By Jonathan Wojcik
ENTRY 21: INCANTATION
As we are shown in older video clips, Ronan was once part of an independent "ghost hunter" group with her boyfriend, Dom, and his cousin Yuan, who attempted to document the obscure religious practices of Dom's distant family. The remote clan worships an ancient "Mother Buddha" deity, forgotten and unknown to much of the modern world, and is shown to ritualistically sacrifice young girls by leaving them at the entrance to a small, stone tunnel, where just a small piece of their flesh is apparently taken from them by their goddess. Dom's aunt informs Ronan that when her daughter is born, she will also have to be offered up, but this was the first Ronan heard that she was even pregnant at all, let alone with a daughter. Spying on the rituals and poking around where they aren't supposed to, the group eventually hear what sound like crying children from the tunnel, and the two men violate the clan's taboos by breaking inside.
br>What exactly happened isn't revealed just yet; Yuan runs screaming from the small cave and can't (or won't) explain what he saw, while Dom's dead body is later seen removed by the cult and carried away. Ronan keeps the camera dropped by Yuan, but the footage is damaged, and when her daughter is born she remains too traumatized by Dom's death to take care of the child all alone, relinquishing Dodo to foster care (with regular visits, at least) for six long years.
Ronan takes Dodo to a shrine to figure out the nature of her curse, and after an intense ritual, Ronan is instructed to deny Dodo all food for seven whole days. The little girl begs to be fed and wastes away quickly, developing more rashes and weird runes on her body until her mother can't bear it anymore and finally feeds her...which results in her exorcists, a priest and his wife, brutally killed by an unknown entity.
After viewing the footage, Ronan finally admits to the audience that she's deceived everyone: the incantation she's asked us to recite is actually an agreement to carry the curse, but the more people who share it, the weaker it will be, so she hopes there will be enough of us diluting the curse that her little girl (and the rest of us) can live a normal life. To truly take on the curse however, we must see the Mother Buddha's true face, and so Ronan must return to the tunnel on live camera feed.
Ronan narrowly evades the cult and reaches the statue, asking us our names before removing the veil...
Over the end credits, we see clips of Dodo living as happy and healthy a life as she can without her mother. The dilution of the curse, it seems, worked exactly as planned.
MONSTER ANALYSIS: DAHEI FUMU
The goddess figure in "Incantation" borrows a number of elements from different spiritual figures, and the seven days of starvation necessary to break her curse are believed to reference the literal mother of Gautama Buddha, who allegedly died after giving birth but returned to life seven days later. Besides these connections, however, the deity and her cult were invented for this film, conceived of as a spiritual sect too ancient and too obscure to be known outside a single, small village.
This is our third or fourth "malevolent god" in these reviews, and maybe that's a common enough trope that it's cheating the rules, but "gods" are generally assumed to just be what we humans call something or other bigger than our brains can contain, and there's a lot making this one feel like something deeply inhuman. She is something that desires to feed on human flesh, and if not given flesh willingly, she takes it upon herself to slowly consume someone by force through her "curse," a process eventually manifesting as the honeycomb pattern of necrosis. That's not just wickedly nasty, but so much more ghoulish and bizarre than the behavior typically attributed to "gods" or "goddesses" that it's difficult to rationalize what this entity is supposed to mean to Buddhism, or what kind of forgotten influence it may have once had before its following dwindled.
The association with arms and hands is interesting, too, especially the deity's agents that we only see visible as gangly arms; once in the cave, and once in a brief, fuzzy video clip where a pair of arms reach out for Dodo. The "Baddie" scene tells us these were very very long, and we'll never even know if they came attached to a humanlike body...or any body at all, for that matter.
It's also far too often that we have an entity or object in a horror film that drives the viewer mad to even gaze on it, but must inevitably disappoint the viewer by either never being shown or never being all that interesting. I personally think that the reveal of the statue's organic tunnel-face is a fantastic compromise given how simplistic it is; clearly breaking the laws of physics, clearly something "alive" and most frightening for its emptiness than for some kind of spooky monster face.
Funny enough, I had "trypophobia" just once in my life, the first time I ever saw a photoshop combination of human flesh and lotus seedpods in my teens. It never affected me again, but I remember the bizarre, indescribable, itchy sort of horror of it, and I almost wish this movie had been my first exposure to that, so I could really experience a little taste of what it's like for the spectacle to "break your brain," no doubt exactly why this aesthetic was chosen for the entity to begin with. Of course, Dom and Ronan did not lose their minds just because of grody holes and a little spatial distortion; we simply have the protective barrier of watching from home. As they stood face to facelessness with the entity, something about that slimy, pockmarked tunnel must have meant something more; a comprehension of the goddess herself, of how ancient and terrible and vast she is compared to ourselves and a realization of her twisted intentions.
With this particular kind of horror, I always imagine it's what some tiny insect would go through if, the very moment it blundered into a spider's web, it was suddenly forced to understand a spider's entire feeding process in the level of detail and context that you and I are capable of, rather than the "ahhh! Sticky!" and "Ouch! What?!" that they more likely experience in those final moments.
