Short Take: Grace (views)

I’d planned to catch Dada’s Dance by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yuan today, but ended up running late for the screening, so I decided at the last minute to catch Paul Solet‘s Grace instead, having heard from my good friend and horror buff Scott Weinberg that he liked the film and thought I would find it interesting.
Interesting? Oh. My. God.

While I’m not a horror buff, I do occasionally watch horror flicks, and I’m not the squeamish type, but I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever been as traumatized by a film as I was by Grace. And I mean that in a good way. Rumor had it that couple people fainted at the film’s midnight premiere the other night, and having seen the film, I believe it, because it’s taken me the better part of two hours to recover from it.
Here’s the brief rundown: The film is about a Madeline (Jordan Ladd) who, after years of miscarriages, is finally pregnant. She wants to go the natural childbirth route (and hey, nice to see any film that touts natural childbirth — that in and of itself is a rarity), in spite of the objections of her domineering mother-in-law. But, alas, when Madeline is seven-and-a-half months along, her husband and unborn child are killed in a car wreck. Devastated, Madeline decides to carry the pregnancy to term anyhow and deliver her baby naturally. And she does, and the baby, of course, is born dead … until Madeline wills her back to life by putting the dead baby’s mouth to her breast.
Now, this is a bit of a hurdle to get over, I understand, but stay with me here.
Madeline takes the baby, who she names Grace, home from the birthing center, but pretty soon, Baby Grace is throwing up her mom’s breast milk. Clearly, she needs something else to satisfy her hunger, and as everybody knows, human blood is the best thing to feed a zombie baby who’s starting to smell like a corpse, and lose her hair and skin … and attracting the biggest horde of flies this side of Amityville. What’s a loving mother to do when her zombie baby needs to eat, and she can only give her so much of her own blood? I think you can figure out the answer to that one.
While the film is gory, and horrific in a “oh no, they are NOT gonna go there, are they?” way, there’s also some interesting things about motherhood and sacrifice in there that I could identify with, though I have no plans to have any zombie babies myself. I had a couple of minor quibbles with a few aspects of the film as they related to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding — water births do not look that bloody, and pumping breast milk is not like turning on a faucet and having it gush out in the way it’s depicted — but this is a genre film, so I suppose there’s not much point in quibbling over those details. More to the point, while it’s interesting how the film derives much of what happens from the idea of how mothers love and sacrifice for their children, it also says something about women losing themselves completely in caring for a child. Post-screening, I engaged in a fascinating conversation about the film with some fellow film journalists, including Devin Faraci and Drew McWeeney; Faraci in particular raised some points about the film that helped me get past the traumatic effects the film had on me, so thanks are due to Devin, for, er … dissecting the film so astutely.
I have no idea how in the world this film could be marketed, or if it could even get an NC-17 rating, but if they figure that part out, I could see this film developing an almost cult-like following. It was hard to watch, and the press audience laughed through much of it, more out of shock and disbelief than disdain, but I can’t deny it had more of an impact on me than almost any horror film I’ve seen outside of perhaps Last House on the Left, so in that respect I have to say the filmmaker did his job of making an effectively horrific film about motherhood gone very, very wrong. If I came out of this film liking it, it’s a pretty safe bet that serious horror fans will eat it up.

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