Experiencing Interruptions?

The Elder

A mother-daughter horror film. A woman loses her mother in a corn maze. A nightmare about the terrors of caregiving.

  • Risa Mickenberg
    Director
    Tumbleweed In A Box, Los Angelinos. Chance Series
  • Risa Mickenberg
    Writer
    Egg (Tribeca Film Festival 2019)
  • Risa Mickenberg
    Producer
  • Sarah Andrew
    Key Crew
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Psychological thriller, Horror, Art Film, family drama, dark comedy, women
  • Runtime:
    5 minutes 1 second
  • Completion Date:
    January 3, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    4,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Risa Mickenberg

Risa Mickenberg is the editor and founder of Hermette Magazine, the aspirational publication for lady hermits, featured in The Daily Beast, AirMail, Australian and New Zealand public radio.
She wrote the feature film EGG (2019): a dark, anti-family comedy that reconceives motherhood, (premier Tribeca Film Festival), starring Alysia Reiner, Christina Hendricks, Anna Camp, Gbenga Akinnagbe and David Alan Basche. 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
Most recently, her video + live performance REQUIEM FOR DEAD PHONE NUMBERS was part of Phil Niblock’s: Experimental Intermedia at Fridman Gallery in NYC.
FURY! THE HOMECOMING, the first episode in her six-hour adaptation of THE ORESTEIA , co-written by Olga Taxidou, was recently presented by the Hellenic Studies Dept at NYU, read by a cast of extremists including Penny Arcade, Max Sharam, Penny Lynn White.
She teaches film at Vermont College of Fine Art. She has been a film fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell. She is a member of WGA and SAG/AFTRA. She has been named by Shoot Magazine as “A Director To Watch.”

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Director Statement

I wanted to make a horror film that was truly scary to women, with mother/daughter dynamics rather than gore. Usually in horror, a woman is threatened by violence. The fear in THE ELDER is related to caretaking, to aging, to loss, to identity. We shot it from above, by drone, because seeing a scene from above, as an out-of-body experience, is particular to people experiencing trauma.
This film is the distillation of a year of role reversal and of helping my diabetic mother when she got pancreatic cancer. It takes place in a corn maze that my mother and actually I got lost in while she was well. It evoked the Minotaur and the Labyrinth and that childlike tendency to hide.