The Woman in the Yard: Stop Telling Me It's about Grief and Scare Me

It's happened many times before, and it will happen again: I'm a sucker for a good movie trailer.

Especially when it comes to scary movies, there's so little you actually need to make it work. A good image goes a long way: just a creepy woman in a black veil sitting alone in the yard. Her face was hidden away. Her hands were covered in blood. One of those very rare scares out in the open, during the day, all based on stillness instead of darkness. There's so much potential in this image. The premise works by itself. It's creepy, haunting, simple and inviting.

I was sold on The Woman in the Yard.

After watching it this weekend, I feel the movie wasted so much horror potential by inserting itself into a subgenre it didn't earn.

For the first third of the movie, it feels like you're getting a solid horror movie. It's definitely not super scary, but you feel something's cooking. A slow buildup, meeting the characters, their trauma, and their surroundings. But even then, you start noticing something's not quite right; it's all done without a gram of subtlety: this is Ramona and she is depressed. Look, she can't get out of bed. She dreams about her dead husband. She's not taking care of her kids. That's like the first 3 minutes of the film.

You endure it, because the promise of the woman in the yard calls you. You still want to be scared, but the scares never arrive. I don't mean jump scares, just the general feeling of uneasiness is barely there. As the story moves forward, the focus slowly turns away from horror to the psychological reason behind the haunting.

And then the woman in the yard actually comes into the house, but unfortunately, she brings nothing new with her.

The movie follows Ramona, a grieving mother struggling to hold her family together after her husband’s death. She’s depressed, isolated, and overwhelmed. She has trouble communicating with her children, and it seems like she's slowly losing her grip on reality. And then a strange woman appears in their yard. She just sits there alone, silent, still. Ramona tells her children she’s harmless, but it's quite clear she's not. As the day goes by, the woman gets closer and closer to the house. Taylor, the eldest son, wants to go for help, but Ramona won't let him. As they interact with the woman, the family learns that she's a projection of Ramona's grief and guilt over the death of her husband. When the sun goes down, the woman can finally enter the house.

In any other horror movie, you'd think that's when shit gets real. Here, instead of dread or violence, the monster just explains herself.

The last decade has been cluttered with grief and horror. That's not to say that's the first film we could call grief horror, but it certainly had a big impact. It's not like I hate the subgenre; I'd happily watch 10 Women in the Yard for the chance of a new Hereditary.

The thing is that, when done clumsily, subgenre becomes a trope. Filmmakers saw an incredibly successful blueprint they could imitate, and now my brain just doesn't get any more dopamine when watching it again.

And that's my main gripe with grief horror: it has become a narrative tool. When watching The Woman in the Yard, not for one second did I think that the grief aspect was an organic part of the story. Instead, it seemed like an attempt to replicate something that other horror films in the last decade have been doing way too much of.

Grief Horror Became a Genre

This is by no means a historical research into the grief horror subgenre, because there's actual in-depth research about it. However, in my informal ass view, I think the recent fascination started with The Babadook in 2014. Horror has always been about allegories and metaphors and whatever, but everyone instantly noticed the intent with this film: the monster is all about grief.

And collectively, we said, "That's what it takes to make a great horror movie". So in the last 10 years, we've been getting more and more well-received horror films that deal with grief. Hereditary, The Ritual, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back, A Quiet Place, The Invitation, Midsommar, and many, many, many more.

It makes a ton of sense; grief naturally blends into horror, and that's something that people way smarter than me have actually studied. The same research has also found that the subgenre has even developed a template.

The protagonist loses someone at the start of the movie or before it begins. This is their ordinary world, and they don't know how to go back into the real world with other people: shitty relationships, they don't take care of themselves, etc.

The monster appears. Whatever the monster may be, supernatural or a dude with a knife, it mirrors the protagonist's trauma. It's just an external reflection of that grief.

The protagonist either defeats, escapes or tames the monster. That brings balance back into their life. One of the main aspects here is that the defeat of the monster is some kind of parallel of adapting to their own loss. In a 'two birds, one stone situation', the protagonist gets rid of the monster, and they learn to live in their new grief-ridden world.

That is, step by step, what happens in The Woman in the Yard. After reading that, you basically have a summary of the story. And it can work. At its best, grief horror turns emotional pain into something terrifying.

But It's Getting Tiring

My problem isn't with grief, it's with overusing it as a narrative tool. Especially when the film isn't that great or the scares aren't that spooky, it's easy to see how grief is only used as a shortcut to create depth.

In The Woman in the Yard, it feels like the movie really wants you to know the theme. It's like the titular lady in the garden is grabbing your face and telling you, the audience, "I'm her personified grief". Horror is drained from the story as soon as you explain it like that.

And this film suffers a lot because of that decision. Honestly, it's not even scary, and that's not by design, I'm sure. Horror needs a bit of mystery, and a film over-explaining its themes is the complete opposite of that.

This lack of subtlety and honesty in the theme adds up to the template we talked about earlier. Taken together, it means that lesser films in the genre are extremely formulaic. But again, it's mostly about them not being very scary. Without horror, these movies are domestic dramas about grief, and not in the cool way like Manchester by the Sea.

Finally, here’s the question for these films: what about grief? What is your actual thesis or comment about it? It's hard sometimes, it's scary sometimes, it's sad? It feels like these movies think that's the ending point. They briefly touch on the subject of sorrow, then they don't actually build anything new on top of that. The whole subgenre feels like trying to come up with clever ways to show grief as a monster instead of having something to say about it.

Where it all falls down

By the third act, the potential of horror is completely wasted. Instead of trying to scare you, The Woman in the Yarddecides to go fully into psychological twists and turns. For example, we go back to the opening scene where Ramona is watching a video of her husband talking about their farm. But now she's in the memory. Physically, she goes through some kind of tunnel and ends up in the memory. And her husband attacks her, because her memories are infected by grief. We are just running around the house and Ramona's mind, and none of it is exciting or scary.

For the most part, the film is not graphic, and the woman in black is not very violent, actually. She breaks a few lamps and pushes people around, but that's as far as she goes. Maybe she kills a dog, but we don't see it. It's like they had no idea what to do with her after she appeared in the yard.

As we get to the end, the metaphor is over-explained, so all we can talk about is the plot. Instead of coming up with theories about what the woman in the yard is or represents, we talk about whether or not Ramona killed herself, or if it's all just a dream. That's fine, but why not both?

So that's my main issue here. If you’re going to make a movie about grief, make use of it, don't just show it. And make it scary, please.