What Happened to Dorothy Bell? (2024)
Directed & Written by Danny Villanueva Jr.
Starring Asya Meadows, Lisa Wilcox, & Michael Hargrove.

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SPOILERS!
Avert thine eyes, lest ye be spoiled.

Found footage will never die, especially when there are always new films added to the sub-genre’s ranks like the new film by Danny Villanueva Jr., What Happened to Dorothy Bell?, the tale of a young Black woman named Ozzie (Asya Meadows) trying to piece together the shattered puzzle of her family history years after being attacked by her grandmother Dorothy (Arlene Arnone Bibbs) and losing the memory of it to the mind-altering effects of trauma. When she discovers that the scar on her face isn’t actually from a bad car accident, rather it’s from the time Grandma tried to carve her up with a kitchen knife, she falls into a rabbit hole of madness that culminates in a whole lot more horror.

Villanueva’s film has such a strong impact because it crosses issues of hereditary mental illness with the supernatural and demonic possession in order to tell a story of a family, like so many other families, plagued by psychological terror. The film never conflates the two; it isn’t trying to take a religious perspective by portraying demonic possession as the cause of mental illness. What Happened to Dorothy Bell? turns the typical Judeo-Christian idea of demonic possession into an allegory, focusing it on one tortured family and their struggle to try breaking the cycle of mental illness and the shame traditionally associated with it that has possessed them for far too long.
Found footage is almost always Gothic, even just the way it mirrors many old Gothic texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula which are largely told in epistolary form through letters and similar correspondence, but What Happened to Dorothy Bell? goes even further than that, like a lot of newer horror today, by focusing on a major Gothic trope: repression. As Freud wrote, “repression lies, not in putting an end to, in annihilating, the idea which represents an instinct, but in preventing it from becoming conscious.” This is why Ozzie’s parents create a lie, not to pretend nothing at all happened but to prevent the real memory from being conscious in her memory. She references PTSD without having to say it while acknowledging the role repression has in traumatic experiences: “The mind has this defence mechanism, it can suppress traumatic memories; they aren’t removed, they‘re just locked in a compartment, and the key‘s thrown out into the world to one day be discovered again.” Many Gothic stories, regardless of the medium in which they’re told, involve the repressed coming back to haunt people. In What Happened to Dorothy Bell?, Ozzie intentionally leans into what was repressed by peering into her grandmother’s past and what she finds haunts her, as well as everyone around her.Another aspect to Ozzie’s family secrets is the gatekeeping her parents do in order to repress the truth and how mental illness can be made worse, the cycles can be perpetuated, in families when parents refuse to be honest about their own family history. When Ozzie confronts her father she asks: “Don‘t you think I deserve to know my own history? To know who I am?” Her dad tries to apologise by claiming they worried about Ozzie’s mental health because of a family history of psychological issues. He says they were attempting to “break that cycle,” but he and his wife did so by lying to their daughter instead of being open with her. There’s even a glimpse of Grandma surfacing briefly in Ozzie, like a vision of those mental health issues continuing down the family line, as Ozzie picks up a knife, moving towards her father, silently threatening him with the blade without even raising it so he’ll leave.

Eventually, in spite of everything Ozzie tries to accomplish by learning the truth of Dorothy’s reality and their real family history, she succumbs to the demonic possession that gripped her grandmother. This is a terrifying horror-movie allegory about the persistence of mental illness across generations of a family. We know from hearing Ozzie’s father reference a history of psychological problems in the family that Dorothy is obviously not the only one who was mentally ill. It seemingly skipped a generation, or at least skipped most of its terrors, as neither Ozzie’s mother, nor her father are depicted as being particularly mentally ill, just dishonest. Sadly their family history claims Dorothy and the consequences reach out beyond only their relatives, encompassing both family and friends; the same thing happens in real life with mental illness, it isn’t only contained to the person directly suffering. What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is an eerie portrayal of what happens to a family when their truth is repressed for all the wrong reasons but it still manages to come to light, threatening to burn down the family tree and whoever else is in its path.