A Fever Dream Shot Through a Sandpaper Lens
Some movies scare you. Some move you. And then there’s Begotten, a 1989 “experimental” film by E. Elias Merhige that doesn’t scare or move so much as make you wonder if you accidentally swallowed expired NyQuil.
Shot in grainy, overexposed black and white, Begotten looks like a home movie found in Satan’s attic. It’s meant to feel ancient and otherworldly, like a Dead Sea Scroll on celluloid. In practice, it looks like someone filmed a snuff puppet show through a dirty fish tank.
This is not cinema—it’s a Rorschach test for pretentious grad students.
The Plot (If You Can Call It That)
Here’s the story, in case you don’t speak “avant-garde performance art.” A masked godlike figure disembowels himself with a razor and ejaculates into Mother Earth, who then gives birth to the Son of Earth, a convulsing man-child dragged around the wasteland by a bunch of nomads who torture, kill, and dismember him before stuffing the remains into jars. Then crops grow. Then it all kind of resets, because of course it does.
Yes, this is literally Genesis rewritten by a goth teenager who just discovered Nietzsche and decided to make a film project instead of showering.
Pretentious With a Capital P
Merhige’s vision is nothing if not ambitious. He wanted to create “a cinematic Dead Sea Scroll,” a film that looked as if it had survived since biblical times. What he actually created looks like the world’s longest Nine Inch Nails music video, except without the music to distract you.
The movie is silent—no dialogue, no soundtrack, just the grinding hum of your own regret for pressing play. Watching it is like attending a mime performance about God’s bowel movements.
And yes, Susan Sontag praised it, which should have been our first warning. Sontag loved suffering dressed as art, and Begotten delivers nothing but suffering, both onscreen and in your living room.
The Visuals: Who Needs Midtones Anyway?
Merhige destroyed his own film stock to get the “damaged” aesthetic, scratching negatives and running them through an optical printer until every frame looked like it had been rescued from a dumpster fire. The result is extreme contrast: pure black, pure white, and zero gray in between.
It’s striking for five minutes. Then it’s exhausting. Watching Begotten is like staring at a Xerox machine having a seizure. Every scene looks like an MRI gone wrong, and after twenty minutes your eyes start begging for the sweet relief of a Doritos commercial.
Acting, or Whatever This Is
The cast consists of largely unknowns from Merhige’s theater troupe, and it shows. Characters convulse, writhe, and gesticulate like they’re competing in an Olympic-level interpretive dance competition. God mutilates himself with all the subtlety of a man cutting a birthday cake. Mother Earth straddles a corpse with the enthusiasm of someone trying to win a keg stand contest.
And the Son of Earth? He spends most of the film twitching, puking organs, and being dragged around by his umbilical cord like a grotesque balloon animal. It’s less acting than prolonged suffering—both his and yours.
Shock Value Without the Shock
The problem with Begotten isn’t just that it’s weird—it’s that it’s boring. Yes, you’ll see disembowelment, semen rituals, and dismembered bodies. But it’s all presented with the energy of a museum installation piece, not a horror film.
The gore is abstracted into grainy patterns, so it never feels real. The “taboo-breaking” sex and violence isn’t titillating or shocking—it’s just tedious. By the time nomads are cutting Mother Earth into chunks, you’re less horrified and more annoyed that there are still 20 minutes left.
Influences? Or Just Rip-Offs?
Critics compare Begotten to Eraserhead. Which is fair, if you imagine Eraserhead stripped of its humor, sound design, and artistry, leaving only a guy shaking a camera at abstract goo for 70 minutes.
There are nods to Bosch and Goya, but the difference is that Bosch and Goya had talent, while Merhige has access to a 16mm camera and a lot of free time. This isn’t painting with film—it’s doodling in the margins of human misery.
The Experience: From Curiosity to Endurance Test
Here’s how the viewing process usually goes:
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Minute 1: Whoa, this looks intense. Like film history come alive!
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Minute 15: Okay, this is unsettling. Where’s it going?
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Minute 35: Still writhing, still puking. Cool, cool.
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Minute 55: Why am I here? What choices led me here?
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Minute 72: I would rather watch paint dry. Or better yet, eat the paint.
It’s less like watching a film and more like being held hostage at an art school senior project showcase.
Cult Status: Because Suffering Loves Company
Despite being nearly unwatchable, Begotten has a cult following. Bootleg VHS copies circulated for years like contraband, passed between goth kids in trench coats who swore it “changed their lives.”
And maybe it did. If you sit through Begotten and still function, you’ve proven you can survive anything, from graduate seminars to performance art weddings.
But cult status doesn’t equal quality. People also worship The Room, and at least The Room has unintentional laughs. Begotten offers no such joy—just unrelenting misery shot through a sandblasted lens.
Why It Fails
Begotten fails because it confuses obscurity for profundity. Yes, it’s dense with religious symbolism, Nietzschean philosophy, and mythic imagery. But symbolism without substance is just noise.
Merhige wanted to explore life, death, and creation. What he gave us is a 70-minute endurance test that makes you grateful for the invention of dialogue, color, and narrative coherence.
It’s not deep—it’s just opaque. It’s not art—it’s an optical illusion of art. Like a Magic Eye poster, you stare at it long enough hoping to see something meaningful, but all you get is a headache.
Final Verdict
Begotten is the cinematic equivalent of being locked in a basement with a strobe light and a philosophy major. It’s grim, pretentious, and joyless—a film that mistakes deliberate ugliness for insight.
If you want to punish yourself, sure, watch it. If you want to impress a date, don’t. Unless your date is Susan Sontag, in which case you’re probably already dead.
