{"id":13103,"date":"2026-10-01T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=13103"},"modified":"2026-09-25T09:57:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T09:57:42","slug":"beauty-and-horror-become-indistinguishable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/beauty-and-horror-become-indistinguishable\/","title":{"rendered":"Beauty and Horror Become Indistinguishable"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>7 Minute, 41 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEWS
\nBegotten<\/strong>
\n –  <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Experimental, Horror, Fantasy
\nYear Released: <\/strong>1989, 2026 4K
\nRuntime: <\/strong>1h 12m
\nDirector: <\/strong>E. Elias Merhige
\nWriter:<\/strong> E. Elias Merhige
\nCast: <\/strong>Brian Salzberg, Donna Dempsey, Stephen Charles Barry
\nWhere to Watch: <\/strong>new 4K restoration opens October 2, 2026, in New York City at the IFC Center<\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW: <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>When I started screening BEGOTTEN, I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I stopped trying to decide if what I was watching was really a “movie” or an exploration. There’s no traditional dialogue, no real narrative structure, and not even the expected character development some experimental films have, and the images are so distorted that figuring out what is happening becomes a challenge in itself. E. Elias Merhige drops the viewer into something resembling a nightmare that the viewers shouldn’t even be allowed to see, and whether that sounds fascinating or unbearable will probably depend on what you’re willing to accept.<\/p>\n

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More than 35 years after its creation, this experience is receiving a second life through Kino Lorber’s new 4K restoration. BEGOTTEN was shot on black-and-white 16mm reversal film and then painstakingly rephotographed frame by frame through neutral-density filters, a process Merhige says required roughly ten hours of work for every completed minute. The restoration returns to the original 16mm negative under Merhige’s supervision, but the purpose isn’t to scrub away everything that gives the film its look. The grain, crushed blacks, blown-out whites, and unstable textures are the movie, and they’re still all there.<\/p>\n

Trying to summarize what happens here almost makes BEGOTTEN sound more straightforward than it really is. The three principal figures are God Killing Himself (Brian Salzberg), Mother Earth (Donna Dempsey), and Son Of Earth – Flesh On Bone (Stephen Charles Barry). God violently destroys himself, Mother Earth emerges from what remains and impregnates herself with his seed, and she eventually gives birth to the Son of Earth. From there, suffering, death, resurrection, destruction, and eventually regeneration form a creation myth without anything resembling an ordinary explanation.<\/p>\n

The opening alone tells you exactly what kind of experience Merhige planned. God Killing Himself sits alone and begins cutting into his own body in an extended sequence that’s disturbing, to say the least. Yet, the cinematography makes it difficult to process the violence. I could understand what I was looking at while simultaneously feeling as though my brain was trying to reject the image. It’s graphic without feeling like traditional horror, because the lack of clarity somehow makes the act feel even worse.<\/p>\n

Without a doubt, that’s BEGOTTEN’s greatest achievement. Horror movies can show us something disgusting, but Merhige makes familiar human shapes look unfamiliar enough that the viewer has to study them. Faces disappear inside the grain, landscapes resemble burned photographs, bodies become moving patches of light and darkness, and figures sometimes seem to materialize out of the image rather than simply walk into the frame. There are shots here that I’m not sure I even liked looking at, yet they’re difficult to forget once they’re over.<\/p>\n

The new restoration is particularly interesting because restoring BEGOTTEN presents an almost backward challenge. Most restoration work focuses on clarity, detail, and stability hidden beneath decades of damage. Merhige intentionally created imagery that looks decayed, scratched, archaic, and several generations removed from its source, so cleaning it up too much would destroy the effect. What has been recovered is the detail within that destruction, allowing the blacks to deepen and the whites to sharpen while preserving the oppressive grain that gives everything its texture.<\/p>\n

There’s something about the amount of physical labor behind the imagery. Merhige reportedly spent four years working through the photographic process, repeatedly exposing and filtering the footage until the grain itself became part of the film. Knowing that makes BEGOTTEN easier for me to admire because this wasn’t simply someone applying an ugly filter to otherwise ordinary footage. The images were deliberately built into this, one painful step at a time.<\/p>\n

Admiration, though, isn’t the same thing as enjoyment, and that’s where my three-star rating comes into play. BEGOTTEN can be mesmerizing for several minutes, then feel almost impossibly long for the next several. Scenes continue well beyond the point where their initial impact already did what it needed to, figures crawl or struggle across the screen at an agonizing pace, and the lack of dialogue means there’s very little to reset your attention when it begins drifting.<\/p>\n

That’s especially noticeable because the movie only runs 72 minutes. Usually that would make a movie feel almost short, but BEGOTTEN can make ten minutes feel much longer because time itself seems to slow once you’re trapped inside Merhige’s mind. I don’t necessarily think the repetition is accidental, because suffering here is drawn out rather than delivered as a quick shock, but understanding why something is exhausting doesn’t make it less exhausting to watch.<\/p>\n

The film becomes easier to process once you understand the basic story, though I’m not convinced you need to. Knowing that these figures represent God, Earth, and humanity certainly provides context for the cycles of violence and rebirth, but BEGOTTEN seems more interested in reaction than comprehension. I could spend considerable time trying to decode its religious, environmental, and mythological symbolism. Yet, some of the movie’s power comes from encountering an image before knowing exactly what it represents.<\/p>\n

There’s a strange beauty buried inside the ugliness here. Landscapes that initially appear barren gradually begin to feel endless, while bodies can look minuscule and insignificant against them. Merhige’s framing sometimes resembles early silent cinema, sometimes experimental photography, and occasionally something that could have been scratched onto film decades before motion pictures officially existed. I can understand why the movie found passionate defenders after struggling to secure conventional distribution, because nothing about it feels designed to sit comfortably beside other releases.<\/p>\n

Its history makes the restoration even more fitting. BEGOTTEN initially struggled to find distribution before a copy began moving between programmers, filmmakers, critics, and artists, eventually reaching Susan Sontag and then institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and Film Forum. That word-of-mouth survival seems fitting for a movie that itself looks like an object passed from person to person rather than something manufactured for mass consumption. It didn’t need everybody to understand it; it needed enough people to recognize that they hadn’t seen anything like it before.<\/p>\n

I’m somewhere between those who see BEGOTTEN as extraordinary and those who find the entire experience tedious. There’s no denying the originality, commitment, or effectiveness of its imagery, and several parts of it are going to remain lodged in my memory much longer than scenes from movies I enjoyed more. At the same time, I felt every minute it was on screen, and there were stretches where fascination turned into waiting for the film to move on.<\/p>\n

That conflict may ultimately be the most appropriate response I can give it. BEGOTTEN isn’t something I would casually recommend, nor can I dismiss it because it bored me at times. Merhige created something that still looks abnormal more than three decades later, and the new restoration gives those images the weight and texture they were intended to have without sanding away their deformity.<\/p>\n

I’m glad I watched BEGOTTEN, and I’m equally glad it ends when it does. Three stars might sound modest for a film this singular. That rating reflects the enormous gap between how much I respect what Merhige accomplished and how much I actually connected with the experience of watching it. For something built around death, creation, and rebirth, that tension feels strangely appropriate: part of me wanted out, while another part couldn’t stop looking.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER]<\/em><\/p>\n

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MOVIE REVIEWS Begotten –      Genre: Experimental, Horror, Fantasy Year Released: 1989, 2026 4K Runtime: 1h 12m Director: E. Elias Merhige Writer: E. Elias Merhige Cast: Brian Salzberg, Donna Dempsey, Stephen Charles Barry Where to Watch: new 4K restoration opens October 2, 2026, in New York City at the IFC Center RAVING REVIEW: When I started screening […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/img\/0367\/0367792.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t