‘Ma’ knows best
Especially when it comes to revenge.
Warning: If you haven’t seen “Ma” yet or don’t want to read any spoilers about Octavia Spencer’s new thriller, stop reading now!
Really, spoilers ahead!
OK, here we go ...
Did you find yourself hiding behind your hands as you watched the bloody ending of “Ma”?
In Octavia Spencer’s latest thriller, the Oscar winner plays a creepy woman who invites local teenagers into her basement so they can party in peace. Except she’s in fact still furious and damaged after being heartlessly bullied by their parents when they were in high school together. The boozy basement is all part of Ma’s elaborate plan to torture the teens, as a way of bloodily striking back against those who abused her.
One night, after drugging the kids and chaining them in her basement (by their necks, mind you), Ma lets her fury loose.
In real life, filmmakers saved the most gruesome scenes in “Ma” for “basically the last two days of the film” with Spencer, 47, who was a “mama bear” to the younger cast between takes, says director Tate Taylor (“The Help”). “She checked in with them a lot to make sure they were cool.”
And Spencer is into the gritty stuff, he adds: “Octavia loves studying crime and serial killers. She likes the psychology of it all . ... She’s seen every ‘Forensic Files’ known to man, every ‘Dateline NBC’ that’s about a murder. She just loves that stuff. It’s her way of relaxing, strangely.”
Here’s how each of the craziest “Ma” moments went down:
When Ma stitches Haley’s mouth shut for saying the wrong thing
Ma exacts specific revenge on young Haley (McKaley Miller), sewing her lips shut after Haley taunts that she needs to “get a man.” To allow Spencer to stitch the actress’ mouth with a needle and thread, “creepy real” prosthetic lips had
to be applied over Miller’s mouth, says Taylor. And, yes, Spencer was afraid she’d puncture real skin. “The only angst she had was sewing the lips shut because she’s just not a seamstress and she didn’t know how do it right,” says the director. “So that worried her quite a bit.”
When she the chiseled guy’s abs the hot treatment
Ripped athlete Chaz (Gianni Paolo) gets the hot treatment in “Ma,” when Spencer’s character attacks his six-pack with a scalding iron. “He was the stud, the most beautiful, handsome guy, who represented someone Ma could never get back in her day. So she disfigures him,” says Taylor.
When she kisses her prey
Andy (Corey Fogelmanis) represents his own father, who lured a young Ma into a utility closet when they were young and sexually abused her, before humiliating her in front of their whole school. In Ma’s basement, “in his efforts
to save his girlfriend (Diana Silvers), he basically does what his dad did, which is act like he liked Ma and kissed her,” says Taylor. But Ma sees through it this time. “That was history repeating itself in a way, so she stabs him.”
When Ma gives a kid whiteface
Why on earth did Ma paint African American teen Darrell’s (Dante Brown) face white? “That’s Ma inflicting psychological torture on a young black man,” Taylor says.
When she uses dog’s blood to kill her abuser
Twenty years after being humiliated by her classmate Ben (Luke Evans), aka Andy’s dad, Ma decides to treat him like the dog he is, killing him by piping canine blood into his veins. Taylor says he and screenwriter Scotty Landes “were thinking all this stuff has been done in the movies – what hasn’t been done? We were trying to think of something that hasn’t been done before. And we came up with dog blood.”