Stop-motion has come a long way from the silly penguins and giant peaches of our childhood. In recent years there has been a very strong (and very welcome) push on indie stop-motion horror projects, but very few as haunting and downright gross as Robert Morgan’s new feature Stopmotion. Weaving terrifying images of puppet mayhem with live-action madness, Stopmotion dive deep into the troubled psyche of a young woman tormented by her own hand-crafted horrors.
Stopmotion stars Aisling Franciosi as a struggling stop-motion animator, working through her personal demons with her art. Genre fans will no doubt recognize Franciosi from Jennifer Kent’s sophomore feature Nightingale (2018) and more recently, André Øvredal’s Last Voyage of The Demeter (2023). Her performance here in equally as brooding and haunted, but while those previous roles saw her battling the evil of men and fabled monsters, Stopmotion turns that fight inward as her character, Ella, plumbs the depths of her own trauma.
“A wonderfully f*cked-up blend of live-action and stop-motion horror.“
Animation runs in the family for Ella but she has yet to find a voice for herself. For some time, her days have been spent following the harsh direction of her overbearing and professionally celebrated mother, who has lost the use of her hands before finishing her final film. After she is hospitalized, Ella is given the chance to make something entirely her own. With no one to force her hand, and with the encouragement of a morbidly curious neighbor girl, Ella begins work on a project that feels so dark and so raw, that she’s unsure just where the inspiration has come from.
Completing whole sequences of her film in a fugue state, Ella‘s mind slowly unravels. She isn’t sleeping, she’s becoming suspicious and protective of her work, and the darkness that has crept into her art begins to poison her waking life as well. She dreams of little nightmarish figures crawling onto her bed. She hallucinates creepy bloodshot eyeballs starring in at her from the peephole in her door. Her grip on reality is slipping but the intoxication of seeing her art come to life pushes her further and further into the psychological void that threatens to consume her.
Most of the horror of Stopmotion is shown through stop-motion animation which is gattdang delight. Ella‘s puppets are comprised mostly of raw meat and roadkill. A winning combo if you ask me, but definitely a choice in materials that the people closest to you will see as a giant red flag. Naturally, you’re treated to little spooky moments here and there when we see the progression of Ella’s film, but it’s an extra special treat to see those freaky little figures break into the real world an interact with Ella in increasingly disastrous ways. There are even moments of more subtle horror where Ella tears open her own flesh, her skin as pliable as the mortician’s wax that she uses to sculpt new characters. It’s all a wonderfully f*cked-up blend of the two worlds, even if the backbone of the story is a familiar skeleton of trauma exploration.
The pain of Ella’s long-forgotten memories thrived in the recesses of her mind like a mold or a cancer, feeding on her repressed torment and growing millimeter by millimeter until its presence was unmistakable. Her mother describes the act of stop-motion as “bringing life to dead things” which couldn’t be truer in Ella’s case. Yes, she is using dead animals to craft her puppets but let a girl play with dead foxes if she wants to play with dead foxes. Geez! What’s more important are the buried memories she has brought back to life and how they are affecting her in the real world. On one hand, she’s finally working through her trauma, but the costs of her head-on approach might be more than she can afford to pay.
“Stopmotion suffers from the same familiar trauma tropes and story beats, there are still great moments of hand-crafted horror“
Stopmotion is a modern, by-the-books exploration of the psychological fallout of horrific experiences. It’s not at all unlike the other dozen trauma-infused horror movies you saw last year, and it’s undoubtedly not the last one you’ll see this year. To be fair, trauma has always been the backbone of the genre and the agreed upon template for telling these sensitive stories has made them acceptable, but also very average.
How we talk about psychological damage is nothing new, but stop-motion animation always feels fresh and there really is nothing quite like Robert Morgan’s creepy little characters. Although Stopmotion suffers from the same familiar trauma tropes and story beats, there are still great moments of horror and exceptionally well-crafted sequences of animation to keep the madness in motion.
Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion is in select theaters now and will premiere on Shudder May 31st. Let us know what you thought of this stop-motion slice of psychological madness in the Nightmare on Film Street discord!
