Day 22: Incantation

Day 22 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: cults, shaky cam, trypophobia, child harm, child abuse, unreality, elderly death, blood and gore, emetophobia

Recommended?: Yes

Spoilers and discussion of many of the mentioned topics below. You have been warned.

My three favorite things are my boyfriend, chicken alfredo, and Dr Pepper Strawberries and Cream 0 Sugar.



Incantation (also known as Zhòu) follows Li Ronan as she tries to put a stop to the curse she brought upon herself before it can hurt her daughter Dodo.

Incantation is a cliche horror film in just as many ways as it's a unique one. By breathing life into old and new horror tropes and creating it's own unique mythology it strikes me as something I'll never see be truly replicated.

Found footage has an inherent meta element to it. The very format is an attempt to immerse you into the story and make you feel, if only for a moment, that what you're seeing is real. The individual films in the subgenre do that with varying degrees of success, and this one does have it's problems in that regard. The use of a score particularly bothered me throughout it's runtime considering it would need to be edited in... But it succeeds in one specific way that I really loved.

It specifically reaches out to you, the viewer, and pulls you into its world.

The focus of the film is, as mentioned, trying to stop a deadly curse. But it works almost like a virus does. The closer you are to the cursed the more likely you are to become effected by it. But it also has the element of increased knowledge making it more harmful. There's no escape, really. You can't do a different chant to get it to go away, or a ritual to protect yourself, you have to pass it on to a new person. As many people as possible. And Ronan does this by putting these videos together in a deceptive way.

She is cursing you directly. Did you memorize the symbol? Did you chant the curse, even in your mind? Did you believe her that it was a blessing or a way to protect her daughter? You have now been cursed. I did. Even now between typing breaks I'm tapping the side of my laptop's plastic shell in the strangely addicting rhythm of the chant and humming it in my head. There's no saving me, and maybe by recommending this movie and rating it so highly, there's no saving you either. Thanks for reading this far.

To some this might sound about as effective in scaring you as an evil chain mail or a cursed smiling dog image, but to me both the inescapable nature of the curse and the deception with which it's presented really hit home for me.

I loved the reveal of Mother Bhudda's face. Expecting a scary demon face or even a mirror and being shown and impossibly infinite tunnel of flesh wounds turned my stomach. I love it, it's so great!

This entire film is just so well put together, almost perfectly. I do think that it drags in parts and doesn't need to be as long as it is, and it isn't entirely faithful to it's found footage conceits. But other than that Incantation is a suitably haunting piece of horror fiction I won't soon forget.


If I disappear, it's Li Ronan's fault.