2025 October Horror Challenge #25 "Beloved"

This is a very difficult review for me to write. My church, the Episcopal Church, likes to use the word beloved a lot and all I can think about is this movie and I don't know how to explain to them that word is very triggering to me and to other people who've read the book and seen the movie just because it's hard to watch and hard to read but I guess history is supposed to be hard to watch and read because if you're watching and reading history and it only makes you feel good then you're not really learning history. to make another point, it's just that this movie is graphic and violent. And I know that horror movies are graphic and violent in general, I'm aware of that, but most of the time horror movies are portraying things that are pretend. Things that did not really happen. In this movie, they're portraying the horrible things that enslavers did to their slaves and this stuff really happened and that makes it hard for me to watch so it's just a struggle for me with this movie and it's themes but it's such a good movie that I can put that aside and try and analyze it a little bit here for you so that you understand what you're going into if you watch this movie. The movie starts and we see that a cabin is haunted by the ghost of a little girl and her mother and her sister and her brothers and her grandmother are all there and they are being tormented by the spirit but the mother makes a really good point when she says it's not evil it's just sad. That is what is really hard to deal with in this movie, how sad it is. I don't want to give away too much and ruin everything for you so I'm not exactly sure what I should say here in my analysis but I'll tell you some of the things that make this movie hard for me to watch. their scenes were slaves are raped and tortured, and there are scenes where a mother is so terrified that her children are going to be returned to slavery that she does some unspeakable things to prevent that from happening and it is really hard to watch. I know I've said that about three times already but that's just how I feel about the movie. I think it was very well done, it was very well acted, and there are a lot of very good actors in the movie. Oprah Winfrey is in the movie she plays the main character, and whether you like her or not she does a good job in this movie. Danny Glover plays another main character and he's good as well though I kind of want to punch him in the face because he frustrates me but I understand that his character is stuck in an impossible situation So I should give him some slack. Kimberly Elise is in this movie She plays Oprah Winfrey's teenage daughter and she is a really good actress Tandy Newton is in this movie and she plays a character named Beloved, And she does a great job as always. I think people would argue that this movie is a drama and not horror movie so I'm going to say why I think this is a horror movie for the rest of this review and leave it at that. First, there's a ghost. Yes there can be ghosts in movies that are not horror movies I have seen that before, like I wouldn't call the movie Ghost a horror movie and obviously there's a ghost in that movie. This movie is different however because the ghost in this movie is a vengeful spirit who comes back because she died a horrible death and once you find out what happened to her and how she died it's hard to feel anything but sympathy for the ghost but then you also feel sympathy for the other characters in the movie because they had to make him possible decisions and they didn't know what to do and they did maybe not the best they could but they did what they thought they had to do. second, there's Gore in this movie a dog's eye gets popped out and has to be put back into place There's a very bloody scene with an ax there's like I said rape and torture scenes there's one scene I'm never going to be able to forget where two men drink a woman's breast smell against her will which kind of makes me want to puke even just saying that and I had to watch it. third, there is a time when the characters band together to get rid of the ghost and they have a kind of exorcism scene that is just about us intense as any exorcism seen I've seen in any other horror movie so I don't know how people could watch that and say this isn't a horror movie because it's got all the elements. I guess in the end if you don't think this is a horror movie and you don't think it belongs on this list and it's not horrifying to you what happened to these poor people, then you can disregard this but I definitely think that this movie is horrific enough to classify it as a horror movie so I will continue to do so.