
For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Day 11 prompt is Child Star. We watched the movie, Mama on Amazon Prime Video
Storyline
Jeffrey Desange, senior partner of an investment brokerage, has a breakdown after a financial collapse and kills several co-workers and his estranged wife and kidnaps his two young daughters, Victoria and Lily. When they’re found five years later, they’re taken in by their uncle (their father’s twin brother) and his girlfriend. Macabre events soon make the new guardians suspect that a supernatural evil force named Mama has attached itself to the girls.
Our Thoughts on Mama (2013)
This movie was surprisingly good. I really enjoyed it and it had a cool story. It was interesting that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Games of Thrones fame, played both the date and the brother/uncle.
The theme for tonights movie was Child Star and while it would have been easy to pick The Shining, Poltergeist, The Omen and many others, Megan Charpentier absolutely killed it in this one.
The story is a play on the typical step-mother story with a bit of Hansel and Grettel thrown in. We have never seen this one and it is one that we will come back to if this theme comes up again.
By the way you can not survive on eating just cherries for five years!
8 out of 10
Trivia
Isabelle Nélisse can’t speak English, which is why she’s not given much dialogue and speaks more with body language.
Supposed to take place in Richmond, Va. There are no places anywhere near Richmond that look like this. Probably because it was filmed in Canada and Spain.
But…Clifton Forge, Virginia, is a real place, as is Douthat State Park where the lake/cabins mentioned in the movie are located, which is about 10 miles away in Bath County, Virginia. The stand-in main street is even very similar. The actual town, however, is not nine miles down a dirt/gravel road. In reality, it has direct access to Interstate 64, the same Interstate that passes through Richmond. It is also the only town in the world with that unique name.
In one scene Dr. Dreyfuss asks Victoria where “Mama” is and she answers, in a monotone, “I don’t know.” This is very similar to a scene from The Exorcist (1973) when the main character Regan Linda Blair a 12-year-old girl possessed by a demon, is asked under hypnosis if she knows who is inside her, and she answers “I don’t know” in a similar manner.
The license plate on Jeffrey Desange’s car at the beginning says number 1 dad – an ironic contradiction to what he does at the beginning of the movie.