Hellbender: the Shock of Knowledge

Content note: Spoilers for the film Hellbender follow

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Cardinal air: lightning fast knowledge, shock of awareness, excitement, fear.

In Hellbender, a no-budget horror film streaming on Shudder, a sixteen-year-old daughter is accidentally initiated into the mystery of her destiny when she eats the worm in a bottle of tequila. She realises that by eating the flesh of a creature that died in fear she has awesome powers. This power is passed on matrilineally and once a daughter comes not her power it is only a matter of time before she kills her own mother and replaces her.

As film critic Gretchen Felker-Martin says, “The film sublimates foundational familial anxieties — the fear of losing control of a child, the fear of that child supplanting and replacing you, and perhaps most elementally the fear of one’s child’s morals diverging from one’s own.”

Izzy’s mother spent the first sixteen years of her life lying to her, keeping her safe by pretending she had a rare disease that meant no contact with the outside world. They lived in an uneasy peace in the forest, playing death metal together on expensive instruments, dressing up in crowns and makeup, crafting, and enjoying idyllic walks among the trees. But the restless prickle of adolescent longing led Izzy beyond the invisible boundaries of the forest, and into a drinking game that had bloody consequences.   

That she had to kill her mother was both surprising and inevitable. Hellbender is a story so crisp and clean you could bite it like an apple.