The Invitation (2016)

directed by Karyn Kusama

Kate Brody

In my memory, The Invitation is a masterpiece of low-budget horror cinema. It is clever, well-acted, and gorgeously scored. It deals deftly with grief, specifically grief around the loss of a child. In my memory, The Invitation, which I watched up to a dozen times on my maternity leave, is moving and surprising and utterly terrifying.

I stumbled upon Karyn Kusama’s 2015 film four years late, in 2019. At the time, my husband Chris and I lived in a tiny Queens apartment that we had attempted to convert into a two bedroom for our new baby. In late 2018, we had turned the back living room into our bedroom, our bedroom into the baby’s room, and the strange, wider-than-a-normal-hallway space that had existed at the center of our apartment into our new “living room.” It couldn’t fit a full couch and TV set-up, so we jammed a small brown loveseat and a mounted projector against one wall and called it a day. That windowless, interstitial cell would become the place I spent my last weeks in New York, mostly alone, with the alien that had come out of my own body.

The early days of motherhood are murky—you eat and sleep at odd hours, you spend your time half naked and covered in milk, you feel at once less than and super human. The experience of childbirth had revealed to me something primal and eternal and animal, but also—my brain barely worked. I couldn’t follow the plot of a Friends re-run, with all its farce and chatting and B-story. I had to watch everything in the dark, so the projector would work, but I feared falling asleep and smothering my own baby. The only thing I could follow, the only thing that could keep me awake, the only thing that made any sense—given how raw and intense and scared I already felt—was horror.

As a writer, I have long been a fan of horror movies. Because they are so stripped down, they make excellent craft studies. There is seldom a subplot. There is often limited dialogue. Like fairy tales, horror movies traffic in archetypes, atmosphere, and place. Even as a process tool, I am a fan of horror movies. I have never listened to music when I write—too many lyrics, too many instruments. But I have been known to play a horror movie and use the score as background noise. They are simple and quiet and tense. They activate your nervous system like a cup of coffee. For my work—writing thrillers—they put you in a perfectly paranoid headspace. They’re a vibe.

For a while, after I first brought him home, the baby and I attempted to muddle through Hannibal, the TV show. But it was the wrong kind of horror. Cerebral, campy, and action-packed. I kept falling asleep and losing the plot, waking up to a scream in the middle of a blood-soaked murder scene with no recollection how we had gotten there. Some of the scenes were so gory, I felt perverse watching them with my baby in the room. I googled “are babies affected by scenes of violence?” “Babies horror movies detrimental?” “Gory content + babies?” I discovered that I was already fucking up as a mom. I needed something quieter, shorter, faster, and easier to hold in my head. Something the baby could nap through in his not-yet-recalled Rock’n’Play, so that I could try to write my novel. 

Enter The Invitation.

The Invitation is set in the hills of Los Angeles. It follows a man, Will, who is attending a dinner party at his ex-wife Eden’s house, along with his new girlfriend, Kira, and their mutual friends. Will has not been back to the house since his son with Eden died two years earlier, and for that reason, the reunion holds a great deal of significance. The entire movie takes place in Eden’s stylish midcentury home, at the hellacious dinner party. It becomes clear almost right away that something is wrong—but is Will paranoid, or are Eden and her new husband trying to sell their guests on something new-age and sinister?

During my maternity leave, Chris and I began to entertain the possibility of moving to Los Angeles with our new baby. There were many family and work reasons to do so, but it was scary to me nonetheless. I didn’t know LA. I knew New York. I loved New York. Could I raise a baby in LA? Would I know how to keep him safe?

I barely knew how to keep the baby safe in New York. Chris and I were the first of our friends to have kids, and I felt very alone. I was worried about getting the baby up and down the stairs of our walk-up, so I stayed inside, sometimes for days and days at a time. I lived in terror of the myriad ways that I could fail the person I had created and of all the harm in the world that could befall him. Who had let me—a broke, clueless 27-year-old—take a baby home from the hospital? It suddenly seemed insane.

In those strange months, as my old life was dissolving and being reformed into something else entirely, I watched The Invitation on repeat, like running my tongue over a sore. Over and over, I watched Will’s son die in flashback. Over and over, I watched Eden lost in her grief. Over and over, I indulged my worst fears about LA. The people there seemed somehow vapid and dangerous—reckless, unserious idiots, high on the drama of their own pain.

I revisited the movie for this essay. I have two kids now. We’ve lived in LA for over four years. The baby from that long dark night is an almost-five-year-old, closer to the age of the son in the film.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the music. In my memory, the film’s score was a thin, escalating, stressful scream of string instruments. Instead, it was even quieter than I remembered. Almost silent at times. The setting no longer seemed otherworldly and creepy, but basic, resembling any of the houses in the Hills where my private tutoring clients live. The characters were not unknowable lunatics and Satanic cult freaks. They were pathetic. They spoke too much (presciently, for a movie made in 2015) about trauma and emotional pain. They represented what happens to you when you can’t get out from under it. When you fetishize your suffering and try to carve out a home inside of it. I had understood the appeal once. I wanted to lock myself in my house with everyone I loved and never leave.

The movie was more mature than I remembered it. Maybe because I’m more mature and less afraid. I still think it’s smart and beautiful and underrated, but it didn’t terrify me the same way, because it can’t. Not this version of me, who spends her weekends coaching tee ball and going for bike rides around the Hollywood reservoir. It met me at a different point in my life, and it meant something different. And now I’m trying to figure out what the movie is that could scare my pants off today. I’m on the precipice of a book launch, so I’m thinking maybe it’s time for a Misery re-watch.

Kate Brody is a novelist living in LA. She holds an MFA from NYU, and her work has appeared in Electric Lit, Noema, Literary Hub, The Literary Review, and The Rumpus, among other publications. Her debut thriller Rabbit Hole, which Kirkus called a “timely rumination on true crime, internet obsession, and paranoia,” comes out on January 2, 2024 and is currently available for pre-order. Kate can be found on Instagram and Twitter @katebrodyauthor.