Dementia and contemporary horror movies: gendered ageing and the haunted home

Over the last decade, a small but growing cycle of 'dementia horror' movies were released that revolve around antagonists with dementia, or stories where the condition itself is a monster or parasitic force that erodes the protagonist's self. These films are part of a much larger public discourse about the dementia syndrome and ageing, and a surge in screen stories revolving around protagonists - rather than secondary characters - with dementia. However, there has been limited scholarly analysis of how the key films at the core of this horror cycle thematically represent characters with dementia and the condition itself. This paper examines how three of the most critically significant films in this cycle, The Taking of Deborah Logan (Adam Robitel, 2014), The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015), and Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020), represent characters with dementia in relation to the ageing body and the home. The article argues that these films externalise dementia and its symptoms in ways that transform the home into a haunted house and offer predominantly gendered representations of dementia, drawing on preconceptions and tropes of the abject female body and monstrous-feminine.