By Jessica Rose

Of all the states of being in the world, mental, physical, emotional, which would you consider to be the most terrifying? What kind of possible change or transition haunts the corners of your mind? What kind of surrounding spaces make your skin crawl? That was what I wanted to find out when presented with a special writing opportunity, one that would be a contribution to a unique collection unlike any other on its topic.

Compiling several talented voices on a variety of subject matter regarding liminal space in horror, editor and curator of the 1428 Publishing Ltd project, Matt Rogerson, pulled together Darkest Margins: 24 Essays on Liminality and Liminal Spaces in the Horror Genre. My essay in this collection, as part of the Anthropology section, titled “Dementia in Dimensions: Trapped Between the Horrors of Cognitive Disease and Death”, analyzes dread captured in the space of elderly aging through horror films. Looking specifically at cursed cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia as allegories, this essay explores the eventual, and inescapable, mental liminal space that evolves towards the end of life and how it uses that transition to create ‘villains’ out of elderly characters in film. Enhancing that period of anxiety, disorientation, and obsolescence, these films use physical liminal space as the characters’ environments further manipulate, confuse, and terrorize. I use The Visit (2015), The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014), and Relic (2020) to support this analysis of mental and physical liminal space brought on by the distress of elderly aging and being faced with the great unknown. Combining both mental and physical states of impairment, the dimensions of elderly aging in these films provide a complex liminal space between disease and death that ultimately confront the loss of identity and the fear of mortality.

Arriving at this particular topic came from an individual journey as I wanted to write about a liminal space I find to be personally terrifying, yet an interesting one to analyze and share with readers. When we think of liminality, transitions and transformations come to mind, with the most popular being coming-of-age themes. There are so many points of change early on in life, and the greatest liminal space, death, is the ultimate destination, but I wanted to flesh out a more unique place within the human timeline. After sifting through some of horror’s most popular examples, my mind went to the home depicted in Natalie Erika James’ Relic. Walls within walls build a house of confusion for its cognitively impaired senior, Edna. James crafts a beautiful, but chilling, story of the final stages of life for an elderly woman living with dementia, the effects this has on her daughter and granddaughter, and the deterioration of the environment around her. Because dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease are something that is a familial risk on both sides of my family, this film and this liminal space are the ones that spoke the loudest to me and the one I dared to face for this project. 

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

While there is a limited number of films about elder horror, or dementia in particular, the ones that do exist are strong. The portrayals range in the literal pain of deterioration, ignorance from others, letting go of the past, the loss of identity, obsolescence, and coming to terms with the unknown allowing me to propose, “Linking both natural and supernatural existential madness and bodily degeneration through an elderly host… presents a hostile takeover that ultimately, and unfortunately, shifts [Deborah Logan] from unassuming and pleasant to vicious and fearsome, from protagonist to antagonist. A prisoner in her own body.” Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit use the found footage style to document the unraveling of their senior characters, all while hiding a sinister secret beneath the surface. Deborah’s daughter, Sarah, and Nana and Pop Pop’s grandchildren, Becca and Tyler, as well as Edna’s daughter, Kay, and granddaughter Sam, in Relic, find themselves at odds with their elders, who have changed for the worse due to their increasingly strange old age behaviors. I decided to narrow my scope to the three films, mostly because they all had similar messages, motifs, and patterns, but also because the central characters, the antagonists, are women. While the content of my essay is open to an interpretation for all genders as it is a liminal space that affects without prejudice, I felt drawn to these specific stories being told as a woman myself. 

In my research, I learned more about dementia and Alzheimer’s than I would care to, but the signs, symptoms, and results all eerily parallel common tropes that fit elderly characterization in horror. These three films see an aging woman slowly losing her mind, her ground in reality, and therefore, herself as a person. Once, creative people who cared for their homes and possessions and loved ones, now turned into a villain, a monster. I found it very interesting that Deborah, Nana and Pop Pop, and Edna’s homes all have a physical space that possesses a significant meaning in relation to the cognitive betrayal at play. With this, I not only wanted to use this thesis to build on the mental and bodily liminal space at play, but also the physical environment, the literal space around them, as well. Fortuitously enough, the films built off of one another with a top, center, and bottom. I noted “If the attic represents Deborah Logan’s brain and Nana and Pop Pop’s basement is the belly of secrets, the hidden maze of walls that parallel Edna’s home and stained glass window act as the middle, the center of the environmental layers used to build the house of cognitive disease in horror: the heart.” The living quarters, once places of happiness, signal a change in the elders’ very being.

The central theme of my essay revolves around how this liminal space in elderly lives easily turns them into villains, but the big question begs to be answered: Why do we find old age, cognitive decline so scary? What struck me personally was that my grandmothers were like these women. My mother is like these women. My sisters and I are like these women. Will my talents be useless? Will my own valuables be pointless? Will my memories be forgotten? The thought dawned on me. Eventually. If it’s not a sudden incident or a terrible illness, this deterioration is highly probable for at least one of the members of my family and me. There is little that can be done to prevent it and little to be done to slow its progress. Observing it first hand and again through these films, I asked, how could someone so full of memories, someone who loved to tell stories and had so many personal belongings, a home and a family, someone who shared her life and love with so many people, become a barely living, breathing shell of a human? Is that going to happen to someone I love? Is that going to happen to me? I express this concern when looking at the elderly woman characters, stating, “However, when her cognitive illness rears its ugly head, and she tries to eat her glass trinkets, these elements of her identity have to be removed. This overturn of her living space, her home, is a direct attack on her identity and autonomy, delineating the parallel curse of possession and dementia alike.”

Relic (2020)

As all of these anxieties culminate to form “hideous” and “disgusting” old women, they shed light on why, as a society, the aging body is a form of repulsion and a common subject of monstrosity. “In a culture that values youth and beauty, these senior matriarchs see the aging woman as decrepit and wretched, undesirable and weak. These women begin to take the shape of the crone, a prominent figure in film and literature who symbolizes the final stage of womanhood, one that is no longer viable for fertility, the anti-mother by definition. Throughout these narratives, we see young and middle-aged women struggle with accepting the reality that their mothers and grandmothers are not who they once were; their mothers are no longer their mothers. They are, in a way, a reflection of themselves and therefore their potential endgame: Sarah uncovers her mother’s sacrifice and therefore sacrifices her life to care for Deborah, Becca is forced to look herself, and Nana, in the mirror to survive and find forgiveness for her mother, and Kay and Sam refuse to leave Edna in the end, generating the same cycle of responsibility and burden.”

Women are most often found to be the subject of scrutiny when it comes to looks and appearances, caring for the home, and creating and nurturing the family. When these roles are reduced, or in the cases of these films, and the result of cognitive disease, decimated, like their trinkets and talents, they are no longer viewed as valuable. While generational trauma does not have to be something that happens directly to a person for it to be inherited down the family line, the filmmakers here have drawn a distinct connection from mother to daughter as caregiver and sufferer. Even though the disease is not hereditary, the trauma becomes inherent through the experience of care and reckoning. Writing this essay allowed me to carve out my own safe space to engage with the frightening possibility of being burdened by someone or becoming a burden to others due to dementia. Because I am a woman and I am human, aging is a natural occurrence, as is the stigma. Since I have given birth to my son, I have become as aware of my own health, well-being, and mortality as ever. His birth has brought on a world of fears that I once only viewed as horror genre mechanics used for jump scares and imagery. Now, however, I find myself sympathizing with the villains just as much as I do the victimized family in these kinds of films. The understanding brought about by this essay and all the expressions surrounding these characters and their narratives have acted as therapeutic vessels in coming to terms with my fear of losing control of my body, memories, and identity, and the strange passage between living and eventually dying.

In a way, dementia is like a death before death, only through this liminal illness, the victim lives through the horrible circumstances. A life so full of everything could slowly disappear. The body remains, but the soul is gone. At least when the lights go out permanently, we have no true idea as to what happens next. The dimension before leaves nothing to the imagination and is instead filled with a prolonged period of confusion, shame, and grief. In my conclusion, I resolve, “Many of the elderly’s actions and behaviors are real symptoms of dementia, a common disease for which there is no cure. The abjection and othering of degenerating seniors is a response that comes from repulsion, ignorance, and contempt; however, the underlying fear resides in those who realize this unfortunate fate exists in our own dimension. The nature of passing on is not static; it is disturbing, unsettling, and, as seen through these films, villainizing.” While it was a cathartic exercise in confronting some of my own deeply rooted fears, they remain ones that I will always hold in that liminal space at the back of my mind. I’ll never be dermally infected with mold like Edna or spiritually possessed like Deborah Logan, haunted by ominous walls, a dark basement, or a vacant attic, but there may come a day when I won’t be able to write or draw or walk or remember my son’s name, and, to me, all those things are just as terrifying.