Watching ‘Mandy’ With Grandma
Editor’s note: this article contains references to alcoholism and death
In 2018, at the age of 49, my dad died from hemorrhaging due to alcoholism. Grandma and I were on either side of him, holding his hands as his body trembled and his heart stopped. I enlisted the help of a friend to clean his blood out of carpets, off the bathroom wall and toilet. I’d seen things like this many times in horror films, but it didn’t prepare me for the smell or the numbness or the utter aloneness of grieving a traumatic loss.
After, I became obsessed with the subject of death. The process, the rituals of grieving and celebrating life all over the world, of reaching into an empty space to find— to find what? To find nothing tangible, just a sense that perhaps he was still there with me. I read books. I watched horror movies. For the first time, I saw how effortlessly they addressed some of my most complicated, most alone feelings, a lifetime of trauma after trauma. Tracing the origins of this bizarre comfort, I could easily identify the common denominator: Grandma, champion of horror, master of escape, Elder Houdini. She could live through anything, and so could I.
I still remember the smell of my Grandma Judy’s VHS tapes. Sure, I had my own, but there was something special and forbidden about her selection, the R-rated horror tales and unfiltered adult dramas. I remember the feel of their thin cardstock cases, the fraying at the corners, the weight of them in my hands as I borrowed. She was my first and favorite video-rental store.
When Grandma was a small girl (picture her in black and white, 1950s, tiny and grim-faced squinting up at the camera in front of a little white house in Arkansas), she would crawl on her belly down the hall at night. She would hide in the shadows, unbeknownst to her parents, to secretly watch the horror movies playing on TV: The Mummy, It Came From Outerspace, Creature From the Black Lagoon. It was these tales and the strange stories of water into wine, of many-winged seraphim and lakes of fire from the Bible, that ignited her natural curiosity about unexplainable things.
As a young woman, she married an alcoholic who was psychologically and physically abusive. She escaped in books— thrillers and mysteries where intelligent killers stalked their victims without mercy and the Final Girls came out of impossible ordeals bruised, battered, but never broken.
She had two sons (one was my father) and later divorced her husband. In the mid-80s, she moved to Arizona, fell in love, managed a restaurant. She partied at clubs, danced, met her best friend.
And then— And then, she knew unimaginable grief. She would go on to outlive both her children, move back to Arkansas without her love.
The bond that she and I share would save us both.
That bond began with horror films, I, my grandmother’s eager student and she, my champion and tutor.
Our first horror movie was Silence of the Lambs. She quoted the ‘fava bean’ line and talked about the bizarre sexiness of Anthony Hopkins (which alone accounts for at least 50% of who I am today). We watched all the Hannibal movies together, saw Hannibal Rising in the theater— still remember the popcorn, still remember the positioning of our seats.
The thing I really loved and respected about Grandma, then and now, was the fact that she didn’t talk down to me. In a rural area in the Bible Belt, where children are often tools for proselytizing and evangelism and otherwise seen but not heard, she held me close, encouraged independent thought, loved me so hard I could come to her with anything. Egyptology, genealogy, horror icons; I wasn’t too young learn about anything, even difficult things. Monstrous things. I don’t remember a scary movie ever feeling scary with Grandma.
Her obsession with vampires was, and is, intense. She loved Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and their film adaptations (though she was disgusted by Tom Cruise’s Lestat, I found him perfect and still do). We watched Blade together (one of the tapes I absolutely wore out with repeated viewings, Stephen Dorff as Deacon Frost— WOOF, a very early sexual awakening before I really knew what sex was). The night we rented Underworld, we watched it together once, and after she went to bed, I rewound the tape and watched it again… and again… the same night. I was obsessive in my pursuit of escapism and grandma was more than happy to oblige.
Now, on the very cusp of 30, I can see how love and horror was and is our salvation; a balm for her grief and, for me, a way to feel connected to someone when I was so disconnected from everyone, including myself.
When I was a teenager, my grandma and I would go to the local Hastings once a week. We’d have coffee, look at books and magazines together, and have intense debates on the use and value of media. Back then, there was a fundamental disconnect between our points of view. She read ‘fluff’ books; thriller beach-reads with digestible prose, straight-talking and street smart heroines a la Clarice Starling, caught in love triangles whilst trying to solve a missing girl’s case. I read classics, was obsessed with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, images of women with tree limbs for hands and evil-doers baked into pies. I read A Clockwork Orange, Palahniuk’s Haunted. To me, her reading was a waste of time, my interests superior.
I realize how egotistic and pompous it was to be on my side of such a pointless debate. That there is no pure or best use of media beyond what we can get from it on a personal and social level, that the value lay not just in what media can tell us about life, about the human condition, but how much it can help us disconnect from those things when it all becomes too much.
The lessons I’ve learned from Grandma’s life aren’t necessarily about deriving meaning of every hardship, but about finding things to enjoy in the face of hardship— and maybe, just maybe, trying not to overthink it too damn much. Traumatized people have to live that way, otherwise it’s too unbearable to live at all.
I have seen miracles, and I have known horror. It isn’t the only thing my grandmother and I have in common, this shared experience of terrible awe and wonder at all it means to be alive, but it is the thing that binds us inextricably together. A thousand little miracles every time she laughs, not despite all she has endured, but in the very ugly face of it. I know no person made of stronger stuff.
Two months after my dad passed, I flew home to Arkansas to spend the holiday with Grandma. Neither of us could bear to be without the other, not on the holiday that dad always cooked a big turkey, a juicy ham, his famous baked beans (that I didn’t like but he made me try every year anyway). We decided to have a movie night, standing outside the Redbox in the cold, flipping through the titles.
“No, not Hereditary,” I said. “A mother loses a child in that one.”
“Definitely not that, then,” she said.
“How about Mandy? It has Nic Cage.”
And reader, we watched Mandy together that night, and Grandma laughed and laughed and laughed uncontrollably as a blood-covered Nicolas Cage screamed.
“Horror is emotional. You feel horror, plus everything else. To me, that’s the whole package. It’s an adrenaline rush. Some people fall out of the sky in a parachute; my rush is horror movies.” – Grandma
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