Relic: The True Story That Inspired The Film

Relic is inspired by a true story. Director Natalie Ericka James drew from her personal experiences to create this bizarre and claustrophobic horror movie. Beneath the creepy events that unfold in Relic, lies a moving and heartbreaking story based on real events.

Relic follows three generations of women drawn together to care for the oldest among them, Grandmother Edna. When Edna goes missing, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam come to stay at her house, hoping to find a clue to her whereabouts. Instead, they find post-it notes all over the house with written reminders, some of them rather strange, like “Don’t follow it.” For a couple of days, they search and wait, until Edna simply shows up as if she was never gone. From there, the story concerns Edna’s mental breakdown that seems to be inexplicably tied to the house she lives in. As Kay and Sam try to deal with Edna and find a solution for her dementia, the house itself is infested with black mold and odd scratching sounds in the walls. Eventually, all of this comes to a head in Relic’s twisted and uncanny ending.

Given Relic’s surreal and eerie the conclusion, it’s difficult to imagine the movie being based on true events. Nevertheless, writer and director Natalie Ericka James took from her personal experiences with her own mother with dementia when writing and filming Relic. In an interview with IndieWire, James shared the moment she got the idea for Relic. It came to her in 2013 when she went to visit her grandmother in Japan. Not only was her grandmother’s house quiet and creepy, but her grandmother also didn’t recognize her. “It really stuck with me,” James said, “this person that had only ever looked at you with love in their eyes, looking at you as a stranger, was really impactful.” After that, she began to see how dementia could be used as the subject of a horror movie.

Relic Is A Metaphor For James’s Experience With Dementia

Inspired by her grandmother who had Alzheimer’s, Relic deals with mental illness. Similar to other recent horror movies, such as The Babadook, which also deals with mental illness, Hereditary, about inherited family trauma, and The Invisible Man, dealing with domestic violence, it has a woman protagonist as its lead. Relic is a metaphor for dementia and the sometimes horrific and confusing things it can do to an entire family.

In Relic, the house itself is used as a representation of Grandmother Edna’s mind as it becomes increasingly confusing and dangerous. The black mold that begins to grow all over the house is used to show dementia spreading throughout her mind, while the creepy scratching sounds represent the terror of a true psychological breakdown.

Interestingly, Relic also takes on the hereditary nature of diseases like Alzheimer’s. By the end of the film, Kay returns to her mother to embrace Grandmother Edna despite the monster she has become, and a small spot of the black mold appears on Kay, signaling the fact that she is next in line for the disease. It’s a mournful conclusion, but also one about coming to terms with death and the inevitable breakdown everyone experiences with age. For James, her real-life experiences with her own grandmother with Alzheimer’s inspired her to make a movie both disturbing and hauntingly beautiful. Based on a true story, Relic is dark, uncanny, and truly heartbreaking.

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