When we lose a loved one, it’s a crushing and life-changing event—and the loss of a young child unleashes an indescribable pain for families. Genre films like Don’t Look Now and The Changeling have captured this emotional upheaval of a life lost too soon, but there are two films that are unlikely bedfellows in representing a mother’s grief: Beloved, the 1998 film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel of the same name, and Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary.

Both Aster and Morrison take grief head-on, centring death as the catalyst for their characters. Beloved, based on a real enslaved woman Margaret Garner, and Hereditary, inspired by a freak accident in 2005, uses real-life horrific instances to create multi-layered explorations of loss. We get two very different families from two different eras, dealing with the legacy of control and grief. Yet the premise of both films is similar and straightforward:  a mother loses a child in sudden and violent circumstances, and in the aftermath, they grieve and try to come to terms with the death within the realm of the supernatural. The world they’ve created after the death of their children becomes an environment to nurture grief, allowing it to manifest as a creature or a conjured soul that won’t rest.

These stories encapsulate what these women feel, showing that Sethe and Annie have surrendered themselves to being emotional outcasts despite the efforts of those around them—succumbing in different ways to generational trauma.  In “Nursing Grief”, we’ll take a look at how grief manifests in both films, how the two women react to the deaths of their children, the contrast between Sethe, Annie and the supernatural, Sethe’s experience of grief as a formerly enslaved woman, The child from the “other side” and what they represent in both films, the matriarchs in Sethe and Annie’s lives, and how audiences connect to grief as a catharsis in genre films.

Please note this is a live broadcast event – the class cannot be watched later, so please be sure you are available at the date and time the class is being offered in before registering. All sales are final, and we will not give refunds for any reason other than class cancellation. Classes curated by Miskatonic London are either in Greenwich Mean Time or British Summer Time depending on the time of year.