If horror cinema is driven by the primal fears of an individual, emerging from somewhere (if from where exactly?) to become images, then “folk horror” introduces questions of collectivity and history to the genre. Thanks especially to Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019), folk horror has been experiencing a renaissance of late, to a degree unfelt since its significant impact on horror aesthetics in the 1970s.
Sebastian Mihăilescu's MAMMALIA is the latest to deploy some of its key attributes. In folk horror the origin of evil is not—or at least not primarily—located in the unfathomable depths of the self, but rather in the past. That past is may also be unfathomable, but in a way that transcends the perspective of the individual. This is especially true because folk horror often deals with pre-modern forms of community, emphasizing group rituals or collectivities aimed at controling the body and sexuality, thereby shattering the illusion of autonomy built into contemporary individualism.
In order to gain access to the collective uncanny, folk horror usually creates a fiction of continuity based on the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. Somewhere—whether sparsely populated northern Sweden (MIDSOMMAR) or a tiny, world-weary Scottish island (THE WICKER MAN)—the old ways have survived. More often than not what drives the main characters into the clutches of an archaic order against which all tried and tested mechanisms of protection fail, turns out to be a latent fatigue with civilization.
As mentioned above, MAMMALIA utilizes motifs as well as a number of quite specific cinematic trademarks of folk horror; one especially impressive example arrives courtesy of Piotr Kurek’s brass-heavy, drone-like soundtrack. However, the film does away with the fiction of continuity. A cult leader dressed in white, always smiling a bit too broadly, tells her followers about rituals of fertility, protection, and healing that used to be practiced “right here”. The knowledge of the ancients must still exist, but our direct access to it has been cut off. "Why don't the gods talk to us anymore?"
The question is a rhetorical one. After all, the folk religions that once gave expression to a different form of community are now irretrievably lost (and it is only because they are lost that folk horror functions as a genre—a practice that should be understood not as a revival, but as an entirely synthetic reinvention of rituals). Those distant folk religions are buried beneath several historical layers. They lie first and foremost beneath Christianity, with its propensity for spiritualization and the internalization of all beliefs. In Romania, even the present generation remains buried beneath the experience of socialism under Ceaușescu. They are further are buried beneath capitalism, which had already transformed Romanian society before Ceaușescu and has only continued apace since 1989.
In MAMMALIA, the ritual is a women's affair. At least at first. But is it really gender difference that can lead us back to the ritual, to the conversation with the gods? Or might the real issue be sexuality itself?
None but the latter layer, capitalism, finds direct representation in MAMMALIA, and in a single scene at the workplace of the film's main character. In an open-concept office, Camil sits focused in front of a computer. The screen, invisible to us, synchronizes the movements of his head as well as the head movements of a colleague looking over his shoulder. This is, however, not a depiction of precisely synchronized productivity: most of the people around Camil lounge listlessly on their rotating chairs, someone is polishing pictures hung on the wall, someone else unfolds a ladder before disappearing into the ceiling.
The world of MAMMALIA is post-heroic, a world that has moved beyond old rituals and all other grand, unifying narratives. Everyone goes their own way. At one point, Camil meets a resident in the stairwell and learns that the apartment building he frequents daily doubles as the set of a science fiction film. Why, on the other hand, two people would get the idea of squeezing an oversized nature painting through a door that is obviously too narrow is only their business. Nor is it anyone's business when two other people grab a third one and, while barely concealed from the outside world behind a window, start to tamper with him in a presumably extremely unpleasant manner.
No one's business, that is, but the camera's and Camil's. The film’s protagonist, at the same time Camil seems like a dispensable visual feature in almost every shot he appears in. Like an addition no one asked for, but that simply refuses to go away. Slim, pale, and with short-cropped hair, he does not stand out much, yet his stubborn presence remains irritating nonetheless. Sometimes he just sits in the foreground with his back to the camera and stares into his empty apartment, and sometimes he emerges from a dark forest in the background only to clumsily maneuver himself again to the fore.
What keeps Camil inside the frame and what over the course of the film increasingly activates him is not the ritual, but his exclusion from it. In MAMMALIA, the ritual is a women's affair. At least at first. But is it really gender difference that can lead us back to the ritual, to the conversation with the gods? Or might the real issue be sexuality itself? Is there a longing for a return to a biological collective (e.g. the mammals of the film's title), since there is no social collective anymore? In the bathtub, we share Camil's gaze at his own naked body. Between his legs, in the foam, his penis rises and falls. Another superfluous pictorial element, another dispensable visual feature that refuses to go away. At least for now.
Lukas Foerster is a film critic and researcher living in Cologne.
Translation: Lukas Foerster
