Director: Danny Villanueva Jr.
Writer: Danny Villanueva Jr.
Stars: Michael Hargrove, Lisa Wilcox, Asya Meadows
Synopsis: Ozzie Gray video documents her investigation into the traumatic events from her early childhood, which involved her late grandmother, Dorothy Bell.
“Can I hold the camera, Daddy?” asks five-year-old Ozzie Gray (played by Arya Washington and voiced by Eva Williams) while Darren (Michael Hargrove) is filming her watching a childhood television puppet show. The song playing on the show is “There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly” and it will become the guiding roundelay for Danny Villanueva Jr.’s found footage horror, What Happened to Dorothy Bell. The old woman of the nursery rhyme starts with a small, strange thing happening to her – she swallows a fly. Thereafter, she swallows a spider to catch the fly, then something to swallow to catch the spider and so on until the the final line is “I think she’ll die.” It’s the path the adult Ozzie (Asya Meadows) takes to discover what happened to both herself and her beloved grandmother, Dorothy (Arlene Arnone); who, for no conceivable reason, became violent almost overnight and attacked her granddaughter before committing arson and then dying.
Years later, Ozzie is watching the tape (among others), and her repressed memories are resurfacing. She’s in zoom therapy sessions with Dr. Robin Connelly (Lisa Wilcox) reading Emily Dickinson aloud and discussing the power of literature and the love of books her librarian grandmother instilled in her. She has discovered that her grandmother did something terrible to her. Young Ozzie picked up the camera to play hide and seek with Dorothy late at night, only to find her slumped in her bedroom play fort wearing a creepy mask the child had made for herself. Dorothy wanders the house and attacks the child with a large knife slicing open her face.
Ozzie has decided to keep a video journal of her investigations into her past and looking back into what happened to the much beloved local librarian Dorothy Bell. Returning to her hometown of Spellbound, Illinois and the home where she lived with her parents and Dorothy, Ozzie is determined to discover how her grandmother became an urban legend – the ‘Witch of Spellbound’ and if her spirit, as reported, still haunts the library.
Ozzie’s feelings of betrayal by her parents Darren and Victoria (Yera Constable) at keeping the truth of her grandmother’s attack from her leave her isolated. Both Darren and Victoria insist that Dorothy suffered from inherited mental illness and there was nothing supernatural happening – yet Ozzie has found evidence that Dorothy claimed a book was speaking to her telling her to do bad things. Ozzie’s first stop is the library where Dorothy hanged herself. The staff won’t help her but George (Steven Alonte) the janitor who knew and cared for Dorothy gives her after-hours access, leading to Ozzie to become caught in her own obsession with the past and a ‘Necronomicon’ like book that has claimed many lives since its inception in 1892.
What Happened to Dorothy Bell? thrives in its scripting and use of screens and ‘found footage’ to cover its small budget. There are echoes of The Blair Witch Project in how Danny Villanueva Jr. sets up Ozzie’s descent into the occult and her own possible inherited madness. Danny Villanueva Jr. leaves sections open to interpretation as to whether certain aspects of the film are happening or if they are Ozzie’s projection of her fracturing psyche. Whether there is a demonic book responsible for countless deaths that has found a new body to inhabit through an incantation hidden in the text, or if Ozzie is hallucinating a great deal of the action in the film seems to be answered in the former until the horrifying dénouement.
Either way the audience chooses to read the film, What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is an uneasy and excellent slice of small budget horror with sustained tension throughout. Everything Ozzie does is like the nursery rhyme at the beginning; one small thing happens, and she compounds it with doing something else which can only lead to doom. Her consuming desire to have her beloved grandmother mentally exonerated for her actions lead her down the path of destruction her parents wanted to protect her from.
What Happened to Dorothy Bell? is as sad as it is chilling. A brilliant and upsetting film which uses its chosen format to great effect.