Lúcio Reis Filho
On October 2, New York’s IFC Center premieres a 4K restoration of what Susan Sontag hailed as “one of the most important films of modern times.” And let’s be honest: if any movie leaves a lasting impression, it’s Begotten. Written, directed and produced by E. Elias Merhige in the late 1980s, this experimental gem still defies easy categorization, proving that its power to disturb remains unbroken. Bleak and unapologetically grotesque—yet imbued with a disturbingly tactile, plastic beauty—its visual language radically shatters traditional ways of seeing.
The seventy-odd minutes of Begotten are a descent into Dante’s Inferno. A deluge of sinister imagery unfolds like a surrealist nightmare, where montage and the unconscious breed startling juxtapositions—conjuring the “weird” precisely as Mark Fisher defined it: as that which does not belong. There is an echo of early, primitive cinema, not just in the macabre mise-en-scène but in the film’s very physical grammar.
An unpolished primitivism coats every inch of the frame: the high-contrast black-and-white photography, with its blown-out whites and crushed blacks, and a camera that shifts between static stillness and frantic, spasmodic jerks. The ruined, shadowy environments bleed into degraded, heavily grained, almost crumbly celluloid, while undercranked frame rates lend every movement an unnervingly hitched, limping cadence.
As an experimental work, Begotten is heavily indebted to the historical avant-garde of the early 20th century. The recurring extreme close-ups of a human eye find an inescapable predecessor in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), while its colliding images evoke Soviet montage and the fragmented, kaleidoscopic geometries of abstract art. It also might be understood as a brilliant act of cinematic bricolage. Moving away from narrative logic, it instead deploys temporal ellipses, superimpositions, double exposures and even a proto-found footage POV perspective—techniques that forge a fractured and deliberately incongruous syntax, leaving it up to the spectator to assemble the pieces.
Channeling both the radical spirit of modernist poetics and the procedures of late-century underground filmmaking, Begotten creates a sensory experience—a guiding principle championed decades earlier by Maya Deren. Merhige’s nod to this pioneer of the New American Cinema and the post-WWII avant-garde goes far beyond borrowing modernist aesthetics; it breathes through the film’s untamed logic, ritualistic weight, and dense symbolism.
Take, for instance, the close-up of a foot stepping across a desolate landscape: a near-mythic gesture that mirrors Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Meanwhile, plunged into shadow and drained of foreground detail by backlighting, the robed figures instantly recall the spectral silhouettes of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)—a remarkable piece of Swedish cinematic modernism.
Merhige’s film strips away characters in any conventional sense, offering instead three allegorical deities identified only in the end credits: “God Killing Himself,” “Mother Earth” and “Son of Earth — Flesh on Bone.” The first violently tears open his own body and perishes. The second rises from the visceral remains to manifest physically, gathering his dying seed by masturbating the corpse to impregnate herself. She then gives birth to the third figure: a trembling, fully grown naked man cast into a desolate wasteland, destined to be dragged, butchered and briefly resurrected by the Mother.
The robed figures gather the butchered remnants of Mother and Son, grind their flesh into dust and return them to the earth. In their wake, the soil blooms. To rephrase Nietzsche, “God is dead.” Begotten ultimately distills itself into a titanomachy—the immemorial clash between dying primordial deities and those destined to inherit the earth (perhaps humanity itself)—staged out of time and across an unknown dimension of pure cosmic horror worthy of Ambrose Bierce’s Carcosa. Far more than a mythic parable, Merhige delivers an immersive, unsettling ritual, dragging us backward into the occult dawn of creation itself.
Anyone daring to enter this infernal den, which operates under its own physical and metaphysical laws, finds themselves voyeuristically peering at a grotesque figure hacking at its own flesh. The self-mutilation plays out in complete silence, yet you can practically hear the howls of agony—or groans of pleasure—as blood gushes forth like black tar. Human figures are mercilessly savaged atop sacrificial altars, while withered bodies crawl through the muck, seemingly dying—or are they merely clawing their way out of the womb of a bleeding earth? Such images summon the mass graves of the trenches and the all-too-real horrors of the Holocaust.
Yet while Begotten carries the torch of the historic avant-garde, its raw, visceral brutality belongs to a post-counterculture landscape. From the late 1960s onward, a seismic shift in social norms and the easing of censorship codes cleared the path for a independent, subversive and experimental cohort of filmmakers—fertile soil for grotesqueries, peaking in the 1980s, the golden decade of body horror.
Drawing on Matthias Regan’s theory of “weird cinema,” Begotten’s weirdness stems directly from formal devices that telegraph its liminal condition: a pervasive sense of dislocation, an acute reckoning with the inexplicable and a radical transgression of boundaries, whether they govern natural laws or society at large. To bring his nightmare to life, Merhige wielded a 16mm Arriflex silent camera loaded with black-and-white reversal stock, before a meticulous post-production process. The sound design—woven entirely from eerily familiar ambient drone and field recordings—gives physical weight to this dense atmosphere.
Originally premiering at New York City’s Film Forum on June 5, 1991, Begotten still endures as that which does not belong—an intrusive wrongness cutting through a sanitized, risk-averse cinematic landscape increasingly dominated by mass-produced monotony that strips the moving image of its materiality. Now, audiences can experience it anew. The film was restored in 4K from the original negative and optical soundtrack, with high-resolution scanning, digital cleanup and final grading under Merhige’s supervision. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
