Dooba Dooba is written and directed by Ehrland Hollingsworth and is shot almost entirely on surveillance cameras with intercut analog scenes. It follows a babysitter, Amna (Amna Vegha), who is plunged into the strange and awkward from the moment she arrives at the home of Wilson (Winston Haynes), Taylor (Erin O’Meara) and their sixteen-year old daughter, Monroe (Betsy Sligh) – and things only get more weird from there, eventually becoming downright offensive and violent. Wilson, for instance, seems incapable of managing Amna’s name; “It’s these ethnic names . . . .” he offers in explanation, following that up with an attempt to give Amna money for what he calls “retributions” (presumably reparations). It very soon becomes clear that Amna is way too nice for her own good, constantly reassuring everyone else (and, we suspect, herself), that “It’s okay.” She should instead be asserting that, actually, it isn’t okay and she’s leaving. She doesn’t.
Check out the trailer for Dooba Dooba here:
The deep affective dread induced by Dooba Dooba comes not least from the fact that Amna is an incredibly likeable and clearly vulnerable character and that she’s in a house inhabited by a family whose derangement she doesn’t seem to grasp as thoroughly as she should – until it’s too late. Monroe’s parents explain away Monroe’s obvious weirdness (and the fact that she needs a babysitter although she’s sixteen) by telling Amna that her brother was murdered when he was seven and she’s “really anxious” as a result. The “dooba dooba” of the title refers to words anyone in the house must repeat as they’re walking around so that Monroe knows they’re coming. After her parents leave, Monroe emerges and the film progresses through the increasingly strange ways Monroe interacts with Amna. Though the surveillance cameras do give the audience some shots of Monroe’s strange behavior that Amna doesn’t see, Amna sees and experiences plenty of it herself. At one horrifying point, Monroe even punches Amna hard in the face. Still, Amna stays.
Amna (Amna Vegha)
An anchor for Amna is her identical twin sister, Ana, whom she talks to frequently on the phone. Late into the evening, Amna persuades her sister to drive over so they can switch for the rest of the night so she (Amna) can go and meet a contact who could help her singing career – and it’s after Ana arrives that the parents come back home and things descend from the strange into the terrifying.
Dooba Dooba is an interesting film on many levels. It does get pretty terrifying, as it’s almost impossible not to sympathize with Amna (and then Ana). The fact that the film is shot almost entirely on surveillance cameras makes the viewer feel especially helpless, moreover: we are in the room with Amna but at a distance, forced only to watch. But it’s not just the relentlessly mounting dread that makes Dooba Dooba so interesting. Intercut into the surveillance tapes are numerous scenes from other sources – notably, Monroe’s student project on President James Monroe, a clip from the 1940 film, The Ape (William Nigh), a video about performing surgery on the brain, documentary footage of electroshock therapy, and an extended clip from Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” speech of 1964.
All of these clips shift the register of the film’s meanings to something more than this particular horror happening in this particular house to these isolated characters (Amna and Ana). That the film means more – that it might even serve as some kind of allegory – is suggested not least by the fact that the (all white) family each have the name of a dead president: James Monroe, Woodrow Wilson, and Zachary Taylor. We even find out that Monroe’s dead brother was called Roosevelt. Putting this fact at the center, Dooba Dooba actually reminded me a lot of Wes Craven’s The People under the Stairs (1991), in which a Black youth, Fool (Brandon Adams), becomes trapped in the house of two white people (“Daddy” and “Mommy”) whom many have argued represent Ronald and Nancy Reagan along with the horrors of Reaganomics: rising economic inequality, gentrification and exploitative, racially-based housing practices.
Dooba Dooba similarly presents a white family, steeped in the supposedly traditional, middle-class values of the ‘American Dream’ (there is a discussion in Monroe’s school presentation of James Monroe’s 1817 “Era of Good Feelings” speech). Like The People under the Stairs, Dooba Dooba dramatizes the horrors this supposed ideal both represses and is predicated on – the exploitation and bodily abjection of others (usually people of color) consigned to the metaphorical basement undergirding the white middle-class home. (Zach Cregger’s Barbarian delved into this kind of metaphor too.) It is telling that the clips of Monroe’s presentation on James Monroe include the juxtaposition of his being president during the “Era of Good Feelings” while also inheriting his parents’ “hundreds of slaves” who never received what Monroe (like her father) telling calls “retributions.”
William Nigh’s The Ape (1940), intercut into Dooba Dooba
While Craven’s The People under the Stairs has racialized economic practices in its sights, Dooba Dooba has a focus on bodily exploitation and medical practices. There are several clips from documentaries about barbaric medical practices – including a video describing how to cut into the brain. One fictional intertext Hollingsworth weaves into his film is the 1940 ‘mad scientist’ film, The Ape, directed by William Nigh and starring Boris Karloff. Karloff plays a doctor intent on curing a woman’s paralysis by injecting her with spinal fluid from men he kills in the process of acquiring that fluid. Dooba Dooba includes a scene in which Karloff’s first patient/victim asks the doctor, “Am I going to die? . . . Please don’t let me die. Please don’t let me die.” Karloff, though, is interested only in hastening the man’s death in the pursuit of his miraculous cure. This scene from a Hollywood horror film is complemented, a while later, by factual footage (clearly from the 1940s or 50s) of a doctor (who looks not unlike Karloff) administering a brutal electroshock therapy to a restrained man. And both of these scenes resonate with fleeting intercut images Jeffrey Dahmer and his twisted ‘medical’ practices – and with the fate that awaits the film’s protagonist. Dooba Dooba is definitely intent, then, on showcasing the extremely fine line between medical practice and torture, between documentaries about experimental medical techniques and body horror.
In short, I highly recommend Dooba Dooba – both for its effective building up of dread and for the larger ideas (about politics, terror and medical practice) that pervade without supplanting its horror narrative.
Dooba Dooba has won multiple awards (including the Official Selection at Frightfest 2025) and is being released by Dark Sky Films – and I’ll keep you updated on the release date.
