“Ah, why should all mankind
For one man’s fault, be condemned,
If guiltless?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

It is fair to say Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the greatest stories ever written. Not for the beauty of its language, though it has some beautiful language, but for its endurance and for its breadth.

Even if you have never read the book, you know it for its essential themes. They are mythic in proportion and so infinitely applicable: Frankenstein is a Creation story. It is a story about loneliness. It is a story about ugliness. It is a story about love. It is a story about yearning. It is man vs. nature narrative. It is a man vs. God narrative. It is a man vs. man narrative. It is a gender narrative. It is a disability narrative. It is a queer narrative. It is a story about death. About fatherhood. About motherhood. About a father’s inability to bear a child and therefore achieve motherhood. His frustration with that. His lacking. His forgiveness—his desire to be forgiven! It is a story about the things man abhors within himself and the lengths he will go to create distance between himself and those things. And on and on.

Mary Shelley has been credited as the inventor of the science fiction novel. Echoes of her work reverberate in that genre and in horror—Frankenstein is present in the horror trope of the immortal villain, in the bond between that immortal villain and his mortal pursuer, in countless stories of scientists who, blinded by hubris—oops!—create monstrosities.

You can find Frankenstein in less-expected places, too, if you are prone to looking for it. Which I am. I have found Frankenstein, for instance, in James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” whose protagonist is at once so desiring of love and so self-hating that he becomes monstrous.

Critical essays about Frankenstein abound. My copy of the novel includes readings of the story from psychoanalytic, gender and queer studies, Marxist, post-colonial, and cultural perspectives. It may all be too much. Frankenstein is a story so well-ingrained into our cultural imagination that the Doctor’s surname can be used as a verb: to frankenstein something is to create it from disparate parts.

Some filmmakers may find this expansiveness overwhelming, but it is Frankenstein’s mythic quality that Guillermo del Toro said drew him to adapting it.

“What I find beautiful is that when you create a universal myth, whether it’s Frankenstein, Pinocchio, Dracula, or Sherlock Holmes, the myth itself rises so far above the original material that any interpretation is equally faithful if done with sincerity, power, and personality,” he told Mundo America.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) is a brutal, visually striking epic that maintains the book’s essential plot with a few serious alterations. Del Toro adds characters, switches their roles around, keeps them alive longer than was originally written. His task is to find the places where an old, expansive myth can speak to what is new and particular.

Del Toro’s depiction is, unlike the 1931 adaptation, but in keeping with the novel, empathetic toward the monster. It casts its most critical eye on the Doctor, Victor Frankenstein, who is brutish in his intellectual pursuits, egotistical, and often cruel. He is as he’s always been: laser-focused on innovation at the expense of his relationships and well-being. But in del Toro’s making, Victor is willing without question to receive money from a weapons manufacturer to fund his life-making pursuit. There is nothing subtle about this plot addition: Death begets life; violence begets capitalist innovation.

The original writing doesn’t linger on the grotesquery of Dr. Frankenstein’s work the way this one does. Victor harvests corpses en masse from the battlefields of the Crimean War. At the top of his gothic castle, in the throes of feverish creation, he saws unflinchingly through a purpling leg, pulls the flesh from a hand, drags mangled bodies through blood and discards them in heaps. And why should he be sensitive? The cobblestone alleyways of London where we first meet Victor are stained with blood from the butcher shops, just as the battle-torn fields of Europe are soaked with the blood of fallen men. There is blood outside and inside, all reminders that the body is temporary, and that this may be life’s truest blessing.

Unless, of course, you are Frankenstein’s monster. For the monster, there is no such thing as death, nor, as he points out, the punishment and absolution that comes with it. He is damned to forever walk the earth—a mistake from the moment he is animated.

Unlike Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, del Toro’s Doctor does not damn his creation immediately. He is at first enamored with the creature, pressing his head to its chest to hear proof of the heart he compelled to beat. But this does not last. Victor ultimately has no patience for the stupidity of new life, or of life in general. He does not have what it requires to nurture a brain that is new to existence. Dr. Frankenstein is not afraid of what he’s created so much as exasperated with it. It doesn’t learn fast enough. It doesn’t have anything to say besides repeating its very first word: ’Victor.’ The Doctor has achieved something miraculous, but it isn’t enough.

“Is it intelligent?” Victor’s brother William asks, upon being told of his brother’s success. “Victor,” he repeats, “is it intelligent?”

Science fiction is so often a critique of its own field. Movies like The Fly (1986), Re-Animator (1986), Ex Machina (2014), Jurassic Park (1993), and so on can be read as moral fables about the folly in man’s attempts to either outwit or become God. Frankenstein is said to be the originator of this line, though Shelley’s relationship with religion is somewhat unclear. She was a baptized Christian, married to a well-known atheist, who herself seemed to fall somewhere in between—what we might call ‘spiritual.’

What she had, it is clear from her writing, was a respect for life. This is what Victor lacks in the early phases of his career, and what he finds again when he remembers that he is in love and is loved in return. His fatal flaw is that he is concerned not with sustaining life, but with outwitting death—two fundamentally different goals. To sustain life is to nurture and value its essential qualities—its beauty, its fragility, its slowness, its stupidity, its limitations.

What many of us recognize as wretched in technological innovation is a result of this Frankensteinian disease: innovation for the sake of innovation, progress without consideration for the soul, an attempt to eliminate that which is fundamentally human. Fear of tech, which even those of us raised to depend on it are beginning to feel, is not simply a fear of the technology itself, but of the people behind the tech and what they imbue it with—or what it, and perhaps they, lack. This is a tale as old as Genesis, and it is a fatherhood narrative, of a sort: Lonely men beget lonely creations.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein ends as Shelley’s book does: Where it began. On a steamship frozen in ice, bound for the Arctic. At the start of the film, the crew’s frozen, suffering men had wanted to turn around and go home, to which their Captain responded: “If man will be free, we’re setting sail forwards, no matter the cost.” 🪱

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Idiot”

The hand of a teenage girl hangs out the back door of a Plymouth Gran Fury, cherry red fingernails grazing the white blooms of roadside Baby’s Breath.

“It's funny,” the girl says. “I used to daydream about being old enough to go on dates and drive around with friends in their cars… It was never about going anywhere... just having some kind of freedom I guess. Now we're old enough, but where the hell do we go right?”

In another scene, in another era, a gaggle of over-eager boys cluster around the front door of another blonde teenage girl’s house. This one coyly smokes a cigarette; a knowing smirk plays across her lips.

“We got a car, a full tank,” one of the boys says. “We’ll take you anywhere you wanna go.”

Ahead of the girls is a future supposedly full of freedom, the kind promised by open roads that lead “wherever they wanna go,” boys and men willing to chauffeur them, gas tanks full of petroleum made less crude, more refined just for their privileged use.

But now, behind the girl in the car, a man approaches with a chloroform-soaked handkerchief, and behind the girl with the cigarette, one sister is stringing herself up from the rafters while the other swallows a fistful of pills. And all across suburban America in cars parked by roadsides and idling in driveways, in neat brick houses flanked by infected elm trees, in the piercing blue of over-chlorinated above-ground swimming pools, freedom seems only to signal death.

Despite the fact that more than half of Americans live in them, the sub-division style of development that began to creep across our landscape in the mid-twentieth century retains an anxiety-inducing presence in our cultural imagination. From Halloween (1978) to Donnie Darko (2001) to Get Out (2017), the suburbs have been the preferred setting for countless horror films.

Just the idea of suburbia, for some, calls to mind a whole range of symptoms indicative of post-modern American ickiness. The eerie aesthetics of assimilation, the consumerist banality of a strip mall—nods to a history of white flight, racial segregation, environmental destruction, the soul-crushing conveyor belt of a 9 to 5 routine, the ‘good fences make good neighbors’ mentality that keeps the HOA at bay. Little boxes made of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.

So, It Follows joined a legacy of horror grounded in suburbia when it came out in 2014, a hit with audiences and critics. In the film, 19-year-old suburbanite Jay has sex with a man who, in effect, curses her. The curse is that she will be followed by slow-moving creatures who want to kill her. They take on human form, but are invisible to others. In order to get rid of these followers, she’s told she has to pass the curse on to someone else, via sex.

The film takes place outside of Detroit, and bears all the hallmarks of American suburbia as seen through the lens of its teenage inhabitants. Two sisters and their two friends lounge in bedrooms and living rooms and on cement patios; they watch mindless TV and wander the streets alone, wearing short shorts, smoking clandestine cigarettes, sipping soda out of big plastic cups. They gather on the playground after-hours; the swings a set piece in the juvenile drama of their lives. One girl reads Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” on a smart phone shaped like a pink shell.

This is a similar landscape to the one the Lisbon girls, of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), inhabit in the 1970s. There are numerous similarities between the two films. The Virgin Suicides also takes place in the suburbs outside of Detroit. The protagonist in both is a pretty blonde exploring her sexuality for the first time, encountering the danger that seems inherent to feminine beauty.

Yet, the girls in The Virgin Suicides are smothered by adult supervision. They are kept under strict watch by an overbearing mother who does not allow them to ride in cars with other teens, date, become cheerleaders, or, eventually, leave the house at all. Other parents in The Virgin Suicides also seem to be ever-present; they come together to rip out a fatal fence in the wake of the first sister’s suicide, chaperone their children at parties and school dances, and throw comically problematic debutante “coming-out” parties for their daughters in country clubs.

By contrast, in the It Follows version of suburbia, the kids are on their own. Not once does a parent step in as their children steal away in cars on overnight trips, date strange men, and—in one instance—literally shoot each other with a gun. The adults in this film are mostly drunk or invisible, leaving the adolescents to fend for themselves against the horrors of the outside world. Ironically, the effect—over-parenting, lack-luster parenting—is essentially the same.

If The Virgin Suicides presents a vision of suburbia that represses, traps, and ultimately destroys beauty and sexuality, then It Follows presents the flip side of that coin—a suburbia inhabited by a population that’s grown comfortable operating under the illusion of freedom. The absent parents of It Follows have sorted out the American dream, now they are free to let their children live in it. Their daughters, under-supervised and over-privileged, struggle with the anxiety of knowing there is danger in the world, if not at their doorsteps.

“I was drawn to the movie as a way of making a film about dread and anxiety,” It Follows director Robert David Mitchell told Slate. “I think it’s more about the feeling of waiting for something. You understand how terrible things can get, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen, or how, or where.”

In the 20th century, a perfect storm of suburbanization brewed in the U.S. FDR’s New Deal creations, including the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Association, post-war economic prosperity, the invention of the streetcar and automobile, and the accessibility of credit cards allowed more people in the U.S. to buy homes than ever before.

Suburban communities of greater than 10,000 people grew 22.1 percent between 1940 and 1950, while planned communities grew 126.1 percent, according to The American Yawp. Over the next 20 years, 83 percent of population growth in the U.S. took place in the suburbs.

The history of personal transportation is intimately tied with the history of the ‘burbs. Newly affordable vehicles and the construction of highways made it possible for more people to live outside of cities—together, they furthered the individualism that has since become an indelible symbol of American freedom.

“A car owner need not worry about train schedules,” writes Ted V. Mcallister. “He could leave at 10 am, or he could leave at 10:15 am. He was master of his time… To Americans at mid-century, the car, perhaps more than any other object, represented freedom—the freedom of the individual.”

No city better represents the coupling of the American suburb and the automobile better than Detroit. As a manufacturing and automotive hub, Detroit flourished in the late 19th and 20th centuries. With increasing affluence came a desire on the part of its wealthier residents to leave the city and spread out to greener pastures.

“Twenty years ago there was a sharp dividing line between living in the city and living in the country,” wrote one reporter in a 1928 edition of The Detroit Free Press. “Now, however, the situation is gradually reversing itself; for today the better class of new homes are being built in the suburban areas, away from the noise and confusion of the city. They have every city convenience available with perfect roads for the motor car.”

What followed is a history many people know well: Redline mapping in 1939 targeted neighborhoods in the Detroit Metro Area that were inhabited by or even located near communities of color, marking them “hazardous” to investment. Neighborhoods that were not racially segregated received lower HOLC grades, while government appraisers gave better grades to wealthier, non-immigrant white neighborhoods, many of which had segregation baked into zoning, housing, and schooling policies. The Detroit Metro Area became the most racially segregated city in the country. Such horror films as Barbarian (2022) depict the depleted, deserted suburbs that have resulted from Detroit’s boom and bust.

Detroit was the automotive capital of the United States; the city where the first-ever “affordable” family car, the Ford Model T, was born and manufactured. It wasn’t just that suburban economic stability relied on the automobile, employing thousands all up and down the ladder, the car also became vital to many citizens’ cultural lives. The city exported this individualistic model of freedom, making it possible for people country-wide to visit newly built drive-in movie theaters and drive-in restaurants, and travel across the country on “road trips.”

“Shopping centers opened with the auto-driver in mind, new motels catering to the car-traveler popped up along desolate highways, and any number of new amusement destinations, from Disneyland to Rock City, opened to take advantage of a nation vacationing on wheels,” McAllister writes.

There was a downside to this new car-enabled freedom; a paradoxical dependency that kept people stuck in the lifestyles that had once felt revolutionary. A car was no longer just a key unlocking previously undiscovered sources of pleasure, employment, and comfort. It became a necessary operating cost, among others, to sustain the suburban lifestyle.

“A car gave a father the freedom to buy a house in the suburb while keeping his job in the city,” McAllister writes. But, “after years of commuting, this same father was likely to feel trapped. He couldn’t possibly give up his car since he had organized his life around it. Freedom lost.”

The Virgin Suicides is not necessarily a horror film, but it is full of foreboding. The very first scene in the movie is of an elm tree being marked for removal. Endangerment is a recurring motif—not just of wildlife, but of the lifestyle the film’s humans have come to enjoy.

"Everyone dated the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls,” the narrator says, near the film’s end. “People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our auto industry.” This overture clarifies that we, the viewers, are looking at the neighborhood from a future where it no longer exists. The Lisbon girls perish alongside the dream of suburbia.

It Follows, which has no distinct time setting, places us in a bleaker suburban enclave, with more slippages between their protected world and what lays beyond.

“When I was a little girl my parents told me I wasn't allowed to go south of 8 mile,” says Jay’s friend Yara. “I didn't even understand what that meant. It wasn't until I got a little older that I realized that was where the city started and the suburbs ended. I started thinking how weird and shitty that was. I had to ask permission to go to the state fair with my best friend and her parents just because it was a few blocks past the border.”

The man who gives Jay the follower-sickness to begin with has been staying in a decaying old house in the “inner city.” To get to his house, Jay and her friends pass the scenery of a depleted Detroit. The script describes the drive south along Interstate 75: “broken buildings wave from the edge of the expressway, gutted plants momentarily block out the harsh sun. Dangerous streets and alleyways loom along their path.” This is the future The Virgin Suicides foretold—the rot of separatism beginning to spread.

As the Lisbon girls are isolated further and further from society, Lux Lisbon seeks freedom via endless sexual encounters on the roof of her home, all attempts to be held, rather than trapped. But because of her restricted life, these encounters can only be brief and unsatisfying. At the end of each interaction, she is forced to return to her captivity. She kills herself, ultimately, in a car.

The end of It Follows finds Jay hand in hand with the boy who has loved her from the movie’s start. It’s not a happy ending, per se, but it is one in which she still has the love and support of her friends. Everyone survives. Without even being able to see the monsters, the teenagers band together to come up with schemes to liberate Jay from her torture. This is, interestingly, an inversion of the “final girl” narrative. Rather than ending the movie alone and alive, Jay finds safety in togetherness. She isn’t the lone virgin who survives by virtue of her purity. She lives because she is loved.

“Even though the characters open themselves up to danger through sex, it's the act of living that opens themselves up to danger,” Mitchell said of It Follows. “And it's sex and love that—at least temporarily—allow us to live in the moment, and keep death at bay.”

Last week I watched Donald and Melania exit their motorcade and enter the White House. He is flanked, in his second term, by all the makings of a techno-oligarchy, the boy geniuses of early 2000s Silicon Valley all grown up and taking their place at the right hand of power while California burns.

Ecologists and land management officials have pointed to the haplessness of the built environment—residential areas encroaching further and further into places where regular burns are necessary to maintain the forest’s natural balance.

“The problems of today were created many years ago when officials approved large-scale development in high-risk areas without adequate safeguards,” J.P. Rose, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told NBC News.

For some time, we have enjoyed the convenience and splendor of suburban sprawl. But it has taken sacrifice to our cities, our forests, our world to sustain that convenience.

The ideas we have about freedom no longer make sense. We still rely on the old individualist markers: cars flying down open roads, a lone eagle spreading its wings against a clear blue sky. But the cars on the highways are filling the atmosphere with fumes, the birds are fleeing with the smoke of our smoldering neighborhoods. Now we're old enough, but where the hell do we go, right?

Many of us will begin looking for new symbols of freedom—the kind that come not from individual release, but collective liberation. We’ll imagine a version of American freedom that is the opposite of manifest destiny, one grounded in digging deeper into our struggles rather than fleeing from them to a place where the grass will surely be greener (for some of us). In this context, freedom isn’t represented by a car but by a bus or a train, where everyone travels together. And suburbia, in this context, cannot represent freedom if it doesn’t embody the true value of community, if it isn’t a place where we care for our children and their futures.

When suburbia is at its worst, it represents a paradoxical togetherness; all the trappings of a community with too few of the support systems. I’ve seen it said a few times recently that “we need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.” As the planet heats up, those of us who are not used to discomfort will have to adjust. And resistance will be uncomfortable, too, as it will require us to give up some of our luxuries. There is a discomfort to riding public transportation, in comparison to the air-conditioned isolation of a sedan. In our togetherness I expect we’ll find new sources of comfort, in the opportunities we’ll have to shelter one another, learn from one another, resist the encroachment of authoritarianism, stop allowing ourselves to be divided and distracted by the quick fix of social media, the muddle of culture wars.

What do we mean by freedom, now? There is the freedom our new political representatives espouse, the freedom of every man for himself. There is the freedom offered by our extractive economic models, the freedom of “choice” and convenience. There is the freedom the new class of billionaire tech owners seem to be referencing when they talk about “free speech.” There is the freedom I used to believe in, when I was a teenager dreaming of getting a license, getting a car, getting out of my town. The pursuit of these freedoms has only ever led me toward a more dissociative kind of disentanglement with the world, an inability to ever truly be where I am, to truly see who I’m with—the tired faces on the Q train as it shuttles between Manhattan and Brooklyn, the skateboarders in the fountain at Washington Square Park, the town council meetings in the old Pennsylvania courthouse—and to be grateful for the forced togetherness inherent to the spaces we share, where at least freedom doesn’t mean freedom from each other. 🪱

Recommended

Donate to the California Wildfire Recovery Fund

The abuse narrative in It Follows, via Reddit

A Suburban Mindset Has Taken Over Life in America, Jason Diamond

The film I was ready to be unimpressed with, is, in brief, about a 50-year-old Jane Fonda-esque exercise video star named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who takes an illicit drug called “The Substance” that allows her to spend seven out of 14 days in the body of a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley). Sparkle abuses the drug, of course, which leads to the extreme deterioration of her body.

Even in my overly analytical state, I was ultimately, and thankfully (isn’t it nice to enjoy things?), won over by The Substance, and I can pinpoint the exact moment when it happened: Sparkle, in her 50-year-old form, is attempting to go on a date but cannot bring herself to leave her apartment. She keeps returning to the mirror, reapplying makeup and upping the ante of her outfit to be first more and then less revealing. Finally, in lipstick and a cleavage-covering scarf, she puts her hand on the doorknob, but like poor Lot’s wife, she turns back. Leering through the penthouse window is a comically large billboard featuring her younger replacement in a cut-out pink leotard. The billboard is so absurdly imposing that it could only have been intentionally absurd. I felt as if I were locking eyes with writer, director, and co-producer Coralie Fargeat: I had to surrender my defenses; I saw what she was doing.

Again, I am among the majority of viewers who thought The Substance was “good” (though I do not think it earned its two-hour-twenty-minute runtime). That said, I’m no arbiter of taste, and I’m willing to take in opinions counter to mine. Maybe there’s something I missed or an argument that might allow me to see the art anew. True to form, the internet had no problem delivering adverse takes.

The first review I’ll reference here appeared in Slate and is written by Dana Stevens; the second is by Emily Gould for The Cut. Both writers felt the same about The Substance: They hated it.

Neither piece of criticism convinced me fully of its writer’s central objections, but Stevens put up a good fight. She acknowledges that The Substance “evokes… all enduring classics of the horror genre,” and is backed by relevant references to that point, though she ultimately concludes that the film disappoints in terms of “intellectual heft.”

“After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already,” Stevens writes.

Personally, I saw the film’s knock-you-over-the-head symbolism and plot simplicity as purposeful; fablistic rather than realistic—a response that Stevens deftly anticipates, when she writes “Fans of The Substance may object that her bluntness is a deliberate style choice, and the filmmaker would no doubt agree.”

I am interested in criticism as an investigation of choices. Stevens attempted to view the film from a perspective beyond her own; she sought to understand the director and writer’s intent, and based her judgment of the film’s merit on a range of externalities and viewpoints.

Gould’s article, on the other hand, does none of that. Instead, she comes to the ironic conclusion that because Demi Moore is “one of the most beautiful 62-year-olds on the planet” it’s not believable that she would “sacrifice everything to allow a glistening Margaret Qualley to burst forth from [her] spinal column.” She ignores, or is oblivious to, the fact that it is precisely because people think that Moore/Sparkle is so beautiful that she is willing to risk everything to maintain such acclaim.

Several times, Gould asserts that Moore/Sparkle—because, in talking about Sparkle, we’re also entering into a meta-narrative about the famous woman playing her—“looks fantastic,” and that, naked, “she looks great, thin and lithe with preternaturally pert boobs and just the tiniest bit of normal-human ass-sag.” Why, oh why, Gould asks, would someone whom I believe to be so beautiful, take such a massive risk? In making her point, I argue that Gould becomes a real-life representative of the capricious, culturally ingrained beauty standards the film attempts to puncture.

If I understand her argument correctly, Gould doesn’t find the film believable partly because she doesn’t see how someone like Moore/Sparkle could consider herself ugly. She wanted more realistic proof that Elisabeth Sparkle is aging: “What a thoroughly chilling—because familiar—moment it would have been to have Elisabeth notice some minor change in her pristine appearance, a stray, unruly gray chin hair or the shock of a vein protruding on an otherwise smooth thigh?”

Sure, Sparkle looks in the mirror all the time in The Substance, and the reflection, to the vast majority of us, is stunning. But her beauty has never been a matter of the image in the literal mirror. The reality of her beauty lies in the amorphous, conceptual world of public opinion—a warped mirror. Gould seems to forget that there is no such thing as beauty; that Demi Moore is “beautiful,” is a subjective opinion, as absurd as that may seem. Without getting too existential about it, beauty doesn’t exist in the same way that a cup or a chair exists (I’m not going to go so far into existentialism as to question the reality of objects); it’s a concept that humans have invented and reinvented over time. When Sparkle is being showered with praise for her beauty, she believes that she is beautiful. When her producer Harvey (played by the magnificently disgusting Dennis Quaid), fires her from her job for being too old, she believes that she is too old. When she overhears Harvey saying that she’s washed up, in her world that means, definitively, that she is washed up, because what men like Harvey have said about her has always been the pivot upon which her success, and her life, depends.

When Gould writes, “The process of aging naturally is disgusting, this movie seems to be saying,” she is at once missing the point and making it. The point is that we think Demi Moore is age-defyingly beautiful. The point is that she doesn’t have gray chin hairs or varicose veins. The point is that beauty is fickle; it can be denied even when it seems obvious to the rest of us. Sparkle does not see her own worth because her self-worth is based only on feedback. That Moore is considered a paragon of ageless beauty, is, I think, essential to the film’s premise. And if there is a larger moral, which Gould seems to want, I would argue that it’s the exact opposite of what she suggests: The process of “aging naturally” would be far preferable to the fate that befalls Sparkle by the film’s end, in which she is rendered physically monstrous. Importantly, in this final act, it is only Sparkle’s body that has transformed; in a sense, her body is only catching up to her brain, which remains as disfigured as it was in act one. No matter how beautiful we think the actress playing Sparkle is, she begins and ends the film as an “ugly” monstrosity, a being with no intrinsic sense of purpose, no family or friends, nothing to live for but the shallow adoration of a fickle public and a rotten industry.

I’m now going to give Gould a break and jump into a larger point about film criticism, namely horror criticism:

I’m not typically interested in assessing whether a movie is good or bad. But I do read reviews, clearly. When review-oriented film criticism is at its best, the writer is well aware of the context in which a film is made, the references a director or writer is attempting, and the genre in which the film is operating—its rules, tropes, and history. When it’s at its worst, the writer is viewing a film in a vacuum, making assumptions about what a director is attempting to say or do without investigating those assumptions further.

As I wrote recently, I find that people issue the least worthy opinions about horror movies when they aren’t in on “The Joke”—The Joke being that believability and unpredictability are not necessarily the point. To put it another way: Market value refers to the rule of supply and demand in capitalism; the price of something is determined by what people are willing to pay. Horror operates similarly: The believability of a film is entirely dependent on what people are willing to believe. And horror audiences are willing to believe quite a lot. So the market value of a horror film is not about whether it’s realistic; in fact, it’s often the opposite. The market value of a horror film is often whether the film earns its unreality.

Because it’s a genre that has not received much critical respect in the past, much of the film criticism reaching the mainstream comes from people who just aren’t in on The Joke. It is from reviewers like these that we get the term “elevated horror,” which I find a tad reductive, since most “elevated” horror filmmakers, like Jordan Peele, readily acknowledge the influence of the genre’s less “elevated” stalwarts. (Sidenote: It’s nice to see FFTW and IRL friends like Kellina Moore breaking into mainstream pubs like the New York Times).

To be clear: I’m not using The Joke terminology to refer to horror comedy. I’m talking about the language fans and creators speak amongst each other, on-screen and off, and I guess I think of this language as a joke because, like laughter, it is a way of processing the anguish of having a body and a consciousness. In my mind, horror has always been a kind of wry smile shared between two people who know they are hopelessly fucked.

Many people are put off by horror’s schlocky, over-the-top gore and brutality. Someone outside of, or opposed to, the genre might be aghast at what horror fans discuss: Cheering for particularly gruesome, well-played “kills,” for instance, hungrily anticipating the death of the virgin, complaining that a murderer is not murder-y enough. In a vacuum, this is disturbing stuff. But we’re not operating in a vacuum—we never are. And that’s what The Joke is: An acknowledgement that we’re inside of an elaborate set-up, one that’s been built up and renovated over years, and is judged by how well a filmmaker can get us to the punch line.

In that sense, horror is a little like “The Aristocrats,” a literal joke form which many comedians have iterated on, including Robin Williams, Bob Saget, and Sarah Silverman. The fundamentals of “The Aristocrats” are always the same: a family auditions for a talent agent by performing a series of vile, incestual acts. The punch line matters naught, since it’s implicit in the title. The comedy isn’t in the originality of the premise, but in the originality of the delivery.

Similarly, horror is a genre particularly laden with in-rules and recognizable tropes. The most famous is the concept of the “Final Girl,” coined by Carol J. Clover in her seminal text, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws.” The Joke in horror is often about how a filmmaker works within those themes, by molding to them, inverting them, or, as is the case in meta horror like Scream (1996), directly referencing (and even critiquing) them.

A final point: Part of what people find distasteful about horror is its tendency to veer into torture porn. This is the stomach-turning “we get it already” reaction that Stevens evokes.

Terrifier 3 (2024) came out recently, a franchise that has boomed since its first film, thanks primarily to the eeriness of its central villain, Art the Clown. In discussing the film, Henry Zebrowski, of “Last Podcast on the Left,” issued what I think is an apt analysis of what differentiates horror sub-genre “torture porn” from plain old torture:

“[My issue with] essentially, torture porn, is when it’s realistic and not entertaining; when it literally is just torturing someone in a realistic fashion and it’s just crying and screaming and there’s nothing else going on… there are things that [Art the Clown] is doing that humans just cannot do… On that level while it’s a horrific sight, it’s also so, so over the top that it really—it’s, art.”

That “over the top” quality is part of The Joke; it’s what allows us to laugh at murder. It’s what both reviewers seem to dislike about The Substance; they wanted it to be “realer,” more “believable.”

In this case, by “real,” they mean more subtle, but some people seem to think the move toward reality happens in the opposite direction. I am opposed to horror films that feature real-life deaths, like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) which sacrificed multiple animals in its making as well as traumatized many members of its cast. In my opinion, these films abuse a tacit agreement between audience and creator. It’s similar to the backlash that occurs when comedians like Louis C.K. reveal that they have actually been committing the heinous acts they riff about on stage. We had been led to believe that we were in on The Joke. When the fourth wall is broken, and The Joke is revealed to be not a joke at all, we are rightfully upset to realize that we’d been laughing the whole time.

There is a massive difference—one might say a critical difference—between snuff and art. Art is a line that separates the real from the contrived; I believe it is a skill to respect that line while appearing to blur it. And it is the critic’s responsibility to inspect the decisions artists make as they perform this tricky routine, why they do or do not choose believability, or subtlety, or sincerity as a goalpost.

In case I’m sounding too sanctimonious, here’s some self-critique: I didn’t care for I Saw the TV Glow (2024). Had I written an off-the-cuff review of it, I would have written a bad review. But then I talked to a friend more cinematically attuned than I am, and he explained the references that had gone over my head. For instance, in one scene, two men arrive at the protagonist’s doorstep and are never explained or referenced again. He told me they were from the ‘90s Nickelodeon show “The Adventures of Pete & Pete.” The idea that comforting characters from our childhood might appear in twisted form is essential to the film; once I understood the choice, I had more respect for the result.

A meaningful piece of film criticism would account for the casual viewer and the more knowledgeable viewer alike. Through more knowledgeable eyes, I understood the film’s value much differently. I understood the context in which the film was made, and I was willing to give it another shot.

That’s the beauty of what a talented critic can do: They can open your eyes. Taking a sincere stab at writing about art requires seeing something once, for ourselves, and then seeing it differently, from a multitude of angles; viewing the piece of art as if through a kaleidoscope, rendering it more beautiful and more complex than it seemed on first glance. You can still do this and come to the conclusion that it sucks, but at least you’ll have earned that conclusion.

This practice is beneficial for the critic, too. In the workshop setting, we're expected to examine a piece of writing in the context of what we think the author is attempting, not based on whether or not we personally like the piece of writing. This requires practicing a mental flexibility that I think is valuable not just in criticism, but in life.

To return to Gould’s review, I want to be clear: I’m not saying that she had no right to write it. I’m suggesting that her criticism, and I think, her own experience, would have been strengthened if she had thought more about why Demi Moore was cast in the role. Filmmakers, like all artists, make deliberate choices as well as unintentional ones, and the latter can be just as illuminating. But I have to imagine that casting Demi Moore—who is considered, as Gould notes, “flawless” —and choosing to leave her “unblemished,” was a deliberate choice. What happens if we genuinely question the choices that confound us? Why Demi Moore? And why not age her a little more? An investigation of those questions leads in a telling direction, one that speaks volumes about the film’s intent. We find the art speaking back to us: Why am I so disturbed that someone who looks like Demi Moore would want to look younger? What does it say about the culture in which I exist and the ideals that culture lifts up for approval or rejection?

This is possibly a banal thing to say, but the magic of art is that it takes us outside ourselves. See Salman Rushdie writing about fiction: “In that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away from our hearts’ desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they may seem weightless, trivial. We let them go. Like men dying in a blizzard, we lie down in the snow to sleep.”

But in order to be freed from our particular selfness and allowed to float into the miasma of a more collective consciousness, where art lives, we have to be willing to let go of the hang-ups we’ve brought to the experience. It isn’t just good practice for film-viewing, it’s good practice; considering the intention behind other people’s choices, actions, words, strengthens our empathy. At the very least, it strengthens our criticism.🪱

The movie follows a doctor and his wife as they attempt to harvest a new face for their daughter, whose own was deformed by a horrific car accident. The wife goes out, finds pretty young women, and brings them back to the doctor’s in-home surgical unit so he can attempt to graft their skin onto that of his offspring. 

Much like Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Godwin Baxter of Poor Things, to this doctor, the human body is just a thing to be manipulated. In one scene, he straps his unwilling, knocked-out patient onto the operating table and hovers with beaded brow over her body. In the way of shared cinematic experiences, everyone of us in the theater tensed as he angled his hand down to make the first fatal incision. Scalpel in hand, the doctor etched a jagged line around his victim’s jawline and up toward her eyebrow. Before he’d reached her forehead, a significant percentage of the audience burst into laughter. One man couldn’t stop bark-laughing all the way through the scene and those that followed; he’d been truly tickled by the procedure (I suspect he worked in the medical field).

After leaving the theater, my friend commented on how strange she found the laughter. This was a movie about the mutilation of young womens’ bodies. What was so funny?

Some people laugh at horror movies because they believe themselves to be smarter than a movie’s creators and/or its typical audience. I am inclined to believe that was the case for the man referenced above. That mindset represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre, which has never taken itself too seriously, and is often not only in on the joke, but pushing the boundaries of its comedic potential.

Some people laugh because they actually get it. Horror manipulates reality beyond the boundaries of what’s possible, allowing for an inversion of norms: We find ourselves reacting to situations in ways that, when described on paper, seem absolutely antithetical to how we’d expect to behave. In this space, an infant can be evil, a trick of the light can be terrifying, and a corpse can be downright hilarious.

I just watched The Substance (2024), nearly two-and-a-half hours of relentless anatomical mutilation. What makes body horror effective is the fact that we all have bodies and can imagine what it might be like to have them mangled. But when we’re exposed to scene after scene of bodily grotesquery, we stop registering the horror as something personal; we reach a threshold at which the body on screen is nothing more than a prop. There’s a moment near the film’s end (I won’t spoil) when the director clearly made a decision to go over the top on the blood and guts, and the effect, as intended, was that it transformed my previous discomfort into laughter. It felt like a relief after two hours of clenching my jaw.

The nature of the genre often requires that horror creators contend with the funny-scary threshold by either purposefully spilling over into humor or coming right up to the edge of what’s scary and pulling back, to maintain tension. Take Hereditary (2018): the horrific death at its beginning happens so fast that it is only nauseating; we are never given the reprieve of laughter. Contrast that with any slasher, wherein the repeated mutilation of bodies—the brutality of the “kills”—often elicit giddy cheers from genre fanatics.

The scary-funny threshold is applicable across horror’s sub-genres: The monster comes out of the shadows for too long and turns into a clown; look at how funny-shaped his head is, look at how obviously rubbery his limbs! Michael Myers standing awkwardly beside a hedge in broad daylight is a little goofy. M3GAN, Chucky, the Killer Klowns, and all the other quasi-animatronic horror villains we know and love are purposefully ridiculous; there’s no way to keep such a character on screen for so long and make it consistently scary. These movies embrace absurdity as part of the overall effect.

Similarly, if a corpse stays on screen for longer than a few minutes, it almost invariably passes from something tragic to something of a comedic prop.

Take I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): The film’s plot kicks off when a crew of drunk teenagers mow down a pedestrian while driving along a coastal highway. The driver, exiting the car, is presented with a corpse strewn across the pavement—the stillness of the once-beating chest now the embodiment of his Big Mistake. When presented with the corpse, the driver’s life is changed; he is no longer the complex being he once was, he’s now a murderer. That realization hits us, the viewers, just as sincerely.

Just a few tense moments later, however, when the driver has been persuaded to dispose of the body, the corpse has lost its shock value and has instead become an unwieldy burden. The head refuses to stay upright, the arms flop uncontrollably, the legs twist in uncanny directions. The driver is now burdened by the fact of the corpse, rather than the life that had once inhabited it. Where we recently felt the heaviness associated with death, we now encounter the dark comedy of the body.

As the driver and his friends are pushing the pedestrian’s lifeless body off a dock, it rears up and snatches a tiara off of one of the girls’ heads. The rest of the assembled teenagers start pummeling the body before collectively rolling it in the water. Moments ago they’d been distraught over having killed a man, only to kill him more concretely once realizing he may have been alive. Funny, that.

There’s also an element of dramatic irony at work when characters are faced with the challenge of a corpse. We, the viewers, know the body is not going to just disappear, just as we know time can’t be reversed. Watching any character try to erase their crime by disposing of the evidence is like watching a magician fail at an illusion—no matter how cringe-worthy, there is something silly about it.

Like those fictional doctors, writers and directors are tasked with the great power and great responsibility of manipulating flesh and bones. A whole catalogue of TV and film tropes exists to describe the various ways a corpse may be handled in film, most of which strike a comedic chord. The "peek-a-boo corpse trope" describes the moment when a main character is running or hiding from a killer and suddenly stumbles upon one of his previously mutilated victims. “Body in a breadbox” describes the placement of a corpse in bizarre locations, like a suitcase or a kitchen cabinet. “Of Corpse He’s Alive” refers to the Weekend-at-Bernie’s scenarios where other characters try to pass off a dead person as a living one. Reddit user Scaptastic points out another corpse trope where characters forget about a dead body and then re-encounter it later on. Surprise, I’m still dead!

Bodies are weird. They’re full of water and viscous fluids, hairy in strange places, and easily breakable. When you’re living in one, you have to contend with all this weirdness as part of yourself; you’re apt to take it personally. But when you’re outside your own body, or when you believe a consciousness has been extracted from a body such that nothing remains but a bag of bones, you’re free to laugh. Sometimes, you just have to. 🪱

Editor’s note: The original version of this essay included a fairytale in the beginning, which, for brevity’s sake, has been moved to the end (‘FINALLY, A FAIRYTALE’). I know this is not something you care about, but this is my Substack and I get to say what matters. All love xo.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?”

― Lewis Carroll

The timeline of my life — like any late 20-something — is in almost perfect alignment with the timeline of the internet. The World Wide Web went public in 1993, I was born two short years later, and not long after the turn of the millennium, I was pretending to be Emma Watson in online forums and dressing up my Stardolls in gaudy pixelated clothing. By the time MySpace came around, I was primed and ready to start uploading top-down, over-exposed selfies with my tongue out and posting inane messages on my Friends’ cyber walls. Not a thought passed through the membrane of my little unformed cerebrum that the remnant 1s and 0s of those missives could potentially stick around for longer than I had eyes to read them. AOL Instant Messenger, likewise, trained my dumb pubescent encephalon to perk up at the sound of a digital door creaking open, the little notification alerting me that someone was reaching out across the digital ether to say ‘asl?’ 

I was an only child living in rural Pennsylvania; the internet was like a living, breathing nexus of connection and possibility. (Someone should have got me a puppy). Still, there were limitations. I didn’t really have a computer of my own, dial-up was inefficient, and my sweet naive pea-brain wasn’t yet trained to think that being online 18 hours a day was a rational way to live one’s life. Oh, but the internet grew, and so did I. We grew together! The internet was a fence becoming more expansive and more intricate every day, and I was the morning glory trellising along it. Or something. 

There was the early Facebook interface, where one could poke and be poked. I remember Kony2012 like a fever dream. I’ve written briefly about the enchantment of Omegle and the era of randomized webcam interactions. But nothing had an effect on me (this should come as a surprise to no one who knew me then) quite like Tumblr. In some ways, blogs — moreso than Facebook or MySpace — were the real precursors to how we now use social media. This is especially true of Tumblr, a constantly updating feed of disparate images and messages, mainly posted by strangers (it was standard operating procedure not to share your Tumblr username with anyone IRL, except maybe your closest, coolest, most aesthetically aligned friends). 

I was on Tumblr nearly every week night in my teenagehood, listening to emo-pop, scrolling through images of other teenagers in other bedrooms papered with posters, ensconced by twinkling strands of white Christmas lights. It must be admitted, I — and those aforementioned closest friends — modeled our looks on the way Tumblr’s cool girls were dressing: oversized sweaters, razor-cut bangs, jewelry made of hemp, stacks of bracelets running up our wrists.

In addition to my personal Tumblr, I had a second blog dedicated to collecting amazing photos from around the globe; places I presumed I would go when I one day escaped my teenage bedroom. I was taking in the world not through experiences or education, per se, but through images — an unrelenting barrage of images, some curated by me, some put together by others, all a delight to my senses in the way no real-life small-town Pennsylvanian experience could possibly compete (someone get Walter Benjamin on the horn!). On Tumblr, I learned to engage not just with the world of people I knew or knew of, but with The World writ large. Though it was not actually the world — it was a curated world, viewed through the filtered lens of the blogosphere, where aesthetic ruled everything and context meant virtually nothing. 

I’m old enough and secure enough to admit that parts of the way I live my life today must have been determined by those formative moments in my own little corner of the blogosphere (what I’m doing right now may be case in point). I discovered poetry on Tumblr — not the Robert Frost plums-in-the-icebox variety, but the sappy, experimental, teenage stream of consciousness that would later morph into Button Poetry and foster fans of a whole generation of poets the likes of Hanif Abduraqqib and Mary Oliver.

The point is, internet is not just a medium that exists alongside my modern life, it has shaped my life, most poignantly in the years when I was particularly susceptible to influence.

That may be why, on a recent re-watch of the 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, as a group of Swedish women surrounded the bent-over and wailing protagonist, Dani, mimicking her grief and rage in a cacophony of echoey, mournful screams, I was thinking this is a lot like the internet.  

Midsommar writer and director Ari Aster has said that he wanted the film to function like a fairytale. In keeping with this mission, the opening sequence features shots of a folksy embroidered tapestry, detailing key plot points in the story to come, which is as follows: A young woman named Dani, whose entire family has recently died, follows her lackluster boyfriend and his grad school friends on a part-pleasure, part-anthropological trip to a Swedish commune run by a people called the Hårga to bear witness to their nine-day ritualistic midsummer festival. 

Dani arrives in Sweden a mess of grief. She can barely keep it together through the plane ride, where she has a jarringly relatable panic attack in the bathroom. Her boyfriend lacks the emotional depth — or tools, or desire — to see her through an unimaginably difficult time. She is, in a phrase, susceptible to influence. 

The Hårga’s grassy, ethereal commune at first seems like a beautiful place, full of people who share with each other, support each other, never take more than they give, are connected to nature, and dress like de-saturated DÔEN models. Other than the obvious homogeneity, we think this might just be the right way to live. There are warning signs, of course, that it’s not quite perfect, namely that pesky double suicide, but even that can be understood as a kind of beautiful, unselfish way of living in community.

The visiting Americans’ varied reactions to this out-of-the-blue streak of violence mimics the way we seem to react to violence online. Some of the more well-adjusted visitors, like the couple who attempt to stop the elders from throwing themselves off a cliff, are understandably mortified. Some — like the two student anthropologists — are content to watch and study it; are perhaps unnervingly neutralized to the violence, even excited by it. And some people, like Dani, recognize something in it. 

So many of us arrived on the internet not necessarily broken by grief, but unformed, in the process of development, in the throes of self-pitying teenagedom. The internet was a fairytale we were happy to step into, because we are humans, and because it feels good to be in community with other humans. It feels especially good in a world that feels like it is — ironically, in some ways thanks to the way the internet reflects reality — careening toward chaos.

It’s not natural to bear heavy emotional loads alone — the Hårga have that right. They have many things “right,” as it were. We would do well to connect more with nature, with each other, with the food we eat and the way our friends and loved ones are feeling. Connection was, after all, the great promise of the internet, and continues to be the promise of web 4.0; that it will connect us in ways we never were connected before. It has done that, and surely will continue to. 

But the machine is now past its fairytale prime, and is instead a conveyor belt that never stops revolving. (Remember that Alice had to keep drinking poison to get herself small enough to fit in Wonderland). As soon as we’ve identified with an opinion, an emotion, an aesthetic, the algorithm kicks works to make it our entire experience. Expressing a strong opinion and getting attention can feel a lot like dry-heaving alongside all seventeen female members of your new overly attentive family. The louder you scream, the louder they scream. The bigger you smile, the bigger they smile. The more you feel, the more they feel.

The internet of 2024 looks like a sleeker version of the internet of my youth, but it is not the same place. On this internet, the magic is like poor frail Twinkerbell flailing to flap her threadbare wings under the weight of disbelief. Finding new pocket-communities to crawl into and get lost in takes time and effort — too many corporations and profiteers have mastered Search Engine Optimization, sucking all the wonder and spontaneity out of the experience of surfing the web (what now seems a quaint term). Surfing this internet no longer feels like exploring laterally across a vast and varied landscape but like diving deeper and deeper into a cave, encountering increasingly more warped versions of what you first found at its surface. (There are exceptions, and I thank the Wikipedia mods and the Craigslist admins every day for their contributions to our species). 

A feeling you express on this internet, even if you eventually, inevitably grow beyond it, never stops expressing you. Raw, unfiltered thoughts have the potential to echo forever down here. You can’t really change on this internet; you can only accumulate.

It is that thought that has made me feel, lately, lost in the machine. I told a friend the anxiety I’m feeling is not that I want to die, but that I want to de-pixelate. It is a sign of a modern life well-lived to have a Google trail miles-long. For someone who is neither famous nor well-regarded in any particular industry, mine is pretty sufficient — how could it not be, when I have been trekking this digital landscape since I learned to identify my own thumbs? Sometimes I can feel the weight of my old social profiles and scattered bylines pulling on my ankles, an invisible tether to all the versions of myself I’m no longer interested in being.

On this internet, it is easy to get cordoned off into siloed communities where we take in only messages that resonate with us and form ready defenses against any infiltration by messages that don’t. Sheltered against the naysayers, we are free to add onto our pre-approved ideas, build on them and remake the world in their image, until the things we are saying become blown-up parody versions of what we originally meant. There is a lot of collective screaming and dry-heaving on this internet; I struggle to remember the sense of joyful wonder that first sent me tumbling (pun intended) into its recesses.  

“When we spend hours each day in a digital environment, we aren’t just exposing ourselves to a shallow way of using our cognitive abilities,” write Ruth Gaskovski and Peco, of the Substack Pilgrims in the Machine. “We are training ourselves in shallow cognition.”

Online communities that inspire the most virulently hateful conspiratorial garbage are participatory and engaging; members feel not like they are watching or learning but like they are actively participating. This is true on “both sides of the aisle,” but it’s easiest to see in conspiratorial communities like QAnon, which began as a game — a kind of true crime investigation encouraging participants to follow the breadcrumbs left by a mysterious figurehead who claimed to be plugged into the dark underworld of American politics. Who didn’t want to figure out who Q was? At some point, the game is not a game. You may find yourself getting drummed up into a state of real action, making real life choices, like okaying your boyfriend’s immolation, or bursting into a pizza parlor with an AR-15.

The longer Dani spends in Hälsingland, the more she is invited to participate —in cooking, in rituals, in drinking the special tea, until she is finally crowned the “May Queen,” which is to say: she stays in the game until she wins. One by one, the Americans die off. It is Dani, swept up by her new family, with nothing to lose, who thrives. By the film’s end, she is no longer a visitor to the strange Nordic village, but its most special, important member — its Main Character, if you will. For a lonely person, misunderstood and mistreated by a partner who is supposed to be her emotional support, this kind of radical integration into a ready-made community would be nearly impossible to decline. 

“This is a fairy tale, and [the Hårga] really are exactly what Dani needs,” Ari Aster said in an interview with Vox. “For better or worse, this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy. This is truly a spoiler, but: We begin as Dani loses a family, and we end as Dani gains one. And so, for better or worse, they are there to provide exactly what she is lacking, and exactly what she needs, in true fairy tale fashion.”

Of course, it is the grim (Grimm?) reality of a fairy tale that being given exactly what you wish for never ends quite as happily ever after as you might imagine. A pivotal turning point in Dani’s experience in Sweden comes when her Hårga friend Pelle asks her if she “feels held” by her boyfriend; if he feels like home to her. She does not have to respond, we already know the answer. She is clearly not held; she clearly needs to be held. It is this realization that leads to her violent vengeance at the film’s end.

A person held too tightly — whose most intense emotions are supported too enthusiastically — loses the ability to move beyond their emotions. A person held too tightly must be held forever, lest they topple over on weakened legs. How multifunctional the verb “to hold” is — there’s such a meaningful difference between held, held up, held down, and held together.

If the ending of Midsommar is meant to be happy, as Aster and others have suggested, I struggle to see how it could continue “ever after” (notably, there are still a few days left of the festival at the film’s end). All I see is a tale of caution — what happens when you allow yourself to go tumbling too far into Wonderland. From down there, everything in the real world is just a shadow on the wall. 

Maybe it strikes you as strange that I think a community of people who live without technology, in communal harmony with nature, bear any resemblance to the wild wild web. Maybe you still think the Hårga are perfect, and it’s the Americans who are whack (by the way, I think both, in this telling, are pretty whack).

I argue that a “perfect” community, if such a thing could exist, is not a frictionless wonderland. A perfect community is full of contradictions. In such a truly idyllic commune, people do not just agree with each other because they are all the same and share the same traditions, interests, beliefs, and ways of living, rather, they understand disagreement — even discord — to be as natural as the seasons of life. In this society, groupthink is not a pinnacle to which the collective aspires but a threat it guards against. In this society, grief is normal, collective processing is normal, but so is the necessary limit to that processing — the point at which you do not get to blindly retaliate, but you learn to accept, forgive, move on; the point at which someone is allowed to rehabilitate, to grow from their error, to therapize.

There is no “winner” in a truly “perfect” society; there is no retribution in the form of burning boyfriend in a bear suit. There is discovery, curiosity, inspiration. What were we trying to do, when we built the internet, if not build a new society — a society something like this one? And, by the way, is it too late to try again? 🪱

FINALLY, A FAIRYTALE

Once upon a time, a magic portal opened up in the world. At first, the portal, though curious, was small and difficult to enter — there were a good number of people who had no interest in it at all — but over just a few short years, it evolved. In no time, young girls and boys in small towns across America were visiting the portal to be transported to the vast and varied new landscape that lay beyond.

Through the portal were other people, like the boys and girls, but different, because they came from strange lands, across wide impassable seas (and to these strangers, the little American boys and girls were equally as bizarre and intriguing). Time worked differently through the portal — whole cities and domains could rise and fall in just a few short minutes; word traveled just as quickly as the boys and girls could form a thought.

Through the portal was every kind of creature the boys and girls could imagine, and more than they could imagine. There were animals that played piano, babies that did mathematics and sung in deep vibrato, teenagers that stayed young and cool forever, ancient wisened elders who shared all the knowledge, mysteries, and secrets they’d collected over their lives, and did so free of charge. There was an endless array of stories in the portal, some that were familiar to the girls and boys, others that were new and enchanting because they represented previously impossible realities.

There were dark, dark dangerous woods through the portal, too. But even peering into these woods was a thrill to the boys and girls, many of whom had limited experience with suffering or terror. Anyway, there was no real danger for those smart boys and girls who stayed on the path — who agreed just to look and to never try and bring a creature from that world into the real one.

Nothing, through the portal, was “real,” though the longer the boys and girls stayed on the other side, the more often they visited, the blurrier the lines became between what was real and what was not. And if the real world started to become more than a little affected by what was going on through the portal? Maybe that was not such a bad thing. After all, the world through the portal was, it seemed, a reflection of what the world outside the portal could be, if only we humans were more magically inclined; if only we opened up our imaginations, destroyed our borders, and freed ourselves from our physical, linguistic, and spiritual limitations. 

But as the boys and girls grew up, the land beyond the portal started to change. A snake had slithered into their Eden. The land that had once enchanted them started to look not like a more enlightened reflection of the real world, but a darker one. Walking through the portal, which the boys and girls — now men and women — had become accustomed to doing regularly, started to feel like a toxic, even frightening, experience. When they weren’t over there, they wanted to be, yet when they were over there, they longed to leave. Everything that they had so disdained about the real world — greed, avarice, violence — was now replicated, even magnified, in the land beyond.

How had it happened, some of them wondered — how had they let the fantastic promise of their magic kingdom turn to shadow and mirage? But it was too late to go back. The portal had become so so all-consuming, it was impossible to tell where its barriers ended and the real world began. Even the sky and the clouds that hung in it had begun to quiver at the edges. There were witch-burnings on either side of the portal daily; it was the only solution they could come up with to deal with the new challenges presented by the high drama of the thaumaturgical clash. And for every grown-up boy and girl who now questioned the necessity of the portal-world, there were 1,000 new boys and girls who could not remember a time without the portal; whose very thoughts and feelings were shaped by its existence. The portal had once taught the boys and girls the very concept of happily every after, but now it seemed that there was no “ever after.” There was only portal, forever, all the way down.

join my digi-commune

Related Reads

• “The internet arrived as a clear savior for the cause of the individual… But it didn’t work.”- Against Branding (and Sarah Fay) by Sam Kahn
  

• “Getting Out of the Fishbowl: The Unmachining Self-Assessment,” by Pilgrims in the Machine

Allegedly, I saw the first season of True Detective in the winter of 2019, when I was living with Sarah in a house in Callicoon, New York. Allegedly, we watched the whole first season and maybe even the second. Maybe because we smoked before (while?) watching every episode or maybe because that was one of the winters of my discontent or maybe it had to do with the bleak southern landscape and Matthew McConaughey’s droning cynicism, but I seem to have been lulled — during those nights in front of the TV — into a semi-aware state, such that, five years later, trying to watch the series again, I only faintly remember certain imagery as if it’s been stewing in the depths of my subconscious (yes, I remember this shot of Matthew in the parking lot, looking around like it’s a nightmare he’s revisiting) but I can’t recall anything about the specifics of a show I once (allegedly) consumed in its entirety.

The script, acting, cinematography are all undeniably good. I adore the Woody-Matthew dynamic. But, what can I say, the detective work begins; my mind wanders. If I had to venture a guess, it’s that something in me — not unlike Harrelson’s character — deeply detests cynics (they are driving in a car along a dusty highway all pale blues and tan).

It’s not that I’m such a romantic, or even an optimist, it’s just isn’t the pursuit of awe and wonderment to be, in itself, an antidote to the depression we may otherwise succumb to when we realize that life is ultimately meaningless and futile? Eileen Myles describes their dog trembling under the body of a horse: “there’s so much shit and there’s so much horse.”

I know the universe is entropic. But my mind is capable of creating order and meaning and that is enough for me. “Whatever order is in the world is not given in our genes or exclusively supplied by nature,” wrote James Carey, then he quoted the biologist J.Z. Young, “‘the brain of each one of us does literally create his or her own world.’” Then he quoted Eric Vogelin, who said the order of history is “the history of order,” but that might be a whole different thing.

All to say, life doesn’t mean much of anything but mine must (and yours and yours and yours).

I find Rust’s brand of over-adherence to his own apathy to be a type of performance in itself — the kind he might otherwise mock — a compulsion to force everyone into the specific reality his brain has created. Luckily I made myself pay attention this go-around and realized that this is the point: Rust is a nihilist who only finds meaning in singular steadfast pursuits of justice. He turns out not just to care, but to care a whole hell of a lot. To care so much he can’t understand what kind of awful paralytics the rest of us are. “His philosophy is just intellectual window dressing for his grief” someone on Reddit writes.

(By the way? The Matthew and Michelle Monaghan scene? My mind was, I’ll say, not wandering then. Also by the way, this show, season 1, has never even heard of Alison Bechdel not to mention her little test. Also by the way. Isn’t it funny that the Bechdel Test is inherently a response to men?)

So, OK, nothing matters in the cosmic sense. If you accept that premise, and really accept it, it turns out not to be so interesting. Cynics are boring at best, completely mentally draining at worst. No matter how good the script. I don’t even really know if I’m using the word cynic right, but you get it.

Marty and Rust are standing at the back of a revival meeting under the shade of a big off-white tent, the kind they pitch up in the dead center of a barren field, next to some scraggly do-nothing tree, and all the women are wearing prairie dresses and all the men look like my childhood friends’ dads. “What do you think the average IQ is among this congregation?” Rust says, meanwhile he works at the behest of the American criminal justice system. See what I mean?

This is the genius of a show like The Wire — every organization is a religion and every organized religion is essentially the same. Sure there are good people. But to justify your belonging in one and denigrate the other — now that’s futility. That makes me think a little bit about astrology. There is a beauty in the kind of magical thinking that leads one to the stars, but an over-reliance on mysticism becomes just as limiting as anything else. It can be so draining now to talk to the astrology girlies; it’s like talking to an actuary.

Why do we love detective television? Perhaps it appeals jointly to both moralistic religiosity and our desire for earthly justice. Someone’s tracking down the bad guys, and he’s doing it with a kind of fervor that makes him a savior here on earth — one we don’t need to wait til heaven to meet. (That is what Matthew McConaughey starts to look like, by the way, if you can get through the bits in the beginning where he’s so unbearably dogmatic about his nihilism you wonder why he doesn’t take a bath with a toaster. He grows on you. And then he really grows on you. And I’m not just talking about the sex scene.)

Mysteries must be solved. Deaths must be avenged. If not in the afterlife then in this one. The present life. McConaughey and Harrelson are like two beautifully fucked up angels drinking themselves to oblivion, shooting up ink and cayenne, atoning for our sins if not their own.

Rust and Marty in Rust’s all-white apartment, both wearing white shirts. It’s a kind of purgatory they arrive in halfway through season one, just before they go undercover to try and catch their bad guy. Marty becoming Rust, Rust becoming Marty. They’re both pacing around doing meditative practices, drinking beer ruggedly. The cause consumes them. That is when I — we you us— move beyond apathy.

“This is how you get all warped,” Marty’s beleaguered wife tells Rust (and by “you,” she means men; again, she is always talking about men) “you always short-change the wrong things.”

2014 was a good year for McConaughey. Fresh off Wolf of Wall Street, best actor for Dallas Buyers Club, then this show. We love Matthew most when he’s fucked up, faithless, and scorning God. That is when he is at his most angelic.

In the absence of God we adapt a set of self-determined principles. All of our best anti-heroes do, including the True Detective boys; one set of tablets for another. Nail this on your door and adhere to it. This is the only way to get along. Otherwise, you might… you know. If Rust’s only true belief is entropy, then this too is a directive toward which his life will bend. When he ends up in a crack house shoot-out, that is the destiny he chose — it is the prophetic fate of a faithless man in a faithful world; how stupid do you have to be to stand beneath a revival tent, he once asked. Meanwhile, he was standing beneath a revival tent. In other words, if you are playing the game, you are as stupid or as smart as anyone else playing the game.

The conceit of cyclical narratives is basically nothing matters if you zoom out too far. Also what goes around comes around. Sometimes you don’t care so hard that you come back around to caring. (Remember when I said, I made myself pay attention this go-around and realized that this is the point — the point is, pay attention!). Once they abandon the game, Marty and Rust take the tape full of horrors (ritualistic child sexual abuse) and show it, one by one, to the men who betrayed their responsibility to stop such evil in the first place (that’s a little like The Ring, by the way). Don’t avert your eyes, they're saying.

An evil man with enough power does enough evil that it lasts forever; it comes back around like how when we were kids we thought we could swing all the way around the top bar of the swings. That’s how the evil thing goes even after the evil man dies or gets locked away; the evil never stops having an impact. With enough luck, it really comes back around — as in, it bites its originator in the ass. But it’s not luck that these children in True Detective need, is it? it’s something like salvation. (Now, a bad guy is humming while he paints the school building).

I think that True Detective season 1 ultimately says, hey, you can interrupt the cycle, but you can’t honestly, diligently, pursue the evils of this world while continuing to live in it as any normal person would. You can’t pick and choose.

That’s maybe why we love these detective series — leather-bound men impervious to societal norms, doing what we can’t. “I won’t avert my eyes,” Rust says, as he’s uncovering the web of corruption and violence to its dangerous end, “not again.” It’s not something he could do if he stayed a legit detective with a badge and a desk — he had to become (drum roll) a true detective. As in, one who pursues the truth.

The ties that bind society, are, in this telling, too morally corrupt to support their own destruction. Biker gangs, revivalists, feds, cults, all God-damned one way or the other. So you have to step outside of society. You have to go to a purgatorial state. You have to become an outlaw cop, operating from the basement of a bar (by the way, a bar is almost as neutral a place as a place can be — it is in some ways anti-revival tent — but it is also nearly impossible to go there too much without becoming a danger to yourself and/or others). Rust and Marty have to go rogue to get saved. Look at all the sacrifices they make along the way— their partners their careers their reputations their health; when these men are good at their jobs, they’re bad at everything else. No family, no friends, no one out there but each other. The only place for a moral person to go is in the cracks. Five years after I last (allegedly) took in this message, I’m more apt to believe it. 🪱

I ask you: does all of life descend into chaos? Probably so. Fortunately, this four-part Food for the Worm series about horror adaptations wraps up quite neatly. Stick a fork in BOOKWORM, she’s done.

Lo, fear not! To soothe your Monday anxieties and quell your fears about the futility of life and order, I’m serving up a RECAP.

Here, once again, are four piping hot reads from three fabulous guest writers and me:

BY: RACHEL KINCAID

“Thought I saw an eagle / but it might have been a vulture / I never could decide
Then my father built an altar / He looked once behind his shoulder / He knew I would not hide”

- “Story of Isaac,” Leonard Cohen

The oldest horror story in the world: there's a man who wants to hurt you. The second-oldest: there’s something wrong with the house and now it’s your problem. 

Both plotlines are at work in The Shining — both of The Shinings, the original 1977 book from Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation (or all three, if you include the 1997 TV miniseries). In fact, watching The Shining feels like watching two movies nested inside each other: one plot features a rapidly decompensating abusive alcoholic, Jack, who is about to turn on his family; the other is about a haunted hotel. 

The haunted hotel film is a fascinating and deeply imagined entry into the canon of buildings with ill intent — a kind of spiritual descendent of Hill House. At its best, the Overlook is Lynchian, with its surreal Room 237; the ghosts that stalk its surroundings range from gruesome haunted house fare to genuinely unsettling.

The rapidly decompensating abusive alcoholic plotline, though, is where the terror of The Shining really takes root. This narrative — about being trapped in a house with a man who wants to hurt you — operates almost completely separately from the ghosts orbiting it, who come to seem more like a Greek chorus urging Jack on, invisible to all but Jack and the audience. 

The real story takes place at the intersection between these two archetypes — what is a father but a man multiplied by the factor of home? 

The book and the film versions of The Shining are meaningfully divergent on this question of men and houses and the dynamic they share. King famously took issue with the film adaptation of his work, both in the characterization of the Torrances — who he considered hamfisted compared to the characters he wrote — and in its relationship to the supernatural.  

King saw Jack Torrance's decompensation as a true possession; an imperfect man who walked into the wrong hotel at the wrong time. The Overlook, in King's imagination, is the real villain, while Jack is a kind of pitiable hand puppet — a hotel walks into a man and puts a mallet in his hand. (I'm reminded of Twin Peaks; some kind of Jungian impulse at work here with our desire to separate violent fathers from their own violence).

And while the original text of “The Shining” does circle around the genesis of Jack's violence, giving him brief moments of clarity about his own impulses, the book’s final denouement reflects the idea of possession pretty unambiguously:

Standing on top of [the kitchen chopping block] was a martini glass, a fifth of gin, and a plastic dish filled with olives. Leaning against it was one of the roque mallets from the equipment shed.

He looked at it for a long time. Then a voice, much deeper and much more powerful than Grady’s, spoke from somewhere, everywhere ... from inside him.

(Keep your promise, Mr. Torrance.)

“I will,” he said. He heard the fawning servility in his own voice but was unable to control it. “I will.”

By the time he and his mallet find Danny, Jack is no longer in the picture at all — Danny describes the evil taking over his father as something "hiding behind Daddy’s face… imitating Daddy’s voice."

Kubrick's work, by contrast, is less clear about who the real evil-doer is, house or man. This is in part a product of the medium — films let us see what people do, but don’t always show us why they do it — and in part because of something else.

The hotel functions as a haunted house, a container for both the violence of the land it was built on and the horrors that have come to pass in it. But it also has other valances: The Overlook — isolated and nested with impossible layers of hallways and chambers representing decades of calcified history — is the ideal laboratory for an experiment about intrafamiliar violence. 

Some men are violent indiscriminately. But some men are violent when the circumstances are right: when they are shielded from public view, without consequences. Sharp, kind doctors like the one who clocks Danny's vulnerability to abuse in the first act don't visit the Overlook; no one does, after the end of the season. 

If you only hurt someone when you know you'll face no consequences for it, does that make you more or less violent? What circumstances would it take for you to hurt someone? What would you need whispered in your ear — would you need the power of suggestion at all, or just a winter disconnected from reality? Can you be sure? 

To ask it another way: if a man thinks dark thoughts, but never commits them because the circumstances don't arise, is he still violent? If he has the will to commit violence but wouldn't have thought to do so unless someone whispers the idea in his ear, how do we assign blame? If he only commits them because the particulars of a house afford him the opportunity, is he at fault — or the house?

These weren't abstract questions for King as he authored the original text. According to the biography, Haunted Heart, he wrote “The Shining” based on his own urges to lash out at his children. King admitted "feelings of anger about [his] kids [he] never expected," saying that he "wanted to grab them and hit them" at times. In creating Jack Torrance, he didn't intend to write about himself. Instead, biographer Lisa Rogak quotes King as writing “The Shining” as a kind of absolution; a way of "trying to keep the hex off… if I write this, it won't happen." (It won't happen; not, I won't do it — a careful invocation of the passive voice). King’s novels sketch out a complex picture of evil; people are driven by inner turmoil and human failings that escalate dangerously because of circumstances that alienate us from our better natures. 

This personal framing didn't translate to the film adaptation; King and Kubrick are working with different paradigms of violence. In the world of Kubrick's Shining, danger lurks around every corner because people are fundamentally violent and they live in an inherently dangerous world. Despite the Overlook’s isolation, we’re made aware of its context: "Wasn't it around here that the Donner party got snowbound?" Wendy asks in the first 15 minutes of the film. Later, Wendy hears a TV news segment about another young wife suddenly disappeared under mysterious circumstances related to her husband. The implication is clear: even if she were able to leave the hotel and the increasingly menacing Jack, who's to say she would be safer out there? 

King is correct in his critiques. Jack and Wendy are hamfisted; Jack is cartoonishly evil, and while Wendy performs admirably, her character has clearly been designed to react, not engage meaningfully — a surface on which Kubrick projects his shadows. 

It's inconvenient, then, that Kubrick's Shining manages to be one of the more resonant and authentic depictions of a spiral into violent abuse on screen. The film is far from a nuanced feminist work, but Nicholson's cocktail of patriarchal tyranny and childishness rings somatically true. Even Jack's most exaggerated delivery, where he rounds on Wendy to deliver a monologue about how she cruelly refuses to support him or consider his needs, does not feel far off from reality. This is one of the shameful secrets familiar to those who have navigated their own personal Jack Torrance: abuse really can be this embarrassingly on the nose.

Most of all, what The Shining (1980) gets right is the waiting: the 146-minute runtime lets Kubrick spool out hours, days, and weeks of almost unbearable dread. This excruciating hang time is a remarkable exercise in verisimilitude; installation art about what it feels like to spend your life in this kind of house with this kind of father, waiting endlessly for the bad thing to finally happen, for the tinder to catch. Gradually, then suddenly.

Wendy comes across Jack in his capacious writing lounge and he's distraught, indisposed. She cradles him like a child on the floor as he tells her with deep distress that he had a terrible dream, one where he murders her and Danny gruesomely. The sneering, fast-talking man we know is gone; the one in his place is feeling real terror. 

There's no supernatural element visible in this scene. We don't see Jack's dream, with ghosts leering from the wings; we have no indication that this is anything but a genuine nightmare, rooted as the worst nightmares always are, in our own most urgent fears. There's just an ordinary man, shaking in his wife's arms, thinking about how it would feel to hurt her.

As Wendy is comforting her husband, Danny appears silently on the edge of the tableau. Only the viewer knows that Danny has just had an encounter with the lascivious ghost of Room 237. His parents only see that he’s disheveled, with visible bruising around his throat like he's been choked. 

While Wendy grows increasingly upset, Jack remains frozen in the background and doesn't even rise from his chair to check on his son for himself, too paralyzed by his own guilt about the imagined harm he caused Danny in his dream to engage in any way with the real harm the child has suffered in the present.

Eventually, Wendy gathers Danny up in her arms and tearfully accuses Jack of assaulting him, finally taking a stand relative to her husband's mounting malevolence and also cementing herself as a target. But the moment just before that happens is the core of the film for me —  the moment where Jack could do something — anything — but chooses not to.

This is where Kubrick and King's visions overlap in a man who has always known he is abstractly capable of causing harm, but is beginning to fear he is capable of doing so purposely — one who is, we imagine, all but begging to be convinced otherwise. We see this man with a chance to fix something, to right the scales even a little; we see him decide not to. 

This is what's hardest to get right in stories about abusive fathers: the violence of what he does to you, and more complicated, what he fails to do.

The novel “The Shining” (1977) is Jack’s story. It’s a horror story about the unspeakable dread of confronting that you are a person who would hurt their loved ones, that you have it in you to raise a hand to your own child. The engine that turns the machine of terror relies on the realization that abusers are not some distant, monstrous Other that you have nothing in common with; the you here is the father, the husband, the Bad Man, anyone who is afraid they could be a Bad Man, which is maybe all of us. 

The film The Shining (1980) is Wendy and Danny’s story. It’s a story about realizing that you are not safe with the man you love, about watching him turn a corner and head toward you. This plot unfolds differently for that reason; the internal clockwork of horror is designed from their perspective. 

This fear extends beyond individual characters and into the fabric of the film itself. When Danny covers his eyes in the hallway, it's the same gesture Jack makes at the bar to signify a kind of melodramatic surrender. The deepest, most potent fear of a kid with a bad dad: that we are just like him after all, that we were always going to be.

From the perspective of a Danny or a Wendy, the chicken-and-egg question of whether Jack or the Overlook are truly to blame is absurd. I wouldn't do this if it weren't for the house, the father says. Outside of here, things would be different, I would be different. What is this supposed to mean to those of us who are trapped inside the house — trapped with him? 

In King's book, there's a clear delineation between Jack-as-Jack and Jack-as-The-Overlook; when Danny sees his father round the corner with a mallet raised to beat him to death, King makes sure Danny tells us this isn't really Jack. "…it was not his daddy, this Saturday Night Shock Show horror with its rolling eyes and hunched and hulking shoulders and blood-drenched shirt." Jack is christened with a new set of pronouns to become an "it." 

The Shining (1980) forces us to confront the much more horrifying thing: this is his daddy. It’s yours, too, and it’s mine.

Where Kubrick has Danny flee from his homicidal father, King engineers a face-off between the two. In a hotel hallway, Danny confronts the monstrous figure of his father and tells him he knows the Overlook is in control. The child’s bravery is rewarded with a last visitation from his real, lucid father — who is already a ghost — and we get the last dialogue attributed to Jack-as-Jack: "Doc, run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you." 

This is what Kubrick is missing by refusing Jack any interiority. The idea that Jack really is as monstrous and culpable as all that — and also loves Danny, and feels, as King puts it, "mortal agony" at the harm he causes him.

It's a critical failure of imagination on Kubrick's part — unsurprising from the same man who couldn't trust that his actors could create anything on their own and needed to be tormented in real life to produce the desired effect on screen. He seems to understand violence, but not abuse, the connective tissue of love that makes it so devastating.

It's hard to imagine anyone loving Nicholson's Jack Torrance — a leering, facetious misogynist who seems mildly surprised whenever he runs across his own son in the hotel where they both live. And yet, his family must love him. Think of Wendy's comical, halfhearted stabs at Jack's arm as he chops through a door to reach her, which are usually read as a marker of her character's incompetence. But if you choose to believe that her character is a real person with an imperfect but coherent sense of the world, her behavior looks more to me like the anguished, impossible choice of a woman who still believes that she's going to lie down next to her husband again when she goes to sleep that night. Who still wants to, on some level. 

I think of King's refusal to believe that this man who loves his family can and will also raise up a hand, a mallet, an ax against them of his own free will. In “The Shining” he imagines a kind of deus ex machina, an outside evil that capitalizes on our potential to commit violence. A void opens up where these stories overlap: an inability to accept that we can do monstrous things of our own free will, and that we remain fully, terribly human while we do so.

This void of imagination is where the actual terror of The Shining originates, and where we sit as spectators, holding a truth too large for the story built around it: that none of us are forced to be monsters either by dint of supernatural forces or our own natures. That the family unit really can be a horror show, and is, but that it doesn't have to be. That we are granted the power of choice and are even now choosing: to harm, to save, to stay, to run. 🪱

Rachel Kincaid is a New England transplant to Minnesota, where she works in newsletters and occasionally teaches writing. Her favorite X-Files episode is "Beyond the Sea."

BY: GUEST WRITER CELIA MATTISON

"I hope you can't sleep and you dream about it
And when you dream, I hope you can't sleep and you scream about it
I hope your conscience eats at you and you can't breathe without me"

-Eminem, Stan

It seems surprising that Lauren Bacall and Michael Biehn ever knew each other, much less co-starred in a film. But in 1981, the titan of Hollywood Golden Age glamor and the understated action star at the center of Terminator and Aliens, came together in The Fan, a psychological thriller about a famous actress hunted by a violent stalker. 

The Fan was a flop both critically and commercially. It’s based on the much better regarded but now out-of-print 1977 epistolary novel by Bob Randall, though neither iteration of The Fan has been much remembered. But before the word “parasocial” joined the popular lexicon, The Fan offered a prescient look at the nature of an obsessive fan culture that would develop over the next several decades into the robust twin industries of celebrity relatability and fandom.

The Fan begins with Douglas Breen (Biehn), a young man who has started writing fan letters to stage and film actress, Sally Ross (Bacall). The letters start off creepy and quickly become frightening. Douglas professes his love for Sally and makes plans for them to consummate their passion, promising that he has the “necessary equipment” to please her. Sally’s friend and secretary of many years, Belle, handles the star’s cascade of fan mail, so Sally remains entirely unaware of Douglas for much of the story. She has her own concerns, namely rehearsals for a major stage musical1 that seems poised to revitalize her career, as well as navigating a reconnection with her noncommittal ex-husband Jake. When Sally doesn’t respond to his increasingly demanding letters, Douglas begins to target the people close to her, culminating in his plan to attack her on the opening night of her new musical. 

Douglas’s behavior in The Fan is textbook incel behavior. His letters to Sally, demanding a response, are full of braggadocious claims about his physical form and endowment, the life he’d be able to offer her, and how he deserves a chance. He makes up a story about an entire store of customers applauding him after he tells off his boss, predating the “and then everyone clapped” internet meme by a good three decades. Listening to Douglas’s self-aggrandizing voiceover as he writes his letters feels like reading the SheRatesDogs Twitter page, except we never see anyone put him in his place. We get the sense that he has gotten away with a lifetime of entitled and antisocial, if not necessarily violent, behavior.2 

Biehn portrays Douglas with an inflated, almost regal sense of self. With his coiffed hair and conservative sweater/button-down combos, he stands in sharp contrast to the hip record store coworkers who are the first to receive his abuse. Like a sniveling, spoiled brat grimacing through picture day, Biehn tunes the boyish vulnerability that made Kyle Reese into an iconic hero to a much darker frequency. One that remains uncannily familiar in an era rife with online male bullying.

In contrast, Sally is sharp and social, a faintly-drawn character that relies heavily on Bacall’s real life legendary career and charisma. While Sally is aware that her Hollywood career has faded, and that much of the stage work she pursues is frivolous, she delights in the pleasures of her matured career and the decades-long friendships she’s built throughout — "I always will love you,” she tells a friend in the novel. “[And] you, Belle, the ocean and the sky. What a rich life I've had!”

The shared intimacy of her correspondences with friends and colleagues is starkly different from Douglas’s unanswered rantings. What might have easily been a melancholic performance of middle-aged self-doubt is instead anchored in Bacall’s debonair ease and frosted edge, which makes her the perfect foil to the twitchily insecure Douglas. What initially drew Douglas into his fandom is not mentioned, nor is it important: what matters is that Sally’s untouchability and poise, which initially appealed to Douglas as proof of her icon status, now infuriates him.  

The obsessed and murderous fan archetype is commonplace now3, but it was just beginning to emerge in popular imagination when The Fan was released, just a few months after the murder of John Lennon. Stalking is still seriously misunderstood and the police efforts in The Fan are almost comically pathetic, failing to catch Douglas even as he repeatedly breaks into Sally’s home and dressing room. No one, including the police, seems to quite grasp the danger Douglas poses, or even the idea that someone like Douglas could exist. When Douglas fakes his own death, Sally celebrates her freedom — no one considers that Douglas is simply a violent first iteration of a fan culture that is about to become an industry.

Douglas’s actions are shocking, but maybe less so today as they would have been to a 1977 audience. We not only have the benefit of 40 years of slasher horror and stalker dramas, but we also are living through a crisis of parasocial obsession. At the time I rewatched The Fan, Timothee Chalamet and Chris Evans were the most recent victims of parasocial meltdowns, as fan communities mounted online attacks primarily against the female partners of both actors. The public has not internalized any of the lessons we might have learned from the experiences of women who have suffered from the spotlight, such as Princess Diana or Britney Spears. The power of a fandom has been harnessed by stars like Nicki Minaj, who called upon her fans to harass reporters after they questioned some of her claims about Covid-19.4 

Fan magazines and conventions have existed since mass media (what was the World’s Fair if not a massive con) but the emergence of the internet, and its fan communities, massively accelerated the growth of fandom as an industry. In the way that there are sports writers, there are now fandom writers, devoted to breathless coverage of the goings-ons in the Marvel Universe or Taylor Swift’s personal life. The proliferation of fandom that has led to an endless parade of sequels, reboots, and podcasts has also resulted in fan’s demands to access—even completely infiltrate—celebrity’s personal lives. We’re meant to contrast Douglas’s extreme isolation with Sally’s glamorous lifestyle surrounded by friends and colleagues.5 But today, her tiny squad of friends and collaborators seems quaint in comparison to the teams employed by even relatively minor celebrities to help them make public appearances, execute brand deals, and most importantly, remain relatable. We’re living in a post-Douglas age. We expect a certain level of rabidity from strangers, and an appropriate level of self-defense from public figures.

Many of Douglas’s hateful behaviors are abbreviated in the film adaptation; his paranoid tirades against queer people, in particular, are cut. The film keeps the scene in which Douglas cruises a gay bar to find a victim he can use to fake his own death. It’s easy to read this moment as that old homophobic trope — that Douglas is a closeted gay man whose self-hate and repression leads him to violence. The fact that Douglas’s victim looks strikingly like him helps with this pseudo-psychological reading. But in the novel, Randall, who was queer, makes it more explicit that Douglas’s homophobia is not a case of a man protesting too much. It’s just another example of his vicious bullying and regressive worldview: women who disagree with him are bitches, men who are attracted to men are degenerates. 

In the novel, I see a queer political reading of Douglas as a physical representation of the endemic homophobic violence that went uninvestigated and underreported in ‘70s New York, the same epidemic captured in the 1970 novel Cruising.6 Police incompetence is even more deliberate and dramatic in the book, and the consequences are far more severe: Sally dies at Douglas’s hands. This interpretation is absent from the film, which mainly gestures to the novel’s queerness through an overtly camp musical. A hint crops up toward the end of the movie, in the final confrontation between Sally and Douglas, when she tells him “we’re sick of this reign of terror. I will not be a victim.” Perhaps Sally is speaking more literally of the friends who have also been victimized by Douglas, perhaps she is speaking of women in general who suffer male harassment. But perhaps this line is the film’s acknowledgment of its queer source material, and Sally’s recognition of Douglas not as an individual threat but as an agent of an unceasingly violent culture.

Here lies the most major difference in the storylines. In the film, Sally lives, turning Douglas’s own weapon against him when he hesitates to once again beg for her love. In the novel, he fatally shoots her on stage on the opening night of her play. Both endings are quite brief, even anticlimactic, because ultimately the story of The Fan is not about Sally’s or Douglas’s survival. The Fan is about obsessive male violence, the victims who get swept into it, the society that permits it, and the woman who is unable to counteract it.

Douglas’s delusions are an extreme example of a parasocial obsession, one that’s  compounded by violent misogyny and entitlement. Today, Douglas could have a network of online communities feeding his obsession, through the manosphere that engages in public humiliation of women, through fan communities that abet stalking, through AI girlfriends that are trained to validate their users. As much as The Fan might seem quaint and corny, it was predictive of a parasocial behavior that would only increase with the dawn of social media. 

“A lot of people feel close to me. People I don’t know and will never meet,” Sally explains to a cop. She had no idea how this pilfered intimacy — first desired, then feared — would evolve to fuel a devouring industry of its own.

Celia Mattison writes about film, fiction, and scuba diving. She is the author of Deeper Into Movies.

BY: Guest Writer Sky Regina

Kate: I mean, no one actually thinks this witch shit is real.

Simon: Yeah, it’s something babysitters make up to scare kids.

- Fear Street Part 1: 1994

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I sniffed out spooky lore like it was candy.  

I was fortunate enough to have a bed with a partial view of my parents’ TV, which meant my first viewings of The Shining, Scream, and Pet Sematary happened between my splayed fingers and Tetris sessions on my brother’s stolen Gameboy. The violent gutting of Casey Becker’s boyfriend in Scream’s opening scene left me internally tangled up with regret and images I couldn’t unsee. But somehow, that particular brand of distress only fueled my desire for more spooky shit. Before I learned to read, I crafted my own bone-chilling tales with the sole purpose of scaring myself before falling asleep. I imagined a wailing banshee waiting at my window or a child-stealing pirate with a hook hand lurking under my bed. It was pretty masochistic, but it was also a huge rush. 

As I got older, I devoured every macabre book I could get my grubby hands on, starting with ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Bunnicula’ before graduating to the more sophisticated — and library-restricted — ‘Fear Street’ series by R.L. Stine. Known as one of the best-selling young adult book series of all time, the first ‘Fear Street’ installment was published in 1989, which meant it was most ’90s kids’ gateway drug to horror novels. Stine has been described as the “literary training bra for Stephen King,” an apt comparison that also captures his trademark brand of wry humor. 

What Stine recognized is something integral to adolescence — exploring the imaginary by engaging with make-believe monsters helps young people bridge the gap between experience and knowledge. Before kids understand that the sounds coming from behind the walls are caused by skittering rodents or swelling pipes, they make sense of the unknown by fantasizing. Anxiety and adrenaline are twin emotions — both induce similar physiological effects, but one is considered negative and to be avoided, while the other is sought after. Children don’t often know how to differentiate between the two, which is why I think they seek these gut-churning, pulse-spiking feelings in scary stories — a low-risk, high-reward pursuit. Stories and allegories are a safe space to look horror in the face, before connecting the dots to the harsh realities of the real world. 

Most kids have their own version of the boogeyman — fictional evil entities that gobble up their fear, haunt their dreams, and dwell in the dark corners of their imaginations. Feeling scared can be really fun, as long as the threat can’t actually hurt you. More zombie, vampire, and gremlin than small-town serial killer with sharp knives that draw young blood. 

Horror maestro and comedy enthusiast Stine has always understood that. He previously edited a humor magazine, and wrote comedic stories under the pseudonym ‘Jovial Bob Stine.’ In his Masterclass, Stine theorized that laughter and fear cause the same visceral reaction, and that you need one to temper the other. He also said horror is easier to write than comedy because we all share the same fears — and that’s true across age gaps. 

“I’ve got to write these scary books,” Stine said in a 2014 interview with Mental Floss. “That’s what these kids want. Kids like to be scared…The lucky thing about horror is that the things people are afraid of, it never changes. Afraid of the dark, afraid someone’s in the house, afraid someone’s under your bed — that’s the same.”

Nineties kids remember the ‘Fear Street’ books as products of their youth, though the most recent book was released in 2019 as part of the ‘Return to Fear Street’ series. The record-breaking young adult (YA) horror series inspired a ‘Fear Street’ revival (piggybacking on the trend of content geared toward those ravenous for millennial nostalgia) as a Netflix film trilogy, released over three weeks in July 2021. 

The trilogy wasn’t adapted from a specific book; rather, it borrows elements of the original series (ex: the fictional town of Shadyside, characters from the Fier and Goode families, etc.) to create a new narrative that captures the subversive spirit of the books. Staying true to the bloody slashics director/co-writer Leigh Janiak says inspired the vibe of the trilogy, the films pump up the gore to hardcore levels — in one particularly gruesome scene, a girl’s face is reduced to bloody ribbons after her head’s pushed through a bread slicer — deviating from the much milder content of the books to appeal to a wider, and older, audience.

As an author of YA horror, I’ve noticed the discrepancy between what’s allowed in movies and what’s allowed in books made for teen audiences continues to exist. YA books have to jump through seemingly endless hoops as they move through the publishing process because of the limitations set by the school and library systems. Too much gore/swearing/sex/other controversial content in teen stories means they’re far less likely to be included in the canon of “acceptable” or “appropriate” books, which also means most publishers won’t acquire them. Not having school or library support is bad for business, and traditional publishing is, first and foremost, a business that prioritizes safe financial bets. 

It can be frustrating having to navigate all these restrictions and watering down my writing to fit a narrow mold, especially when teen movies seem to “get away” with including far more contentious content — which I wholeheartedly support; let the teens have the messy blood and profanity of real life.

Some progress has been made. Fantastic, boundary-pushing YA horror novels like ‘The Honeys’ by Ryan La Sala and ‘The Taking of Jake Livingston’ by Ryan Douglass (who’s been very outspoken online about the bullshit of publishing gatekeepers’ refusal to take risks in YA) have managed to slip through the cracks and make it onto bookshelves. But these types of books, both of which also happen to be written by queer authors and center queer main characters, are the exception. And, of course, they tend to cause a stir among those hellbent on suppressing and censoring teen literature. But the powers that be in the YA publishing industry often forget to cater to their target audience — readers aged 12 to 18 — and what they’re actually interested in reading. 

According to Marcia Kochel, teacher librarian in Decatur, GA, tweens often prefer to read books geared toward a slightly older age bracket with grittier themes and higher stakes. She says: “When I do booktalks, kids gravitate toward shocking topics. For example, if I say a book is about a school shooting, or an alien invasion, or a mysterious plane crash, kids will pick it up. Many middle schoolers are looking for horror books that are actually scary, and it can take a lot to scare a middle school kid.”

When I was ready to up the ante on edgy content, my steady diet of ‘Goosebumps’ — both the books and the TV episodes — naturally paved the way to ‘Fear Street’. But this happened years before my school library deemed me old enough. Much like the thrill of trying to rent an R-rated movie, those forbidden ‘Fear Street’ books shelved next to Christopher Pike’s pulpy paperbacks stoked my curiosity, leaving me salivating for stories just out of my reach. My school librarians acted as the gatekeepers to these alluring, off-limits novels, keeping them under lock and key until I turned 13, the apparently magical age when tweens enter teenhood and can finally “handle” the gritty subject matter considered inappropriate for 12-and-unders. 

I remember a few times when my horror-hungry friends and I convinced an older kid to borrow the restricted teen books and share them with us as though they were contraband cigarettes or nudie mags. We’d read the especially salacious bits aloud, giggling during recess about “buxom blondes” with blood trailing from several orifices. These relatively tame books paled in comparison to the horror films a lot of us had already watched, of course, but there was something about their bootlegged nature that fueled their novelty. We wanted them more because we weren’t allowed to access them, except at the Scholastic Book Fair (speaking of, Scholastic’s recent response to book censorship was so bad, they had to issue an apology) if you were lucky enough to have parents who either didn’t care about or were too busy to monitor what you were reading. 

Fictional horror has always been a comfort, a way to escape the real-life horrors of youth: the mass school shootings, the insidious cruelty of bullying, the close-to-home terror attacks. I still prefer the anxiety caused by movie and book monsters over the human ones that can actually hurt me — people are far scarier. So why do adults feel the need to censor young people from book boogeymen that can’t actually claw through the page and tear their hearts out? Or even from stories that show the grit of reality in the guise of protecting the children from “perversity”? Author Ryan La Sala thinks it isn’t really about protecting the children at all; rather, the censorship movement is more about adults “churning up resentment against communities.”

The absurdity of these types of literary restrictions for youth is now echoing across the US, with book banning spreading simultaneously with the even more absurd — and not to mention dangerous — passing of anti-LGBTQ+ laws. The two are inextricably linked, with more and more queer books making the banned book list by the day. A recent report by PEN America found that during the first half of the 2022-23 school year, 26% of banned titles had LGBTQ+ characters or themes, and that these content categories appeared more commonly among banned books: violence and abuse, health and wellbeing, and themes of grief and death.

So if modern teens can’t get their fill of relevant and, at times, life-saving stories through literature, at least they’re more likely to find them in film. The Fear Street trilogy is a stylish and entertaining love letter to ‘90s teen horror, ‘70s summer camp slashers, and Salem-esque, witch-trial folklore, but it also grounds each film’s plot with contemporary themes, despite the historical settings of 1994, 1978, and 1666. Tackling generational trauma, queer love and homophobia, and the dangers of mob mentality, power imbalance, and entitlement, the film trilogy serves its blood n’ gore with heaping scoops of emotional depth and character development — things the books severely lack — and has tons of fun while doing it. 

The filmmaker’s experience mirrored my own: we both remembered how scandalous the books were to us in our youth, while rereading them as adults was obviously far less intense. 

Janiak called the books “pretty tame” in a Slate interview: “But my memory was of subversive violence and sex and all of these things. So it was really important to me to preserve both of those things: being true to the slasher subgenre, and also being true to the spirit of what it felt like reading those books as a teenager.”

She more than succeeded. Watching the trilogy brought me back to adolescence, when I secretly inhaled juicy tales of murder and betrayal that would one day inspire my own writing. And like YA author Ryan Douglass, my goal is to write diverse characters fighting for their lives “to give a kid something real to relate to — something as ugly as his waking life.” 🪱

Sky Regina is a freelance editor and writer from Toronto, Ontario. Her fiction is represented by Lucy Hamilburg at The Hamilburg Agency. When she needs a brain break from writing, she can usually be found hunched over campy horror novels with her terrier pup by her side, or devising believable ways to worm her way out of social commitments (to spend more time with her dog).

• Extra credit: Check out Slate’s Scaredy Scale, which describes the Fear Street trilogy as “...the ideal on-ramp for tweens raised on R.L. Stine books to work their way up to full-fledged horror,” for a deep-dive into how Fear StreetPart 1: 1994 earned its R rating.

• “The Librarian Who Couldn’t Take it Any More,” from the Washington Post

By: Elizabeth Lepro

“People have to live and die somewhere, after all.” 

- ‘The Haunting of Hill House,’ Shirley Jackson

What haunts a house? Generally, we attribute a haunting to ghosts of a building’s insidious past: murder, torture, enslavement, repression, sexual transgression, greed, and myriad other sins by or against the family unit. A house can hold one-thousand secrets. For that reason, they have time and again made apt metaphors for generational trauma, or for that warm and fuzzy, walled-in feeling of going completely insane.

Hill House is a foundational haunted house — perhaps the foundational haunted house. In Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel ‘The Haunting of Hill House,’ a doctor of philosophy sets out to study poltergeist phenomena and invites two women, Eleanor, called Nell, and Theodora, to join him in the mansion as “assistants.” His intent is really to see how these women — both of whom have encountered the paranormal in their lives previously — will react to the houses’ particular charms. Also along for the ride is Luke, a relative of Hill House’s proprietors. While staying at Hill House, Nell, Luke, Theodora, and Dr. Montague are subject to increasingly intense hauntings, namely a violent banging on the walls and doors each night. But it is Nell who experiences the most isolating — and ultimately fatal — haunting.

That story and its titular house have since spurred two feature films, a TV series, and a play, not to mention countless haunted houses in the imaginations of other writers and filmmakers. But Jackson’s Hill House doesn’t quite align with our aforementioned understanding of haunted houses. To set off its cursed history, no horror needed to occur within Hill House’s walls; the building was born bad.

By Jackson’s original description, Hill House is a “masterpiece of architectural misdirection.” Every angle in the house is not quite 90 degrees. Its steps are purposefully un-level. Each doorway — and there are many, many doorways — is a tad off-center, meaning doors always swing shut unless they are held open. A maze of narrow passages and interconnected rooms twist around the inside of the structure like concentric intestines, so that once you’ve reached the center of the home, natural light is an impossibility and disorientation a guarantee. A statue can only remain standing in Hill House if it’s been specifically weighted to offset the imbalance of the floor. Likewise, anyone who enters Hill House with intent to stay is required to recalibrate and submit to the house’s slanted reality.

“Hill House is vile,” Jackson writes, through the lens of her characters. “Diseased,” “leprous,” “disturbed,” “sick,” a “place of contained ill will.” 

What Jackson asks us to consider is not just the house-as-metaphor, but as a legitimate object and subject in its own right. Consider a house, she urges, designed precisely to inspire in its inhabitants a sense of cerebral disorder. Consider a house that becomes haunted not against its maker’s best intentions, but because of them. Consider a house built not to shelter a family, but to trap them.

Once we’re able to imagine this kind of house, sidled up against the darkened hills, she pushes us further — decades further. What of the people who choose to live inside such a house? Not necessarily those who, against their better judgment, wash up on its murky shores, but that slim percentage of people who enter the house and, knowing its design, decide to stay. These are the people for whom a bad house becomes a siren call. Or, a home.

Shirley Jackson’s grandfather Samuel C. Bugbee built houses for wealthy families in the San Francisco hills — elegant, opulent “millionaires’ palaces” for post-Gold Rush robber barons. “It is hard to imagine more potent symbols of gilded-age excess than the Nob Hill Bugbee mansions,” writes Ruth Franklin in her seminal biography of Jackson. These mansions were considered cursed from the start. “Lifeless and forlorn,” the Morning Call said of the Nob Hill mansions in 1891, “they tell no story but of pride ungratified and happiness that could not be purchased. So the shadows seem to rest on Nob Hill.”  

True to their infamy, the mansions burned down in the early 1900s. But Jackson’s family would go on to form Bugbee & Sons, a firm responsible for the construction of the California Theater, Wade Opera House, and the Golden Gate Park Conservatory.

Given this familial inclination for home-building and Jackson’s own domestic life — she would become a wife and mother of four, who also wrote essays about parenting — she composed her fiction primarily in, around, and about houses. “She delighted,” writes Franklin, “in putting a domestic twist on the supernatural.” 

Jackson spent the earliest years of her childhood in California, which she describes in dreamy scenes of eating pomegranates on fenceposts and delightfully pinching rosebuds on the bush in her garden each spring. But in high school, Jackson’s family moved to Rochester, New York, and into a “handsome five-bedroom colonial with Tudor accents,” by Franklin’s description. Her parents had their sights set on joining the local elite. Meanwhile, Jackson was stewing. “Golly, how I hate this town,” she wrote in her diary. 

This was 1933 —  interestingly, around the time that Halloween-themed haunted house attractions began to crop up in the U.S. Though Jackson’s well-off family might not have felt it, the country was in the swings of the Great Depression and it was fantasy towns like the ones the Jackson family lived in that must have moved her to write stories like ‘The Lottery,’ in which everything that seems perfect on the surface is actually simmering with horror underneath. 

Criticized endlessly by her mother, ignored by crushes, rejected from sororities, witness to racism and anti-Semitism pre-WWII, young Jackson learned in Rochester what some of those Nob Hill families must have discovered, too: happiness cannot be purchased. Later, Jackson likely reflected on the gigantic luxury homes her family had wrought as delirious vestiges of a more excessive time, when no dream seemed too big for a house to contain it. 

In all adaptations, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ begins with a desire for the house. Dr. Montague, a self-proclaimed student of supernatural manifestations, has been “looking for an honestly haunted house all his life.” 

Eleanor Vance, or Nell, meanwhile, has been cooped up in her mother’s house for 11 years, sacrificing her own life to care for the ailing woman right up until her death. When she gets the doctor’s letter inviting her to participate in the experiment, she is overjoyed. “During the whole underside of her life, ever since her first memory,” Jackson tells us, “Nell had been waiting for something like Hill House.” 

In its original form, Nell’s drive to Hill House is something like Little Red Riding Hood’s journey through the woods to grandmother’s, pre-wolf. She drives along a pleasantly winding road, past quaint small towns, lush fields, and orchards. On this drive, she passes a large house with a pair of stone lions propped at its entryway, and she begins to construct a fantasy:

Time is beginning this morning in June, she assured herself, but it is a time that is strangely new and of itself; in these few seconds I have lived a lifetime in a house with two lions in front. Every morning I swept the porch and dusted the lions, and every evening I patted their heads good night… When I slept it was under a canopy of white organdie, and a nightlight guarded me from the hall. People bowed to me on the streets of the town because everyone was very proud of my lions.

This vision of a home of her own is so intense that Nell cannot see the real world through its glossy windows. Nell sacrificed her youth for her mother. She shows up at Hill House’s doorstep, that vile place, believing that it is her prize.

In haunted house films, families often pull into their new driveway on a sunny day, wide-eyed and expectant, full of hope for their new lives. The kids rush to lay claim to their rooms. The adults consider all the ways they might repaint or refresh. They roll their eyes at old wallpaper, confident in their refined, modern tastes. Only we, the watchers, know that this bliss is unsustainable. We know it as we watch Nell drive toward Hill House, just as we know it when we see the family in any haunted house film unpack their belongings. A new house — particularly a new, old house — is foreboding. Better, we think, to pack it back in the station wagon and get one of those grayscale prefabs shipped in on wheels, history-less. In slashers, we beg the teens not to go deeper into the house. In haunted house films, we beg the family not to go in at all. This house, we know, is not a warm vessel for their new future. There’s too much unrealistic hope resting on something so real. 

Shirley Jackson’s mother had a significant influence on her life and work. Geraldine Jackson was a practitioner of Christian Science, an idealist faith that believes “the real universe is the spiritual expression of infinite, perfect, creative Spirit, the divine Mind; that it is infinitely good and right,” as opposed to the material world we occupy, full of greed, ignorance, fear, etc. (Christian Scientists also believe in spiritual healing, and Shirley would later reflect on watching her mother and grandmother pray over her brother’s broken leg for days before taking him to the hospital.) Geraldine was, by Zoë Heller’s description, “an elegant, rather vapid woman, who was disappointed by her daughter and who made it clear that she would have preferred a prettier, more pliable one.”

Between the mansion-builders and the Christian Scientists, Jackson’s lineage was peppered with idealists — an ancestral line dedicated to seeing the world not as it is, but as it would be in their own image.

Jackson never fit her mother’s conventional mold. She was an independent, strong-willed child who spent hours alone writing and would later in life study witchcraft. It’s clear from Franklin’s biography that Jackson struggled with her mother’s criticism, and sought, at times, to recontextualize her own life because of it. Later in her life, she placed an index card in the front of one of her teenage diaries suggesting that most of its content was affectation.

Though she may not have been able to confront her mother directly about the pervasive influence of her idealism, she certainly bucked it in her writing. After the family had moved to the East Coast, Jackson wrote in her diary about the death of her former self, the one who had existed in the sweet-scented California air. “She was a dreamer, and dreamers have no place in our matter-of-fact modern world,” Jackson wrote. An “infinitely wiser person” took her place.

It is that Jackson who eventually gravitated toward the wicked underbelly of an idealistic world. This “infinitely wiser person” wrote stories about a seemingly pleasant village carrying on its annual tradition of stoning one citizen to death, about countless women driven to madness by oppressive expectations, and, of course, about large houses full of terror and despair. In a truly un-Christian Science statement of opinion, Jackson once wrote, “I can’t understand this desire—this requirement—to hide true things, and display to the world a suave, untroubled visage. If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it?”

Jackson wrote ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ while raising four children in bucolic 1950s Vermont, stuck in an intense marriage to a man who cheated on her belligerently and without shame and that often left her feeling lonely and oppressed. To deal with agoraphobia and anxiety, she relied on a combination of tranquilizers, amphetamines, and alcohol.

In the novel Jackson was writing, a spirit goes marauding about the hallways every night, pounding on doors, turning baby head-shaped doorknobs, and warping walls, begging to be let into one of its many rooms. The further Nell falls into her paranoia and isolation, the more intensely she feels Hill House’s spectral presence. When the house has her firmly in its grip, she steps out of one fantasy, and into another.

“No stone lions for me…no oleanders; I have broken the spell of Hill House and somehow come inside.” “I am home,” she thinks, ascending a dangerous spiral staircase. “I am home.”

In the last chapters of Shirley Jackson’s life, she struggled immensely with mental anguish. It was in these final years — trapped in a haunted house of her own —  that she, too, began to fantasize. 

“i think about the glorious world of the future,” she wrote in her diary in 1964, “not to be different and weak and helpless and degraded …and shut out. not shut out, shutting out.”

On the outside, Jackson had created a vision of 1950s domestic bliss, one that undoubtedly brought her moments of happiness and comfort and that she’d dreamed of as a child. She’d cultivated a circle of literary friends, who often visited and described her as “buoyant.” She was financially successful thanks to her writing and was nominated for a National Book Award. But in her most private moments, she longed to escape the life she’d built. That longing came to fruition. Jackson died in bed of cardiac arrest on August 8, 1965, at 48 years old. She was at home.

Almost 20 years since we had last been inside Hill House, we returned to it again in 2018, this time in episodic format.

Because Mike Flanagan, who directed the Netflix series Haunting of Hill House and wrote or co-wrote many of its episodes, has “always been drawn to familial horror,” he completely renovated the guts of Jackson’s novel to create a powerful multi-character storyline that is neither indulgently faithful nor disrespectfully unfaithful to its source material. Rather than a more direct retelling of Jackson’s story — as both of the film adaptations are — the show is an adventure inside her work and mind. 

The Crains, in this telling, are a husband and wife house-flipping team, who move into Hill House with their five children in the summer of 1992. Olivia Crain is the creative mind behind each renovation that her husband, Hugh, brings into reality. Their plan is to renovate the old mansion and sell it so they can build their dream house — to construct one dream in order to create another. The house, of course, doesn’t oblige and the summer ends with Olivia’s death. As the series flashes between the past and the present, we see how each of the five children are affected as adults by the time they spent as children in Hill House. One of the characters, a type-A mortician, is named after Shirley Jackson. 

“We wanted a character… who took us right up to the face of death and mortality, and turned the lights on,” Flanagan told Simon Abrams of Vulture. “I felt like Jackson herself operated that way in her own life, processing social anxiety and her feelings about society by walking directly up to them and staring them in the face.” 

“Shirley never wants to look,” a man tells the television character Shirley, “but Shirley has to look.”

What each of the siblings in the show are asked to do, over and over again by the ghosts of their past and present, is look — not imagine, not dream, not create, not run away, but look and see. They each resist in various ways. Theodora, for instance, a medium who can see people’s memories when she touches them, constantly wears gloves. But a truly haunted house does not allow us to look away; it demands constant attention, and when the children finally return to their haunted house, they are greeted by the same demanding, familiar ghosts of their past. In the penultimate episode, Shirley, the character, falls into a dream of her own funeral, in which a mortician leads her husband to her embalmed corpse. 

“I hung flowers full of smell and posed her like a dreamer,” the mortician says. “And now, she is fixed and pretty. But underneath, she is a horror.” 

Shirley Jackson began ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ by telling us that “no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” It’s a formidable opening, especially in the context of the story that follows. Dreaming is a fact of life, Jackson tells us right away. Yet she spends the rest of her novel — and, in many ways, the whole of her life — excavating dreams to see what horror lay wriggling at their rotten cores.

So what did Jackson believe haunts a house? Perhaps it has nothing to do with what we can’t see, and everything to do with what we choose to ignore; what realities we sacrifice to make a dream seem real. A haunted house is born from expectations and aspirations that so often rely on a fantastic unreality — dreams of absolute safety and certainty, forever; dreams of propriety, that a house is destined for you, that its future and yours are inextricably intertwined. But dreams and nightmares live on the same spectrum; in the same state of singular unconsciousness. What’s worse, we each enter that unconscious state alone. A dream can only be shared in the metaphorical sense — in reality, whatever walks in the fantasies you create in your mind, walks alone. 

Jackson knew what it was to be lonely in a house full of people. She knew that if your dream brought you to a place like Hill House, where the walls are built to keep it trapped, it would go on knocking against closed doors, banging back and forth like a pinball, turning knobs, warping the walls, and ripping the chandeliers from the ceiling, begging to be let in the rooms where the people are. You can live in a house, but you cannot live in a dream. Not, at least, without waking up in a nightmare. 🪱

Editing by the ever supportive Nicholas Gambini.

RELATED

• ‘Whose hand was I holding?’ Remembering ‘The Haunting’ and its scariest scene

• ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ by Charlotte Perkins Stetson

Film: Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, 2022

Where to watch: In your girlfriend’s frenemies’ parents’ hurricane-ready mansion.

“Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister's and brother's keeper.”

- Rebecca Solnit, 'A Paradise Built in Hell’

During the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a soldier saw a man taking groceries from a store. On the rubble-strewn street, fires flaring around him, he bayoneted the looter. 

Only it wasn’t a looter. The man had been invited by a grocer to take supplies from his store before it was consumed in the flames. A small businessman was trying to help his community, aware that the usual laws of commerce and self-interest had been suspended in the general conflagration. But the soldier, even with the city crumbling around him, knew his job was not altruism, but the protection of property, enforced on pain of execution. 

Rebecca Solnit tells a number of these stories in her 2009 study of community response to disaster, 'A Paradise Built in Hell.’ I thought about the book repeatedly while watching director Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022). 

Bodies Bodies Bodies  is not exactly a slasher horror movie. Instead, it’s a social comedy about horror — more specifically about how horror and fear make social bonds fall apart. Reijin’s characters know how slashers are supposed to work, and because they know bodies are supposed to pile up, they start piling up the bodies. 

Though the movie isn’t exactly meant as a genre commentary, it ends up suggesting that fantasizing about the monsters among us brings those monsters into being. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, not because fear makes us tremble in adversity, but because fear turns us into our own adversaries.

Early horror films generally focused on monsters: Godzilla, Frankenstein, the Fly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula. The threat to order and life came from magical or scientific freaks who were, whatever their other dangers, relatively easy to identify. When you looked up on that boat in Nosferatu (1922) and saw Count Orlok stalking toward you with his unnatural proportions, pointed ears, sharp teeth, and long tapering claws, you weren’t going to mistake him for some other innocuous traveler. The line between good and evil, or normal and monstrous, was easy to see.

This began to change in the horror movies of the 1960s. In films like Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1962), there were no creatures and no prosthetics. Hitchcock’s Bates Motel is a looming gothic pile, but that just emphasizes that there aren’t any looming gothic monsters crawling out of it. Instead, the murderer is just some guy with psychological problems and a sharp implement. As film critic Owen Gilberman put it in his discussion of Psycho, “In truth, there was no monster at all… There was just Norman and his rage.”

This became the standard formula in the years and decades that followed. Monsters still popped up here and there for nostalgia’s sake, but the new, hot antagonists  were (more or less) just people. In films like Deliverance (1972) or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), rural residents were depicted as remorseless murderers bent on avenging themselves on urbanites. In Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13^th Part II (1981) singular serial killers wracked up horrific body counts. 

These killers tended to be masked, not so much to conceal their identities (which weren’t mysteries) as to suggest that anyone could be behind that mask — me, you, lover, friend. In the slasher, death wears a familiar face, which means its mode is as much paranoia as fear. Universal townspeople might join together to torch the monster; in the slasher, those townspeople are more likely to come after each other. The owner of the hotel, the stranger you meet by the side of the river, a hitchhiker — they’re all potential threats. 

It’s probably not an accident that the slasher subgenre coalesced and boomed during an unprecedented crime wave.  Violent crime in the U.S. increased by 126% between 1960 and 1970, and then by another 64% between 1970 and 1980. Reactionary politicians used the resulting sense of pervasive fear to blame and demonize the Civil Rights Movement, and to fuel a massive racist system of mass incarceration which is still with us. Filmmakers used the same anxieties to build a new horror genre based on paranoid fear of… well, everyone.

Slashers (like mass incarceration) offer a particular kind of response to danger and crime. As Peter Hutchings writes in The Horror Film (2014), “the knowledge acquired through the cumulative viewing of horror films, and especially the slasher variant, encourages the horror audience to be constantly aware of off-screen space as a potential source of threat.” Slasher viewers are constantly surveilling for danger. The victors in a slasher prioritize vigilance (don’t go in that basement!) and self-reliance. The Final Girl who makes it through the slasher assault is able to outrun and outfight not just the antagonist, but the other characters; she’s the fittest who survives. 

Slashers depict disasters as individual trials. Solnit’s 'A Paradise Built in Hell' is based on a study of numerous natural disasters, from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, and in it, Solnit argues disasters often pull people together rather than putting them at each other’s throats. When disaster strikes, Solnit says, people typically care for each other, rescue each other, and try to help each other. During Katrina, for example, many strangers set out in small boats to find survivors. Volunteers took strangers into their home.

Not everyone reacts so well, obviously. Many people are convinced by movies and the mass media that people are “hysterical or vicious in the face of calamity,” as Solnit puts it. When you think that others are going to horde food, or use disaster to rob you, you may become violent and selfish yourself. 

Authorities like police are especially prone to assume the worst of others, Solnit suggests. After Katrina, in a notorious incident on the Danziger bridge, police opened fire, killing two and wounding four. The police claimed they were defending themselves from snipers. But there were no snipers.

Like those police, the characters in Bodies Bodies Bodies know the rules of slashers too well — everyone is after you, the world is a dangerous place, hypervigilance is safety. 

The film starts with wealthy Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) bringing her new working-class girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to a party at the fabulously opulent home of Sophie’s best friend David (Pete Davidson). Shortly after they arrive, a hurricane hits, and everybody plays a murder party game which involves slapping each other in the face and then making a lot of accusations. 

In a pause, David goes outside on the porch to play with his father’s sword; while no one is watching, he accidentally slices open his neck, killing himself. The other kids  —  irresponsible, on numerous drugs, and with phones and roads cut off by the storm  —  panic and turn on one another, certain that there’s a killer among them. 

There isn’t. But soon there are a lot of dead bodies anyway.

The brilliance of the film is that it carefully builds on the viewer’s and the characters’ knowledge of the genre as the carnage escalates. Neither filmgoers nor characters sees David do himself in; they discover he’s hurt only when, drenched in rainwater, he lurches against the outside window in a scene that evokes (surely with intent) the Janet Leigh shower scene in Psycho. 

The murder game and the Hitchcock reference tell you what kind of film you’re in. Now the question is just who is the murderer and who is going to survive? The script dumps a swimming-pool full of red herrings into the mansion, giving you a chance to exercise your slasher-honed instincts. Greg (Lee Pace) is a big white guy and a vet. Jordan (Myha-la Herrold) comes on to Bee; hypersexual women can be a bad sign in slashers (see X).  Max (Conner O’Malley) left the party in a jealous rage after a fight with David. Maria and Sophie both seem to be keeping secrets from each other.

Slowly, though, it becomes clear that these aren’t motives or clues, but excuses. “It’s okay to be nervous. That’s part of the fun,” Sophie tells Bee as they prepare for the party. It’s the horror movie ethos — being scared is entertainment. We have an investment in our own paranoia, which drives the narrative, and becomes a kind of ethic in itself. 

Much of the movie is the characters working themselves up to terror, and then violence, from a standing start. They head to the mansion to party during a hurricane, but inside their house, they’re safe. The storm is a fun pastime, like the murder party game itself.  But that stimulation isn’t sufficient, so they  stalk through the house to find something, or someone more insidious. Over and over, they plead with each other to de-escalate; Greg asks them all to put their knives down, Jordan begs Sophie to stop following her up the stairs, put down the gun, step away, let’s just talk about this. But they’ve all seen too many slashers, and they know that any one of them can be the killer. Love, sex, lifelong friendships — there is no relationship that can serve as the basis of safety or solidarity. Survival is kill or be killed. You can’t negotiate with a mask.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is, among other things, a satire. Its most direct targets are the young and the affluent clueless. The house party set sink into petulant ennui the way they dive to the bottom of their private pool. Their hate only shines with more malice because it’s focused on trivialities — who did or did not respond in the group chat, who is hate-listening to whose podcast. Their bickering is laced with social justice buzzwords — “gaslighting” and “I’m an ally” — deployed with so little sincerity it barely registers as hypocrisy. They are too shallow and self-loathing to form real friendships, which is why they fall apart immediately when faced with any threat, real or imagined.

It's certainly fun to despise a bunch of privileged jerks. But I don’t think the film is just about one generation (per The Last House on the Left) or one social stratum (per The Hills Have Eyes). After all, when you watch the film, you’re in the house with the kids, waiting for some murderer to show up when the only murderer is right in front of you.  

The slasher is a parable, but it’s also a blueprint. Fear and mistrust are self-generating. When you’re convinced everyone is out to get you, you help ensure that you are part of the everybody out to grab that knife. “The best defense is a good offense,” Greg quips, but it isn’t. The best defense is trust and solidarity. With it, monsters hold no terror. Without it, you don’t even need a monster to pile up the bodies. 🪱

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He's the author of ‘Fecund Horror: Slashers, Rape/Revenge, Women in Prison, Zombies and Other Exploitation Dreck.’ His Substack is Everything Is Horrible. 

 RELATED:

Hi worms,

This is not a normal essay post, so enter at your own discretion. First, an announcement:

Food for the Worm is a recipient of the Horror Writers Association Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship Fund for Non-fiction Writing! A huge thank you to the HWA for its generous support and a congratulations to the writers awarded some of the org’s other grants. It’s so cool to be validated :-) I love prizes

OK, but what does that mean for you? It means I’m able to launch a new project featuring more guest writers and more interesting essays on this genre we all find so very neat.

This winter, FFTW will publish a series of four essays all focused on horror novel adaptations, i.e. horror books that were made into movies. I’m looking for two writers to pen two of the essays. The essays should focus on the films more than the books, but other than that it’s a pretty open concept.

This is a paid opportunity. $250 per essay. Please send your pitch to mailfortheworm@gmail.com with the subject line “Bookworm: [NAME OF FILM].” These are the guidelines for submitting pitches.

The second thing I want to say is a note about the regularity (or lack thereof) with which I send newsletters. I hope my thoughts will be useful to other people who are worried about their productivity.

When I started FFTW it was, and remains, purely a passion project — something I could do to exercise my creative writing muscle and an opportunity to build on some ideas around fear that I’d started tossing about in college. I thought it would be fun and experimental and the people who wanted to read it would read it. And, I mean, that’s what’s happened! Unlike so many other things in my life, I didn’t want this to ever feel like an obligation nor did I want to put too much focus on growing the following inorganically or pushing for subscribers. For that reason, I didn’t set any sort of rules for myself about when I would write and publish. I just do it when I feel like it.

That was, somehow, two years ago. And while I’ve seen Substacks much younger than this one amass huge numbers of subscribers in that time by churning out posts every week or more (and by the way, a lot of those are superb), I just haven’t felt compelled to worry too much about how many people are here or whether I’m doing “enough.”

The most frustrating thing, for me, about the world of non-fiction writing, from news reporting to magazine think pieces, is the frenetic pace we’re expected to keep as writers. Every single — and I do mean every single — advice column for writers and creatives today includes something along the lines of “publish frequently.” I’ve worked in social media management (bleh) and found the same advice amplified by 10 million. (And I think that has more to do with the desires of the platforms themselves but I’ll not digress.)

But why? From a growth perspective, I get it. The more you put out, the more people you’re likely to reach and the more followers you’ll have and the more you’ll be able to… capitalize? spread your message? advance your career? etc. The more present you are on the internet, the more love the internet is meant to give you in return. But that feels a lot like fast fashion to me. Capital for the point of capital. Why would I publish something I don’t feel that confident in purely to gain readers whose interest comes from a piece of writing that feels inauthentic to what I’m doing?

Additionally, as readers and viewers and consumers, we’re absolutely saturated. What good is it doing us to be pounded with information every second of every day — especially when so much of that information is written without thought, without fact-checking, and with a bunch of rehashed ideas from the same exact piece of writing published 2.5 seconds earlier on an adjacent platform?

And the truth is, I’m busy. I’ve had a summer with lots of highs and lows that got a little crazy in the last two months, and I just started graduate school, and I have jobs. I just don’t have time to make a sacrifice to the Gods of the Content Machine as often as they may decree. I’m sitting on an interview with the creator of the Final Destination franchise — which I conducted four months ago! And I have to actively silence all the alarm bells in my head going off telling me I’m doing something wrong with my inactivity.

Also, you’re busy. No one is sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for me to drop 2,000 words on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We’re just here when we’re here.

Ultimately, what I want to say is: I like doing this. I like watching scary movies and over-thinking them and wondering if a guy getting his head cut off says something about the culture and bewildering my mom (who is supportive nonetheless). I really, really like working with other writers at our own disposal. I like editing their stuff and seeing it shine in the end like a little shell spit up from the ocean. So I don’t want to ruin it with a bunch of postmodern content bullshit about how much I should be posting and what kind of promotion I should be doing.

There will probably come a day when I open up a paid submission feature. And it’s true that when I have a guest writer I push their work out there with vim. Thanks to this grant, I’m going to be doing some advertising and outreach and maybe we’ll grow some. I could one day post weekly. Who knows! Anything could happen! But I’m not going to stress out about it. I want you to know that whatever I do in this one corner of the internet, I’m doing it because it feels right and true.

So, for now, I hope the way we do things here — sporadically and with whimsy — is OK with you. If you have thoughts to share on the topic, feel free to send ‘em. 🪱

Film: Creep, 2014

Where to watch: You will receive a DVD, a knife, and a stuffed animal in a box. Play the disc.

“As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me? you are completely screwed, because the next question is How Much?”

- Tony Hoagland, “The Loneliest Job in the World”

The camera is wobbly, handheld. A timestamp in the bottom left corner of the screen reads 03.21.2012. “I don’t know who I’m meeting,” a male voice says, flipping the camera around to film the mountains rising in the middle distance. “The ad said $1,000 a day, filming services. Discretion is appreciated — whatever that means.”

The voice belongs to Aaron, a videographer traveling to a remote mountain town to meet a client he found on Craigslist. He’s filming his musings on a handheld camcorder, whose shaky footage comprises the entirety of the film. It’s so 2012. Aaron may be coming in blind, but he’s optimistic. Best case scenario, his mystery client is “some 40-something sitting alone in her apartment, waiting for some young, handsome boy to come up the hill and give money, rub downs, and whisper sweet nothings to.” He doesn’t consider a worst case scenario. 

Instead of a lonely, attractive older woman, Aaron meets Josef. Josef is… intense. He has an inoperable brain tumor, and, he tells Aaron, wants to record a video diary for the unborn son he’ll likely never meet. He initiates long hugs. He loves pranking Aaron with jump scares. He’s a little weird.

But at what point does ‘a little weird’ tip the scales into ‘definitely get out of there’? Creep (2014) lingers uneasily on that question and on the constant mental calculation required by fleeting online encounters. It makes a formidable entry in a new kind of collective folk-horror that explores the dark potential of anonymity in the digital age. In 2014, when Creep was released, these encounters were more possible than ever thanks to the growing popularity of Craigslist (already almost 10 years old), Uber (founded in 2009), and Tinder (founded in 2012). 

This was the internet’s awkward adolescence, a strange hinterland where easy accessibility was married to a lack of traceability; a time when you could meet strangers for any imaginable reason, but before you could discover their whole life story with a few well-placed clicks.

Today, interactions appear to be more traceable thanks to cameras and security checks, however opaque to the average person. And yet, almost everyone I know has a creepy online meet-up story: a disturbing date, a house viewing that gave off terrible vibes, an inappropriate Facebook Marketplace seller. From the other side of these encounters, in the safety of the present, we can laugh about them — they become funny/scary anecdotes, that in turn feed into new mythologies, shaping the landscape of urban legends and new folk-horror tales. My favorite of these is the one where a woman goes back to a Tinder date’s house only to discover that his entire apartment is covered in cling film. Or, one that I was fully invested in and wholeheartedly defended against skeptics (because my friend said that it had definitely happened to a friend of his sister’s flatmate’s friend) — the story, again Tinder-based, of someone who got a rare parasite from kissing a date that doctors said could only be caught from someone who had had sex with dead bodies. Fine, in hindsight, it’s a little less believable. But what is chilling about these stories is the goosebump-inducing near-miss, the deliciously haunting what-ifs. Creep follows these what-ifs to their terrible conclusion — what if that guy from Craigslist wasn’t just overly friendly, wasn’t just a creep, what if the funny/scary anecdote was actually, definitely just scary?

Creep wasn’t going to be a horror film. Working with the bare bones of a script, Mark Duplass (Josef) and Patrick Brice (Aaron), largely improvised the dialogue for what  was initially a small found footage project between friends. Brice told Decider in 2015 that in the beginning Creep was “essentially a dark comedy about two sad people forming a connection, or a friendship,” but on the advice of friends and fellow filmmakers, the movie morphed into something rather different. This was solidified when Jason Blumhouse got involved as producer, but the original dark comedy aspect, still strong, provides crucial context for what the film is doing. 

Duplass’s Josef ends up going to some disturbing places, but many of his antics are so unexpected and bizarre that they have all the hallmarks of a great funny/scary anecdote (‘and then he, like, ran off into the woods and jumped out at me’), rather than indications that anything truly sinister is about to take place. Josef oversteps the mark again and again: for the first ‘scene’ he wants Aaron to shoot, Josef strips completely naked and mimes bathing his unborn son (queasily referred to as “tubby time”). Later, Josef writes ‘J + A’ in a heart on a rock and offers Aaron serious financial assistance about eight hours after first meeting him. But Aaron, and the viewer, are repeatedly disarmed by Josef’s timely apologies and sudden intense vulnerability as he lapses into musing about his own imminent death. After all, he does have an inoperable brain tumor — you’d be a little erratic too.

It is this taut unpredictability that keeps the viewer’s attention. While there is something undoubtedly ‘off’ about Josef from the outset (the insistence on hugs, the just-too-tight running gear, the eager, loving intensity of his gaze), the strangeness is never quite strange enough to make Aaron back out of the day’s filming, until things start to swiftly escalate, and Josef’s story begins to unravel.

Sinister wanted-ads are nothing new. As far back as the 1940s, the financially motivated ‘Lonely Hearts Killers’ Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck murdered three women who answered Lonely Hearts advertisements. The ‘Want-Ad Killer’ murdered at least two women in 1974, one of whom was lured in with a job advert in a local paper, and the ‘Craigslist Killer’, a Boston University medical student, found sex workers on Craigslist, met them in hotels and robbed them at gunpoint, culminating in the death of Julissa Brisman in 2009. What sets Josef apart from these killers is his motivation for luring Aaron to the cabin, which doesn’t seem to be straightforward as sex or money. 

In Josef’s final video message to Aaron, a plea for redemption, he says, “I just want a chance to show you who I really am, and the truth of me, because the truth is, I’m a sad person. And I really need a friend, and you’re the only chance that I have.” It is this ambivalence – this impossibility of placing Josef into the neat category of conventional freak – that keeps the channel of communication open between the two men. There’s no ‘aha’ moment where we finally twig what Josef is up to or what he wants, right up until the very end. 

For the first half of the film, all the focus is on Josef’s antics, but as the storyline proceeds, so too does a growing awareness of Aaron’s own more muted strangeness. It’s not clear why Aaron goes to Josef’s cabin in the woods in the first place, and what keeps him there as things go south. Josef presses the money into Aaron’s hand as soon as he arrives, supposedly releasing him from financial obligation. As a man, Aaron may feel a sense of security denied to female sex workers, or a macabre curiosity as to how far Josef will go, or maybe — just maybe — he needs something from this encounter too. 

Variety’s review writes Aaron off as “dangerously naïve, if not downright clueless,” while others posit that his politeness is his undoing. Is it just deference and social ritual that keeps him engaging with Josef? The little we learn about Aaron is enough to conjecture that he too is deeply lonely. He says he had a girlfriend once, but there is no mention of one now, or even of any friends or family. In the second half of the film, the camera’s focus shifts from Josef to Aaron as the latter records his own reactions to Josef’s increasingly alarming overtures. When Aaron begins to receive parcels from Josef, the first (and for all we know only) person he tells is the camera. Aaron seems just as socially marooned as Josef, freaking out alone in his house. After watching that final missive from Josef, where he says he really needs a friend, Aaron turns the camera back on himself. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Look at him. He’s so sad.” Of course, he goes to meet him. 

In the Decider interview, Mark Duplass says that “Aaron is obsessed with being obsessed with, and that’s what keeps him there.” But by the end of the film, it’s not clear whether Aaron’s reciprocal fascination with Josef is borne out of some obsessive compulsion, or something softer, more hopeful – an outstretched hand, a feeling of pity, or even of recognition. So maybe the question of Creep is just as much about who would answer a random Craigslist ad as it is about who could be posting them. Online missives, fired into the ether, can be picked up by just about anyone: someone hopelessly naive, yes, but also someone a little sad, a little lonely. Josef’s words could be Aaron’s: “I just want a chance to show you who I really am, and the truth of me, because the truth is, I’m a sad person. And I really need a friend, and you’re the only chance that I have.” 

Aaron is not physically vulnerable in the same way that the victims of real-life wanted-ad killers are vulnerable – sex workers, young girls, unmarried older women in the 1940s. But he is lonely, and isolated. To compare his situation with real-life victims requires a shift in focus, to see vulnerability not as a personal failing but as the consequence of a society that lets people fall through the cracks to varying degrees: financially, socially, emotionally. 

The balance of power and vulnerability in Creep veers from one man to the other like the turns of a switchback. While Aaron’s isolation in the woods (and later his lack of privacy when it becomes clear that Josef knows where he lives) makes him physically vulnerable, he also has the upper hand over the apparent emotional vulnerability of Josef. When money is added to the mix, as with sex work and with the $1,000 that changes hands between Aaron and Josef, things can get even more volatile. While sex workers can be physically vulnerable, the men that hire them exhibit a different type of vulnerability, a desperation that sometimes makes them violent as a retaliation against their own over-exposure. When Aaron goes back to meet Josef after escaping him, he exposes his own desperation, and  the fragile balance of power shifts again. 

Creep zeros in on this uncertainty, and its potential to create explosive situations. Despite the eventual gory horror, we circle back to what the film was initially about: “two sad people forming a friendship;” the push and pull of two lonely men scoping each other out, reaching out and then retracting before reaching out once again.

Today's world is arguably more atomized than it was in 2012. The landscape of our lives has been changed by sites like UpWork, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Uber, Grindr, Hinge, and Seeking Arrangements, whether we actively rely on them or occasionally dabble. Almost a decade after Creep’s release, we continue to open up our lives to brief, anonymous encounters, especially when financial or emotional necessity demands it. Sometimes, things feel like they’re creaking at the seams, chasms opening up in systems that do not serve everyone safely or adequately – the housing market, the world of work. A friend, looking for a room in a city groaning under the weight of an acute housing crisis, answered an ad only to discover that the guy who posted it wasn’t offering a room, but was actually renting out one half of his bed. It was the side closest to the bathroom, though. Another friend, whose childcare job pays minimum wage, meets older men who pay for her to travel abroad. I look at pictures of her smiling in the sun and think about how these men operate under pseudonyms, or initials. Just a few flimsy letters. While we can make informed, rational choices about what is dangerous and what is safe, it is impractical to become an island. The implicit trust we must have in the world to keep moving through it is astounding. When you think about it, it’s pretty scary/funny.

Because we can do doctoral-level research on prospective dates, or see a picture and star rating of our Uber driver before they arrive, we feel a level of comfort that belies the fact that, when it really comes down to it, we don’t know these people. In acknowledging this, we have to confront something within ourselves — after all, if we’re going to meet a stranger, then we are also the stranger that someone is coming to meet. At the same time, Creep belies the gap between our true motives and the stories we tell ourselves. Aaron agrees to meet Josef one final time because he’s telling himself that he’s doing something nice for a sad, lonely guy. But by this point in the film, we realize Aaron is the sad guy, and, in the end, the vulnerable one too. 

The horror of Creep is ultimately double-edged – not only are there creeps and weirdos out there, as there always have been, but you have to address your own dark impulse to let them in, and the state of a system that demands it of you. How far can you afford to give someone the benefit of the doubt? How much can you risk for work, housing, or the promise of connection? Who are you really risking it for? How can you know at what moment you step, blindly but willingly, over the point of no return? 🪱

Hannah Green is an arts and culture writer based in London, UK. Her work has been featured in various publications including The Cardiff Review, Pilgrim Magazine, and Tears in the Fence Magazine. You can find more of her writing on her website, and subscribe to her newsletter here. Twitter: @hsmckelveygreen.

RELATED

One self-inflicted terror of my pre-teen years was also among the most banal — video chat roulette, a lá Omegle.

The platform’s tagline is “talk to strangers!”, a pretty on-the-nose directive targeted at the very population warned not to do just that. I remember sitting in front of the camera with a few girlfriends, waiting for the screen to load and reveal someone new, who could be anywhere from Atlanta to Azerbaijan and could be doing anything from playing a song on the ukulele to masturbating. I would say there was a one-in-three chance that the person on the screen would be masturbating.

It felt then like a true window to the world and all its gritty and gruesome possibilities. And I was reminded of that feeling when I watched We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the 2021 film about a struggling teenage girl who gets involved in an online horror RPG. I always find the straight-on “webcam shot” in horror anxiety-inducing, though I think horror films that use it well are far-and-few-between. The camera is facing straight at a person’s face — usually a teenage girl’s — and in the background is an intimate space, typically a bedroom, dimly lit and partially pixelated.

Since we have some new subscribers, I thought I’d try out a thread for the first time: Chime in — what is it about the webcam shot that’s so eerie? Any films that use that concept particularly well?

“Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Lochness,
Goblin, ghoul, a zombie with no conscience
Question: What do these things all have in common?
Everybody knows I'm a motherfuckin' monster”

- Jay-Z, Monster

The pioneering 1980 single “Adventures of Super Rhyme” by Jimmy Spicer contains a cartoonish verse in which Count Dracula turns into a bat and flies off to Brooklyn. “He didn't like blood, not this vampire,” Spicer raps, “the disco beat was his desire.”

Another early hip hop innovator, Lovebug Starksi, famously rapped amid the lumbering funk of 1986’s “Amityville (The House On The Hill)'' about making love to Frankenstein’s bride. 

These court jester-like emcees shared an affinity for the Universal Studio monsters of the 1930s, envisioning an alternate universe where infamous ghouls weren’t chased out of town by the locals with pitchforks and fire, but were instead embraced within the sanctuary of an inner city block party.

Thematically, hip hop and horror have been linked from the get-go. Both have historically been treated like industry outsiders by critics, despite consistently revitalizing music and film as art forms. It’s no wonder that time and time again rappers have taken on the personas of Hollywood bogeymen, with many emphasizing their ostracization from society. 

“Horrorcore” — a conceptual style of rap centered around emcees pretending to be larger-than-life serial killers — truly cemented the ties between rap and horror movies in the 1990s. The Geto Boys’ 1991 deep cut “Chuckie” features Bushwick Bill using his microphone a lot like a shovel as he digs into his own twisted yet surprisingly deep affinity with Hollywood’s most murderous doll. Bill, who died in 2019, was born with dwarfism, leading school bullies to dub him “Chucky.” He reclaimed a playground taunt and turned it into both a shield and dagger. Over three minutes and 48 seconds he boasts about throwing frog legs into cake mix and explains that downing gin inspires an appetite for dog brains, all while the cackling, B-movie synth line encircles the listener like they’ve just fallen into a lake filled with pissed-off piranhas. 

Bill’s blood-thirsty punchlines were a hint of anthems to come. Across a decade widely known as the “golden era” of hip hop albums, the RZA-led Gravediggaz rapped about existentialism and suicide over beats more inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre score than the Wu-Tang Clan; Kool Keith transformed into the vengeful sadist Dr. Octagon; DMX sung a twisted lullaby about murdering children that contained knowing winks to Freddy Krueger; 2Pac and Biggie compared themselves to the Candyman and Alfred Hitchcock; and Brother Lynch Hung — the self-proclaimed Black Hannibal Lector — told dissenters to “rest in piss.” 

By embracing twisted horror imagery, these rappers arguably put out career-best material and cemented their roles as industry pariahs, while also injecting the sometimes gaudy and overly serious 1990s with a surrealist creative edge. 

As the new millennium dawned, horror and rap solidified this bloody partnership, even if the pace somewhat slowed. Unless you dressed like a Juggalo or worshiped Tech n9ne and Necro, horrorcore rap just wasn’t anywhere near as zeitgeisty in the early 2000s as it had been in the ‘90s. Eminem, then, deserves enormous credit for reviving horrorcore ideals in mainstream pop culture via his decision to stand on huge stages rocking the rampaging Jason Vorhees’ signature hockey mask and unleashing horrifying rhymes about throwing his wife’s corpse into the Atlantic ocean. Remarkably, these were both the central tenets of Diamond-selling albums. 

Em’s fascination with horror arguably peaked with 2009’s Grammy-winning comeback album, Relapse, where his raps — which include a fantasy about lynching Britney Spears (“Same Song and Dance”) and another (“Stay Wide Awake”) about opening an umbrella up inside of a, well, you can find out that one for yourself — unravel with a bizarre elegance akin to a half-naked Buffalo Bill dancing in his basement. On Relapse, the biggest selling rapper of all time treated the Dr. Dre beats at his disposal less like head-nodders and more like visceral special effects supplied by gore master Tom Savini; Em dares and dares you to take his Slim Shady persona seriously. Crucially, Relapse proved that rap and horror could still be a potent mix. 

Aside from the likes of clipping, Sadistik, Fatboi Sharif, and Backxwash, a more recent rap act with a notable love for transgressive horror references has been Drakeo the Ruler. The late LA rapper’s dry, cryptic vocal cadence is perhaps better suited to reading campfire ghost stories on Halloween night than sliding on bouncy DJ Mustard’s beats.

“If I could write a movie I would re-write The Exorcist,” he bragged on his biggest song “Impatient Freestyle.” Another banger, “Flex,” contains an ominous threat about using a machete to “gut” his opps just like Halloween’s Michael Myers when faced with a Haddonfield babysitter. 

Drakeo’s music contained an atmosphere that titillated and terrified in equal measure. When he threatened to shoot a baby in 2016, he continued in that rich horrorcore rap tradition of pushing the envelope as far as humanly possible. Horror director John Carpenter took the artistic risk to shoot a child dead in 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, so Drakeo felt like he was entitled to do the same, even if the legal system disagreed: the lyrics for “Shoot a Baby” were later used against Drakeo in court. 

“The whole point of me starting to rap is I get to rap and talk about these things and not do these things,” he told the Guardian at the time. “It’s not real. Rapping is rhyming and pretending. It’s a persona.” 

Just like horror, rap music has historically been dismissed as a serious artform due to its violent imagery and rule-breaking approach to storytelling. Whether through Mary Whitehouse’s video nasties or Delores C. Tucker’s hatred of gangsta rap, horror and hip hop have both long been victims of sustained censorship campaigns designed to besmirch artistic merits and conflate subject matter with criminality. It doesn’t matter that both have kept the entertainment industry alive during historical financial slumps or pushed storytelling to new heights: the harsh reality is that rap albums rarely win Grammy Album of the Year gongs and horror movies rarely take home Oscars. 

Aside from the shared experience of being pushed to the critical fringes, I sense rappers — particularly from Black, working class backgrounds — also see something relatable in the way horror cinema and its characters are branded societal outcasts or ostracized because of their appearance. The fantastical idea that these souls might finally strike back — just like Leatherface with a chainsaw — and gain superhuman powers to terrorize the invading yuppies with, appeals directly to rap artists who similarly feel pushed into a corner by society, usually because of the color of their skin, systemic injustices, or just an outright ignorance toward their art. 

“[In horror] there are little moments where if you're under the right stars and the right light hits you, or when the northern lights are going by, you could become a superhuman being,” horrorcore architect and Geto Boys’ member Bushwick Bill said in a 2015 interview with VICE. “To be able to be bigger than who you are; I think rappers have always been fascinated with that. That you could turn into a werewolf and be strong, or that you could use electricity and bring something back to life.”

However there’s also a nagging sense that rap loves horror much more than horror loves rap. Rap-fueled horror movies like 2000’s Leprechaun in the Hood and 2001’s Bones (where Snoop Dogg plays a stoned vampire) are insultingly bad, with narratives that treat the ties between the two artforms like they’re superficial and silly. When I interviewed horror film auteur John Carpenter a few years ago, I told him that I believed his eerie music inspired the sound of modern trap composer Metro Boomin and also the atmosphere of a lot of dread-inducing drill songs. He bluntly replied: “I don’t care for rap music.” It felt revealing, even if a new generation of horror filmmakers and rappers now have an opportunity to start afresh and become much more visible allies. 

Perhaps the raucous horrorcore-fueled energy of the 1990s won’t be repeated across the 2020s, not on a mainstream level anyway, with the grip of auto tune-driven trap still far too strong. Yet rap and horror’s relationship will also never fully fade either — the two artforms share a deeply ingrained outsider’s perspective and creative philosophy built around bedazzling fans with both satire and nihilism. So long as America’s low-income neighborhoods and inner cities feel stalked by death, and their occupants are marginalized by those in power, the rappers who emerge will reference horror villains in their bars. To give the legendary Bushwick Bill the final word: 

“The idea for horrorcore rap was lyrical Hollywood — to [take horror cinema and] make a rhyme for people in the neighborhood. People in extreme impoverished situations, well, if they ain't reaching out to God, they’re reaching out to the other side. The whole horror thing is our break from the monotony.” 🪱

Thomas Hobbs is a UK-based freelance culture, film, business, and music journalist. He has interviewed the actors behind Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and the Candyman across titles including BBC, Dazed, Guardian, Financial Times, Vice, Okayplayer, Little White Lies, New Statesman, Billboard / Telegraph. 

By FFTW’s inaugural guest writer KELLINA MOORE

Film: M3GAN, 2022

Where to watch: On a sentient television that just bludgeoned your annoying neighbor to death.

“Successful Camp…even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.” 

– Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’

“She’s the apex of 21st century technology wrapped up in four feet of silicone;” she’s yassified Chuckie; she’s a viral TikTok sensation; she’s modeling a sold-out Deftones hoodie and giant platform leather boots for Heaven by Marc Jacobs; she’s staring into your soul from out of the uncanny valley with her too-big blue eyes and perfectly styled caramel-blonde hair, singing Sia’s “Titanium.” She’s a Model 3 Generative Android — M3GAN for short — and she’s a sign of the times.

The titular doll from M3GAN — directed by Gerard Johnstone, written by Akela Cooper, and based on the story by James Wan, who also produced the film — became an icon before the movie even debuted. She danced her way straight into the hearts of viewers in trailers so viral they prompted editors to take the film from an R to PG-13 rating to reach a wider portion of the chronically online population. M3GAN remained the IT girl even after her film debut, when she showed up in an ad for Heaven, the trendy younger sister-brand of Marc Jacobs. 

M3GAN’s icon status marks a return to familiar territory for the genre. After years of nearly pathological obsession with the idea of “elevated horror,” it’s nice to see viewers remember that horror doesn’t have to be a deep, metaphorical examination of trauma to be worthy of praise; it’s just as exciting when it’s campy, unserious, and an unabashed good time at the theater. Plenty of my favorite movies are so-called “elevated horror,” and it’s great that more attention than ever is being paid to the way genre films speak to deeply rooted societal fears and inequalities. Still, it makes sense that as we get more and more self-serious wide-release horror movies, some of them are bound to be hollow imitations of what came before. 

When The Babadook did a grief metaphor, when Hereditary did family trauma, when It Follows did sexual politics — all with a sharp eye for aesthetics — they felt like fresh and innovative approaches to the genre at its most resonant; genuine articulations of each director’s sensibilities. But by the time we get to films such as Lamb, Men, and Smile, a formula becomes apparent (even in the titles), and the choices start to feel a little less inspired, a little more like empty shorthand for emotional depth. Even Prey for the Devil, a run-of-the-mill exorcism movie produced by Lionsgate (which as far as I can tell only my boyfriend and I saw in theaters), included a scene where the main character receives a copy of van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score — an iteration of horror-as-trauma so disingenuous and painfully on the nose that it had me cackling in my seat.

Enter: the swing of the pendulum, the other side of the spectrum, the return of the horror-comedy. The genre recalibrates right on time, partly in response to the tedium of too much self-serious horror, partly as a return to form; a reminder of the aspects of horror we forget or dismiss when we assume they’ve been “elevated” out of existence.

The late aughts and early 2010’s were responsible for some of the best and most beloved horror-comedies — Zombieland, Jennifer’s Body, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, The Cabin in the Woods. The 2020’s seem set to give us a new batch — The Menu, Barbarian, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and, most notably, M3GAN. Call it a new recession indicator; the bright red lip you buy to make an old dress feel new; a reflection of our collective need for pure escapism. Call it the blood index.

M3GAN is the perfect movie to usher in the return of the horror-comedy because it never tries too hard to be funny or campy — it just is. This is largely thanks to the writing and story-developing team of Cooper and Wan, also responsible for 2021’s spectacular Malignant. The camp element comes from effort, from earnestness and a love of the craft, from the palpable feeling you get when watching a film that the people behind the camera enjoyed making. The enjoyment is infectious.

This sense of play comes in stark contrast to the slew of recent films that seem miserably obsessed with signaling that they are intellectual, above the genre, more than “just” a horror movie. M3GAN is a horror movie that loves horror movies, one that revels in the indulgences of the genre. It is, according to Sontag’s definitions, the superior “naive” camp versus a “deliberate” camp — the excess comes from an unabashed enthusiasm, rather than a self-conscious, self-defeating irony.

Wan has been obsessed with creepy dolls for basically his entire career — his debut, Saw, features Billy the Puppet, Dead Silence boasts an army of evil ventriloquist dummies, and The Conjuring stars the haunted doll Anabelle, who earned her own spin-off. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Wan credits his lifelong doll obsession to a childhood viewing of Poltergeist. 

“That creepy clown doll definitely scarred me for life,” he said. “But I also like to say that I'm a big collector of these kinds of things. I love my collectibles, my action figures, and so naturally, the idea of making movies based on one of these things coming to life is exciting for me. It's thrilling, and, of course, in the horror genre, it means I can have a lot of fun with a story like that.” 

The charming-yet-horrifying appeal of Billy the Puppet comes from the fact that Wan made the puppet himself in his bedroom, knuckles deep in clay and papier-mâché, forming and painting the iconic red spiral cheeks with his own two hands. This effort earned him increasingly larger budgets, culminating with the one that made M3GAN possible. She is a combination of six different puppets, CGI and animatronics, and a real child actor (Amie Donald), who wore a silicone mask for the longer walking and dancing shots. The result is a form so detailed that it's alternatingly unnerving and almost distractingly stunning. The combination of digital and practical effects (helmed by recent Academy Award winner Adrien Morot) lands M3GAN perfectly in the uncanny valley; her movements are jerky and manufactured enough to be inhuman, but smooth enough that she’s not instantly identifiable as such. No wonder she became so instantly popular — the effort put into her special effects nearly outshines the film surrounding it.

Knowing that M3GAN’s creation required that much effort and dedication is also what’s so tickling about the ‘M3GAN for Marc Jacobs’ promo. I initially assumed it was a simple photoshop effort, maybe made by a fan and not even the brand itself, but a photographer and stylist credit suggests that a team of people went through the effort required to dress and take pictures of an actual puppet. The knowledge that M3GAN herself was in the studio, being posed and wheeled around while someone wrestled a Deftones hoodie over her plastic head elevates a simple marketing campaign to a hilarious, deliciously camp cultural moment.

M3GAN is more than just a pretty silicone face. Cooper’s earnest script, as it waxes between drama and humor, delivers meaningful emotional impact, beneath the camp. 

M3GAN’s “primary user” is a young girl named Cady (Violet McGraw). Her parents’ death opens the movie, the inciting incident that sends her to live with her Aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), the developer of M3GAN. In one scene, M3GAN and Cady sit in an observed room for a scheduled demonstration of the doll prototype for the toy company higher-ups. The scene moves between humor and sentimentality so abruptly that the tenderness almost comes as a jump scare.

M3GAN 

Hey, Cady.

CADY 

Hi, M3gan.

M3GAN 

So, how would you like to help me make a flower

decoration with nothing more than some colored paper and a rubber band?

[CADY crying]

M3GAN  

Cady? Why are you sad, Cady? Is it your arm? Is it

still sore?

[CADY shakes her head]

Then what is it?

CADY 

It’s just that every day I wake up in this strange house, and I remember that my parents are dead. It’s like it’s happening all over again. I miss them so much. I’m worried that I’ll forget all the things we did together. That one day I’ll be looking at pictures of my mom like she’s some stranger.

M3GAN

Tell me something about your mom. Something that makes you happy.

CADY 

I don’t know. I can’t think of one thing.

M3GAN

Just try.

CADY 

One time, she found a cockroach in my schoolbag. She was upset ’cause I didn’t eat my sandwiches. And then all of a sudden, this thing crawls up her wrist, and she just started screaming like a maniac and ran out of the house. That was pretty funny.

M3GAN

Okay, so that’s a memory you won’t ever forget.

CADY 

What do you mean?

M3GAN

I mean I’m keeping it for you… Here.

[CADY on recording] 

One time, she found a cockroach in my schoolbag. She was upset ’cause I didn’t eat my sandwiches. And then all of a sudden, this thing crawls up her wrist, and she just started screaming like a maniac and ran out of the house. [Chuckles] That was pretty funny.

M3GAN

Anytime you wanna tell me something special about your parents, something funny or sad or anything at all, you just tell me, and I’ll keep it safe. And we can listen to it whenever we want.

Then M3GAN (voiced by Jenna Davis) starts to sing, which is so unexpected it ratchets the scene back into camp humor. But it doesn’t undercut the emotional resonance of the scene, either — I’m already tearing up in my seat. Hidden within the camp sensibility, the song and dance, M3GAN delivers moving observations about the nature of technology and humanity. Technology, among the frightening possibilities it threatens (and M3GAN has plenty to say about this), can also help preserve our memories, amplify our capabilities for love. Profundities are littered throughout the film, if you open yourself up to receiving them from an evil child robot.

This ability to move effortlessly between humor, horror, and drama is reflected in Cooper’s own understanding of her writing process. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Cooper said,

“I don’t ever really write to tone. I’m not like, ‘This is campy now,’ and ‘Now this has to transition into seriousness.’ I just write the scenes as I see them in my head. It all just starts with the characters. ‘What are the characters doing in the scenes? What are they feeling? What is M3GAN doing? What is she feeling? How is she responding to all of this?’”

From here — from an understanding of character, from a love of the craft — flows the kind of work that has a contagious exuberance, the kind of work that goes on to have a life and modeling career of its own.

The beauty of M3GAN is that it exposes the elevated/trashy horror dichotomy as false. Horror movies can be campy and meaningful. They don’t have to be produced by A24 and overloaded with metaphors and heavy-handed visual motifs to have something interesting to say about the human condition. Horror critics have been arguing for the social, critical value of the genre for ages — any film undergrad who’s written about George Romero’s oeuvre would tell you as much.

As an appreciation for the critical merits of horror becomes more mainstream, let M3GAN remind us that the spectrum of what horror can accomplish is broad, and we do ourselves and the genre a disservice by only examining films we deem “intellectual” enough. Let M3GAN remind us that we do our best work when we are die-hard obsessed, in love, and unashamed of our efforts. Let M3GAN remind us to try as hard as we can, to reek of self-love, and let everyone see. 🪱

Kellina Moore is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction writing at Columbia University. Devotee of the monstrous feminine, reality TV, and maximalism, Kellina uses writing to examine non-serious and overlooked material with serious attention and care, with a special interest in contemporary horror films. Kellina’s work — criticism, personal narrative, and hybrid — appears in FLOOD Magazine, HASH, and The Final Girls. You can find Kellina on Twitter @_babyslasher

Related:

• ‘Building M3GAN,’ Katcy Stephen

• “They look like people but they aren’t people”: ‘The History of Creepy Dolls,’ Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

So, I watched a bunch of David Cronenberg movies in the last several weeks. Let’s get into that:

“Body horror” has always struck me as an odd distinction. Does fear of something happening to the body not lie at the heart of all horror in one way or another? The body possessed. The body slashed. The body tortured. The body transformed. The body obliterated – no more body. Without the body, what is there to fear?

But, OK. I can see reason for the subcategory, if only, as ever, to give us a handier way of discussing a subset of films – in this case, movies that see the body transformed from within or movies in which people are attacked by ailments rather than knives.

“It’s important to remember that in the mid-1970s, horror films were beginning to be overwhelmed with stabbing, bloodletting and murder,” writes Willow Catelyn Maclay, for Polygon. “The slasher film was bearing fruit, and in comparison [David Cronenberg’s 1975 film] Shivers looks startlingly different. With the help of special effects artist Joe Blasco, Cronenberg created something brand new that was rooted in medical realism.”

The Fly, another Cronenberg film in which Jeff Goldblum’s character Seth Brundle transforms into an insect hybrid he calls Brundlefly, features a scene in which Brundle pulls two of his own weakened fingernails off to reveal a white puss oozing from the nubs. At this point, Brundle is still mainly human. He first approaches the mirror to find that his face is splotchy and sprouting course hairs in patches. He opens his mouth and scratches a layer of enamel off a bottom tooth. Then he discovers the fingernails. That, like dreams of our teeth falling out, is uncanny nightmare territory. Anyone who has struggled with body dysmorphia, dysphoria, or visible physical conditions of any kind (and I imagine this includes all of us, at some time or another) can attest to the sense of helplessness one feels when the image they’re presented with in the mirror is not what they expected; is in fact the opposite of what they desire. Bodily dysfunction in dreams is said to be a manifestation of anxiety; the loss of control. In real life, it feels much the same.

Plenty of people have read the film as an allegory for the AIDs epidemic, given its timing. Cronenberg ascribed to it a more general symbolism, of aging or disease in general. It is particularly horrifying to imagine the decay of your body, like any bodily process that happens against your will and is without recourse.

The bodies in Cronenberg films constantly undergo metamorphoses. In Shivers (1975), residents in an apartment building become sex zombies thanks to a parasite; in The Brood (1979), a woman grows an out-of-body amniotic sack, which pops out children who are the physical manifestations of her rage, both protective and murderous; in Scanners (1981), a select group of individuals, subjected to the same chemicals in utero, have the power of telekinesis; in The Dead Zone (1983), a Stephen King adaption, a car accident leaves a man disabled but gifted with a psychic ability, one that strengthens as his body weakens.

I would argue that more than one of these films suggest some benefits to extra-human adaptation (along with plenty of downsides) but none do so quite as emphatically as Crimes of the Future (2022). The film is set on a climate-ravaged Earth some time in the indeterminate future. Humans have begun to adapt to the new environment and techno-industrialism. Some people no longer feel pain and are no longer subject to infections; some people eat plastic.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

In The Fly, Brundle waxes between acceptance and disgust with his new form. Ultimately, he rejects his transformation and, in his attempt to return to what he once was, accidentally becomes some brutal combination of machine-fly-human just before dying. In Crimes, a boy named Brecken regurgitates what his mother describes as a “thick, white drool… like acid” to dissolve his food — he shares that characteristic with Brundlefly. Only this time, the drool is an example of beneficial human evolution because it allows him to eat plastic, a ready resource.

The boy’s parents are divided on whether this makes him a savior or a freak. “I wanted to, someday, present my son to the world. Because I wanted to show the world that the future of humanity existed and was good,” says the boy’s father. “A creature,” the boy’s mother, Djuna, calls him. “A thing.”

SAUL TENSER

If the police found Brecken’s body and did an autopsy, what do you think they’d find inside it?

DJUNA

Outer space.

Djuna cannot see her son’s humanity through the crime that is his body. She joins the stodgiest people in Crimes, along with the cop, who wants to suppress the possibility of naturally occurring plastic digestion, and the bureaucrat, Wippet, who suggests that disease shouldn’t have gone away because people no longer have reason to wash their hands. “Human evolution is the concern,” says Wippet. “That it’s uncontrolled, it’s… insurrectional. It might lead us to a bad place.” These people most resemble today’s reactionaries who think they can police a body, legislate a matter as conceptual as gender, or keep their children from the reality of what we might call the transformative flesh.

Watching the evolution of Cronenberg’s career one film after another, I also saw the evolution of an idea: the human potential to grow and change for our own good – if we can let go of our attachment to the body as we know it.

SETH BRUNDLE

You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you?
I'll bet you think you woke me up about the flesh, don't you?
But you only know society's straight line about the flesh.
You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, gray fear of the flesh

Brundle may be in a manic insectoid rage as he says this, but he’s right about one thing: we are obsessed with the flesh and terrified of its potential. Old conversations about new drugs like Ozempic rehash a familiar consideration: should we be satisfied with the bodies we have or is life as a human a process of never-ending alteration?

One of the simplest pieces of wisdom ever relayed to me came from my friend Laila, who, when talking about the female desire to return to the body we had in high school, said she can, at times, reach inner peace when she reminds herself that she is a woman now. Not a girl, a woman, with a woman’s body. To compare the body you woke up with today to one of its previous forms is useless – to take inspiration from Heraclitus, you’re not the same person, it’s not the same body. In a recent interview, the journalist Misha Gessen said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could think of transition as a lifelong option?”

With one notable, impermanent exception, we each live in our bodies alone; there is no one to share the burden of your flesh or mine. I don’t see a way around this. I do know that the horror we encounter when our bodies defy us is not insurmountable, it just requires adaptation. We each decide, with varying degrees of safety and success, to transform the flesh, let the flesh be transformed, or adapt to the reality of afflictions and realities we cannot control. When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning and found himself transformed, he was wrong to try and get up to go to work and live his life as usual. For better or worse, there is no returning to the body you’ve left behind. 🪱

Thoughts on Cronenberg? Feel free to share.

RELATED / OF INTEREST

• ‘The Devil’s Bait: Symptoms, signs, and the riddle of Morgellon’s’ by Leslie Jamison

• ‘Body is reality: tracing David Cronenberg’s history with body horror’ by Willow Catelyn Maclay

• ‘Slashed Beauty: On Female Masks in The Skin I Live In, Eyes Without a Face, and Under the Skin’ by Kelsey Ford

• ‘What we talk about when we talk about trans rights',’ and interview with Misha Gessen

“They said, ‘All teenagers scare the livin' shit out of me’

They could care less as long as someone'll bleed

So darken your clothes, or strike a violent pose

Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me” 

- My Chemical Romance

Ah, to be a teenager in the ‘90s. Rocking a pair of low-rise jeans, a rhinestone-studded arm cuff, and an unironic daisy-chain thumb ring at my seaside high school graduation, nary an iPhone in sight. To run my hands through the globs of hardened gel propelling my boyfriend’s frosted tips far, far away from the gravitational pull of his forehead… to drink straight from the bottle on a moonlit beach… recount folklore around a campfire… mow down a pedestrian on a drunken joy ride along the coast, shove him in my trunk, toss his body off the pier, and make a four-way pact with my pals to never speak of it again… 

So begins the “last summer of immature, adolescent decadence” for the characters in 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer.

I Know was writer Kevin Williamson’s neo-slasher follow-up to Scream (1996). The film is a much more straightforward slasher approach than Scream (Williamson reportedly wrote I Know first), but the films share a vital quality, something that defines the work of their creator: both movies take teenagers dead seriously.

First, the plot. I Know centers on four characters, each of whom fulfill quintessential slasher film archetypes: Helen Shivers is a bombshell blonde fresh off a beauty pageant win; Barry Cox is Helen’s aggressive jock boyfriend; and nice guy Ray Bronson is the dutiful counterpart to final girl Julie James, the scholarly brunette. 

The foursome is celebrating high school graduation with some good ‘ol fashioned reckless driving when Barry drops a bottle of liquor onto driver Ray’s lap, distracting him from the road. “Watch out!” Barry screams from the sunroof as the car rams into a body crossing the otherwise empty roadway. Worried that a pesky manslaughter charge will destroy their bright futures, the group agrees — with hesitancy on Julie’s part — to get rid of the body by dumping it into the harbor. An academic year goes by. Though every character but Barry is plagued with varying levels of guilt, the teens think they have gotten away with it. That is, until someone begins to send the characters a message that says — you guessed it! — “I know what you did last summer!”

Like so many teenage horror victims before them, the young people in I Know face brutal repercussions for the transgressions of their youth. Barry, the least likable, will go first, via a hook to the abdomen. His girlfriend Helen meets a similar fate amidst a pile of discarded tires. And so on. There are other deaths — side characters and bystanders — there are near misses, and then there is the film’s final reveal (calling it a “twist” might be too generous): the pedestrian they hit with the car didn’t die. That means the kids never killed anyone in the first place. Oops!

Poor, guilty Julie would probably find this revelation much more satisfying if all of her friends were alive to hear it. 

🪱

I Know What You Did Last Summer is among the first of the “neo-slashers” — a sub-genre that emerged from a swamp of ‘80s and early ‘90s low-budget, high-profit serial killer films, all favoring re-invention over innovation and playing to varying degrees of self-seriousness on the slasher formula established by Halloween. (I’m working off of what I think is a succinct definition of the term by the writers at Horror Homeroom).

Not only is I Know entrenched in a cultural moment, it’s also deeply entrenched in its own genre; part commentary, part homage. It’s one of those movies — and there are plenty in horror — where it’s unclear how seriously we should take the plot. As always, you are free to turn off your brain and enjoy the ride.

Many entries in the slumber-party rotation of horror films from my childhood were of the neo-slasher variety — Final Destination, House of Wax, Wrong Turn, and I Know What You Did Last Summer among them.  Becoming a teenager, these horror movies promised, would be thrilling, sexy, and absolutely fucking terrifying. 

Similarly, any teenage horror character at the turn of the millennium had to be familiar with the horror films of their adolescence. Our beloved young horror victims could no longer stumble around mindlessly in the wake of a masked killer without precedent. These kids had to at some point acknowledge the deja-vu.

In the late ‘90s/early 2000s, a genre notorious for self indulgence was bumping up against the products of its own design — a media-saturated generation fluent in irony with a penchant for navel-gazing.

Enter Kevin Williamson. 

🪱

Williamson — also the voice behind Dawson’s Creek — is one of those screenwriters, like Amy Sherman-Palladino, Aaron Sorkin, or Diablo Cody, whose dialogue is instantly recognizable and carefully constructed, even when it’s layered over by the choices of studio executives. (“That, I think, is something all writers should strive to do, is make the script the star of the movie,” Williamson once told A.frame.)

Where so many films feature characters written by people who appear to have never met a teenager (lookin’ at you, Rob Zombie), Williamson’s adolescent victims feel possible. They speak in quippy, relevant pop culture references and innuendo — not as unbelievably clever as Rory Gilmore, not as hyperbolically vapid as Paris Hilton in 2005’s House of Wax. 

“‘Is this really how kids talk?’ That was the question,” writes Frederick James about Dawson’s Creek. “It’s a question that missed the beauty in the point: that however kids talked, the show refused to talk down to them.”

Williamson’s teenagers are sex-obsessed, sure, but they are also concerned with broader realities. They aspire to go to law school and become respected artists; they feel guilt and shame; they look out for each other (when they’re not offing each other). The boys are caught between their desire to see boobs and their understanding that such a desire is, like, so cliche. The girls are products of the third wave and will be part of the fourth, contemporaries of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ally McBeal, sometimes accepting of and at other times quick to invert their role as stereotypes.

“Hey, it’s all about the hair. Don’t you forget that,” I Know’s Helen Shivers tells Julie. “Especially when you become some big hotshot lawyer. Those professional women types think it’s all about brains and ability and completely ignore the ‘do.’” 

It isn’t just the dialogue that’s self-aware in Williamson’s “neo-slashers” and those it inspired.

In Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the like, the bad guys are superhuman. They are folkloric, like the hook-handed man the protagonists swap stories about in I Know What You Did Last Summer. These boogeymen might have had reasons to kill originally, but those reasons blur over time. Eventually, their vengeance is distilled into the driving force of their lives. They kill because they are killers.

In Williamson’s plots — and those of many of his contemporaries — the killers are not boogeymen, but actual people. And not just people, but young people! (Note: Williamson did not write I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer). Williamson’s teenagers are frequently direct and indirect murderers. In I Know, Barry Cox is the reason for the initial car crash and the person who convinces his friends to hide the body. He also has reason to believe the car crash victim is alive, but chooses to leave his body in the water anyway. 

The Scream protagonists are ‘90s kids in upper-middle class suburbia and their dialogue is peppered with the appropriate film references. Both of the teenage murderers are well versed in the cinematic psychopaths who precede them, referencing Norman Bates and Hannibal Lector as they go in for their final kill.

Last century’s slashers feature teenagers who are the unwitting victims of cultural brutality. In the 2000s, teenagers are the products of that brutality. They’ve watched too many movies, and, for better or worse, they’ve taken notes.

“Scream shows us is that the post-1990s generation—the media generation—lives in a world in which ‘reality’ has profoundly changed,” writes Dawn Keetley, “in which the boundaries between what happens in real life and what happens in the mediated world are increasingly blurred.”

BILLY

Maybe your movie-freaked mind lost its reality button?

RANDY

You're absolutely right. I'm the first to admit it. If this were a scary movie, I'd be the prime suspect.

STU

And what would be your motive?

RANDY

It's the millennium — motives are incidental.

🪱

Historically, horror is obsessed with killing teenagers. Maybe audiences want to watch them be punished for their youth and sexuality by the dictates of some “deeply ingrained puritanical moralism.” Maybe we just want to watch them. Maybe it’s some other third thing, that teenagers are the most likely victims of cinematic brutality because they are old enough to act on their own free will but young enough to walk directly into trouble without seeing the red flags. 

Not the youth of the new millennium. We’re pretty sure we invented the term red flag. If anyone is going to do us in, it’s each other. 

Neo-slasher teenagers are dead set on determining their own fate. They don’t sin out of pure negligence or sexual desire. In I Know, the teens make the decision to cover up a horrific crime. In Jennifer’s Body, not only is Megan Fox’s character a cannibalizing murderer, but the people who made her into such a creature are also 20-somethings, hell bent on becoming famous. In Scream, the teenage killers kill each other.

I would wager that we are in the midst of yet another slasher revival — complete with Scream reboots and an I Know What You Did Last Summer T.V. show — another opportunity to twist the knife in a genre that loves to see teenagers murdered and murdering. Like all writers before them, new writers will have to consider the impact of the last 25 years on this generation of American youth.

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (2022), a take on a campy slasher that seems to draw inspiration from Scream, does this well. Thanks to writer Sarah DeLappe and help from Kristen Roupenian of ‘Cat Person’ acclaim, the dialogue has the same believable witty edge as Scream and I Know. DeLappe shares Williamson’s ability to wrap up the sincerity and absurdity of the culture — the right now — into a few snarky lines delivered by a young person just before she’s pushed off a balcony. '

Everyone seems to know too much and nothing at all.

“The culture of young people has shifted a lot because of the amount of media that we grow up with,” Bodies, Bodies, Bodies star Amanda Stenberg told Complex, “the amount of self-branding and self-awareness that is almost forced upon us from a very young age.”

[SPOILER] Bodies features no murderer — no indiscriminate evil. Instead, the young people kill each other off one-by-one, each time thinking they are protecting themselves from what they know must be true, has to be true, based on what they’ve seen in the movies.

New slasher writers should take note: Gen Z isn’t going to hide in the closet when they hear a bump in the night. They’re going to burn down the whole house and everyone in it.

Come to think of it, it’s kind of like that Spiderman meme. 

Subscribe now

Recommended Reads:

The Posthuman Monster of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) by Dawn Keetly

Slasher Movie Tropes: Why Horny Teens Die and Final Girls Stay Alive by Corey Callahan

Amandla, Amandla, Amandla: The Bodies Bodies Bodies star is already living in the future (Amandla Stenberg in conversation with Hunter Schafer)

When we last checked in, I was set to visit the Adams family in Roscoe, NY. Unfortunately, COVID halted those plans for now, though I hope to return to them soon. Stay tuned.

FILM: Signs, 2002
WHERE TO WATCH: On a tube T.V. set, in your closet, wearing tin foil.

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism… Everybody worships.” 

- David Foster Wallace

In M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002), silence and dialogue bear equal weight.

Take the dinner scene, in which former Reverend Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), his two young children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin), and his brother Merrill (Jaoquin Phoenix) prepare to eat their chosen end-of-the-world meals. With an alien invasion impending, each is terrified and still reeling from the brutal death of Graham’s wife and the children’s mother. 

We see the family seated at the dining room table through the frame of a rectangular doorway as the camera moves in:

The scene is somber.  No one is moving.

GRAHAM

What's the matter with everyone? 

Eat.

No one says anything.  No one eats.

Beat.

MORGAN

I'm scared.

BO

Me too.

Everything in Signs is confined. The characters are suspended between grief and terror. The cinematography makes clear that the family is confined by the walls of their home and that the home is further boxed in by the towering stalks of a midsummer cornfield. We rarely leave the farm, and are only given a window to the outside world through the square frame of a T.V. set. Dialogue is confined within meticulously paced measures, like music notes. I picture a metronome thrumming softly on set, working to keep the film within its steady four-beat rhythm. How else to explain the way each character delivers their lines so consistently — heeding the whole- and half-rests, waiting for the next tick, never jamming an extra note within the measure or speeding up the time signature midway through their careful hymn.

“It is not just what we hear that is frightening,” wrote Roger Ebert, in his review of the film. “It is the way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard. I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more disturbing.” Of the film’s actual score — composed by James Newton Howard, who also worked with Shyamalan on The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable — William Ruhlmann wrote that “the only distinguishing characteristic about it — consistent with Shyamalan's style — [is] that it is so relentless.”

From the relentless beat of daily life, we find staccato arcs of joy, sadness, anger, relief, and ecstasy. For many people, these are signs to keep on. Miracles remind the faithful that they are not alone and deep bouts of despair suggest that they are being tested for something greater. For those who, like Graham Hess, feel forsaken, what is there to give structure to suffering or joy? How can we define our perimeters as neatly as a piece of carefully composed music; as definitively as a crop circle in a cornfield? What use do we have for signs?

M. Night Shyamalan was just over 30 when he wrote and directed Signs, his third film at the time. For a movie about aliens, he drew from pretty Earthly inspiration. In an interview with Tim Greiving for The Ringer, Shyamalan said he was at a Denny’s when he saw a family eating in silence. He thought they looked burdened.

“I was looking at those people in the Denny’s, and I knew they were coming to my movies, and I wanted to make them feel better,” Shyamalan said.

We find a particularly burdened family in Signs. The bulk of the film unfolds in the wake of a brutal car accident, the one that killed Mrs. Hess (though we aren’t given the details of her death until later in the film). Graham has given up his post as an Episcopalian priest. His brother Merrill, a loveable, goofy former baseball player, has come to the family’s Pennsylvanian farmhouse to help take care of Graham’s kids. The film opens in silence, then we hear dogs barking. Merrill and Graham wake up to find the kids missing. Following the sound of the dogs, they run in a panic toward the cornfield, where they find Morgan staring at three massive crop circles, stalks perfectly flattened. The third circle is attached to a line that spears into thirds like a rounded pitchfork.

“I think God did it,” Morgan says.

Shyamalan had already begun filming when four hijacked planes flew into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field not unlike the Hess’s in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Cast and crew held a vigil before filming the flashback scene where Graham comes upon the accident that left his wife pinned between a truck and a tree. In the same interview with Greiving, Shyamalan said that the 9/11 attacks had a latent effect on the project.

“I think part of the spirituality of the movie came from its time, where we were at that moment,” he said. “All of us felt vulnerable and grateful to be together, and that our particular loved ones were OK, and feeling lucky on a lot of levels — and randomly lucky, you know?”

“Randomly” is an interesting word choice, since Signs denies coincidence. [Spoilers]. 

When the alien species finally touches down on Earth, the faithless Graham realizes that, rather than burdens, he is surrounded by small miracles. The glasses of water Bo obsessively distributes around the house are revealed to be the aliens’ Kryptonite, Morgan’s asthma saves him from inhaling an alien’s noxious gasses, and Merrill’s baseball prowess gives him the strength to beat an alien to death with a baseball bat. 

“In the face of utter hopelessness, these outcomes suggest that the cosmos is on the side of humanity,” wrote Beatrice Loayza, “that something ingrained and incontestable in the fabric of the natural world has got our backs.”

Signs is most consistently criticized for its “irrationality”: If the aliens are highly intelligent, why would they choose to land on a planet made up almost entirely of water, the very thing that kills them instantly? To this, I offer: Humans are intelligent – we are at least aware that we cannot breathe without oxygen — yet we regularly and eagerly shoot off into space. We die on brutal summits. We jump out of airplanes. Inhale carcinogens. Pollute our own naturally-breathable atmosphere. “Intelligence,” as we’ve defined it, is not an aptitude for survival, but a willingness to test the limits of that survival regularly, buoyed by a bedrock belief in our own perseverance.

And I do think that everyone has a belief system — astrology, karma, Judaism, Catholicism, science*, pragmatism, energies. For some, a belief in the existence of aliens offers a form of reassurance: something greater is out there. For others, denial offers a similar sense of solace. 

Belief systems help us reckon not only with the inevitability of death, but also with the unbelievable reality of our lives — that we survive despite loss, chaos, tragedy. 

After 9/11, people grasped for signs and symbolism. In some cases, that grasping became dangerous. We know that conspiracy theories tend to proliferate after tragedy, some of which seek to deny a given tragedy entirely. And people too often use tragedy to justify the unjustifiable. There’s a lesson there, too, but it’s not the one we’re to take from Signs, because the film doesn’t zoom that far out. Instead, like most of Shyamalan’s films, we’re asked to put our faith in the possibility of a final, satisfying twist — one that makes sense of the senseless.

There were stories about miracles after 9/11, like the chapel across the street from the Towers where not a single window pane shattered and the stories of people who experienced life-saving setbacks in their commutes. “Something… has got our backs.” Through belief, for better or worse, we rearrange the misfit contents of the universe. We find reason to justify survival. 

Excerpt from an email sent to photojournalist Mark D. Phillips regarding his photo “Satan in the Smoke,” in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001:

“For those of us who know the Bible, this is not a surprising photograph for it is written in Luke 21:25-26 - ‘And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and waves roaring; Men's hearts failing them for fear…’”

There are a few ways to read the alien trope in horror. Aliens can stand in for the unknown or, more insidiously, for the “other.” But alien films also offer an opportunity to triumph in the fortitude of humanity.

Even when pitted against a species capable of out-inventing, out-traveling, and out-sciencing us, we humans tend to be victorious. Not because of our scientific prowess. Not because of our ability to transcend our own mortality. Not because we are blessed. But because we are human. Because, left with no other options, we believe in our own survival. 

Alien films suggest there is something special about humanity, about being alive on this planet, in this timeline, with the very set of resources and natural abilities we have been given. In the end, the characters in Signs find that the tools they need to access transcendence are already at their disposal. 

In one of the film’s most iconic moments, the Hess family discovers that Bo’s old baby monitor is intercepting alien transmissions. All four members of the family are on top of the car, each holding onto each other in a chain as Morgan jabs the monitor into the sky. We hear nothing but the faint crackling of static, when: 

THE SOUND FROM THE MONITOR SUDDENLY CHANGES.

MORGAN

Stop!

Everyone STOPS exactly where they are.  

Graham holds Bo over his head.  

Bo reaches out to Merrill.  

Merrill sits on the roof with one arm out.  

Morgan stands with the baby monitor raised high in the air.  

The Hess family remains very still on the hood of their station wagon as they listen.

Again, we find silence punctuated by sound; a sign reserved for those who are listening. 

Greiving describes the film’s score as suspense that builds to a revelation. The revelation for Graham Hess, who ultimately returns to his faith, is this: Stop, listen. Hold onto the people you love. Don’t lose the signal. Within the confines of your own life, you may find evidence of the miraculous.

* I’m not suggesting that science — or anything named herein — isn’t “real” or “true,” only that a reliance on science’s ability to explain everything offers the equivalent reassurance someone might get from spirituality or elsewhere. In other words, we’re not contemplating the thing itself (aliens, science, religion), rather the feeling (reassurance, fear, skepticism) the thing evokes.

Edited, as always, by Nicholas Gambini, who has just graduated from Columbia University with a degree in being really good at spelling! Please congratulate him should you see him.

Recommended reads:

“How to Pray to a Dead God,” by Ed Simon

Tim Greiving’s full interview with Shyamalan