Friends who express curiosity about my love for horror films are often surprised to hear that, beyond the thrills and chills they provide, I also find them comforting.
There are the obvious childhood associations born of discovering them when I was young. But beyond nostalgia is the way that horror films often delve deep into intimate emotional territory, suggesting to me that someone is aware of my fears, anxieties and sorrows and cares enough to tell a story about them.
To say in response to my need to feel heard, “Yes, indeed there are monsters. And indeed, they sometimes win.” In this case I'm speaking of two things: losing my mother to heart disease in 2023 and my own brush with death following a widow-maker heart attack in late August of this year.
In the first instance, my mother’s death underscored a process I had been going through for many years, wherein she and my father both became individuals with their own histories, their own flaws, dreams, hopes, and disappointments. In short, my idealized childhood categories for them, and my demand that they live up to them, disappeared.
They became something better, lodged deeper inside me than before. They became the mystery of what it is to be human and to deal with the fear of abandonment.
This brings up the second thing. Would my own children (now grown) go through this same process upon my own passing? Would they recognize the struggle I had endured, the one that frustrated even my best attempts to be that idealized parent I wanted to be for them?
What, I wonder, will they continue to wonder about, seek answers for and ultimately have to surrender understanding about, when it comes to their father? And will they be able to do so in peace with my memory? What if they don’t? Benjamin Barfoot Daddy’s Head offers a vision of what unresolved grief can make us vulnerable to.
When his father James (Charles Aitken) also passes away shortly after the death of his mother, Isaac (played younger by Rupert Turnbull and older by James Harper-Jones) is left alone with Laura (JuliaBrown), his young stepmother. Both deal with grief in their own way, struggling to connect with one another.
Laura relapses into her addictions. The emotionally withdrawn Isaac begins hearing ominous sounds and is soon visited by a creature who bears an uncanny, if extremely grotesque, resemblance to his father. However, as is often the case, the grown-ups around him refuse to believe his stories until things spiral so completely out of control that he can no longer be ignored.
Barfoot does offer up some tropes; there are Isaac’s disturbing drawings, and the adults unwilling to consider the supernatural. But like The Babadook (2014), Possum (2018) and other films that make powerful use of trauma, Daddy’s Head exists in a liminal space where both healing and horror must be reckoned with.
The camerawork, special effects, creature design and the design of its lair create a spiderweb for the imagination and what skitters out of it comes straight from the darkest regions of the uncanny valley. But Barfoot is also careful to limit how much of the creature we see at any one time, making Daddy’s Head one of the more effective horrors of the year for me.
The obvious metaphor of the screenplay is also well-handled. How can we crawl into each other’s heads. Do we ever really know our parents? Could we really handle the truth?
I am curious to see what audiences will think of the ending. Some may find it abrupt, even perfunctory. But to me it was no less perfunctory than the conclusion I came to about my own journey through facing grief and mortality.
Reality, however unpleasant or mundane, is a far less dangerous and desirable state of being than what we can conjure for ourselves and there is still an enormous amount of room left to acknowledge the darkness and still embrace our love for our flawed families.
The film enjoyed its world premiere at Fantastic Fest.