In The Taking of Deborah Logan (Adam Robitel, 2014, USA), doctoral student Mia is making a research documentary about Deborah, who lives with Alzheimer's disease. Deborah constantly mends the telephone switchboard locked up in the attic and claims to see a dark figure from her past. Her daughter asserts that Deborah's behaviour is nothing concerning – she is simply (re-)living the past in the present, as she worked as a switchboard operator for the most of her adult life. As the documentary-within-the-film progresses, the film-makers come to realise that the behaviour displayed by Deborah is not characteristic of people living with dementia. Deborah exhibits extremely violent and aggressive tendencies, her skin sheds like a snake, and her mouth is able to open wide enough to swallow the entire head of a young girl. In turn, both Mia and the audience discover that Deborah, who is characterised as slowly emptied of her personality and presence because of her dementia, is actually possessed by a man whom she had murdered years ago. In other words, in The Taking of Deborah Logan, through the lens of horror, the negotiations between the past and the present as experienced by the person living with dementia, are surfaced and made visible.

In a similar vein, The Visit (M. Night Shyamalan, 2015, USA) sees teenagers Becca and Tyler visit their grandparents for the first time as their mother goes on a holiday. Becca, who loves cinema and wants to perfect the art of film, decides to document the whole visit with both her digital video camera and her Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera. The teenagers find that their bedtime is unusually early, and that they are instructed not to leave their room after 9.30pm. They soon find out why: when night falls, their grandmother goes into a maniacal fury and charges around the house naked scratching at doors. Throughout, though the film is shot to strongly evoke a supernatural film, with specific allusions to films such as Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007, USA) and Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998, Japan) amongst other horror films, the affect of horror really comes from the idea that the grandparents are old and that the grandmother lives with dementia.