Grima: A Visceral Psychological-Body Horror Taking You Back to School

Richard Harrington’s 6-minute horror Grima revolves around a protagonist who could really use a few psychoanalysis sessions. As she learns that the past will simply not be buried and forgotten, that our ghosts do come back to haunt us—and even exist specifically to haunt us—Jen is confronted once again with a prison of which she is both inmate and jailer. 

Still a teenager in school, Jen (Monroe Cline) is complying with that baffling exercise in order: head down, eyes closed, no words. The lighting in the classroom is bleak, and the colour grading chillingly cool. The warden/teacher is the irascible to the extreme Miss Finster (Lynn Allinger) for whom discipline is a matter of serious crime and severe punishment. Her dreadful method—or at least one of them; one expects she has an arsenal of sadistic devices to implement on a group who have little choice but to endure—is dragging nails across the chalkboard and having her hostage stand right by. Perhaps the film does us a kindness by toning down the intolerable sound just enough to keep viewers from running away at first screech. But not enough that we do not understand why the Spanish word for this experience is the chosen title of a horror film. 

The point that the film tries to build through and beyond the tyranny of Miss Finster is Jen herself. Lying in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves, Jen is the heroine of a horror about what Joan Didion called ‘character’. The cruelties of the past, masked with bored nonchalance in adulthood, haunt Jen to the point that having switched truth for lies, her reality and dreams have begun to bleed into one another. We, the audience, are also caught in the net of her trial by torture and though there is no time to think about our own such little tricks, the shadow of the thought can begin to grow, a lot like the echo of nails on a chalkboard.

Cline makes it look effortless, the many facets of being part of a disempowered class whose individuals make up their own currency of power among themselves. She is both the defenseless hostage of the school system and the cool author of her own life. The gap in between, only referred to second-hand, ironically makes room for a Dickensian figure like Miss Finster (Allinger is frightening) to assume the moral high ground. 

There is no satirical note here, however. An out and out horror without the cushioning of even a breath of humour, Grima makes bare something we like to forget: that adolescence really was that painful, and our varyingly ironical and nostalgic recountings are a mere umbrella we hoist in the hope that we never have to encounter our mortifyingly wounded and wounding selves again.  

Watch Grima Horror Short Film Trailer