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There is plenty of spooky content to stream this Halloween weekend, whether you’re in the mood for Psycho or It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. But if you’re looking for something modern, creepy, and women-led, you might want to try Greta, which is airing on HBO tonight at 8 p.m. ET. This psychological thriller from director Neil Jordan (who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for 1992’s The Crying Game) premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2018 before opening in theaters last March, and it’s essentially a B-horror film but with an A-list cast.
The basic premise is this: Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Frances McCullen, a waitress who’s grieving the recent death of her mother. When she finds a high-quality purse was left behind on the subway, she does the right thing by returning it to its owner, Greta Hideg (Academy-Award nominated actress Isabelle Huppert). After she does, the two women connect over coffee and become friends. Everything is going great until Frances discovers a dozen purses identical to the one she found on the subway in Greta’s house. Frances tries to cut off all ties with Greta, but Greta’s not having it. She stalks Frances relentlessly and grows increasingly unhinged. She insists she can be Frances’s new mother. Frances is all, “No thanks!” and Greta goes a little berserk.
Interestingly, Greta came out just a few months before Ma, another psychological horror film about a lonely woman who becomes obsessed with a much younger woman. In Ma, the older woman is Sue Ann “Ma” Ellington, played by Octavia Spencer, who agrees to buy alcohol for a group of teens, as long as they agree to drink it in her basement. When they don’t want to hang anymore, she gets a tad upset. Both Greta and Ma were distributed by Universal Pictures, though Greta was released by Focus Features, a smaller subsidiary of Universal. Both received mixed reviews; at 60 percent, Greta‘s Rotten Tomatoes score is just slightly higher than Ma‘s 54 percent.
This simultaneous release of similar films like this happens more often than you think. The phenomenon is called “twin films,” and it’s a very interesting Wikipedia deep-dive the next time you’re avoiding work. Some other examples include No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits, two 2011 romantic comedies about friends with non-romantic sexual relationships; Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, two 2012 live-action Snow White films; and Churchill and Darkest Hour, two 2017 biopics about Winston Churchill. And of course, let’s not forget the competing Fyre Festival documentaries from Netflix and Hulu. The reason for this phenomenon varies, but one possible explanation is that when a studio realizes there are several similar scripts circulating, it becomes a race to see who can get their movie out first. Fascinating stuff!
Anyways, go ahead and watch Greta on HBO. Hopefully, Ma will be there soon enough!
