I know you’ve probably heard about paternal horror – hell, we’ve covered it right here on No But Listen before. But today, I’d like to take things a step further, move up a generation, and talk about a couple of movies that deal with grandpaternal horror.
The movies I’d like to talk about are both from the last few years, if from different continents – 2020’s Anything for Jackson, directed by Justin G. Dyck, which follows a pair of bereaved grandparents (Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings) after they kidnap a pregnant woman to perform a ceremony to bring back their deceased grandchild, and Best Wishes to All, directed by Yuta Shimotsa, a 2023 psychological horror set in rural Japan as a nursing student (Kotone Furuwaka) as she visits her grandparents (Yoshiko Inuyama and Masashi Arifuku) only to discover a shocking secret about how they have maintained their family’s good fortune. Both films are genuinely fantastic – Anything for Jackson a grief-stricken, twisted nightmare with genuinely great scares and a twisted sense of humour, and Best Wishes to All a uniquely odd and memorably slippery story that takes a couple of viewings to entirely make sense of.
But what both films have in common is the central theme of grandparents – a bit of a side-step from much of the high-ranking horror of the last decade or so, from Hereditary to Relic to Bring Her Back, which has focused on relationships between parents and children.
I think what makes these movies distinct from the paternal horror is the status that grandparents generally take up in our lives – at least, as far as pop culture is concerned. As one of my favourite cartoons in the world sums up, for many of us and certainly in storytelling, grandparents are a place of indulgence, love, and support – a place where you’re stuffed with food and care and attention, even if those come in the idiosyncratic ways specific to your grandparents. While parental relationships are often strained by the reality of real life and the more immediate impact of their actions, grandparental ones are softer, sweeter, a little more rose-coloured.
Which is what makes them so prime for puncturing in the horror genre. Both Anything for Jackson and Best Wishes to All have scenes of serenity, comfort, and familiarity ripped to pieces by a moment of pure, shocking horribleness. In Best Wishes to All, a comfort-food family dinner is interrupted by a mutilated prisoner of the grandparents crawling out of his room and attempting to escape, only to be swiftly and matter-of-factly returned – in Anything for Jackson, the movie opens with the lived-in morning banter between the long-standing couple, only for them to violently kidnap an innocent woman who comes to their door. Throughout both films, there are scatterings of the same thing, the comforting normalcy of baking cookies and miso soup laced through with blood sacrifices and force-feeding. There’s something about this horror against the backdrop of the warm grandparental home that’s strikingly effective in its grotesqueness, buoyed along by fantastic performances from the grandparents in question.
But I think what ultimately makes both of these films as striking as they are is that they are about family – that the horrible acts that serve as the centrepieces to both these stories are entirely in aid of caring for and loving and having close to them the generations of the family ahead. In Best Wishes, the grandparents have exchanged the violence towards and suffering of someone else for the safety and security of their family – in Anything for Jackson, they’re willing to torment and even kill a pregnant woman for the sake of bringing their grandchild back (or, at least, soothing the guilt one of them feels for their part in his death). Like so many pop cultural grandparents, these characters sit at the head of their proverbial family table, doing everything they can to make life better for the generations that have come after them, but the far reaches of what that means for them are so utterly counter to the kindness and love they spring from as to turn into a horrible mockery in the process.
What do you think of grandparental horror, and these two movies in particular? I’m looking forward to seeing where this little mini-genre goes in the next few years, and I’d love to hear any recommendations you might have in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via YouTube)
No But Listen 