Andrew reviews one of the strangest art house films ever made.
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| "Leatherface, come to mommy!" |
E.
Elias Merhige's debut feature and experimental student film Begotten is either one of the great art horror films of all time,
or a video installation fit for a haunted house on Halloween. Taking cues from
Lynch's Eraserhead, the film is shot
in high contrast black and white and contains no dialogue, just an ambient
soundscape of wind, film print damage and occasional organic as well as
industrial sounds. On screen we see what appears to be either a loose
interpretation of the Book of Genesis or a series of Rorschach tests hinting at
grotesquerie and the occult. There's a lot of regurgitation of blood and human
organs throughout the film, which is said to be God giving back life to the
Earth, but I'm not so sure. Mostly, the film is intended to look like a gothic
religious relic unearthed from within a rusty film can over a quarter of a
century old.
While
E. Elias Merhige eventually entered into more commercial fare such as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero, Begotten is the project that
cinephiles, horror aficionados and rock stars like Marilyn Manson (who
featured clips of the film in some of his music videos) continue to return to.
Reportedly, to achieve the look of a found silent feature from the depths of
the Earth, Merhige spent 10 hours re-photographing the footage before
hand-damaging individual frames. It's a remarkable visual accomplishment not
unlike Harmony Korine's Julien Donkey-Boy
and its dirty glass look. Music, if you can find any here, consists of
Aphex Twin-inspired ambience and a throbbing heartbeat, creating a sleepy sense
of unease. Ever present is the sound of print damage and a film projector, with
intentional glitches and drops in the sound.
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| "Hi. Yes, I'm here for the Cradle of Filth video shoot...." |
Closer
to pure art than cinema (or for some, closer to a Horrible Sounds of Halloween audio cassette), 'Begotten' can
either be deeply disturbing or incredibly tedious. Its snail pace and
deliberately slow movement, including an overuse of slow motion, hint at a
sensibility my former English Professor aptly named "the first week of
film school." The fact that physical copies of Begotten are difficult to obtain either adds to its allure or
repulsiveness, with some finding its exorbitant costs on eBay undeserving for
such a film. Whatever your take on this surreal, nightmarish, pseudo-quasi
religious art-horror film object is, it's the kind of slow burn you can play in
the background before its flickering images of blood, vomit, goth and grain
crawl beneath your skin.
-Andrew Kotwicki