that unthinkable. It’s no surprise that so many of our entries deal with the specific loss of children, and use it as a catalyst to send their grieving parent protagonist to any length to try to assuage the feeling. We Are Still Here tells the story of two parents (Andrew Sensenig and Barbara Crampton) who have retreated to an old house in the New England hinterlands in the wake of their son Bobby’s death. It’s not long before the grieving mother claims she’s seeing her son’s ghost and demanding things like seances. We Are Still Here is about an inability to let go when a loss is so great and so unfair that it defies belief. Bobby’s parents are ultimately willing to go to any length to see him again, even if it means filling the bellies of the monster in the basement with the souls of an entire town.
4. Pet Sematary
The 1989 and 2019 adaptations of Stephen King’s novel are both serviceable retellings of what was a deeply disturbing book. King has always been an empathetic and sympathetic writer. Even when rendering his bestial villains and his flawed heroes, there’s rarely a moment in his story when you don’t understand why a character is doing what he or she is doing, even when doing it is clearly madness. So, when Louis (Jason Clarke in the newer version) discovers that a patch of soil not far from his new house revives any dead creature buried within it, we understand why he has no choice but to put his slain child beneath the dirt— even after we’ve seen what it did to the family cat. “Sometimes dead is better,” goes the tagline of the film, and it really is King’s whole thesis. In his semi-autobiographical work On Writing, King talked about his own struggles with addiction, which reared its head particularly strongly when his mother died. How we cope with loss can vary, but we must actually do it, or the failure to do so will literally destroy us.
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