"Shiva Baby": Asking Difficult Questions

"Shiva Baby" has been described as an anxious person's horror film and as a feature-length panic attack — but it's still, somehow, hilarious.

Shiva Baby, Screenplay & dir. Emma Seligman (2020)

Question: What does Emma Seligman’s debut film, Shiva Baby, have in common with Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead? Answer: That they are two of the funniest horror films I’ve seen.

And just as Shaun of the Dead mixes zombies with romance with horror with action with comedy, Shiva Baby has you constantly wondering what kind of film it is. It’s inarguably a family drama, but how many laughs make a comedy, and how much tension (and how many jump-scares) make a horror? The point is that Shiva Baby is difficult to pin down.

Its plot, at least, is relatively straightforward. Shiva Baby is about a college senior, Danielle, bumping into her sugar daddy and his family at a shiva for someone she only sort of remembers. According to Seligman, she’d considered shooting the film like a rom-com. And that would’ve worked, though probably not half as well as the unsettling blend of black humour and horror Seligman ultimately chose. She’s called this the …