Son of Sara, available streaming now, deals with some familiar horror territory with just enough flourishes and oddities to make it worth checking out. That may sound like faint praise, but the horror genre is probably the most overloaded with low-budget cash grabs, so when an actually interesting low budget film comes along, it’s worth taking note.
The story is nothing ground-breaking as it deals with a young pregnant woman dealing with a possibly Satanic pregnancy. That may sound like a spoiler, but Son of Sara doesn’t waste time or insult your intelligence by dragging things out. If the cold open of a gory murder of a woman giving birth wasn’t enough to tip you off to some wild shit about to go down, the titular Sara is snarfing down some truly vile-looking raw ground beef within the first few minutes.
Honestly, the plot of the film is the weakest element since any horror fan has seen it before and will see it again. Sara’s pregnancy gets weirder, and it turns out the guy who knocked her up comes from a family that has been dealing with fucked up pregnancies for generations, and of course they have a creepy farmhouse, and of course Sara goes there despite the fifty or so red flags.
But none of that matters all that much when it comes to horror. What matters, at least to me, is the effectiveness and mood of the film. In that regard, writer/director Houston Bone (excellent horror director name), shows plenty of promise. He does what he can with the limited budget as far as locations and whatnot with the farmhouse making up for the clearly-not-a-bar bar set. But it’s the sound design of the film that worked on me the most. The refreshingly practical gore (honestly, if this had used a bunch of CG blood, I probably wouldn’t even write about this film at all) is nice, but the sickening spurts and whatnot are great. Even better are the eating sounds during the disgusting ground beef scene and the subsequent stomach noises later. The sound of this film had a visceral effect on me, and that can’t be said about most horror.
That written, a short run time (under ninety minutes) and gurgly gore don’t make for an automatic classic. Some of the odds and ends added to the film make it a tad more interesting, but no amount of queerness or incest can overcome such a tired storyline. Though the ending does give some promise, especially with it claiming to be “Volume One.” But I’ll have to get into spoilers for that.
SPOILERS
So Sara has Satan’s baby and the incest family get satisfyingly killed by a glorious demon baby throat rip and a pitchfork right in the ass. And then Sara and her partner are left with a clearly demonic baby. This is no Damien. It’s a wonderfully practical devil baby. And they love the thing. The film ends with them happily walking out of the farmhouse. Who knows what happens next? Which is why I’m much more interested in what Volume Two might be than what Volume One was. How do you raise such a baby? There’s no explaining away those horns and bloodlust. How will that work? Hopefully, Bone gets a chance to show us. For now, we have this promising start.