HORSEHEAD is a fantasy movie with horror elements which takes place on two planes of reality, so to speak:
The first is the real world, in which a young woman is visiting her mother and step-father on the occasion of her grandmother's death, whom she hadn't seen since she was a little child. The relationship with her mother is frosty, and there are unspoken issues between them. During her stay, she gets the flu, experiences vivid and disturbing dreams and gets progressively weaker and sicker until the final scene.
The second is the dream world, where in the first dream after her arrival she sees her grandmother looking for a key, and from there she tries to piece together the solution to the mystery using lucid dream techniques. At first, her dreams are very confusing, but as she puts together clues (and the audience is also given clues from scenes in the real world scenes), it becomes gradually clear that she is uncovering a long-held damning family secret.
The movie demands a lot of patience from the viewer in that it does not even begin to become clear what this is all about until past the midpoint. No doubt some people will be turned off by that since by then, they may no longer be interested in putting the puzzle together. In my case, the gorgeous fantastic dream imagery kept me interested enough to pay attention to what is going on, so here is an explainer of how I understand this movie.
In short, as I see it, the movie is a story about the sorrow and pain visited upon three generations of women of a family by the mandates of archaic religious belief. More precisely, I see this as an indictment of the harmful consequences of religious beliefs surrounding "illegitimate children", an inadequate standard expression which already dehumanizes them, in my opinion.
Now to the details:
SPOILER ALERT
The protagonist, Jessica, has had a certain kind of confusing nightmare which features a demon-like feature with a horse-head, all her life, and indeed the movie opens with one. She wakes up to a phone message from her mother to come home because her grandmother just died.
On the train ride, we are exposed to a book she has been studying about a lucid dream technique (a technique for building awareness that one is dreaming and changing events as one wishes) called MILD, which stands for Mnemonic Induction of Dreams (this is a real-life technique, by the way).
We are told that the technique is used to "fight and destroy evil in dreams" that gnaws at people in real life, and that the horse is an "archetype of the mother", or alternatively a "messenger of death".
Once she arrives, we quickly find that her stepfather is much warmer and welcoming to her than her mother. The subsequent events have been broadly summarized above, so let's get to the meaning of the imagery.
Many of her dreams begin with the depiction of clockwork and metronomes, which I interpret as her traveling back in time. Indeed, whenever her grandmother is shown in her dreams, she is a young woman only slightly older than her.
We are also introduced to her grandfather, previously described by the family handyman as an "Old testament kind of person". In her dream, he is similarly young as the grandmother, and depicted as a cruel and sadistic punisher. His booming voice and dark, handsome appearance make it almost appear as if he is the devil himself. The implication that his zealous adherence to religious belief has turned him into a kind of devil is unmistakable.
The one person who does not appear younger in Jessica's dreams is her mother. I interpret this to mean that her mother, or at least a defining aspect of her, has not changed since she was a young person. In time, it becomes clear that this aspect is that she would rather lie or be dishonest than face reality, which is particularly ironic given that she lectures her daughter early on that Jessica needs to face reality. The mother lies to her own father about her pregnancy and tries to escape into the fantasy that she is "the immaculate one" when she is young, and she ends up lying to her daughter about aspects of her pregnancy when she is old.
The grandmother calls the horsehead demon "the Cardinal", which to me makes it plain that it is an allegory for religious guilt. She advises that Jessica should follow the wolf and always run from the cardinal.
What the wolf represents is not spelled out in the movie, but it is an easy guess that it represents the authentic, independent self, untamed, so to say, by the restrains of religious guilt. Coincidentally, I recently saw the unsettling but excellent movie WOLF HOUSE (2018) where the wolf, as I understand it, represents the fascist mindset, so interpretation is still context-dependent. Therefore, even if it is not difficult to guess, I think the filmmakers should have given more hints as to what the wolf represents.
There are two near-incestuous scenes, one in which Jessica is in the bathtub with her own grandmother as a young person, and one in which she begins to make out with her mother upon the latter's initiation. I interpret these to mean that Jessica is so desperate for love from either-love which she never received (the first because she last saw her as a small child, the second because her mother has always been unloving toward her)-that she is even willing to go the incestuous route.
There is a scene in which the horsehead demon slays the wolf, just before Jessica uncovers the family secret, which I interpret as a foreshadowing of the events which she is about to witness, but at a spiritual level: religious guilt won out and robbed the people involved-her mother and her grandmother-of their authenticity.
In the grand reveal, we find that upon the unrelenting pressure and intimidation by her grandfather, Jessica's grandmother performed an abortion on her mother in a church. The twist is that her mother was pregnant with twins: the second twin survives and becomes Jessica.
In the quasi-epilogue, it all comes together: Jessica's grandmother, who was looking for a key early in the movie, was actually looking for some kind of absolution for the religious sin she committed; Jessica's mother was always cold and unloving to her because Jessica was a constant reminder that she had violated religious tenets, something she could have pretended as if it had never had happened if the abortion had been completely successful; and Jessica finally finds peace in knowing that she has a twin, and as such, part of her twin is in her, as symbolized by her heterochromia in the concluding scene.
This is a good fantasy movie with a definite message, but the message gets kind of buried under all the admittedly gorgeous imagery. I personally do not like movies where there are confusing elements just for the sake of causing confusion, and HORSEHEAD is definitely not that kind of movie, but it is sufficiently opaque that a portion of the audience will find it difficult to discern what it is about. Also, the ending should have been a little less open-ended, in my opinion. But those who do not mind a challenging movie with wonderful visuals will likely enjoy it.
The first is the real world, in which a young woman is visiting her mother and step-father on the occasion of her grandmother's death, whom she hadn't seen since she was a little child. The relationship with her mother is frosty, and there are unspoken issues between them. During her stay, she gets the flu, experiences vivid and disturbing dreams and gets progressively weaker and sicker until the final scene.
The second is the dream world, where in the first dream after her arrival she sees her grandmother looking for a key, and from there she tries to piece together the solution to the mystery using lucid dream techniques. At first, her dreams are very confusing, but as she puts together clues (and the audience is also given clues from scenes in the real world scenes), it becomes gradually clear that she is uncovering a long-held damning family secret.
The movie demands a lot of patience from the viewer in that it does not even begin to become clear what this is all about until past the midpoint. No doubt some people will be turned off by that since by then, they may no longer be interested in putting the puzzle together. In my case, the gorgeous fantastic dream imagery kept me interested enough to pay attention to what is going on, so here is an explainer of how I understand this movie.
In short, as I see it, the movie is a story about the sorrow and pain visited upon three generations of women of a family by the mandates of archaic religious belief. More precisely, I see this as an indictment of the harmful consequences of religious beliefs surrounding "illegitimate children", an inadequate standard expression which already dehumanizes them, in my opinion.
Now to the details:
SPOILER ALERT
The protagonist, Jessica, has had a certain kind of confusing nightmare which features a demon-like feature with a horse-head, all her life, and indeed the movie opens with one. She wakes up to a phone message from her mother to come home because her grandmother just died.
On the train ride, we are exposed to a book she has been studying about a lucid dream technique (a technique for building awareness that one is dreaming and changing events as one wishes) called MILD, which stands for Mnemonic Induction of Dreams (this is a real-life technique, by the way).
We are told that the technique is used to "fight and destroy evil in dreams" that gnaws at people in real life, and that the horse is an "archetype of the mother", or alternatively a "messenger of death".
Once she arrives, we quickly find that her stepfather is much warmer and welcoming to her than her mother. The subsequent events have been broadly summarized above, so let's get to the meaning of the imagery.
Many of her dreams begin with the depiction of clockwork and metronomes, which I interpret as her traveling back in time. Indeed, whenever her grandmother is shown in her dreams, she is a young woman only slightly older than her.
We are also introduced to her grandfather, previously described by the family handyman as an "Old testament kind of person". In her dream, he is similarly young as the grandmother, and depicted as a cruel and sadistic punisher. His booming voice and dark, handsome appearance make it almost appear as if he is the devil himself. The implication that his zealous adherence to religious belief has turned him into a kind of devil is unmistakable.
The one person who does not appear younger in Jessica's dreams is her mother. I interpret this to mean that her mother, or at least a defining aspect of her, has not changed since she was a young person. In time, it becomes clear that this aspect is that she would rather lie or be dishonest than face reality, which is particularly ironic given that she lectures her daughter early on that Jessica needs to face reality. The mother lies to her own father about her pregnancy and tries to escape into the fantasy that she is "the immaculate one" when she is young, and she ends up lying to her daughter about aspects of her pregnancy when she is old.
The grandmother calls the horsehead demon "the Cardinal", which to me makes it plain that it is an allegory for religious guilt. She advises that Jessica should follow the wolf and always run from the cardinal.
What the wolf represents is not spelled out in the movie, but it is an easy guess that it represents the authentic, independent self, untamed, so to say, by the restrains of religious guilt. Coincidentally, I recently saw the unsettling but excellent movie WOLF HOUSE (2018) where the wolf, as I understand it, represents the fascist mindset, so interpretation is still context-dependent. Therefore, even if it is not difficult to guess, I think the filmmakers should have given more hints as to what the wolf represents.
There are two near-incestuous scenes, one in which Jessica is in the bathtub with her own grandmother as a young person, and one in which she begins to make out with her mother upon the latter's initiation. I interpret these to mean that Jessica is so desperate for love from either-love which she never received (the first because she last saw her as a small child, the second because her mother has always been unloving toward her)-that she is even willing to go the incestuous route.
There is a scene in which the horsehead demon slays the wolf, just before Jessica uncovers the family secret, which I interpret as a foreshadowing of the events which she is about to witness, but at a spiritual level: religious guilt won out and robbed the people involved-her mother and her grandmother-of their authenticity.
In the grand reveal, we find that upon the unrelenting pressure and intimidation by her grandfather, Jessica's grandmother performed an abortion on her mother in a church. The twist is that her mother was pregnant with twins: the second twin survives and becomes Jessica.
In the quasi-epilogue, it all comes together: Jessica's grandmother, who was looking for a key early in the movie, was actually looking for some kind of absolution for the religious sin she committed; Jessica's mother was always cold and unloving to her because Jessica was a constant reminder that she had violated religious tenets, something she could have pretended as if it had never had happened if the abortion had been completely successful; and Jessica finally finds peace in knowing that she has a twin, and as such, part of her twin is in her, as symbolized by her heterochromia in the concluding scene.
This is a good fantasy movie with a definite message, but the message gets kind of buried under all the admittedly gorgeous imagery. I personally do not like movies where there are confusing elements just for the sake of causing confusion, and HORSEHEAD is definitely not that kind of movie, but it is sufficiently opaque that a portion of the audience will find it difficult to discern what it is about. Also, the ending should have been a little less open-ended, in my opinion. But those who do not mind a challenging movie with wonderful visuals will likely enjoy it.