Tommy Metz III:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. The basis of all human fears, he thought, a closed door, slightly ajar. Both of these quotes from H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King from Salem’s Lot, respectively, describe the horror that comes from the outside, the invaders that threaten to topple our foundations of safety and sanity once they force their way in. We build gates, both real and emotional, to protect our way of life. But what if the invaders are already inside? What if, indeed, the call is coming from inside the house? As French philosopher Louis Eugene Marie Boutin once posited, the only true— Oh shoot. Okay, sorry guys. That’s my shipment of biscuit and gravy smoothies for the month. Let me go grab that. I’ll just let my co-host take over for a second.
Well, hello, boys and goose, and welcome back to another dinosaur of Spitting in the Snark. I’m your favorite ghost host, the Crypt Keeper, but I’m not a bone down here in the dark, because I have skeletons of guests with me. First off, we have the pod father himself, the one in phony, Pete Fright! I mean Pete Wright! And next up, we have the professor who’s always dead of the class, teen and diaz, because teens are scary and make fun of how I dress. I need teen and diaz! And last but not least, I have the displeasure to meet for the first time the one and boldly, Hell C. Scar Rust. Rust is scary because it means you are taking care of your metal. I mean Chelsea Stardust! Chelsea, it’s wonderful to meat you. And that’s spelled M-E-A-T because of puns. Now back to Thomas Stressley sweats the turd. Goodbye, kiddies. Goodbye.
Oh, I forgot to breathe that entire time.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh my God.
Kynan Dias:
Surprised you have your eyes left in your skull.
Pete Wright:
I know.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh my God.
Tommy Metz III:
Okay.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, I shouldn’t have worn mascara.
Tommy Metz III:
Hi guys, sorry about that. Thank you for joining me. Say hi, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Hi, Tom.
Tommy Metz III:
Hi, Kynan.
Kynan Dias:
Hi, Tommy.
Tommy Metz III:
And hello, Chelsea. So for this episode we’ll be talking about the invaders from within, three films which deal with horrors not barging their way in through the locked front door, but instead make themselves known within your hometown, your beliefs, or even your own mind. The three films we will be disgust— just getting— disgusting, I’m done with that, are Sam Levinson’s 2018 Assassination Nation, Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 Return of the Living Dead, and Tarsem Singh’s 2000 The Cell.
All right, welcome everybody. So thank you so much for joining. To start this, who had seen these movies before? You’ve seen all three. Chelsea wins, Pete two, which—
Pete Wright:
Two. I got two.
Kynan Dias:
I’ve lost again.
Tommy Metz III:
You’ve none of them, I love it.
Kynan Dias:
Zero out of zero.
Pete Wright:
Oh, Kynan.
Tommy Metz III:
I love it. Which one hadn’t you seen, Pete? Let me guess. Assassination Nation.
Pete Wright:
It was Assassination Nation, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. Okay. Well then let’s start with Assassination Nation. These are the invaders that come from inside your community or inside your hometown. Quick sum up: the town of Salem goes through its own witch trials of sorts when a hacker by the name of Erostratus releases everyone’s private emails and texts, causing the town to demonize each other, and ultimately a group of teenage girls. Quick note, while not explained in the film, Erostratus was an arsonist who burned down the Greek temple of Artemis in 356 BCE in an attempt to become famous, or in other words, for the lulz.
Okay, so let’s start with axes to grind. There’s gotta be some. Number one: is this even a horror movie? I’ll start with that.
Kynan Dias:
It’s a lot of movies.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s definitely a thriller.
Pete Wright:
It’s a lot of movies.
Kynan Dias:
No, it’s a lot of genres, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s a lot of movies. It’s definitely a thriller for me.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I personally think — but it’s very up for debate and I want to hear what you guys think — it is a horror movie for me because one of my biggest fears of all time is mob mentality. So it is a horror movie to me because it’s just sort of a nightmare come to life. What do you guys think? Pete, why don’t we start with you?
Pete Wright:
Well, I don’t know if this is an axe. The movie is political. Politics, correct. It has a take on doxxing and witch hunt logic and masculine fragility and surveillance culture, and it’s all right there on the tin. And it also kind of doesn’t trust you to figure out anything on your own. There’s no irony, there’s no ambiguity, there is no breathing room for anything. And the fact that it takes all that and sort of tells you in the opening trigger warning that it’s gonna refuse to be argued with, because it’s telling you what it’s gonna do, preempting any of this criticism about it — which is kinda great, but it’s refusing culpability, I think, in some of the way it’s telling its story.
Kynan Dias:
And it does beat you over the head. Even though it tells you it’s gonna beat you over the head, it does later. And then with ten minutes left they’re like, hey, this is about the election. They say that — girls can be anything.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Kynan Dias:
Girls can be president of the United States. Oh, except for that one. It’s like, okay, I got it.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
Chelsea, what did you think?
Chelsea Stardust:
So I think I would classify it within that genre since you brought that up. Satire, thriller, horror. IMDB thinks it’s under that horror category. So I’m always a little squishy with that stuff too.
I have very strong feelings about Sam Levinson as a creator and what he makes. And hey listen, I am someone who does watch Euphoria, as more of a study, I think, if anything. I have to kind of put the movie aside. How he portrays women, teens, sexualizing a lot of things — I have a very complicated relationship with this director. I think he’s sort of trying to be today’s Harmony Korine or Larry Clark, kind of trying to do that stuff under this crazy color palette. There’s a lot of things. I have a very complicated relationship with this movie.
Tommy Metz III:
Sure.
Chelsea Stardust:
There’s things about it I love, but the mob mentality thing — that’s horror to me.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
This watch should hit very close to home, and I think politically where we are, it kind of was tough to watch. It was tougher for me to watch this time than the first time I watched it in 2018.
Pete Wright:
How you doing on those axes though, Chelsea?
Chelsea Stardust:
I’m just deciding if I want to get into it or not, and I don’t know if I do.
Kynan Dias:
There’d be a rest of the episode if we just got into axes, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
So I’m gonna respectfully take a sidestep to that. But setting you up with the trigger warnings — it kind of defeats the purpose because it’s like, we’re gonna show you all this stuff and be in your face. I would have liked to not have had that. I understand why you’re doing it, because I think that was a time when we were seeing a lot of that. But now you’ve set me up for a bunch of stuff and you best deliver if you’re gonna do that.
Kynan Dias:
For me, when I was watching, I was like, oh okay, this is like Euphoria before Euphoria. And then I didn’t make the connection that this Sam Levinson is that Sam Levinson, and I felt really silly afterwards. Okay, there’s a lot to be said about Euphoria and this sort of sub-genre that is Sam Levinson. The strengths of it are very, very strong.
It did make me feel a little bit like a very old person. I don’t like to go back and look at scenes for this show or class or anything, and I couldn’t follow literally what had happened sometimes. So there’s a fantastic sequence where Maude Apatow is mad at Bella Thorne and she drags this baseball bat through the school, and it’s this really, really engrossing sequence. And then at the end of the movie I was like, wait, who were those people? Why were they mad at each other? I had to go back and look, and I’m still not sure that I understand what happened in that sequence.
So there’s a lot of that. Everything feels really wow, really entrancing in the moment. And then kind of at the end of the movie, I don’t know if it really meant anything or added up to anything. And I’m just not sure.
Tommy Metz III:
I like all of these comments and I think all of this is fair. One of the reasons that I picked this movie and felt comfortable picking this movie is, Chelsea, because you have joined us on this podcast. A group of men talking about Assassination Nation without any kind of other viewpoint would be insulting and insane.
I think this movie has so much style — and style to burn, as Kynan already said. It’s nineteen movies, and it seems like someone who is, Hamilton-style, running out of time. But then he bites off all of his own tricks for Euphoria.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Can I just ask a question?
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
And then sort of for the item. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I’m assuming I’m the only one who hasn’t watched a single minute of Euphoria. I have no connection to Sam Levinson besides this movie now. Should I have done homework for this homework?
Kynan Dias:
You’ve seen Euphoria now that you’ve seen this, I think.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes, yes, yeah.
Kynan Dias:
So that’s not a horror movie, though. That one is a little bit more than this movie pretending that that’s really what teens really like — every teen really is like that — which is one of the problems of Euphoria. This one, by the end of it, you can kind of go, okay, it’s kind of a fever dream, and maybe this isn’t literal. But Euphoria is pretty like, yeah, watch your kids.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
That’s what’s happening.
Pete Wright:
All right, fair enough.
Tommy Metz III:
Euphoria is more — and it also leans heavily into drug culture more than this.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
Where to start? One of my biggest axes to grind: Larry Clark doesn’t apologize for it as much, but Sam Levinson definitely is like, hey, you creeps, how dare you sexualize teenagers? While actively sexualizing teenagers in the most bare kind of way.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s really just one of his big tricks.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
But then the movie wants to rub your face in it. It’s like, okay, but you didn’t have to dress everyone — you directed this movie, right?
Pete Wright:
You wrote it, right?
Chelsea Stardust:
And under the guise of empowerment.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
That’s where my issues come from.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Right. Yep.
Pete Wright:
That is the whole thing.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
The adult man writing extreme experiences for teenage girls is more fraught than I think he is aware. There is a lack of self-awareness to this production that stands out.
Tommy Metz III:
But there is a lot of empowerment to be found in it. It’s just maybe not where he thinks it is, or as constant as he thinks it is.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Kynan Dias:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
Do you guys think that the film does a good job showing the fester in the town of Salem before the wheels come off the bus?
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, yeah, I think so.
Tommy Metz III:
I think so too. I like even little things like Pennywise — I don’t remember anyone’s names.
Chelsea Stardust:
I think so.
Tommy Metz III:
Mark, Bill Skarsgård.
Chelsea Stardust:
Mark, Bill Skarsgård.
Tommy Metz III:
Bill Skarsgård saying things like, oh, you should have seen your stupid face.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah, Skarsgård Junior, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Pennywise.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
There’s so much misogyny, just sort of blanketed — very small misogyny and girl-against-girl misogyny. There’s all sorts of things. I like that a lot, that it doesn’t just sort of come from nowhere and say that if everything was exposed, then society would just rip itself apart. Do you agree with that, Pete?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I think so. There is a lot of that simmering bit before the actual witch hunt — you get that there is a witch hunt at work. The subtextual witch hunt, the cultural witch hunt that is acknowledged through doxxing. That seems to be humanity-decency proof in this movie. There’s just no opportunity for anybody to try to do anything good from jump, even with each other. It seems very, very dark. So yeah, I would agree with that. There’s nothing subtle, but it is precise.
Tommy Metz III:
And incredibly timely. There is a timelessness to this movie that is just happening today’s news with politicians being outed, with all of that. And then with that one character saying, you know, it’s always the people that are trying to take away other people’s rights that are then doing everything. But then our main protagonist saying, I think you can disagree with them and still feel empathy.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
I like that — again, it’s not subtle, but I like that it does bring up a conversation.
Pete Wright:
One of the great horrors of this movie is that I’m watching it and wondering if we will ever be living in a time where we can say this movie is dated. That’s terrifying.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Right.
Pete Wright:
This movie was timeless when it came out, and it’s timeless now, and that’s horrifying. It’s one of the great horrors of this movie.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
They create this social media world, I think in a successful way, that’s pretty seamless, so that we kind of forget how clunky that is in other movies, and how they’re able to put this as the real monster — social media — and have it hovering over them, flooding their peripheral vision, just being on all the time. I think they do a very, very good job of that.
So we understand when things start to go, how these particular people can’t live without this. I never was asked, why don’t you just all put your phones down? Which happens in other movies where you feel superior to them.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Just put your phone down. In this one, that would be impossible for them. They couldn’t even be in classes without their phones.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
There is part of me that wishes — I deeply love the style of so much of this movie. It’s so ambitious. So much of the split screens, so much of the crossing. It’s beautiful filmmaking at times. But, as you said, it’s not subtle, but it’s precise. There’s stuff in here that I wish was in the hands of a different filmmaker, or that we could just talk about the mob mentality and the politicalness of it. Because it’s not just male fragility. It’s the idea of the different political classes in America that we’ve seen, especially with the rise of MAGA.
There’s so much of, quote, “the rest of the world is laughing at us, taking pleasure in our humiliation.” There’s so much woundedness in the movie that’s just waiting to come out. I think it has a lot.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
The continued insistence from so many people saying — the two words that are used the most in the movie I think are “good people.”
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
We’re good people. We’re good people. Good people of Salem. And then on the other side, I know I’ve made some mistakes, but I’m not a bad person. There’s so much justification throughout that it’s fascinating. I wish there was a different version of this movie so I could enjoy the style of this movie, but then also some of the commentary.
Kynan Dias:
It’s unfair, I think, to compare Sam Levinson to his father, Barry Levinson, but I would like to see that movie where Barry Levinson, of Rain Man fame, directs instead.
Pete Wright:
Oh my God.
Kynan Dias:
Instead.
Tommy Metz III:
Wait, is that true?
Kynan Dias:
Yeah, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I didn’t know that. Weird. What a weird Thanksgiving.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. The apple that falls from the tree is definitely like a pomegranate, you know? It’s just very different.
Tommy Metz III:
I had no idea. Well, it also makes sense how Sam Levinson kind of seemed to come out of nowhere — because he didn’t crawl up out of nowhere.
Kynan Dias:
Right, mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
He didn’t, right.
Tommy Metz III:
Got it. Okay. He Max Landis-ed it.
Pete Wright:
It’s funny, there’s some interesting textual — we see the witch hunt metaphor all the time. One of the things that this movie does very well is it says the witch hunt is not a metaphor. It is the entire architecture of American structure. We are always eating ourselves from the inside.
We are deeply — and I say this with great intention — we are an organism that is deeply nationalist. Even those, the good people, the bad people — what this movie is saying is everyone is its own sort of cellular nationalist. You find the thing that doesn’t fit and you chase it out. That becomes a real poison. And I think this movie, one of the things that it does well with all the style it has to burn, is it tells that story really terrifyingly well.
It happens to be 19 other movies at the same time. And there is a universe where maybe Barry Levinson tells the entire Lolita storyline that’s going on in this movie in isolation, and it’s a gripping and terrifying story. Here, it’s like an F story at best. And yet we get this angle that privacy in this movie is a body part that you can lose. That’s a crazy telling.
There’s a lot going on that — as much as I’m conflicted by the filmmaker, the tonal choices — this is a huge swing about an entire community that’s still eating itself from the inside out.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Right. It could even get lost — Tommy’s theme that is uniting these movies, that it’s very interesting, because there is so much going on here, you might not really even think about until someone like Tommy comes and — this is what the horror is, the witch hunt as scapegoating these people, but it’s because of this self-hatred and of doing these things, for some of these people that aren’t inherently even bad.
But then they are doubling down in that MAGA sort of way of like, oh, you said this action of mine is racist, so I might as well become a racist. I might as well live that and become a deplorable. So that Joel McHale arc is very interesting. He’s made this mistake that is questionable or at least understandable, and now he’s being told he’s a bad person, and now he is becoming the leader of the purge and becoming a murderer, a rapist. Rather than saying, hey, instead of thinking about this and what can I do here — I’ve lost everything, so I might as well become a monster.
But again, like Pete’s saying, he’s the ninth or tenth character in the movie. But that is terrifying in and of itself, right? From Lily’s point of view: I’ve loved you. I was willing to throw my life away for you, and now because of this problem, this badness at the core of our relationship, you are a million times worse than you ever were and not that person anymore.
Tommy Metz III:
By insisting that they’re good people. It’s almost — yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Pete really did explain the idea of why I, and Kynan just backed it up, why I thought this was a good idea for the invader from within. They do say that the rest of the world is laughing at us. I like how insular the movie is. We never get a second outside of just this little town of Salem. And we don’t need the rest of the town. They call the FBI and say, can you turn off the internet? And the FBI is like, what?
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
The idea of eating yourself alive. The town is eating itself alive, and then people are eating themselves alive. They just can’t be the bad person. But to not their credit — but the movie does begin with two different people, beginning and middle, trying to reason with the public and just not being allowed, just being immediately shut down.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And the deeply nationalist idea that you said, Pete. The line at the end of the day, “nothing unites us like a good tragedy.”
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Unfortunately, that’s true.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s too enticing to not go to the bonfire, unfortunately, in a movie like this.
Pete Wright:
There is a sequence in here that gets to one of my great fears, which is the home invasion bit. We’ve done a whole episode on home invasion films, and that sequence was fantastic.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
That faked one-er, it’s incredible.
Pete Wright:
It was really— yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
It is incredible. It is really well done. I bought it. There wasn’t anything in the craft that took me out of that sequence. It was horrifying.
Tommy Metz III:
The first time that I watched it, I was convinced that it was a one-er, but now I know — and filmmakers are really good about it — if you are doing a one-er, you never have even a second of complete black, because everyone’s going to say you faked it.
Pete Wright:
Yep.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
This movie actually has a lot. When I rewatched it for this, I was like, oh, this is like 19 shots.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. He’s like not even trying, right?
Tommy Metz III:
I thought this was one thing. You always have a lens flare, you do something to make sure — yeah, but it’s just so ambitious.
Pete Wright:
Or wall, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s incredibly—
Pete Wright:
You can tell there’s a lot of really good synchronized crane work. There’s some really cool stuff going on in there even with any fakery going on. It doesn’t take me out of it.
Chelsea Stardust:
There’s so much confidence in the movie. But the trigger warning at the beginning—
Tommy Metz III:
Right. So much—
Chelsea Stardust:
—feels like, I would like to see this movie without that, to start it without any of that. Because there’s so much confidence throughout the movie as a director. And also the cast in this movie is really incredible. And so many people that now obviously are very popular — a lot of actors that are very popular. You can see, for those who have seen Euphoria, so many seeds planted that he’s — it’s sort of like, this is the test run, and then he’s taking threads of this and expanding on them in Euphoria. So it sort of feels like a test for something that’s gonna be much longer, multiple seasons.
Tommy Metz III:
Right. All the way to the marching band.
Kynan Dias:
Oh, I was glad you brought that up, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I mean, he really just throws everything into this movie and then re-takes it out. He’s like, what should I do this scene? Oh — it’s like when Scorsese — this is not related, but I remember Scorsese giving an interview about The Departed, and he was like, when we were introducing Jack Nicholson, I couldn’t figure out what music cue I should use. Then I was sitting in traffic and someone was playing Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones, and I was like, that’s it. And I was like, have you watched any of your own movies? You use that song constantly. What do you mean you just heard it in traffic? That’s what I feel like Sam Levinson did.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
Between The Idol, which was such a hate watch, and Euphoria. He’s just fighting off himself in a really crazy way.
Kynan Dias:
But I do want to talk about that last marching band sequence, which is really creepy, really, really interesting.
Tommy Metz III:
Please.
Kynan Dias:
Again, going back and forth between, hey, is this a confident film or not? I’m not sure always. They lead up to this climax. We don’t see the climax, we get the reveal of what was really going on, and there I’m kind of left a little cold. Like, oh, do you not have the fortitude to show us some of that?
So then they do it instead in this really surreal scene with the marching band going through, and clearly the town has half killed itself. That’s an image that’s gonna stick with me. I don’t know what it means necessarily. Is it this nationalist thing, I suppose? They’re playing We Can’t Stop by Miley Cyrus. Again, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel about it, or even be like, oh, that sums it up. But it’s an image that I’m gonna remember for a while and be thinking about.
Tommy Metz III:
I take it really in the same tone, personally, as the trigger warnings. I don’t think that the trigger warnings are used to say, everyone buckle up, I’m worried that you’re not gonna be able to take this. I think it’s bragging. I think it’s saying: this movie is about to be about everything, and I’m owning it, and let’s go.
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
And then I destroyed an entire town and did all this crazy stuff, and I’m gonna have a marching band walk through the town that’s on fire at the end, because hooray, this is us. There’s no answers. This is just America. What’s more American than a marching band walking through past cars that are on fire? It’s kind of like Donald Glover’s music video of This Is America.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yes, yes.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
It has that same kind of feel to it. We talked about that it was a little over the head — oh, you can even be president, just kidding. I really love that monologue, “except for maybe the president,” with all of the contradictions that she’s saying. I’m not going to say them here because it’s pretty explicit, even that. But just all the ways — again, it’s one of those things where the movie gets very, very sharp and focused, and it’s like, ah, if only it could have just been about this. Like he’s saying about the Lolita of it all. If it was just about that, or just about the town. And instead it’s 900 split screens all at once.
Pete Wright:
That’s such an easy argument to counter too. The point of this movie is to trauma-max, right? Like that’s what we’re doing. Any individual component of this movie has been made as a movie before. And part of the unique gift of this movie, if you love it and you’re trucking with it, is that it does jam so many things in there.
So it’s funny how the movie does disservice to any one of the individual 900 stories. At the same time, that’s the one story that it’s telling. Look at all of the craziness going on in the world right now. We’re giving you a snapshot of exactly what you’re living through, in the extreme. But really, here we are. This is why you wake up in the morning and feel like crap. This is why — because every element is just taken to its extreme, and this is your anxiety, America. Welcome. I get it.
Tommy Metz III:
We can’t stop, we won’t stop.
Kynan Dias:
No, we won’t stop.
Tommy Metz III:
Great. I’m glad that at the very least this film exists for this kind of conversation. It has a lot of strengths, a lot of failures, and it’s a lot. Is there anything else that people— I’m ready to move on unless people have anything else they would like to say. Especially, Chelsea, if you wanted to go down any of the alleys that you passed.
Chelsea Stardust:
There’s so much to unpack. I do want to talk about the reveal of the hacker. The fact that it’s revealed to be — I when I first saw this, I was trying to remember if I clocked it. I think I did. The brother.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Chelsea Stardust:
The lead character’s brother. I think it’s that kid, because he would just pop up and not have much to do. I was like, mm-hmm, what’s going on here?
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
There’s more to this story. It’s sort of like — speaking of home invasion — The Strangers, “because you were home.” I was bored. I’m gonna burn it all to the ground. The selfishness involved. I don’t care how it affects all these other people. It’s just spooky. Real spooky.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
But yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
There’s no real reaction. You get the reaction from his parents saying—
Chelsea Stardust:
From the parents, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
What are you, how can this even be? And he just says, for the lulz, which is not even a phrase people use anymore.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, for the lulz, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, there’s no seemingly self-awareness.
Chelsea Stardust:
And exactly. We were talking about the timeliness of this — this movie is almost ten years old, which is really crazy to think about. I really enjoyed re-watching it because I was definitely seeing it under a totally different — I was a different person when this movie came out. So now, so much time has passed. Revisiting it and having watched Euphoria, I said, oh, there’s so much in here. But one day I’ll do a Sam Levinson TED Talk.
Tommy Metz III:
Excellent.
Kynan Dias:
Excellent.
Tommy Metz III:
I’m sure that’ll be fine because he doesn’t seem problematic at all.
Okay, so then moving on to the next movie, and the idea of why I thought this would be an okay one to do invaders is Return of the Living Dead. One of the world’s craziest, one of my favorite movies of all time. I want to break it down. What I think the invasion is of this — other than the fact that it is sort of a locked-off area, and you’re supposed to be safe in cemeteries, and cemeteries are for rest — this movie also brings up four different changes, near the beginning as far as I know, to the Living Dead mythos.
Number one: zombies being fast. Of course, this predates 28 Days Later, the rage virus, which I remember got all the credit when it came out. Everyone’s like, oh my God, Danny Boyle, what a genius. Number two: zombies talking and having coherent thoughts. Number three: eating brains versus just flesh. And number four: headshots don’t end it. You have to grind them up completely because the stuff will just— and that’s just not things that we have in other movies.
And real quick — and then I’m gonna give it over to axes, depending on your reading, and I’m going to want to know what you guys think — this insane movie is potentially one of the most horrifying ideas that I’ve ever seen in any horror fiction in my life. Okay. Do you want to start with — do you have any axes to grind?
Kynan Dias:
Yes. I’ll ask it to you as someone who loves this movie.
Tommy Metz III:
Mm-hmm.
Kynan Dias:
Are they—
Pete Wright:
That’s not telling.
Kynan Dias:
This movie has a really sterling reputation, and I just need to admit, I don’t get it yet. Are they all supposed to be stupid? Is every single character meant to be stupid? Maybe if I had understood that going into it as opposed to me going, these are odd decisions they’re making. Maybe the film is saying every living person is just the stupidest person in any movie you’ve ever seen, and they’re all here for you.
Tommy Metz III:
I don’t know the answer to that question. This movie, for me, is incredibly ahead of its time, and is such a weird masterclass of tone — while also not being consistent in tone, but it all just works for me.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm. Right.
Tommy Metz III:
I don’t know.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
I don’t understand how this movie was made and what the thought process was in making it.
Kynan Dias:
Right.
Tommy Metz III:
And I know that’s not a satisfying answer, but this movie is just such a weird anomaly.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
Chelsea, Pete — what do you guys think? I know that you guys have seen this movie a bunch before. What is your take on — I mean, because it’s so stereotypical with the crazies and the bad kids—
Kynan Dias:
I’m gonna take my clothes off in the cemetery here because it’s raining and things like this, but I—
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Chelsea Stardust:
This — I love this movie so much. Came out in like the greatest year ever, 1985. I think everyone read the brief. Obviously the director-writer Dan O’Bannon of Alien and Aliens. I think it is just this beautiful horror comedy with a capital C. Everything’s so heightened — the punks are heightened. You see Repo Man, where it’s very grounded punks, and then you say, how do we raise that in this? And I think everyone, you see a lot of these actors, they knew the brief going into it.
There’s some tonally squishy things, but within the tone of comedy horror, horror comedy, I just love this movie. I think it’s such a delight, because a lot of the zombie movies are so serious.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Chelsea Stardust:
Almost all of them are. And this is the first one where it’s like, let’s take this kind of insane idea and actually really lean into it. We’re here for it. We see the dog split in half coming to life. Come on. We know what we’re signing up for.
Kynan Dias:
I love that stuff. In a normal movie, maybe there would be one cat, like if this were Heathers or something—
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
No, no.
Kynan Dias:
She is smart, and she’s looking around like, everyone here is a total moron. But in this movie, there isn’t that take at all. There isn’t that tack of, like, one person understands where humanity has failed.
Tommy Metz III:
There isn’t sort of just the audience surrogate.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah. Right.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s probably the paramedics.
Chelsea Stardust:
No, no.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
They seem smart.
Kynan Dias:
They’re the most right.
Pete Wright:
Send more paramedics.
Tommy Metz III:
Or the guy that calls in the bomb at the end. He seems extremely confident, except that he lost all of these good bodies.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah, yeah, that’s true, mm—
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
They kind of want it to be Ernie, I think sometimes. They set you up for it to be Ernie, but then you see he’s got a gun holstered right next to him, ready, pulls it.
Tommy Metz III:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Okay, okay, okay. We’re all here for the same reason.
Pete Wright:
That’s it. For a film that kind of loves these kids enough to actually give them the apocalypse, it does not write them as people. Trash and Spider and—
Kynan Dias:
Right.
Pete Wright:
—Suicide and Casey and Tina. They’re all silhouettes with spicy attitude.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
And I couldn’t help but think of a movie like Lost Boys, which was just two years later, right?
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Compare that to how it writes its own subculture kids. It’s very, very different.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Whatever issues you have with that movie, it has more competent kids. The other thing about it is — and this gets to what you guys are talking about — the punk surface really hides grumpy generational politics. The kids are idiots, the working stiffs are all fools. The only quote-unquote competent adults wear uniforms — until they drop a nuke. The cynicism in this movie is total.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
And kind of flattening, because we’re missing that audience surrogate that is effective for us. And also, I love this movie. All of that is okay.
Tommy Metz III:
There’s a potential that maybe some of the thought behind it was — it’s such a nihilistic movie.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s the Assassination Nation.
Tommy Metz III:
Nobody wins. Everybody loses. And it’s the assassination of the living dead. Maybe they needed to have some sugar with the medicine. There’s no way out of this.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I’m fascinated by the meta-ness of it. I remember seeing it for the first time and was like, do they know the cameras are on?
Pete Wright:
You can do that?
Tommy Metz III:
And then — yeah, exactly.
Pete Wright:
Right, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Even — because you said that everyone read the brief and knows what they were getting into, but even then, the movie still pokes fun at itself with certain of the line readings when they redo them at the end during the credits. When there’s lines like, “we think you should” — that wasn’t written to be funny, but he says it so stilted in such a weird way that the movie goes, hey, look what we got away with. It’s very interesting. Not to make a pun, but the movie is also sort of eating itself alive. It makes fun of the idea that it’s a movie within a movie, and then even makes fun of its own actors at times.
I did want to ask — so the most horrifying idea in horror fiction, I think, is the idea — and this is what I want to ask. The practical makeup, the practical stuff, is really outstanding, especially for the time. Especially Tarman?
Chelsea Stardust:
Tarman.
Tommy Metz III:
Tarman, the guy in the barrel. So the lady — they trap the lady and they tie her down to the gurney, and she says, it hurts to be dead. And the eating brains stops the pain. How do you guys read that? Do you think that it hurts to be dead, or are they just in pain because they’re reanimated? Because one of those options is horrifying and almost has no business existing in this crazy movie.
Zombie movies, one of the things they almost never take on, except for things like Idle Hands or Cool Hearts — I don’t remember what some of them were called — but the idea of zombies walking around: are there still people in there?
Kynan Dias:
That’s right.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Tommy Metz III:
Are you aware of what you’re doing?
Pete Wright:
Are you aware of—
Tommy Metz III:
This movie is saying, at least during this movie, yes. So what do you guys think? Let’s have a vote.
Kynan Dias:
Well, the idea that the zombies are still in there usually is for us as the audience and these characters to feel some kind of guilt or remorse, or even a fear that that might become us. But as you say, this gurney one is something completely different, where she’s on there and she’s like, this is all we can do. There’s no other choice here, because the entire after our deaths until infinity is pain and awfulness. And we’re gonna keep inflicting this terrible pain on other people, but it’s only gonna even help us for a little bit, but it’s all we can do. That’s terrible.
Tommy Metz III:
So you don’t think that they’re just in pain because they’re reanimated — that everyone in that cemetery is suffering, but now they have a chance to do something about it?
Kynan Dias:
Right. I think the bigger one — that everyone is suffering all of the time. And that’s just what life is after you die. Woo.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, very, very dark ideology, this movie.
Tommy Metz III:
Pete, Chelsea, what did you guys think?
Pete Wright:
I guess I had the benefit of watching this having had this conversation with you offline years ago, Tom. I don’t know if you remember this, but we talked about how just awful that is. That makes the rest of this movie insane to me. This movie has such a smart question of philosophy smack dab in the middle of it, in such a weird casing. You’re right — I just don’t think it has any business being in here. And yet it makes the rest of it just sort of transcend its genre in a weird little way. It forces you to say: okay, everything else I’m watching, if I know how much it hurts to be dead, makes everything else like a euthanasia film. It’s time for the pitiable deaths. That changes — it completely refactors how I watch it.
Chelsea Stardust:
I’m gonna take the stance of, it’s because they’re reanimated. When she says, I can feel myself rot — I think because they were in this slumber, they are brought back to life, and because they are reanimated, they feel all the things, which they didn’t feel all the things before. Now it’s like, oh, I’ve been brought back to consciousness, and this is the only thing we can get to that will make this go away.
And also, the only way for them to die again is to basically be burned up. The one character — I think it’s Frank — that crawls into the crematorium to end it himself. So this is forever, as a zombie, how we will live and be in pain until someone can put us out of our misery.
I do think it’s because they were reanimated, and they feel they are dead, and it is incredibly painful because now they can feel it, and this is the only thing that can help the pain. But that scene is the core of this movie, and it just hurts my heart to watch. You sympathize with her so much in just what, a minute of the movie or something, and it’s so quick and so brief and chilling at the same time. But that’s my stance.
Kynan Dias:
So quick and so brief that you don’t even try to see how the practical effect is being made, like in another movie, where you’d be like, wait, let me look over here.
Chelsea Stardust:
So incredible. It’s so good.
Kynan Dias:
No, no, no, there’s a very important question being— and I think it might be even darker. So you all are saying, if you burn them up, they go away, that they’re sort of cleansed. But I don’t know. We have seen that they don’t go away. They just become particles. So in effect, I don’t know if it even does cure their pain. It just gets to the point where they’re small enough that we don’t have to think about them anymore.
Chelsea Stardust:
And it rains.
Kynan Dias:
So so I don’t know if it even um if it even does cure their pain, it just gets to the point where they’re small enough that we don’t have to think about them anymore.
Pete Wright:
It’s a really interesting thing too when you look at this in the overall canon of Romero’s zombies. Romero’s zombies just feel really mournful, and O’Bannon makes them complainers. That’s a real worldview. I’d never thought about it before — that O’Bannon’s take after Dark Star and Alien was to make bitchy zombies. But he did, and it plays. It’s a different take, and you can totally see how that ripples out through the other sprawling O’Bannon-inspired zombies in films later.
Chelsea Stardust:
And they’re very smart.
Kynan Dias:
That’s interesting, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Send more paramedics, send more police.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
They know what’s up.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Bring out the buffet.
Pete Wright:
Right. Yes. Talk about meta intelligence.
Tommy Metz III:
While you are laughing, if you stop to think about it, it makes zombies so much more dangerous, so much more terrifying — because they are smart and quick, and not just sort of overcome.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
They can cosplay. They can put on outfits. They can do all sorts of things. Which makes things worse.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah. I like that idea that they’re complainers. Like from Alien, Parker and Brett complaining about the credit situation, not getting their fair thing. But now we have our two guys who are dying and complaining about the paramedics telling them that they are already dead.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
That is one of the creepiest and funniest things in the movie — them telling, no, you don’t have a pulse, you are dead. And they’re like, this healthcare system, what is this? Send me some better doctors.
Tommy Metz III:
Is there— I don’t have a lot more to say about this movie. Is there anything else that we would like to cover before we move on to the third and final? I think this movie is just — I said it all before, but it’s just so fascinatingly weird.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It really feels like no one was watching, and they were just able to do this. And it’s outstanding.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, this movie exists because somebody got away with it.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s really—
Chelsea Stardust:
The best.
Pete Wright:
That is an entire gestalt.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
This movie — we didn’t even mention sort of the Cold War paranoia, but it’s definitely in there. And the generational distrust, I guess we brought that up earlier, goes both ways.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Nobody trusts each other. Watching at this time for this show reminded me that death as appetite versus death as rest is the horrifying angle for me. And — this is me maybe just now artificially trying to tie another thread between all these movies for you, with you in partnership — they’re all in some way showcasing—
Tommy Metz III:
Please.
Pete Wright:
—the body. We’ve spent so much time with the girls’ bodies in Assassination Nation. And now they’ve made the body in this film a joke. The body is the joke and also the punchline. And also the threat.
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
All of those things wrapped up. And we’re about to transition to a movie where the body becomes almost irrelevant.
Tommy Metz III:
Right. A prison, in effect.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Or a king, actually — less of a prison, more of a kingdom, as it turns out, for Carl.
Pete Wright:
Mm-hmm.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Could be either one.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. Also, the needle drops in this movie are amazing.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, yeah. Yes please.
Chelsea Stardust:
I have it on vinyl.
Tommy Metz III:
I want to party, yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, chef’s kiss to this soundtrack. For a long time — I have a DVD of this movie, but I think it took a long time for it to find Blu-ray. I can’t remember which company put out a beautiful Blu-ray of this movie because of music rights.
Tommy Metz III:
Maybe Shout Factory.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, maybe it was Shout, that sounds right. Maybe Arrow did a release too. Because of the rights — we’ve got The Cramps, we’ve got so many great needle drops. And of course, for the 80s horror lovers, the naked Linnea — you get to see Linnea Quigley, who also becomes a zombie. Which is like, hey, hats off, lady. Wow.
And she looks so short. You see her, and it’s like, oh, she’s tiny. It’s always a delight to see her. I love a heightened punk character too.
Tommy Metz III:
No.
Chelsea Stardust:
But yeah, I had to give a special shout out to the music, because it’s just so perfect.
Tommy Metz III:
Absolutely. Well, then, as Pete brought up, we are moving on to The Cell. The reason that I picked this one is because the invaders are actually inside your mind. And interestingly, the good guys are the invaders this time. The interlopers are our heroes.
This is from legendary music video director Tarsem. He also made the visually — and I think far more narratively — stunning The Fall, starring Lee Pace, which if you haven’t seen, I highly, highly recommend.
Axes — I have one axe that I’d like to start with. When you go into a dreamscape, I think this movie is visually outstanding, but I want at least the promise that everything is somewhat relevant — illuminative of something in the real world. At times this film just feels like a collection of images that look cool. Like dogs going like this, or things of water knocking bugs off of leaves. Sometimes it’s beautiful, but it feels a little music video-ish to me.
Because there are other times when the visuals are so indicative and echoing Carl’s life growing up, and how he wants to see himself, how he wishes he was — that kind of stuff. It does a great job of tying certain things together, like the water, like the symbol from the metalwork being found throughout the landscape.
What did you guys think? Do you have any axes or just opening thoughts? Kynan, why don’t we start with you?
Kynan Dias:
This one was new for me. I was stunned by this movie.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh.
Kynan Dias:
So, even — I’m worried about any kind of axe, but the sequences that are less interesting to me are the Vince Vaughn sequences. I think he’s just being miscast. It’s easy twenty-six years later to go, oh no, you’re more of a D’Onofrio than you are a Ben Affleck. You should be the weirdo. He just doesn’t have that kind of gravitas that you would want from — I don’t know — Denzel Washington in this role, or something like that. Those are the sequences where I’m like, oh, get back to JLo, she’s perfect here, and get back to Marianne Jean-Baptiste and obviously D’Onofrio.
Tommy Metz III:
I very much agree. And it’s very telling that his most convincing and best line reading is when they reverse the feed — he’s now, no, not reverse the feed — he’s inside his mind and the three baby bird ladies on the beach all say weird things, and then he just goes, okay.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s the best part of him in the movie, which is very telling. Pete?
Pete Wright:
This movie — I’ve never really connected with this movie, and I know I should have. Just watching it this time, it reminded me that the script is the weak link by a mile. This procedural FBI plot — the race against the clock, the find the buried girl — it’s bog-standard Silence of the Lambs knockoff territory, and I think it owes Demme an enormous unacknowledged debt of gratitude.
I think it is not a great script. The empathy-for-the-killer arc is way undercooked. It keeps telling us that she has empathic gifts. It doesn’t show us what that actually looks like in this case. The interior dream world is all spectacle, and doesn’t offer us a whole lot of transformation.
So I think there’s a lot of weakness in just how the root of the story is told. And it is so gorgeous and so stylish, like we talk about — just style to burn. I could just watch any one of these characters wearing those dope-ass suits all day. They are so cool.
Tommy Metz III:
You mean the floating suits?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, the floaty suits. I want to sleep just like that.
Tommy Metz III:
The red float — yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Just tie little things to my PJs and let me sleep levitating.
Tommy Metz III:
Chelsea?
Chelsea Stardust:
I love this movie. I am a 2000s, early 2000s horror apologist. This is a time of horror that I love and will defend whenever I get an opportunity. A lot of these movies are being revisited now and people are realizing, oh, these movies are actually great.
But this one — loved it when I saw it. As I texted y’all, I bought it on Blu-ray, because I realized I didn’t have it. Shame.
This movie is such a feast for the eyes, especially obviously the costume — the woman who went on to win, she had won the Oscar for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Really iconic people worked on this movie.
I will say, if I really have to dig into it and put my nostalgia aside, you are all exactly right on what my axes were to be, if I have to find something. The imagery is so strong, that when you encounter the bug on the leaf with the water, it takes away from that. There’s certain moments that you’re like, oh, you don’t really need that, because — again, that’s the confidence of, no, you need to trust these other gorgeous images you have. You don’t need all this extra stuff.
And I agree about Vince Vaughn, which I didn’t think about until this time I watched this movie, because I’ve watched it so many times. So I was like, hmm, is this just me? Because the other people are so strong, like D’Onofrio and obviously JLo. So yeah, that stuff kind of comes through.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
You notice it even more. And it is a Silence of the Lambs for the 2000s. That’s definitely what they’re doing — and showing you Mister X and things like that. And instead of a — well, they’re in a vat of water. It’s very similar in those senses. But I just think this movie is such a feast for the eyes. And there is, again, a level of confidence and competence in this movie that I love. And Howard Shore doing all the beautiful, gorgeous score.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm. One of the things I didn’t anticipate the movie would be doing, knowing about this movie for a long time — I’ve wanted to see it for a long time — is that it doesn’t neatly divide these dreamscapes into happy dreams and scary dreams. It shows that very early on in just the prologue: you can be in one that’s like, oh, this is the beautiful child’s dream, and then have monsters in it, just on a dime.
So even as you were luxuriating in all of these — wow, I’d love to be here — you’re still like, oh, but something’s gonna happen around this corner or that corner. It’s very, very effective. There’s not a safe moment in the movie, even as you are luxuriating in the beauty of it.
Tommy Metz III:
We brought up Silence of the Lambs. One of the things that I like is that this movie is forward-thinking in having — not female protagonist — the female actress that ends up being locked in the tank for the majority of the movie, that she gets into a parking garage and immediately takes out pocket mace. She’s ready. She’s not being backed into a van by a creep on the couch like Silence of the Lambs. There are some updates.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
True.
Tommy Metz III:
One of the things that I remember — I read the script before the movie came out, and just being blown away by how specific and weird and time-intensive the serial killer kink is. His whole process, the scheduling needed — there’s just so much overhead involved. It almost is too much.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
It goes right to it. Apparently there is a cut that the MPAA — MPAA, did I just make that up?
Kynan Dias:
Back then it was, yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. The MPAA was just like, oh no.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
You have all of it. And then they really cut it down to the very little that we’re seeing, because there’s just so much perversion and cruelty and sadism going on. It again feels a little bit like, how did they get away with this?
One of the things that I wanted to bring up — the lady — and I’m calling them baby bird women, I shouldn’t, that’s probably me, but — they both are looking up towards the sky. Do you remember what they said? I just wanted to know, because there’s levels of the movie that I think I am still uncovering of his subconscious, that I did rank in the beginning, saying some things are just to look cool. But there’s still levels of things that I’m still finding.
These three say, in order: have you seen him, my boy, my little one, my father took him from me? The next one says, I spit it out, my whole big deal didn’t mean anything. And the third one, my child’s an abomination, he has no soul. So those are three different viewpoints from three women that look exactly the same. Did anything like that kind of strike you in the movie — that yes, it looks cool, yes, it looks eerie, but it’s also talking really about the psychosis?
One of the things that I caught this time that I’d never caught before is that really interesting scene where JLo goes under and she doesn’t know that she goes — there’s that forced descent she goes over. Do you remember what the scientist is saying? He says, I need you to check circuit breakthrough 6 through 12. It’s a power problem. I need you to check 6 through 12. Later on, we find out that that’s how old Carl was. He was six when his — what was it?
Kynan Dias:
His baptism, or—
Tommy Metz III:
When his — yes, it was the first time he heard the voice, it was at his baptism.
Chelsea Stardust:
The baptism.
Tommy Metz III:
I think I had some kind of seizure. Nobody helped me but him. We find out later that he was six years old. So you’re seeing that amount of time, the six through twelve.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
I like that stuff. And I love the image — and this is something that, speaking of Sam Levinson, Tarsem bites off his own effects in The Fall that he does in this — the idea of a person seated at a throne being connected to the tapestry of the room.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
When he walks forward, that’s something that he just straight up does again in The Fall. It’s great both times.
Chelsea Stardust:
Love it.
Tommy Metz III:
That scene was the one that sort of broke it open for me, because he says to her, “where do you come from?” Meaning she is the invader in the scene.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
He’s doing fine. He’s seated in his throne, while his younger self is running around. He’s at his most powerful. Which I think is just really interesting. It’s a very dreamscape-y, ambitious idea to take on.
Kynan Dias:
Right. And the trifurcation of him into three different characters there, that she’s anticipating — okay, maybe I’m gonna help this child. But you’re not quite sure, because we’ve seen her preferred child, Edward, turn into a monster at a moment’s notice. So she’s still kind of gingerly with him. And then gradually we see, okay, there’s the serial killer, the older version, and then this king version of him.
I think that’s really smart, because it’s not like, oh, they’re all on the same page, or they all have the same strengths. They all, it turns out — you can’t kill one without killing the other one, which I think is super smart. But also she’s trying to figure out, in the psychological game, how do I fix all of them eventually? And you can’t quite do that. I think that’s really, really cool — that they’re chasing each other and she’s just sort of, I’m a visitor here, I don’t know the rules of this.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, navigating someone’s shadow self that has come, and saving the child but and saving the man — and how do we get this shadow self out? Just that battle — to piggyback on what Kynan’s saying, I am here for that.
I didn’t think about the like Hamlet witches as much. But bringing that up now, when I rewatch it, I want to try to find more about that. Now you’ve piqued my interest, because I saw it and I was so engrossed in the movie. I was like, I know that — I’m sure that has something to do — I’m sure I’ll see it along the way, and then forgot. So now I’m gonna pay more attention next time.
Tommy Metz III:
The idea of the shadow realm. I mean, the line — he’s not even Carl anymore. He’s this idealized version of himself, a king in a very twisted kingdom, a place to indulge.
Pete Wright:
It’s really interesting. As you talk about that — one of this movie’s first principles is that beauty is going to be the language of a brutally damaged psyche. That’s visual and conceptual conflict. And using it the way this movie does, it speaks because there aren’t words for what has happened that can completely express the pain that this kid has gone through, that this adult who is still a kid is going through, is living through.
The fact that it’s pitted against this character whose sole superpower of empathy is the greatest professional risk that she can have — I think that conflict is really compelling. And I don’t think movies — movies rarely take clothes as seriously as this movie does. Holy crap.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh, my God.
Pete Wright:
So.
Kynan Dias:
I love what you’re talking about with empathy, because JLo — I’m glad that you’re all fans of JLo here, or at least not taking cheap shots, because I think it’s easy to do.
Tommy Metz III:
No, this and Out of Sight, I think, are her two best movies.
Kynan Dias:
She’s a very versatile actor.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
She doesn’t get enough credit. And then you get to this moment where it becomes this physical fight between her and the king. And you’re like, ah, that’s part of the reason this has to be JLo. It can’t just be a softer actress. It has to be someone who’s capable of both.
But then the movie surprises you, and it’s like, that’s not gonna work. So the action hero part of what JLo is, isn’t going to work. She has to go back to the maternal figure — and the ultimate maternal figure — and be the Virgin Mary in this crazy thing, and drown him.
I love all of that. And she’s just so perfectly encapsulates that strange vulnerability — yeah, we should have known that, because she’s a child psychologist and she’s not an FBI agent or something — but it stuns you. It was really surprising that we had to go that route instead.
Tommy Metz III:
Speaking of that sequence when she reverses the feed, and Carl has come into her mind — Tarsem starts gilding the frame of the movie itself with flowers in gold.
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
How did you guys take that? What did that say to you? Because it’s almost like we’re seeing the feed how we would see it.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Chelsea Stardust:
Mm-hmm.
Tommy Metz III:
Is that sort of how you took that? It’s a little meta, and I sort of get lost in my own sentence when I say that, but I was just trying to make sense of it.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. I think so, because she’s bringing them into her mind. Is that what we’re talking about?
Tommy Metz III:
Correct.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah. I think they wanted to show someone who’s in a safer space, maybe, so they’re adding these flourishes to it, I’m guessing. And it’s also — yes, I do love the meta-ness of it. I do think you’re right about that. That is part of it, like laid into it in that moment.
Tommy Metz III:
It’s just an interesting choice, because that’s never used anywhere else in the film. And her world is already beautiful. There’s already rose petals flying around, or cherry blossoms. So to add that extra bit — and then her world gets corrupted.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
When he shows up.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Pete, did you have any thoughts about that? Because I know that you’re not as on board with this film. Is that the kind of thing that you find interesting, or just a flourish for flourish’s sake?
Pete Wright:
I’m gonna tell you what I thought as I was watching it.
Tommy Metz III:
No.
Pete Wright:
I immediately thought, I think this is an episode of the Lawrence Welk Show.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh no.
Kynan Dias:
Low voice. Low voice, speed getting close to me.
Pete Wright:
Is that what’s happening right now? This movie writ large is an amazing test case — and maybe one of the best test cases I know — on whether visual ambition can carry a script that I don’t find compelling. And I genuinely — I think this conversation is a great example. I genuinely flip depending on who I’m talking to. You guys are all making a great case for it.
I find the visual flourish here was maybe a bridge too far for me. Maybe in that sequence was a bridge too far. The movie had already had a lot going on, and it Assassination Nationed itself with just a little bit too much visual flourish for me.
Tommy Metz III:
Did you watch to the very end of the credits when the marching band goes through Carl’s mind?
Kynan Dias:
Yeah, they just do Mambo Number 5, though, because it was earlier, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Exactly.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh my God.
Tommy Metz III:
Unless we have other things, I think I want to wrap it up. I don’t have a big ending. My big ending is to throw it to Pete to find out what he’s going to be talking about next.
But thank you for watching these — I was a little afraid that the invaders from within theme — as I talked to Pete, I also picked these movies, then maybe took a theme and stretched it around these movies. But I do think it worked out okay. In any case, thank you for watching these movies, for better or worse. I really appreciate it. This was a great conversation.
Kynan Dias:
Great, wonderful.
Tommy Metz III:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
I love it.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, love it.
Pete Wright:
It was a great set of films. I think the concept was fun. And yes, now it’s my turn.
Tommy Metz III:
Yes.
Pete Wright:
It’s been a real roller coaster for me, you guys.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yay.
Tommy Metz III:
It has.
Pete Wright:
Trying to figure out what — I think I’ve been thinking about this for four months. Since my last one, I’ve been thinking about it.
So, over on The Next Reel, Andy and I have been doing a series we’ve called Thinking Machines — AI, science fiction movies generally talking about AI, cognitive stuff. Can the machine outthink us? What does it want with us? Can we have a relationship with it? They’re the movies that you might expect us to be talking about. But the whole time I have been thinking about this, I’ve been thinking about this tonal conversation that we didn’t really put together over on The Next Reel.
And so I give you the AI girlfriend experience. Three films.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh.
Pete Wright:
We’re gonna take 50 years of films. They’re about 50 years apart. And they’re all circling around that same idea: that the scariest AI isn’t the one that’s really trying to take over the world. It’s the one that’s been built to fit inside your life.
We’re gonna talk about — the first one, 1977’s Demon Seed. Y’all, just get ready. This one is gonna be probably the most bonkers of the set. It’s the 70s. But I do want to start with the 70s, because we culturally have been having conversations about AI in our lives for many decades. This is not a new thing to be terrified of.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
The second one is tough to access. It’s 2018’s Cam. This was a Netflix film, and it was written by a former camgirl. And the movie addresses the life of a camgirl and what happens when AI is interjected into it.
Chelsea Stardust:
Oh.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
Get ready. It’s hard to find. I happen to have it. We’re gonna watch it together. I apologize to listeners — it’s gonna be one that, if you haven’t gotten it, check your library, because it has been erased from the world, apparently.
Tommy Metz III:
That’s so dumb, because it got really good reviews. I saw it when it was on, it got really good reviews.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
It’s a Blumhouse film.
Tommy Metz III:
Why would that one disappear?
Pete Wright:
It’s a Blumhouse film. Yeah, I don’t know.
Tommy Metz III:
Huh.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah, what did they not want you to know?
Pete Wright:
I don’t know.
Kynan Dias:
What are they trying to keep from us?
Pete Wright:
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
Tommy Metz III:
Oh, interesting.
Chelsea Stardust:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
The last is just last year’s Companion.
Tommy Metz III:
Companion, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Companion. You saw that coming. You saw that coming. We start with house, then we go to the screen, and then we go to the bedroom. We’re talking about three machines. We’re talking about three women. We’re talking about the role of men in creating AI, and why men are so fixated on making AI rather than just being nice and having a girlfriend.
Kynan Dias:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I want to know what it is about men and synthetic women, and why we just keep doing terrible things to them when we do. So I think it’s gonna be a really interesting set of films to talk about. I hope it’s timely. And I can’t wait to talk about it next month.
Tommy Metz III:
These are great choices. When you said AI, I was kind of hoping you were gonna say everyone has to watch Chris Pratt’s Mercy three times in a row.
Kynan Dias:
Okay.
Tommy Metz III:
That sounds great, Pete.
Pete Wright:
You should be so lucky. Yeah.
Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.
Kynan Dias:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
So it’s gonna be super fun. So thank you, everybody, for joining us. Tom, thank you for your expert tutelage.
Tommy Metz III:
Pleasure.
Pete Wright:
Great set, great set.
Tommy Metz III:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
Definitely head over to TruStory FM. You can learn more about the shows of The Next Reel family of film podcasts. And until next month, when we talk about AI — on behalf of Chelsea Stardust and Kynan Dias and Tommy Metz III, I’m Pete Wright, and we will see you right here, sitting in the dark.
