This Dark Fantasy Horror Move Brings all Your Childhood Nightmares to Life

The Big Picture

• Moon Garden
  is a dark fantasy horror film that sublimates childhood anxieties through an industrial wasteland.
• The movie follows a comatose child’s journey through a surreal wasteland, battling biomechanical creatures.
• Moon Garden
  explores the terror of growing up, emphasizing the importance of love and perspective to overcome fears.

Moon Garden, written and directed by Ryan Stevens Harris, is a 2022 dark fantasy horror film that mesmerizes and terrorizes by sublimating childhood anxieties through a richly textured, dark industrial wasteland full of terrifying, tear-drinking monsters. The film follows the journey of a child stuck in a coma, wandering through an existential wasteland toward consciousness.

As she progresses through the dreamy labyrinth of her mind, she is confronted by her child-like grasp on her parent’s psychological shortcomings and deteriorating relationship; her negative feelings manifest as terrifying biomechanical creatures. At the same time, her positive memories appear as friends leading her through and defending her from an ever-lurking, despairing monster addicted to her suffering. The film is beautiful and terrifying, a dark fairy tale that exposes the fears and joys of childhood.

What Is ‘Moon Garden’ About?

Emma (Haven Lee Harris) is a precocious little girl who lives with her loving parents. Her mother, Sarah (Augie Duke), is a tender and beautiful woman who deeply loves her daughter. She spends her days snuggling her child and telling her fantastic stories that excite and fascinate the little girl’s imagination. Her father, Alex (Brionne Davis), is a kind man who’s a writer of children’s books, and though frustrated by failure, he dotes on his little girl. However, there are cracks in the relationship between the couple; Sarah is suffering from depression, which has affected her relationship with her husband. The two are physically distant from each other, not often appearing on-screen together, which clearly demonstrates the rift that has grown in their marriage. Alex’s frustrations with his inability to produce a work of notable worth have—in its own way—isolated him from his family and are exacerbated by his wife’s depression.

In a harrowing scene, Sarah scoops her daughter up in the middle of the night, and they try to flee the house. It’s important to note that she is not escaping his abuse but rather fleeing as a result of her deteriorating mental and emotional state. She wants to escape an uncomfortable situation and spare her daughter the discovery, but Alex discovers her escape plan and gently stops them. Through it all, it’s clear that Emma can sense something is wrong but doesn’t understand what it is.

As Sarah and Alex argue about the escape attempt, his disdain for his wife is palpable, and suddenly, in a freak accident, Emma is struck on the head and falls into a coma. Emma wakes to the sound of her mother’s radio static voice in an industrial wasteland full of bubbling toxic goo, a phantasmagoria of sight and sound that is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. At the same time, a chattering monster named Teeth (Morgana Ignis) stalks her, provoking her fears and indulging in her sorrow. Teeth is addicted to her tears and extracts them from a machine in what is one of the most disturbing flurries of cryptic surreality committed to film. Emma must escape Teeth and follow the sound of her mother’s voice toward the land of the wakeful or be trapped in her mind, imprisoned by terror until she dies.

‘Moon Garden’ Exposes the Terror of Growing Up

Children have an imperfect understanding of adults, as they’re reliant on them for their security and emotional state. The stability of one’s parents is the primary determining factor in how a child will grow up, and while they do understand the complexities of adulthood, they pick up on the non-verbal cues that parents broadcast despite their limited knowledge. It’s not for lack of love on the part of her parents that she feels such existential dread, but she can feel the rift between her parents, and this gives her great anxiety. The world of her coma is populated by psychic representations of her fear of adulthood, a biomechanical wasteland full of terror and pain but also of great beauty. In the lower parts of the realm where Teeth drinks her tears, he subjects her to feelings of isolation and loneliness; these feelings reflect the problems between her parents created out of a child’s limited understanding of the world, which makes for a great scary movie.

For Emma to escape Teeth, she must embrace what her parents gave her: to revel in love as an antidote to her sorrow. Her mother’s stories are the foundation of her imagination, and her imagination has imprisoned her in some ways. Her father’s love is evident in a scene where Teeth is attempting to drown the little girl, where she falls into a beautiful memory of a day at the beach when her parents taught her to swim. What is unconsciously learned in the scene is that one needs to kick one’s legs to traverse the ocean of adulthood. Simply put, she needs to be brave, and she needs to fight. So she does, and she escapes. Emma is a composite of her mother’s imagination and heart as well as her father’s tenacity, making her a formidable force when battling against her terrifying enemy.

Innocence Plays a Major Role in ‘Moon Garden’

As Emma is emboldened throughout her journey, she climbs a magic ladder into the sky with a queen from her father’s stories, sitting atop a cloud and drifting further away from her mother’s voice. In a flashback, she remembers when her mother told her that when riding a cloud, one needs to find a way to control it. Emma quickly figures out that the way to prevent the cloud from moving in the wrong direction is to focus on the good things. Perspective is the answer to despair, and when they find themselves trapped in the ether of their haunting depression, it helps them move toward the good stuff, whatever it may be. In this case, it’s a day at the beach, story time with Dad, and cuddling under a blanket with the people who love you. Adults are not perfect, and the world is full of lurking terror, but it only takes a sliver of night to banish the darkness.

The horror elements in Moon Garden are deeply rooted in the little girl’s loss of innocence as she confronts the realities of her parents. The film’s fantasy elements accentuate the horror aspects by creating a world so foreign to our own that it casts doubt on the hero’s ability to navigate the world. It reflects our fears about growing up and dealing with life’s moral gray areas, but offers audiences an antidote to this despair by contrasting the darkness with moments of unbridled love and joy. The result is a terrifying but enthralling movie that merits dozens of rewatches for its rich imagery and emotional depth.

Moon Garden is available to watch on Amazon Prime in the U.S.

Watch on Amazon Prime