Begotten: the most misunderstood horror film

Begotten is often brought up in "disturbing movies" icebergs or reviews and often described as pretentious, too cryptic, pointless, meaningless and everything in between. Here's what I think.

Skinamarink has been seared in my brain since it came out, because this is a movie that in any other age of horror film, would be considered unbearably pretentious, worse than anything Kubrick ever made. It’s agonizingly slow. Nothing actually happens. You’re meant to live the horror inside the brains of children which (most likely) you’re not. And you’re meant to infer the story according to your own interpretation or childhood experiences, not actually have it explained to you.

Yet this film was showered with adoration by reviews but, much more importantly today, influencers online who do movie breakdowns and simialr content.

It was considered peak horror because it doesn’t have any monsters; due to its slow burn psychological terror; due to its use of darkness and clever camera angles; due to nostalgia, the popularity of garbage analog horror content farms, and many other reasons.

And that is all fine. No comments. The movie IS good and I agree there.

But it reminded me of something else.

When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, I was a massive, massive horror buff and I chased just about anything from american horror slop to asian masterpieces (and slop) to student films and (unfortunately) straight up exploitation / borderline fetish horror that I immediately regretted watching and more often than not, didnt even finish.

But I found many gems, such as Tetsuo the Iron Man, Kairo, Noroi, Black Metal Veins; and yet, one film stood out, a film that genuinely gave me nightmares: Begotten. Which was never even meant to be a horror film, ironically.

I was drawn to watch it because I like Nine Inch Nails, and I read one of their songs uses a sample sound from this film. So I watched it.

I will go into bigger detail on my feelings later but what actually still shocks me is that to this day, even after the arthouse horror scene is more popular than ever, people still think this is meaningless pretentious garbage - or, at least, this is what I see in most youtube reviews or comments. I hope its just bad internet representation.

Conversely, some contrarians unnecessarily overhype this film, due to its infamous opening scene; but then, viewers get extremely disappointed because they realize the gore is not the actual point of it and beyond the first scenes, the film is slow, has no dialogue and is just hard to follow in an age of short attention spans.

But setting aside my personal opinion, a hill I will die on is that this movie is NOT meaningless or pointless. It is not even a student film as is often said online, but an actual professional artist’s work that, due to the time it was made in, it never stood a chance at general distribution. The man had a story to tell, and a medium he wanted to use. And the movie scene was just not ready for it.

Again: the story isnt that hard to understand and I think this is the first thing that genuinely annoys me because it feeds directly into this glorification of anti-intellectualism. That if you’re too dumb to understand a film or a book, you’re more relatable to your audience, even if personally, you actually are more intelligent than that. I absolutely hate this.

To be fair, maybe my understanding of this film has more to do with my interest in ancient religion and philosophy, and maybe I know more about these topics than others, but all you have to do before you make a video or post an article, is BASIC RESEARCH. These topics aren’t exactly the most obscure or esoteric to find. Blind Dweller did it, and so can you.

I still feel I need a disclaimer: i dont claim to know EXACTLY what the director’s intentions were for this story. I am merely discussing the most obvious interpretation of this story, for ME. Take it as you will.

So let’s start by unpacking this very simple story

God’s Death and the Curse of Flesh

The opening scene shows a character credited as “God” committing suicide.

Out of his death , “mother Earth” comes out from the shadows. Mother Earth then inseminates herself using the penis of the dead God and due to this, gives birth to the first Human, who is closer to a helpless newborn or a maggot than an actual adult being.

To get this out of the way right now, this is not just “oh gosh golly a severed penis how shocking”.

This story has been told in different ways since the very earliest civilizations started telling stories about how the universe was formed.

The most famous, and most similar story I can think of without too much research, is the story of Osiris, Isis and Set. Because egyptian mythology is literally thousands of years old in itself this story, and the overall cosmology, changed often. But the most famous version is that Osiris was murdered by Set, his body cut into pieces and spread across the deserts. Isis, Osiris’ wife, went searching for all his body parts to bring him back into a whole being (he later became a god of the underworld).

Isis used Osiris’ penis to inseminate herself, which is how she gave birth to Horus, one of the most important egyptian gods - the god who would fight Set and defeat him every night, making sure the Sun would come back every day and nourish the precious Nile crops.

In the case of Begotten, this immediately stood out to me as a way of showing a common theme in old creation stories: the creator God dies, and Gaia / Nature uses his semen to create the first human.

However, something goes horribly wrong in Begotten’s particular take, because this first human is not a hero or anything, it’s essentially incapable of standing on his own. There is an obvious “organized religion” imagery that plays a huge part here, depicted as the cult figures who abuse him and mother Earth.

My reading, again, was straightforward.

Human beings were created to be naive and close to nature, but civilization and organized religion, among other things (the violence of self awareness in itself) meant, this version of mankind was doomed to fail. The cultists strike me as humans who still worship the dead god, as if it is the one and only important being ever.

The film ends bleakly with mother Earth having been raped by these people (just like Nature itself in our real world) and this first human / baby being beaten to death. She just drags his body back into nature (a forest) and the film ends.

Again, I am NOT trying to claim the absolute true reading here, only my own interpretation of this film. The truth is the artist’s ownership.

I am simply stating that if you have some basic concepts of philosophy, religion, atheism or ancient cosmology these themes are not new, shocking, or innovative. We’ve been told these stories in different ways many times before.

What’s actually innovative is how the director chose to tell this story: in a silent film using the aesthetics of silent films, but downgraded to even worse quality, giving it a fever dream, analog quality that is very impressive for its age.

Why is this movie disturbing?

The movie was not intended to be a horror film. This came later when scenes from the film went viral on the early internet (and also including the Nine Inch Nails music I spoke of), and the aesthetics of it made people... unnerved. Remember, this is the era of “cursed videos”. And I feel clipping the opening scenes fed right into this particular taste.

So now is when I chime in with MY reasoning as to why this movie is so disturbing to me, and most importantly, why horror in general (intentional or not) is completely subjective, and you should NEVER tell others what they should or shouldn’t be scared about.

The grainy old film, and the lack of dialogue, means this movie lives off what I consider to be extremely well crafted “background” sound design. I put background in quotes because, since there is no dialogue, it’s not just background, it’s actually HOW the story is told.

I have always been extremely sensitive to sounds, more than anything else. I’ve never been diagnosed with anything that can explain it, and can’t be bothered getting that diagnosis, but that’s just the way it is. A sound effect that has literally no impact on someone normal, can make me have a panic attack.

This has happened to me in shopping malls with bad speakers, when dogs bark agressively, hearing babies cry and so on.

So when I watched this film, the horror for me was entirely in the sound design. Not the imagery or the idea of it, but the sound effects.

And when I say “horror”, I really mean it. This film gave me nightmares the same day I watched it. And I have never watched it again.

The algorithm is telling you what movies to like

Considering the last section , I feel most reasonable people agree. What scares you in a film depends entirely on your personal fears and life experiences. No brainer.

And yet.

I am from the generation that grew up at the same time as the kids of Skinamarink - in fact, one of my earliest memories is when I woke up in the middle of the night and my parents had left to go to a friend’s house, leaving us in bed. I was absolutely terrified, even too scared to wake my own sister up.

You’d think this film would therefore tap into that particular moment of my life, and yet - because of this weird sound sensitivity i have - it didnt. Skinamarink is a gorgeous film but thats it. Conversely Begotten sent me into genuine night terrors.

What I’m getting at here is : younger people today are HEAVILY influenced as to what is SUPPOSED to be scary, explained to them by online reviewers and “breakdown” videos, INSTEAD of watching things on their own and experiencing the pure vibes of the film with no pre conceived notions.

Horror has ALWAYS been meant to be subjective - from the tap into satanic panic of Rosemary’s Baby, to Saw, to Backrooms, these films may not be scary for YOU, but they are meant to tap into SOMEONE’S fear. And that’s the thing. If you’re scared of spiders, a spider video from Australia is the worst thing ever. If you’re not, it’s just cute.

Let’s start applying this to film.

I would go as far as end Youtube movie reviews for this reason but, we all know that is “too far” and wouldnt even work anyway because, apparently, young people now use Letterboxd to decide if they want to watch a film or not.

So again, I’m begging. If you read this. If you find yourself curious about a horror film.

GO WATCH IT.

Dont check the reviews, dont check what your favorite content creator has to say.

WATCH IT, FEEL IT.

Then, you have a truly free, unbiased, personal experience.

Something increasingly hard to get these days.