Old Relics: Horrors of an Ageing Woman
On a picturesque beach, in the gathering dusk, a woman turns, horror-stricken, to survey the face of the man beside her. She reaches out with a quivering hand to touch his skin and utters some of the most chilling words known to modern-day society: “You have wrinkles”.
The abhorrence of ageing is laid bare in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest offering Old (2021), inspired by the graphic novel Sandcastle (2010). In this film - one of the first to enter production following the initial outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic - a family travels to a luxury beach resort seemingly too good to be true. There they are specially selected by the hotel’s manager to be taken to a paradisaic cove nearby, driven alongside several other guests by the resort’s evasive driver (a Shyamalan cameo, played with relish). But the characters’ elation quickly turns to horror with the discovery of a dead body, floating in the tranquil waves; even more so when the corpse swiftly and inexplicably decomposes within a matter of hours. Trapped on the shore with no obvious means of escape, the characters themselves begin to undergo a process of rapid ageing, their children becoming adults before their very eyes. Each must try to evade the mysterious forces that keep them there, or face their own demise as night draws in.
For thousands of years human beings have sought ways to curtail the ageing process. Mythical tales of fountains of youth and whispers of evasive elixirs of life permeate the fabric of our global history, long-equating the value of mortal existence with the desperate desire to prevent the ravages of growing old. In 2020 the global market for anti-ageing products was estimated at $58.5billion, and is projected to reach even more meteoric heights as we emerge slowly into a post-lockdown world. Facial serums and night-time creams have become liquid gold in plastic-packaged form, promising to bolster their users in the fight against the detestable conditions of fine lines and grey hairs.
The biologist Andrew Steele defines ageing as “the exponential increase in death and suffering with time”. Far from simply accepting our lot, he identifies the process as a disease for which we must find the antidote. As we approach old age—that is to say, our 60s—the likelihood of fatality increases exponentially. It’s little doubt, then, that fear associated with our own mortality is a fruitful trope in the horror genre, made all the worse in Old by its effect on young children. As we age the likelihood of death doubles every 7-8 years, our immune system in decline and our propensity to develop age-related ailments such as cancer, heart disease and dementia, heightened. In Old, the cause of this decline is unclear but the result is not: unless the characters escape their surroundings, an unnaturally natural death looms in hours, and with it all the loss implicit in ageing.
Society’s distaste for the process may be widespread, but the implications of this aversion are far from equal. For the Clooneys and Pitts of this world, bespeckled with salt-and-pepper grey hairs and facial lines that speak of wisdom, ageing is forgiven; like fine wines and pickled vegetables and other things that improve with time, what these men lose in years they can stand to gain in potency and virility. Not so for women, for whom advanced maturity comes at the expense of fertility and ostensibly, sexuality. No matter that older women are far more likely to report feelings of contentment, calm, and zest for life in their later years: devoid of these markers of apparent femininity, at the movies these ageing females are unhinged and monstrous, spinsters and old maids vampirically seeking youthful vitality, lest they lose the male gaze forever.
The onscreen appearance of the elderly woman, stooped and haggard against the dying light, has become a horror trope synonymous with our collective dread. In Natalie Erika James’ Relic (2020), the inscrutable stare and fervent mutterings of Edna, an elderly woman afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and increasingly prone to late night wanderings, are ostensibly the architects of terror. But even more frightening is the character’s loosening grip on her own reality, and it’s this that sets the film’s unique commentary on ageing females apart. As her decaying sensibilities flicker over creeping figures from her distant past, Edna’s waning is as heartrending as it is unnerving, her daughter and granddaughter’s anguish at her increasingly spectral form and the mysterious goings on around them founded in love, as much as fear.
Unable to communicate her cognitive experiences and confined to her failing physicality, Edna descends slowly into the abyss, relegated to wandering the unfamiliar recesses of her own mind, symbolised in the film by the warren-like corridors of her crumbling home. Relic invites the viewer to journey with this matriarch amidst the narrowing hallways, sudden dead ends, and the movements that flash in the corner of one’s eye. As the once-familiar building twists and jars with the apparitions that populate Edna’s psyche, we are reminded of one of the most real horrors imaginable: the creeping loss of all sentience.
The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the vulnerability that comes with ageing. With uncertainties around treatment and a markedly worse impact on the elderly, 16 months after the global explosion of the disease, a grotesque stance has begun to gain traction: an intimation that an older life lost to the illness is negated by the imminence of morality in some form or another. What matter is the nature of an aged person’s death? What value ought to be ascribed to a life nearing its end? We are living for longer than ever before, yet conversely consumed with the desperate desire to stopper the effects of the very process that takes us there.
The desolation of ageing and all the grief inherent is the price to be paid for the privilege of longevity. But ageing is also the thief in the night, the monster beneath the bed; no matter what we do, all roads lead here. Old and Relic are films about the fear and loss implicit in becoming old, the terrors associated with the erosion of cognisance, sight, and sound, all the losses that lead us tripping down twisting pathways and gloomy corridors to places and fates unknown. But they are also films about love and compassion, and the people who follow us into dark places all the same.
The ageing woman is withered and wasted, the milky whites of her eyes, unreadable. She is all contentment and fury, neither fearing nor fearful, released from objectification and sexualisation and scrutinization and penalisation for her audacity to change. She is grown up and grown old, her life rich and replete with meaning; a foreign land and an awfully big adventure and a happy ever after. The words and sounds on the tip of her tongue evade her; she buries her toes in the warm sand and fixes her gaze on the horizon as the darkness comes. She is invisible to all those who do not see her, and so the ageing woman is free.
Ella Brook Muir is a postgraduate candidate whose research examines queenly dress and other forms of material culture in sixteenth-century England and France: the networks of commerce that created and cared for clothing worn by royal women, and how fabrics, hues, and items of attire were observed and understood throughout society. She is a writer of various things, including a (sporadic) newsletter that explores the objects around us and the affection we hold for them. Ella is editorial assistant at History Today magazine and incoming Chief Copy Editor of the Royal Studies Journal.
We've been going independently for years now, and so far have self-financed every single project. In order to do more work, and continue supporting amazing filmmakers in the genre space, we've launched a Patreon.
If you are able to support us and the work we do on Patreon, we'd truly and deeply appreciate it.