S ANYONE WHO JUST WENT THROUGH THANKSGIVING OR CHRISTMAS WITH THEIR FAMILY CAN ATTEST, TRUE HOR- ROR STARTS AT HOME. THAT’S THE CONCEPT BEHIND MAMA, THE FEATURE DEBUT OF SPANISH DIRECTOR AN- DRES MUCHIETTI, WHO BASED IT ON HIS THREE-MINUTE SHORT FROM 2008, TITLED MAMÁ.
“We do commercials in Spain and we’re mostly known for comedy,” says
Muchietti, who co-wrote Mama with his sister, Barbara Muchietti (who also served as a producer). “We made the Mamá short to show people we could do something with suspense and horror because that’s all we ever wanted. People who saw it were so intrigued by the story behind Mamá that it got us interested in playing with the idea of what would happen if these two girls were raised by a ghost.” Mama is the story of Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse),
who were abandoned in the woods as infants and raised by the movie’s eponymous spirit, which might be the ghost of their murdered mother. When discovered five years later, they’re sent to live with their irresponsible uncle (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau: Game of Thrones) and punk guitarist aunt (Jessica Chastain: Texas Killing Fields). But just as a new family starts to form, Mama returns to claim her children. She might have a soft spot for the little girls, but her attitude toward the surrogate parents who aim to replace her is downright malevolent. The film was produced by Guillermo del Toro, who came on board after see-
ing the short. He was on hand along with the Mucheittis during the film’s on- set press day in Toronto last fall to discuss his love for the tale. “I think mothers are one of the scariest figures in horror,” he explains.
“Hitchcock made a career out of movies about horrible mothers. The scariest thing about a mother is the suffocating instinct and ultimately the posses- siveness. What I thought was very scary was [Mama’s] love, the worst kind of love.” That perversion of maternal devotion has been a long-running theme in
horror movies and literature, birthing such classics as Psycho, Rosemary’s Baby and, more recently, the gory French shocker Inside. According to del
Toro, Universal was quick to see the potential in the Muchietti siblings’ twisted family fable. “I said to them, ‘All you need to do is put a tagline on the poster that says,
‘A mother’s love is forever.’ That’s absolutely horrifying and something every- one can relate to.” Details of that haunted family dynamic were kept under wraps, but jour-
nalists were shown early test footage of the movie’s centrepiece, Mama her- self, a gangly, shadowy thing that creeps around with unnatural, jerky movements. The ghost is a combination of the crawling, long-haired onryo ghosts that populate J-horror and the fairy tale-like aesthetic common to modern Spanish genre films such as The Orphanage (whose director, Juan Antonio Bayona, has also been championed by del Toro). In order to preserve their vision for Mama, the filmmakers eschewed digital spookery in favour of making the spirit an entirely flesh-and-blood creation. “Neither Andy or I are fans of CG because you lose control,” explains Barbara
Muchietti. “Even if [the CGI team] is amazing, they aren’t you and they can start to direct their own movie.” Instead, the Muchiettis hired six-foot-seven actor Javier Botet to play the
titular ghost. Botet, best known for his role as the emaciated, demonically possessed girl lurking in the penthouse of the apartment building in [REC], plays the character as a sort of human puppet. “There was no option,” assures Barbara. “We did a mechanical test for him
just using strings for his movement. We showed it to Guillermo and he just flipped out and showed it to everybody in the studio. So I think Javier’s contract was the first one signed.” Andres adds, “Six guys pull strings attached to his legs. You see something
that is unreal, but it’s still real because there is an actor there. He’s also filmed backwards and at various speeds. I wanted to combine several techniques so you can’t quite tell what’s going on. It’s anti-natural and something that you can’t figure out. ... As a child I loved these [Amedeo] Modigliani paintings with very stretched faces and empty eyes that we had in our house, which always scared me a lot. It’s a place where generally monsters don’t go. For some reason, they tend to come from very common places.”