For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the John Candy meta comedy Delirious (1991), in which a concussed soap opera writer finds himself stuck inside his own show, which he can manipulate minute-to-minute via typewriter.
00:00 Welcome
04:55 Spellbound (1945) 09:50 Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) 13:25 Intolerable Cruelty (2003) 17:43 The Ladykillers (2004) 21:26 Cocaine Bear (2023) 30:30 The Mothman Prophecies (2002) 36:40 Calvaire (2004) 41:55 Project Wolf Hunting (2023) 44:27 The Outwaters (2023)
The Broad Theater is currently screening a series of films programmed by Damien Echols, a formerly incarcerated member of the West Memphis Three (who were famously misconvicted of murder as teenagers at the tail end of the Satanic Panic era). Echols kicked off the series with the early-aughts supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies, which he watched dozens of times while incarcerated, since it was among his wrongful prison’s severely limited media library. It was Echols’s first time watching the film projected in a proper theater, and it was my first time watching it in any setting (besides catching out-of-context clips while flipping channels on broadcast TV). Only one of us had a clear vision of what we were doing there. Since his release from Death Row, Echols has pivoted into full-time promotion of ceremonial magick, a one-man religious crusade that has apparently expanded from books & blog posts to theatrical programming. To him, The Mothman Prophecies is a spiritually significant work of populist art that uncovers some hidden truth about real-world magick, transcending the film’s more obvious commercial concerns. In my jaded, agnostic eyes, it’s a well-made but largely unremarkable example of mainstream horror filmmaking in its era. Seeing this anonymous PG-13 Studio Horror for the first time in such a reverent, religious context was (third) eye-opening, but less in the way it specifically reveals something about the mechanics of the universe than in the way Echols’s personal enthusiasm for it reveals the spiritual power of movies that happen to hit the right audiences at the right time.
There’s nothing specific to The Mothman Prophecies that you can’t find echoed elsewhere in mainstream cinema, so it’s tempting to discuss it entirely in terms of comparisons. The most charitable comparison would be to call it The Sixth Sense meets The Empty Man, but given how generic it can feel from minute to minute, the more truthful one is Stir of Echoes meets The Bye Bye Man – those films’ Great Value equivalents. Music video director Mark Pellington livens up the assembly line proceedings with some spooky excitement in the scene-to-scene transitions and titular Mothman visions, but his quick-edit visual style is so typical to 2000s studio filmmaking that his efforts just emphasize the movie’s overall anonymity. There’s also something warmly nostalgic about its grand finale—a widespread disaster set piece in which a metal bridge collapses into the Ohio River—being staged through miniature modeling and other practical effects, since its modern equivalent would certainly be simulated in rushed-to-market CGI. Even so, that says more about the time when it was made than it does about this movie specifically. Every commendable detail of The Mothman Prophecies is a result of its effectiveness as an aughts era time capsule: its reliance on the star power of Hollywood hunk Richard Gere; its casual inclusion of tender sex scenes; its pre-torture porn tendencies towards subtlety, sincerity, and restraint. The only context where the film should be cited as anything special is when padding out one of those “Christmas Movies That Aren’t Really Christmas Movies” lists that auto-populate every December to juice up the streaming numbers for Die Hard.
That is, unless you’re Damien Echols, who has obviously found much deeper spiritual meaning in his record-setting repeat viewings of the film. Echols explained that the characters’ visions of a winged “mothman” foretelling future disasters resonated with him as someone who has had similar visions of angels visiting his prison cell. The Mothman figure is even described as an angel in his initial introduction, where illustrations of him are feverishly scribbled into a hospital patient’s bedside notebook in the exact art style you’d imagine in a mainstream horror of the era. When Debra Messing is introduced as said hospital patient and—more significantly—Richard Gere’s wife, you instantly assume she will be fridged, because you have seen a movie before. The Mothman Prophecies quickly obliges, freeing Gere to travel the country in search of the mythical Mothman who visited his wife in her final days. Two years later, Gere inexplicably finds himself in small-town West Virginia while traveling elsewhere on assignment for his newspaper job, where he discovers that locals have been suffering the same Mothman phenomena that haunted Messing’s hospital room. Even to the audience, the Mothman only appears as quick, hallucinatory visions, recalling Pellington’s music video background instead of a Roger Corman creature feature. He’s more symbol than monster, and his appearance is merely an omen of impending natural & manmade disasters that Gere is helpless to prevent. There’s a distinct terror in not knowing the whats, the whens, and the wheres of those disasters until it’s too late, and in having your vague Mothman-inspired warnings dismissed as lunatic rants, but that does little to compensate for how indistinct the film can feel elsewhere.
Hearing Echols describe The Mothman Prophecies‘s accuracy to the magick of tuning in to the world beyond our material one was interesting, but I think it says more about how limited media access can add personal significance to all generic pop culture ephemera than it says about this movie in particular. Practically every title that The Mothman Prophecies recalled to me in the moment—the supernatural visions of The Sixth Sense, the inescapable doom of Final Destination, the hallucinatory pavement lines of Lost Highway—were all released when Echols was incarcerated, making it unlikely that of all the movies in the world, those were the few he could’ve accessed in prison. The other two selections in this ceremonial magick series at The Broad were produced after his release in 2011: the low-budget occultist horror A Dark Song and the ludicrous sci-fi novelty Lucy. Since I’ve already seen those films, I believe my personal magick journey ends here. In fact, I left early during Mothman‘s increasingly abstract, philosophical Q&A so I could catch the most convenient bus home. Still, I appreciate the narrative progression that Echols has sketched out in this short program – from the initial inkling that there’s a world beyond this one in The Mothman Prophecies to the ritualistic magick practices of A Dark Song to the unlocked, all-powerful mental magick of Lucy. In my mind, this series opener was the most unexpected, idiosyncratic choice of the three. It has endless competition that covers the same subject, so in a way it’s the most personal to the programmer behind it; there’s no other reason to single it out. It was also just nice to see local goths out & about having a good time, as the audience appeared to be more fans of Echols’s brand of magick spiritualism than they were diehard Mothheads. Others may have had a richer experience at that screening, but my biggest takeaway was that no one in the world is a bigger fan of The Mothman Prophecies than Damien Echols, since the circumstances of his fandom are so personally specific and the movie itself is so broadly generic.
You’d think that after a half-decade of horror’s outer limits being defined by A24’s emphasis on atmosphere & metaphor, the genre would overcorrect by snapping back to surface-level cheap thrills, just for the sake of variety. And I guess in some ways it has. Recent breakout successes like M3GAN, Barbarian, Smile, and Malignant have signaled a wide audience appetite for high-concept gimmick premises with traditional jump-scare payoffs & haunted house decor. At the same time, though, some of the buzziest horror titles in recent memory have dug their heels even further into arty atmospherics, carving out a new horror of patience & subliminals. I’m thinking particularly of Skinamarink—which simulates childhood nightmares by applying eerie digital filters to public domain cartoons & shots of empty hallways—and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – which borrows heavily from online creepypasta lore & imagery without ever directly participating in the horror genre. These are low-fi, low-budget works that distort the atmospheric horror aesthetic of recent years into D.I.Y. bedroom art, removing even more of the genre’s crowd-pleasing tropes & payoffs so that it feels entirely abstracted & unfamiliar. And now the arrival of the found-footage cosmic horror The Outwaters makes that doubling-down feel like a legitimate trend.
For anyone curious to dip their toe into this (loosely defined) low-fi horror trend, The Outwaters may be the most accessible entry point. It will test your patience just as much as its sister chiller Skinamarink, but it rewards that effort with a much more pronounced, traditional payoff. It’s my personal favorite among these recent low-key creepouts, anyway, since I tend to prefer bloody catharsis over eerie atmospherics. The Outwaters effectively splits the difference between horror’s current trends towards both moody abstraction & on-the-surface cheap thrills. It starts as a low-key, mildly spooky drama about parental grief, but eventually ditches any tidy metaphorical readings for a lengthy, bloody, freewheeling freakout in the Mojave Desert. As trippy as it can be in its Skinamarinkian disorientation, it’s anchored to a concise, recognizable premise that could neatly be categorized as The Blair Witch Project Part IV: Blair Witch Goes to Hanging Rock. It strikes a nice balance between the slow-moving quiet of its bedroom art brethren and mainstream horror’s return to big, bold, bloody haunted house scares. Maybe that makes it a less artistically daring film than World’s Fair or Skinamarink, but it also makes it a more overtly entertaining one.
I’m likely overselling the relative accessibility of The Outwaters here. By design, the first 2/3rds of the runtime are kind of a monotonous bore. The film is presented as the raw, unedited footage of three memory cards recovered in the desert, revealing the final days of four twentysomethings who went missing in 2017. The switch between memory cards provides natural chapter breaks as the four friends leave their urban comfort zone to shoot a music video in the sun-bleached wasteland. They reminisce about dead parents, wake up to deafening booms in the night sky, and become increasingly distracted from the art project they originally ventured to shoot. Otherwise, though, there isn’t much in the way of horror on this road trip into the abyss – just good buds being buds. Then we get to Card 3. The Outwaters saves all of its go-for-broke haunted house freakouts for its final chapter, where it unleashes an axe-wielding maniac, intestinal snake monsters, genital gore, and enough cyclical time-loop mindfuckery to make Benson & Moorhead seem like timid cowards in comparison. By the end of the third memory card, I was desperate to return to the aimless hangouts of the first hour. The finale is a relentless, disorienting assault on the senses, and I loved every squirmy minute of it.
You can tell The Outwaters was made cheaply just by glancing at the credits, where Robbie Banfitch’s name repeats as writer, director, actor, producer, cinematographer, editor, sound designer, and special effects artist. The most encouraging thing about this recent crop of low-fi horror freakouts is how far & wide they’re being distributed. In decades past, they would’ve been left to rot at local film festivals & VHS swaps. In that context, I greatly admire Banfitch’s attempts to offer his audience the same startling scare gags they’d find in much less artistically ambitious horror-of-the-week products from major studios. The Cronenbergian flesh snakes who screech and lunge at the film’s small cast are some of the most disturbing onscreen monsters I’ve encountered in a while, regardless of budget level. Meanwhile, Skinamarink has a more novel approach to D.I.Y. nightmare imagery, but its visual language is limited to recognizable, everyday objects: popcorn ceilings, vintage toys, cathode ray TVs, etc. I still don’t think The Outwaters could be honestly marketed as an accessible, mainstream horror flick; most audiences will feel alienated by it. It does reward your attention & patience a little more than its easiest comparison points, though; maybe even more so than the original Blair Witch.
Our current Movie of the Month, 1957’s Peyton Place, is a sprawling epic of small-town scandal & melodrama. It’s essentially Douglas Sirk’s “Harper Valley PTA”, an exquisite illustration of lowly gossip & pulp. Since its source-material novel was essentially the Fifty Shades of its time, its major-studio adaptation had to put on an air of arty prestige & high-minded sexual education to justify the indulgence. The sex education aspect is loudly pronounced, advocating for healthy sexual habits to be openly discussed and taught in schools, since the small-town sex shaming of all “dirty talk” is what causes heartbreak & tragedy in its doomed characters’ lives. Prestige is a much trickier quality to signal to the audience, something the film prompts in its sweeping shots of artificial woodland vistas and soaring melodramatic strings. It also signals prestige in the casting of Lana Turner as its biggest-name star, prominently advertising her performance over much meatier roles for the teens-in-crisis beneath her. When Peyton Place hit theaters, Turner was a glamorous movie star that afforded the film an air of legitimacy. A year later, an act of domestic violence in which her daughter stabbed a mobster boyfriend in her family home would make her a magnet for tabloid scandal, dragging Turner down to the movie’s true gossipy nature.
Getting a sense of where Peyton Place fits within the restrictions & subversions of Old Hollywood’s final hours means getting familiar with how Lana Turner was understood & adored as an Old Hollywood movie star. So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to bask in more of her Studio Era glamour.
Since every other title on this list casts Lana Turner for her star power but doesn’t actually center her as its star, it’s imperative to include her iconic, spotlight-commanding role in this classic studio noir. Turner plays the world’s most pragmatic femme fatale in The Postman Always Rings Twice, using her smoky sexual charisma to inspire a lovelorn drifter to kill her husband so she can run her own roadside diner, to both her and her lover’s eventual peril. Despite a couple mid-film courtroom battles that ice their wayward momentum, it’s a great story about two lost souls who are so rottenly horny for each other that they don’t know what to do except destroy everything. If nothing else, it’s easily 1000x sexier than its 80s erotic thriller remake, a movie that Turner dismissed as “pornographic trash” without ever actually watching it.
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
The only reason the mean little Hollywood tabloid The Bad and the Beautiful can’t claim to be a proper Lana Turner showcase is that she’s outshined by an incredibly unrelenting Kirk Douglas performance that leaves no scenery in his path unchewed. The movie itself is also somewhat outshined by its own overperforming peers in the same way, as it boldly, brashly recalls Citizen Kane & Sunset Boulevard without having any of the necessary virtuosity to back it up. Luckily it’s bitchy & cynical enough to stand on its own as a self-hating Hollywood mythmaker, and it props Turner up as a mildly fictionalized version of herself – a powerhouse Studio System starlet with a troubled life offscreen. She’s unusually vulnerable in the role too, plunging to rock bottom before towering over Douglas’s frantic anti-hero as his romantic foil.
Turner also plays a struggling actress who eventually makes it big in Douglas Sirk’s classic melodrama Imitation of Life, and I’d say she’s also outshined as a secondary attraction there, despite her prominence on the poster. Like in Peyton Place, Turner’s name is used as a box office draw, but the most compelling melodrama in the film is reserved for the teens running circles at her feet. She looks absolutely fabulous in the role as the matriarch Broadway star, though, modeling a million-dollar wardrobe that broke records for Old Hollywood productions at the time.
By pretending to position Turner center stage, Sirk was able to get away with telling a subversive story about racial discrimination, passing, and self-hatred with Juanita Moore’s character in a way that would’ve frightened off studio execs without blinding them with Turner’s gowns & jewels. The boldly political sex education messaging of Peyton Place is hidden behind Turner’s star wattage in a similar way, even if it’s not nearly as tasteful nor exquisitely staged as its Douglas Sirk equivalent. By the time she “starred” in Imitation of Life, the real-life tragedy in Turner’s family had already made tabloid headlines, but she was still useful to Sirk as a signal of class & prestige, which I think says something about the inherent strength & respectability of her screen presence.
For Carnival 2017, a few members of the Swampflix crew joined forces to pray at the altar of the almighty Divine. The greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of our favorite filmmaker, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.
Our initial krewe was a small group of Swampflix contributors: site co-founders Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas, regular contributor CC Chapman, and repeat podcast guest Virginia Ruth. We were later joined by local drag performer Ce Ce V DeMenthe, who frequently pays tribute to Divine in her performances. There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2023 excursion, our fifth year in operation as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe (and our first year returning after the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020):
Welcome to Episode #180 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the classic films and lasting legacy of Marilyn Monroe, from her beloved comedies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) to her post-modern post mortem Blonde (2022).
00:00 Welcome
2:00 Krewe Divine 3:30 Divine Trash (1998) 4:36 Attachment (2023) 8:35 SexWorld (1978) 12:15 Bijou (1972) 15:58 The Red Shoes (1948) 18:10 A Matter of Life and Death (1946) 20:35 Chan is Missing (1982) 21:51 Caravaggio (1986)
26:04 Blonde (2022) 44:30 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) 58:56 Some Like It Hot (1959) 1:16:23 Niagara (1953) 12:25:25 Don’t Bother to Knock (1952)
I don’t know about you, but when I find an aughts-era Neve Campbell thriller set in the hot, sticky depths of the American South, I expect it to be a knockoff Wild Things. A real trashy one. It turns out Lost Junction is more a knockoff of the Melanie Griffith matricide dramedy Crazy in Alabama, so it’s an entirely different kind of trashy. Instead of echoing Wild Things‘s audience-trolling triple crossings and poolside threesomes, Lost Junction offers trashy delights of a much weaker flavor: Neve Campbell struggling to master a Southern accent; an emotional plot-stopping monologue from acting powerhouse Jake Busey; a touristy road trip to pre-Katrina N’awlins; vintage CW visual aesthetics, etc. It’s rated R, but it’s Rated R for “Language,” since Campbell’s genteel Southern belle can’t stand to hear the gruff men in her life do a cuss, so they tease her with those cusses incessantly. I expected Lost Junction to be a Bad Movie; that’s fine. I just wasn’t prepared for it to be such a chaste one.
You’ll have to excuse my unusual lack of contextual bearings here. Lost Junction apparently did not exist prior to my stumbling across it at a local Bridge House thrift store, and only the thinnest of Wikipedia pages has had time to populate since that fateful purchase. To borrow some inane language from people who like to chat Avatar online, this film has no cultural footprint. It’s not even streaming on its obvious, destined home platform Tubi. The only reason a bad-taste loser would ever pick up a physical copy in the wild is whatever residual affection for Campbell as a screen presence still lingers so many decades after her Golden Age titles like Wild Things, Scream, The Craft, and Party of Five. There’s some small pleasure in seeing her do a half-speed Kristin Chenowith impersonation as the world’s most chipper femme fatale, but it’s not a good sign that Jake freakin’ Busey steals the show from under her with only a fraction of the screentime. By her tragic damsel’s own admission, she can’t cook, she can’t sing, she’s not that bright, and she’s kind of a prude. There’s not much to her at all outside her “Southern” accent and her off-screen history of domestic abuse. As a result, there isn’t much to the movie either.
Billy Burke costars as a generic Drifter With a Past who hitches a ride with the wrong dame, climbing into the Manic Pixie Murder Suspect’s car not knowing that her husband’s dead body is cooking in the trunk. Our star-crossed lovers meet in the first few frames, and although the film basically functions as a sunlit neo-noir, there isn’t much actual criminal behavior in their subsequent Bonnie & Clyde crime spree. The dead husband clearly deserved it, it’s frequently questioned whether Campbell actually did it, and most of the movie is a getting-to-know-you first date that happens to involve his rotting corpse (give or take a third-wheel intrusion from Busey). At least in Crazy in Alabama, Melanie Griffith took great transgressive delight in carrying around her husband’s head in a hatbox. Here, Campbell would rather just pretend that her husband never existed, which isn’t much fun for the (nonexistent) audience following along at home. The most incongruous cheeriness we get is in the impromptu road trip to New Orleans, where Campbell refers to our cemeteries as “neat little buildings” and the doomed couple dance at a bar called Gator Blues. It’s cute, but it’s not worth the commute.
While perusing her IMDb page to confirm that Lost Junction does indeed exist, I was shocked by how many films Neve Campbell headlined in the aughts. She basically disappeared from my radar at the close of the 1990s, outside occasional resurfacings as Sidney Prescott or as one of Don Draper’s anonymous hookups. It turns out there are plenty of post-Wild Things titles out there waiting to offer the sleazy Neve Campbell thriller that’s apparently missing in my life, titles like Intimate Affairs, Last Call, and When Will I Be Loved. Or, those are just more dusty DVDs waiting to prank me with eye-catching, tantalizing covers at the thrift store, only to reveal their overly demure nature once I take them home. I hope Jake Busey will be there as a third wheel to keep the mood light & chaotic, because there’s no way I’m going to avoid taking the bait a second or third time.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, by which I mean I recently rewatched Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour. Noir always looks different after watching Detour. The Poverty Row production values look dreamlike & otherworldly instead of limited & cheap; the femmes fatales seem more deliberately, deliciously vicious in their misandry; and, most glaringly, the tough-guy alcoholics at the genre’s center start looking like whiny babies instead of macho lone wolves. Apparently, David Lynch sees the genre through those same grubby Detour lenses. At the very least, his 1990s neo-noir Lost Highway turns the interchangeability of the genre’s drunken mopes into a kind of existential crisis. A Lynchian nightmare, if you will. He tells two loosely connected noir stories about two unremarkable, pouty men, then gradually makes it clear they’re just same story repeated. They’re all the same story, with the same miserable sad sacks circling the same drains.
Bill Pullman stars as a mopey saxophonist frustrated by his loosening grip on his straying LA hipster girlfriend (not unlike the down-and-out pianist who loses his girlfriend to her own Hollywood starlet ambitions in Detour). Until he doesn’t. Pullman disappears after the first act, inexplicably transforming into a young-dumb-and-full-of-cum teen mechanic played by Balthazar Getty, who quickly gets into his own girlfriend troubles when he falls for a gangster’s moll. With Lost Highway, Lynch twists himself in knots trying to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling in a second draft . . . and he eventually gets there, even if the slack-jawed, leather-jacketed drip needs a little supernatural help from a legit movie star like Pullman to pull it off. Of course, neither of these parallel losers are as compelling as the femmes fatales that get them in lethal, cosmic trouble—both played by Patricia Arquette—but then again they never are.
Because this is a David Lynch film, I’m zapping some of its magic just by “explaining” what happens and how it relates to larger genre filmmaking traditions. So much of Lost Highway is composed of hypnotizing highway lines, Skinimarinkian hallways, and UFO-landing strobe lights that reducing it to a loose collection of noir tropes is somewhat insulting and very much beside the point. Still, you don’t really need to hear that Lynch uses red velvet drapes to mark the boundary between reality & the dream world, or that the dream-logic procession of the plot(s) defies rational explanation; you’ve seen a David Lynch movie, you get it. The only vivid deviations from his go-to formula are the temporal markers of when it was made: a Trent Reznor-supervised soundtrack, a Marilyn Manson cameo in a stag night porno, a mid-film spoof of road safety PSAs, etc. On that front, real-life monster Robert Blake might outshine Arquette as the film’s MVP, dressed in the usual ghoulish make-up as one of Lynch’s trademark specters of Death, except this time armed with a menacing camcorder that updates the usual formula with some weirdo 90s video art. It’s all very eerie, off-putting, frustrating, and strangely compelling, which is to say that it is a David Lynch film.
I do find it helpful to have some kind of a contextual anchor to help appreciate Lynch’s work. I don’t want to be the guy who “maps out” the identity shifts, time loops, and dreamworld symbolism of Lost Highway as if it were a puzzle to be solved, but I also find very little enjoyment in the late-career formlessness of projects like Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return, so it helps to seek a little guiding structure under the heavy layers of nightmare logic. It’s the Philistine position to take, but I truly believe Lynch was at his best in his early career, when his most far-out, for-their-own-sake impulses were still somewhat tempered by Hollywood storytelling conventions. With Wild at Heart and Lost Highway in the 90s, there was still just enough recognizable genre structure beneath Lynch’s loopy surface aesthetics that he hadn’t yet completely lost me. Hell, I’d even rank Wild at Heart high among his very best. He was already pushing his subliminal anti-logic to its late-career extremes, but I detect enough familiar noir DNA in Lost Highway‘s bones to not feel totally abandoned. And a lot of that has to do with how mopey & ineffectual its two parallel leads are at center stage, and how much fun Patricia Arquette has crushing them under her heels (when she’s not getting crushed herself by even more vicious bullies further up the Hollywood food chain).
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Brandon Cronenberg’s debut sci-fi horror grossout Antiviral (2012), a dystopian satire about the commodity of celebrity illness.
When I think of movie sequels that best their originals, what come to mind are the ones that go bigger, broader, and cartoonishly extreme, exploding the comparatively timid premises of their source texts – titles likeGremlins 2, Ghoulies 2, Child’s Play 2,Paddington 2, Batman Returns, and Magic Mike XXL. In all of those examples, though, I still like the original films that preceded them, which is more than I can say for the volatile, twisty screenlife thriller Missing. Missing is a spin-off sequel to one of my least favorite entries in the screenlife genre, Searching (a film that I should note Britnee reviewed very positively for this site back in 2018). Searching wasn’t embarrassing in the way that lower-budget screenlife schlock like Safer at Home and Untitled Horror Movie can be, but I still resented it for cleaning up a trashy genre I love for its illogical technophobic fearmongering by turning it into safe, This Is Us-style melodrama. Laptop-POV thrillers should prey on the eeriness of life on the internet, not act as tech-friendly advertisements that constantly reassure parents their terminally online children are actually doing okay. It was basically Unfriended for the corniest of suburbanites, a perspective I was happy to see dropped in its much meaner, trashier sequel.
Missing improves on the Searching formula in practically every way, most of all in how it maintains a healthy paranoia around modern tech even while explaining why it’s useful (and in how it’s willing to put its characters in actual, sustained danger instead of just pretending to). Storm Reid stars as the mouse-clicking, keyboard clacking internet detective du jour, a teenager who investigates the sudden disappearance of her mother—lost while vacationing in Colombia—from her laptop control room in California. Missing‘s tone echoes the hokey schmaltz of Searching‘s parent-child melodrama, scoring its petty mother-daughter tensions with heart-tugging piano flourishes you’d expect to hear in an engagement ring jewelry store commercial. Only, while Reid clicks away at the Ring cameras, location trackers, search histories, password workarounds, and username paper trails at her fingertips to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, she’s revealing more than just the speedbumps & heartbreaks of modern familial bonds; she’s also cataloging the tools of the modern surveillance state. The surface-level text of the film details the twists & turns of a Dateline-style “true” crime mystery and subsequent familial grief, while the glaring subtext is all about how deep privacy-invading technology has already seeped into our daily lives in ways we’ve learned to ignore, simply because it’s convenient.
One of the major things I love about screenlife thrillers (and one of the major reasons they’re dismissed as frivolous novelties) is their nimble ability to document of-the-moment trends in modern life online. It’s something most other genres are scared to touch for fear of looking gimmicky or dated, despite computer screens accounting for so much of the visual data most audiences absorb on a daily basis. There’s something fearlessly honest about engaging with that supposedly uncinematic imagery, but I also just like to imagine how incomprehensible screenlife aesthetics would be to earliest cinemagoers who were astounded by The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in 1896. For its part, Missing doesn’t have many updates in modern screenlife to document, except maybe the frustrating ambiguity of Captcha challenges and the low-key hostility of a thumbs-up emoji. It does have plenty notes about life outside of the computer, though, marking our cultural obsession with turning real life tragedies into true crime #content; zoomer teens’ uncanny savvy in navigating the back roads of social media; and our casual, collective acceptance of privacy invasion from vampiric tech-world capitalists. On a more practical, immediate level, it’s most useful as a showcase for Reid’s skills as a young actor and editors-turned-directors Will Merrick & Nick Johnson’s understanding of screenlife’s unique visual language, since those three collaborators account for almost everything we see onscreen. It’s a fun, well-staged mainstream thriller with just the right balance between social commentary, shameless sentimentality, and trashy what-the-fuck twists, when Searching only hit one of those three metrics.
Swampflix 