Here is a trailer for 2016’s The Witch, which is enthused by Mashable as “genuinely chill-inducing.” I watched this little guy and while I would very much like to see this movie, which is out in 2017, I must dispute that the trailer is all that scary. Especially because yesterday, I viewed another film trailer that scared me so much, I am not really sure I am brave enough to see the entire film. It made me instinctively want to turn the lights on, except they were already on, and I was sitting next to a giant picture window in my office, surrounded by my coworkers, in the middle of the day. That is how scary it was: I wanted to pull the covers over my head.
No, the trailer was not for Sinister 2. It was for an Austrian film entitled Ich seh, Ich seh or, in English, Goodnight Mommy, the dubbed version of which will be released in the States on September 11. Like The Witch trailer, it opens with an ominous score and a picturesque shot of a clearing leading to a forest, underscoring humanity’s instinctive unease about the woods. And like The Woods, it concerns itself with motherhood and small boys, both of which are, abstractly, inherently terrifying.
Only in Goodnight Mommy, the terror is not abstract at all. The plot revolves around a mother who returns to her home after a round of plastic surgery on her face, all wrapped up and unrecognizable both in appearance and, as the boys observe, in behavior.
Last year, the Guardian wrote:
“We witness the awful result of a paranoid thought entering the sons’ heads. She is not the nice loving mummy they knew, the mummy who once loved to sing them a lullaby - and doctors have removed a birthmark which they consider the definitive proof of her identity. As near-identical twins they attach supreme importance to tiny details like this. Their conclusion is that this woman is an impostor and she must be tortured until she reveals what she has done with their real mother.”
Okay, but:
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