Begotten — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Plot

The film opens on a dilapidated shack, inside which a robed and masked figure disembowels himself with a straight razor. He dies after cutting open his abdomen and removing his internal organs. A woman in white emerges from his remains. She brings the corpse to arousal and uses his semen to impregnate herself. Time passes and the woman, now visibly pregnant, stands beside a coffin. She gives birth to a fully matured yet malformed man and leaves him lying in the wilderness, shaking violently and unable to walk.

Soon a tribe of robed nomads arrive, seize him and drag him away by his umbilical cord. He vomits part of his organs, which the tribe accept as gifts. They lead him through a rocky hillside, stopping to drag him into a fire pit where they repeatedly stab him with a fork-like implement and appear to collect some of his blood. They then carry him to a hill and leave him there. His mother then returns, places a rope around his neck and leads him into a forest as he crawls spasmodically behind her. Later in a quarry, three nomads with large, erect penises appear and strike his head with a club before attacking his genitals with a large stick as his mother stands trance-like nearby.

The nomads fatally cudgel his mother before sexually assaulting her body with their clubs and raping her while her son lies injured. As the nomads leave and the woman's son kneels before her body and mourns her, two robed figures arrive to cover her corpse and carry it away. They travel to a gorge where they and their fellows harvest mounds of clay into small jars. The robed men cut the mother's body into small pieces, crushing her bones and placing them into the jars. Meanwhile the son has crawled through a desert and reached the sea some distance away, where the robed men find him, tie him in a sack and murder him, repeating the same process and burying the jars into the crust of the earth. Over time, the burial site becomes lush with flowers and crops. The closing images present two victims of an atomic blast and show the mother, as before, leading her son into the forest.

Cinematic style

Begotten is shot in a dark, grungy and visceral style. Distorted perspectives and degraded image quality were used to evoke an ancient and otherworldly atmosphere. The film has been described as "a cinematic Rorschach test of grotesque, imagery" and "a feature-length fever dream". Merhige was interested in crafting imagery through analog format and sought a decayed look that suggested the footage had been damaged through time and wear. He said:

I wanted Begotten to look, not as if it were from the twenties, not even as if it were from the nineteenth century, but as if it were from the time of Christ, as if it were a cinematic Dead Sea Scroll that had been buried in the sands, a remnant of a culture with customs and rites that no longer apply to this culture, yet are somewhere underneath it, under the surface of what we call "reality."

The influences for Begotten's visual style include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Blood of the Beasts (1949), Seven Samurai (1954) and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971). He also lists the unconventional style Andrzej Munk, Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel. Other influences identified by critics include David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant (1926) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), as well as tribal art, ethnographic studies and the paintings of Piero della Francesca. Visual underminings from 1930s horror films, such as intertitles, was also commented on by David Annwn Jones, who wrote that it was utilized to express its own set of evolving visual ideas and techniques.

Before and during Begotten's shooting, Merhige experimented with different types of film. In one experiment, he ran an unexposed negative against sandpaper to scratch its surface before shooting on the damaged reel, and in another Merhige modified the film emulsion and frame rate to create a staggered time and motion effect. Footage was deliberately shot overexposed, to reduce the details of the image. Unsatisfied with the results, Merhige decided on an optical printer for further processing. He was unable to find an optical printer priced within his budget, so he built one himself. The printer was constructed in eight months with spare parts from camera stores and special effects houses where he had worked. Merhige had worked as a special effects designer for various companies, including a Disney television series that involved the animation technique of rotoscoping. This experience gave him the technical knowledge needed to handle the film's post-production and visual effects on his own.

The post-production process was time-consuming, with each minute of footage generated by the optical printer taking between eight and ten hours to complete. Each frame of raw footage was fed into the optical printer and projected onto an unused film negative; multiple photographic filters, including color and neutral-density filters, were used to alter the image. Developing the Kodak Plus-X film stock presented a significant challenge. Unprocessed reels required a dust-free environment as the Kodak film stock is notorious for its fragility; each reel was handled with protective gloves to avoid unintended imperfections. Three months of extensive tests were implemented during photographic processing. When a test shot was sent to the laboratory for processing, minuscule calibration errors sometimes ruined the shot and the process had to be restarted. Merhige asked that laboratories adjust their usual development procedures to his custom specifications, but was repeatedly turned away. Eventually, he found Fred Schreck's Kin-O-Lux Labs. Merhige began a friendship with Schreck who taught him to hand-develop his footage.

Merhige hired his father for a number of scenes, stating that his father was "very open-minded" to the project. Editor and film-maker Aram Avakian, whom Merhige had become acquainted with, also supported and encouraged Merhige to complete the project. Results of the rephotography process removed almost all of the gray midtones from the visible spectrum, leaving only extreme contrasts of black and white. He used similar techniques for segments of his next film, Shadow of the Vampire (2001).

Music and sound design

Begotten has no dialogue or text apart from its opening intertitles. Merhige chose to make the film silent after viewing documentary footage of the bombing of Hiroshima, having been emotionally affected by the complete silence and lack of voice of the victims. Merhige recalled in 2024:

All of the victims had this look of complete calm and just calm astonishment as they looked millions of miles past the lens of the camera. I remember[ed] thinking that, when life becomes that extreme... that terrifying. When you see things that you can't unsee, and experience things that no one can relate to on the entire planet... you're really left with this spooky, terrifying silence.

Intending to evoke a similar atmosphere to the Hiroshima footage, Merhige developed the film as set "[in] a time that predates spoken language" in which "communication is made on a sensory level". Frustration with storytelling through exposition and the limitations dialogue imposed upon narration also contributed to the lack of dialogue in Begotten.

The film score and sound effects were written and mixed by the then novice composer Evan Albam. Merhige and Albam spent a year working on the soundtrack, crafting the right balance of visual and audio cues. The music is ambient and dirge-like, and contains natural sounds such as bird calls, insect noises and heartbeats. Music in Begotten often mirrors the improvised and incomplete atmosphere of early silent films. The sound effects mixed into the score are often looped, differing from the normal synchronized sound. Writing for the academic journal Film International, the artist Ted Knighton argues that this "incomplete" feel to the sound touched upon the themes of creation. He wrote that Begotten is "not a film of an evolving world, it is [a] film as an evolving world". Scholar Andrew M. Whelan writes, the ambient and unconventional score of Begotten shares the same thematic style as power electronics, a form of noise music, that provokes strong reactions from listeners.

Theatrical screenings

Begotten did not secure a limited theatrical release, but over time had gained popularity as an underground film, especially through distribution channels specializing in subversive or transgressive content. Merhige booked one-off screenings at various film festivals and art museums. The earliest screening took place on October 24, 1989 at the Goethe-Institut as part of the Montreal World Film Festival. Strong reactions of attendees were reported, as The Gazette described a majority of the audience as "too stunned by what they'd seen to react". After its debut at the 1990 San Francisco International Film Festival, it was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, on October 22 with Merhige introducing the film, followed by a post-screening discussion with the audience. It was shown at multiple film festivals from 1991–1996, these included special screenings at New York City's Film Forum, American Cinematheque, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Begotten has appeared at multiple film festivals since the mid-2010s. The first took place in October 2014 at Brooklyn's Spectacle Theater as a part of its annual "Spectober" event. That month, the independent arts venue the Horse Hospital screened the film, accompanied by a live, improvised music score by band The Begotten. It appeared at the third annual horror film festival SpectreFest on October 28, 2015, which was followed by an onstage discussion with Merhige. It was shown at the Music Box Theatre in Midtown Manhattan on September 25, 2016, during its 25th Anniversary celebration, where it was screened from Merhige's personal 16mm print. It was presented as a double-feature alongside the director's other film, Shadow of the Vampire, and followed by a Q&A with Merhige.

The film was screened at the Short Film Festival in London on January 8, 2017, in its original 16mm format, accompanied by a live performance of the score. It was screened on October 17, 2019, at the Rice Media Center, as part of a celebration of "Low-Fi" Analog film series. More recent screenings include on March 29, 2022, at Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon, Portugal, that November at Goldsmiths, University of London and in 2023 at the L'Etrange Festival.

Reception

Merhige was initially fearful that audiences would misunderstand the film and said that he "felt sure it would be misunderstood and consigned to the underground again. I see it as a very serious, very beautiful work of art, but when it was first finished, I was always thinking, 'What if everybody just laughs? What if they don't see anything in it?' There is always that possibility." Although critical reactions to the film were polarized, Merhige has said that he is grateful for the film helping to start his career.

The few reviews it did attract were mixed to positive. Some critics praised the film's unique visual style and resonating themes, and remarked on its graphic violence. In a positive review, Sontag described it as "a metaphysical splatter film" and "one of the 10 most important films of modern times". In a 1991 review, Joe Kane of the New York Daily News praised the film's minimalist soundtrack, cinematography and subversion of the traditional narrative structure. Newsday's Jon Anderson awarded it his highest score of four stars, lauding what he felt was its deconstruction of the barriers of dream and reality, bestowing additional acclaim towards its exploration of the human condition through its unconventional style. Marc Savlov from the Austin Chronicle called the film "Experimental, haunting, dreamlike, and intentionally confounding", further writing on the film's grainy visual imagery, horrific imagery as having an influence on the VHS sequences in The Ring series, and the works of Guy Maddin. In their annual publication of The Video Movie Guide, the authors Mick Martin and Marsha Porter rated Begotten their highest score of four stars, praising its uniqueness, while commenting that viewers would either 'love or hate it'.

Begotten's narrative and use of symbolism were highlighted by some critics. The Courier commented that the film "goes beyond convention" with its story-telling. Jackson Hole News described the film as 'an accurate portrayal of the religious attitudes and ideas of the Dark Ages'. Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader called it a "remarkable if extremely upsetting" film, applauding the originality of its visuals, but cautioned that its graphic violence was not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. The Christian Science Monitor's, David Sterritt compared it favorably to Samuel Beckett's novel How It Is in regards to its symbolism and narrative structure. Sterritt also commented that the film's claustrophobic atmosphere and dark narrative were hard to stomach but equally entrancing overall.

Although some critics wrote favorable about the film's visual imagery and narrative themes, others criticized its brutal violence and long running time. Awarding it two and a half out of four stars, John Kenneth Muir felt its narrative would be better suited to a short rather than a feature film, despite praising its "originality" and "powerful" imagery. Echoing this sentiment, the Polish journalist Bartłomiej Paszylk thought the first half was compelling and "genuinely frightening", but wrote that the narrative would have been better served with a much shorter length. The film's graphic violence and imagery were criticized by Janet Maslin of The New York Times who described it as "too grotesque" to engage an audience, although she highlighted its unique narrative.

Creation mythology and religious themes

Begotten's story is built around the idea of creation myths. As Scott MacDonald wrote, the film's plot reflects many contemporary popular attitudes towards the origins of life and religion. Merhige said that he deliberately crafted Begotten to appear as part of a mythology and incorporated mythic and existential themes. Critics have noted a multitude of mythic and religious motifs, including connections to Christianity, Celtic mythology, Druidism, Egyptian Mythology and Slavic paganism.

The opening scenes allude to creation myths such as life reborn from the corpse or dismembered parts of a primordial being. The death of God Killing Himself becomes a form of self-sacrifice as Mother Earth emerges from and impregnates herself with his remains, which Paşcalău notes as a form of divine origin and transcendance. The art historian Herbert S. Lindenberger suggests that the film's narrative is a reworking of early writings on creation mythology published by social anthropologist and folklorist James George Frazer, who intended to shock his readers with what Lindenberger described as "the savagery of their ancestors". As Verrone writes, the storyline was founded on ancient mythologies, recounting the birth of a divine entity and their subsequent suffering, describing the film's premise as "a cryptic passion play about Earth's birth and torture". Marc Savlov echoed this statement and described the plot as an allegory for the death and rebirth of god. Film Comment's Robert DiMatteo comments that a "God's eye" is applied to the film's human characters, with their movement and behavior comparable to insects; they move in "the way [that] ants move when they carry food up a hill".

The main characters are mythic and religious archetypes. Merhige has said that Mother Earth and Son of Earth are partially based on the virgin Mary and Jesus. Some writers have noted similarities between Mother Earth and both the Slavic mother goddess and the universal personification of Mother Nature. Christian motifs are also incorporated into the main characters. Lindenberger has described the motifs as symbolic mirrors to Christianity, with allusions to Mary and Christ and his resurrection. According to Papageorgopoulou and Charitos, the main characters of Begotten are an amalgamation of Christian and Egyptian archetypes As they suggest, traits from the Egyptian gods Osiris, Isis and Horus are ingrained within the characters of God Killing Himself, Mother Earth and Son of Earth, respectively. Additional traits from the Christian concept of God were also listed. Connections to the film and Christian and Egyptian beliefs, according to Papageorgopoulou and Charitos, are viewed through the graphic death of God Killing Himself and the impregnation of Mother Earth are mirrors to the Osiris myth, specifically the disembowelment of Osiris and his wife's impregnation.

Paşcalău identified elements of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism within the film. This is especially prevalent in recurrent motifs of death as the catalyst for the birth of new life; a symbol of the interconnected nature of all existence within the Hindu and Jain beliefs, specifically the concept of saṃsāra where all life is trapped in a cycle of reincarnation by karmic attachments. Likewise, the divine suicide of God and the birth of new deities, as Paşcalău states, mirrors the Buddhist teachings on suffering and non-being.

Recognition

Begotten had a significant impact on Merhige's career. He was hired in the late 1990s by the singer Marilyn Manson to direct music videos for his eponymous band's songs "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid", the latter utilizing imagery incorporated from Begotten. Manson was a huge admirer of Begotten, and had the album's art designer P. R. Brown view the film while developing the album's cover art. During pre-production, Manson contacted Merhige to ask if he was willing to direct the video for his song "Cryptorchid". Manson has stated that Begotten was played on a loop during the entire recording for his album Antichrist Superstar. A decade after Begotten's release, Merhige directed Shadow of the Vampire. Nicolas Cage, the co-producer, advocated hiring Merhige to direct the project based on his positive impression of Begotten.

In a 2021 retrospective, Fangoria writer Soham Gadre said that, while Begotten remains a cinematic outsider, it has gradually achieved more exposure and recognition. Since the start of the 21st century, Begotten has gained more prominence through its availability online and various streaming platforms such as YouTube, helping it accumulate a wider audience. Before its removal of graphic content, clips and photographs from the film began circulating on the blogging platform Tumblr and later on TikTok, exposing it to a new generation of fans. It has gradually developed a cult following and is described by some writers as the director's masterpiece. It was listed in the 2011 book 100 Cult Films by the academic Ernest Mathijs and filmmaker Xavier Mendik over Mendik's objections, who felt that its following was too small to merit inclusion. However, it was ultimately included, to Mathijs, the film's following represented "the real sectarian cult; it's a very small committed group of people. It's like a secret handshake that goes worldwide. If you've seen Begotten, you're in that cult."

Though initially mixed in his response to the film, Muir has since described Begotten as "one of the most disturbing films ever made". Industry professionals such as the writer and photographer Chris Marker, actor Elijah Wood, director-screenwriter Eli Roth, and film editor Dennis Jakob have expressed their admiration for the film. Natalia Keogan of Paste described the film as one of the best and the most unsettling avant-garde films. In his 2014 book Disorders of Magnitude: A Survey of Dark Fantasy, the author Jason V. Brock wrote that Begotten was his seventh favorite work of radio, film, or television production.

Several publications selected it as one of the most disturbing films of all time, including Highsnobiety (2016), Entertainment Weekly (2017), and NME (2023). Similarly, Begotten has been ranked in several top film lists, including number four by Joblo.com (2012) and Nylon (2017); number twenty by GamesRadar+ in 2018; and number twenty-three by Complex Magazine in 2021. Over the years, several sources have erroneously reported Time as placing Begotten in its top-ten list of either 1990 or 1991, but the film was not included in either year.

Influence

Begotten has influenced several avant-garde and experimental films and is cited as an inspiration by several artists. Michael Pope's 2001 experimental film Neovoxer has been compared to Begotten as it contains a similar visual style and "impressionistic mythology". According to Panos Cosmatos, the flashback sequences in his 2010 film Beyond the Black Rainbow were directly inspired by Begotten. When interviewed by the critic Joshua Miller, Cosmatos said that he wanted the sequences to "have the look and feel of an artifact that was in the process of deterioration" and that Begotten's visual style was the perfect look for these sequences. Eddie Alcazar's 2016 short film FUCKKKYOUUU was noted by the magazine Vice as possibly influenced by Merhige's film. Jimmy Joe Roche's experimental short film, Skin of Man (2018), was also said to have been influenced by Begotten.

Critics have described some films as a visual throwback to Begotten, including Baskin (2015), Ville Marie (2015), Flesh of the Void (2017), and Prototype (2018).

The album cover for the Swedish heavy metal band Katatonia 1997 album Sounds of Decay contains a screenshot of Begotten. In an interview with webzine Chronicles of Chaos, band member Jonas Renkse recalled the idea behind the inclusion of the image came out during a conversation with a member of the record label Avantgarde Music. The doom metal band Begotten derive their name from film. In the promotional video for their 2001 song "Sterile Nails and Thunderbowels", the Swedish black metal band Silencer used clips from Begotten interspersed with original footage. The American music artist Zola Jesus listed the film as a major inspiration for her 2017 music album Okovi, stating in an interview with ARTnews that during the development of the album, she played the film on loop to help with Okovi's audio and visual aesthetic. For their experimental musical composition Frankenstein Bemshi! at the 2018 Rochester Fringe Festival, the performers Dave Esposito and G. E. Schwartz mixed portions of Begotten with the 1910 film Frankenstein, accompanied by live guitar music, electronic soundscapes, spoken narration and poetry added as text to the movie's image.

Begotten

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Plot

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Development

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Cinematic style

Music and sound design

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Theatrical screenings

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Reception

Thematic analysis

Allegory of perception

Cycle of life

Creation mythology and religious themes

Mystic and occult motifs

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Recognition

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