AF Episode 3: "The Video"

 

Sci-Fi Pulse called this episode "hilarious" in its review yesterday. 

Now you can see it for yourself!  Episode 3 of Abnormal Fixation: "The Video."

Sci-Fi Pulse Reviews AF Episode 3: "The Video"

In advance of tomorrow's Abnormal Fixation episode, "The Video," Raissa Devereux at Sci-Fi Pulse has posted a review of the episode.  

She writes:

"The comedy is even more hilarious, and the tragedy is even more heartbreaking. Muir underpins the tonal extremes with incredible world-building. For the comedy, viewers get an incredible sequence tied to Alyssa’s back up plan.That isn’t all, though. We also get an ever more earnest story behind an app Elvis has used to cope with separation. For the tragedy, viewers confront the titular video. For this, Muir employs a sobering mix of history, mythology, and body horror...

...Muir and Alicia Martin absolutely sell the comedy and history between Elvis and Season. However, the grounded, harrowing turn by Pauline Mae Allera as Chesa centers the story....

...Abnormal Fixation, Episode 3: “The Video” is wonderfully layered entertainment. So far, Muir has given his audience a whole-hearted class on less is more film making."

Read the full-review here!

AF: Meet Chesa (Pauline Allera)

Tomorrow on Abnormal Fixation's third episode, "The Video," Elvis, Season, Bleeder and the team investigate a disturbing video, from a mysterious young woman named "Chesa." 

In that "dark web" video, Chesa reveals a harrowing tale, and drops an important clue involving the mystery of the Woodpyre Mill Phantom.

In real life, Chesa is played by the amazing Pauline Allera, a talented graphic artist, and storyteller, who you will be hearing much more from, I'm certain, in the future. 

I first met Pauline during the pandemic, when she was a remote student (on Zoom!) in my Public Speaking class  I learned of her amazing artwork in class, and I was so glad when she took on the role of Chesa for our indie show.

Last spring, when we started prepping AF, Pauline really did amazing character work for Chesa. She constructed a back story for the character, granting her new depth and motivation. Much of that detail now ends up on screen. It's so good. 

After intense rehearsals, Pauline shot her material for the episode first, before the rest of the cast in principal production, and she set the bar high.  When we filmed the other cast members reacting to Chesa's video, they were actually watching Pauline's footage!

I can't wait for you to see Pauline and meet Chesa tomorrow, in "The Video."

AF: The Team! 100K and rising!

A humbled and grateful hank you to all the viewers who are discovering, watching, and re-watching our silly rockumentary web series.  

The second episode "The Team," is over 120K views at this time!  (It's a record for our channel!)

JKM Talking AF on The EasterPod

I'm appearing on the newest edition of The EasterPod, hosted by Corey Easterday, who portrays "The Professor" on Abnormal Fixation.  

Corey and I talk horror, my writing/creative career, and of course, the making of the show itself. It was an honor to spend this time with Corey.

Give it a listen when you can!

Soon...

 

Sci-Fi Pulse Reviews AF (Abnormal Fixation) Episode 2: "The Team"

Sci-Fi Pulse reviewed episode 2 of Abnormal Fixation, "The Team," this morning, and it's the kind of review that writers really cherish getting, I must admit. I know I have cherished writing them too.

I'm certainly not the first critic or writer or filmmaker in history to note the connection between comedy and horror, or to note how something funny can come from something dark. Or how we laugh because of, sometimes, the absolute absurdity of our existence.

And stylistically, there's a true, undeniable connection between the form of the "found footage" horror movie and the "mockumentary" comedy.  

There's an absolute tether between those two formalistic concepts. On one end of the spectrum we laugh. And on the other end, we scream.

So it's especially nice to get a review that gazes at how the themes of our indie, grassroots web series are underscored in the creative equation: in the arc, the storytelling, the performances, and so on.

Reviewer Raissa Devereux writes:

"Enabling is the theme that unites all the characters. Muir crafts dialogue and sight gags that reinforce the theme. Moreover, he ensures that the dialogue and sight gags foreshadow their character arcs..."

She terms the episode "visceral" and notes the social commentary on "out of control capitalism," which is, indeed,  part of the equation of this set of stories.  

The Woodpyre Mill Phantom, of course, is a real life reflection of what was happening in mills in NC a hundred years ago, in the 1920s. 

The long hours ("the Stretch out" is NOT an invention, it's real), child labor, and more are all things that one might have hoped would be consigned to history.  Five years ago I would have thought it impossible to a see a return of the age of the robber baron, but current events have made this episode, the Phantom himself, and AF, all the more timely and relevant.

You can read the whole review of "The Team" at Sci-Fi Pulse!

And Episode 2 "The Team" has dropped!  Let me know what you think of the show (and the series so far...)

Meet "The Professor" (Corey Easterday)

Episode 2 of Abnormal Fixation drops tomorrow!

But in the meantime, I want to introduce you to one of the show's incredible cast-members, Corey Easterday.

Corey portrays the series' mysterious Edward Snowden-esque character, "The Professor," and he brings a deadpan, off-kilter delivery to the secretive, unusual character and friend of Elvis Bragg, as you will soon see. 

When not appearing in Abnormal Fixation, Corey is not only a successful stand-up comedian here in Charlotte, NC, but the host of the popular local podcast The EasterPod. 

I love working with the talented Corey and sharing scenes with him, and I can't wait for you to meet The Professor tomorrow, in "The Team."

AF Reels!

(AF) Abnormal Fixation Episode 1: "The Contest"

 

Meet AF's Alicia Martin (Season Winters)

Abnormal Fixation's first episode, "The Contest" drops on YouTube tomorrow, here!  

In the meantime, meet Alicia Martin, who stars in our indie web-series as forensic biologist Season Winters.

Alicia and I have been working together on creative projects for almost twenty years, on projects like The House Between (2006 - 2009) and Enter The House Between (2023). Last year, she and I co-authored the first book in a supernatural/psychology thriller series, The Subway Game (2024), which is free on Kindle (hint, hint). The lead character, Eloise Webb, is modeled on her!

Alicia has won Best Actress awards for her role in AF at The Critic's Choice International Film Festival, Cineplay International Film Festival, Elegant International Film Festival, The Script Symphony Awards, and Magic Silver Screen. 

She was also nominated for best actress at the Oniros Film Awards in August 2024. I suspect Alicia is so effective in the role not merely because of her great talent, but also because of her temperament. There is little I can do, playing her klutzy husband, Elvis, to rattle her, alas.  Because I really want to rattle her, and it never works. But that long-suffering, level-headed, sharp-witted approach makes Season real, grounded, and also comedic.

Can't wait for you to see Alicia in action!

AF is Best Comedy Film, wins Best Supporting Actor at Elegant International Film Festival!

 

David Lynch (1946 - 2025)

50 Years Ago: Dark Star (1975)

Conceived as Planetfall, Dark Star (1974) is the first film of director John Carpenter and writer Dan O’Bannon.  The film began as a student project at U.S.C. in 1970, with principal photography occurring early in 1971. The film underwent re-shoots in 1972 to extend the fifty-minute production to eighty-minutes, and to make it viable for a theatrical release.  The film was then purchased by Jack H. Harris (The Blob [1958]), who demanded additional reshoots.  The film finally premiered in 1975, and met with negative reviews, and relatively little audience appreciation.

Regardless of its origin as a student film, Dark Star is today considered a cult-classic. Its low-budget nature does not take away significantly from the film’s success in part because it is clear the filmmakers had both a creative strategy, and an example to follow. In short, Dark Star is the anti-2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).  As a work of (caustic) 1970s art, it knowingly draws all the opposite conclusions about space travel, mankind, and man’s place or role in the universe. In so cleverly over-turning the 2001 apple cart, Dark Star not only lives up to its title, it remains one of the funniest science fiction films made in the 1970s.

“Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap. Just give me something I can blow up.”

Eighteen parsecs from Earth in Sector EB-90, the spaceship Dark Star continues its apparently un-ending mission: to destroy unstable planets in order to pave the way for human colonization.  

Unfortunately, the ship has grappled with some severe damage recently, and the newly promoted captain, Doolittle (Narelle) is ill-prepared when one of the ship’s thermonuclear bombs prepares to detonate while still attached to the underbelly of the ship.  Dark Star’s computer suggests teaching the bomb the study of Phenomenology.  

While Doolittle grapples with this existential crisis, Sergeant Pinback (Dan O’Bannon) battles a mischievous alien pet that has escaped from captivity and Lt. Talby (Dre Pahich) dreams of seeing the mysterious Phoenix Asteroids with his own eyes…

“Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?”

Dark Star is an outer space comedy that succeeds brilliantly on the basis of a very good, well-told joke. Visually, thematically, and in terms of philosophy, the film cleverly operates as the antithesis of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Being the “Anti-2001” may sound like a relatively simple or juvenile thing, but actually the opposite is true considering how consistently Carpenter and O’Bannon’s film develops its world-view.  By creating a world so clearly and deliberately the inverse of Kubrick’s vision, Dark Star’s creators have fashioned an intelligent and challenging response to that beloved science fiction film, one that meaningfully re-evaluates mankind’s nature and his place in the universe.

In brief, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a majestic, stately picture that establishes the mysteries of the universe in the form of the monolith, but which also suggests that man’s progress over time possesses a shape and a purpose; moving from ape-like primitive to evolved star child.  

By contrast, Dark Star suggests the absolute absurdity and pointlessness of the human existence, and therefore of the universe itself.  Right down the line, element-to-element Dark Star mirrors and parodies 2001’s sense of “cosmic purpose” with its own sense of man’s irrelevance in the scheme of things, as well as his general pettiness.

In Kubrick’s 2001, the space age is beautiful, stately, wondrous and because of man’s intended destiny, even ordered.  The spaceship and space station interiors are depicted as roomy and minimalistic, and the incredible visuals of space vessels in flight -- docking and landing -- are sometimes accompanied by instances of classical music such as the Blue Danube Waltz, a composition that suggests the formal, dance-like nature of objects in space, and in motion.  

2001’s “theme song” as it might even be considered is “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” a formal composition by Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) which again, primarily denotes order.  As Kenneth Von Gunden and Stuart H. Stock wrote in in Twenty All-Time Great Science Fiction Films (Crown; 1982, page 190), the composition: 

“…opens with an ascending phrase of three notes…which represent Nietzcshe’s view of the evolutionary rise of man…These three notes serve note that the number three is essential to the film: from the perfect alignment of the three spheres of Earth, Moon, and sun at the beginning to the appearance of things in threes.”

Dark Star’s first anti-2001 conceit is to adopt country music -- the vernacular of personal stories and human emotions -- as its theme song.  The country music genre is not generally symbolic in nature, but literal in its storytelling of failed love affairs or a relationship now lost.  So where Kubrick utilizes his music to suggest the transcendent and ordered nature of space travel, Dark Star’s theme, “Benson, Arizona” by Bill Taylor evokes nothing of grandeur or cosmic importance. 

The lyrics of “Benson, Arizona” explicitly involve the long separation between an astronaut and his Earthbound love, a love that connects that astronaut not to the future (and evolution), but the traditional past.  

This connection is like a tether, dragging him back to earthbound concerns and therefore precluding the chance for growth or transcendence.  Dan O’Bannon noted this context when he said in an interview that the astronauts’ days aboard Dark Star were sad and ridiculous.

The specific comparison between 2001 and Dark Star involves the nature of life on a ship traveling in space.  In A Space Odyssey, the crewmen fly the roomy Discovery towards a rendezvous with destiny near Jupiter.  In Dark Star, the unkempt astronauts fly their ship, the Dark Star on an endless quest across the galaxy to destroy unstable planets.   One journey is, in keeping with the name of the ship, about “discovery.”  The other is about death and destruction…about “blowing things up.”

In the course of these journeys, both men are contacted by home, and again, Dark Star makes a point of inverting the themes featured in Kubrick’s film.  In 2001, a news anchor for BBC-12’s “The World Tonight” interviews astronauts Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) about life on ship.  There is a time lag of approximately seven minutes because Discovery is 80 million miles away.  But meaningful conversation about life in space is still possible…just delayed.

Dark Star opens with a message from McMurdo Base on Earth as a military officer contacts the crew and notes that there is a ten year time lag in conversation because Dark Star is 18 parsecs distant from Earth, a gap that makes any meaningful conversation impossible.  In 2001, the “entire world” joins the BBC interviewer in wishing Dave and Frank a “safe and successful journey” to the stars.  Dark Star’s communique to Earth, by contrasts gets play in “prime time” and “good reviews in the trade,” but the actual content of the message from home is negative.  Earth will not be sending replacement radiation shields to the damaged ship, because of budget cuts and the vast distance separating the ship and the home world.

Both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dark Star also comment on “intelligent” devices and their relationship with mankind.  In the former film, the mellifluous-voiced HAL 9000 becomes murderous on the journey to Jupiter, and must be de-activated.  Under Dave’s auspices, man re-asserts his rightful control over the machine (thus symbolically conquering technology; the latest in the line of tools since the ape-man through that bone into the sky in the film’s prologue…) and then heads off to evolve via the stargate/monolith “trip.”  

Once more, Dark Star inverts that very premise. 

Here, the crewmen of the Dark Star must interact with a talking bomb, one who is convinced that it must detonate (following an accident aboard ship which activates it) and thus kill everyone.  The ship’s acting captain, the appropriately-named Doolittle (Narrelle), -- who all-things considered would rather be surfing – must teach the bomb Phenomenology in order to prevent it from self-actuating and detonating.  After the bomb learns Phenomenology -- the study of consciousness, essentially -- it becomes an ego-maniac, convinced that it is the only sentient being in the universe.  The bomb decides that it is God and before detonating declares “Let There Be Light.”  

In other words, in Dark Star, man does not conquer his technology.  Instead, he is eclipsed and destroyed by it. Technology supersedes man, and man does not evolve…he is destroyed.  Dark Star even re-parses the transcendental stargate sequence of 2001 to its own ends. It is notable too that the bomb adopts the self-image of man: as destroyer.  The ship’s mission was to blow up planets, and now the bomb will blow up man, a variation of that mission.

In Kubrick’s film, Bowman endures a “cosmic trip,” and the aging process, and then is re-born as the evolved “star child.  There’s a cosmic trip” in Dark Star too, but it is not transcendental in nature.  A crewman named Talby (Pahich) joins the glowing, colorful “Phoenix Asteroids” and becomes indistinguishable from them.  The message is hence that man is not unique and special -- he is not a delicate snow-flake -- but rather part and parcel of a vast, meaningless universe, and in some ways just another grain of sand inhabiting it.  

Doolittle, meanwhile also meets his distinctly not transcendental end. He surfs into the atmosphere of a planet…and burns up. His point of greatest self-actuation is reliving his favorite form of leisure…a hobby.

Up and down, Dark Star functions so colorfully and so amusingly because it undercuts and reverses the premises of the grand Kubrick film again and again.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Discovery is a perfectly-ordered technological paradise featuring very few signs of human character or individuality.  The Dark Star’s living quarters, by contrast, look like a messy dorm room.  The Discovery is so spacious that Frank Poole can jog alone through a vast circular track.  The Dark Star, by contrast, is so small that its crew literally possesses no elbow room on the bridge.

The men of Dark Star are also not the brave, resourceful astronauts we have come to expect from efforts like 2001 or Star Trek.  Talby sits alone on the observation deck, isolated from the crew.  Pinback can’t be bothered to feed his alien pet.  Doolittle would rather dream about surfing in Malibu than handle the ship’s problems. Even the injured captain, Powell -- who is kept stored barely alive in some kind of cryogenic freeze unit -- is more interested in his hobby (baseball in general, and the Dodgers specifically) than in helping the ship survive a crisis.  The evolution of man does not seem like much of a possibility with these characters as the spearhead for the future age, does it?

Even visually, Dark Star plays knowingly as a mirror reflection of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  In Stanley Kubrick’s film, the Discovery first passes on the screen from left to right, a visual short-hand for a journey outward.  In John Carpenter’s Dark Star, the ship passes from right to left, thus implying a journey back rather than forward.  Since the film concerns man’s inability to transcend petty concerns and specific incidents (reflected in the use of country music as well as the crew’s petty demeanor), the idea transmitted is that mankind is forever journeying, but not really heading anywhere of import.

There’s an old truism about movie-making that goes: the best way to criticize a film is to make another film yourself.  In some crucial and cerebral fashion, Dark Star epitomizes that notion, and note-for-note, it overturns the premises and ideas of the grand 2001: A Space Odyssey.   If the 1970s is truly the wake-up from the hippie dream, as my friend and mentor, Johnny Byrne used to insist, then Dark Star is pointedly the wake-up from the 2001 dream; an acknowledgment of the absurd and pointless nature of man’s existence…even in the Space Age.

50 Years Ago: Satan's Triangle (1975)

“Within the last thirty years just off the east coast of the United States, more than a thousand men, women and children have vanished from the face of the Earth. No one knows how or why. This is one explanation.”

-Title Card, Satan’s Triangle (1975).

A coast guard rescue copter out of Miami flies to the dead center of the Devil’s Triangle in response to a distress call from a yacht, the Requite. Aboard the copter are pilots Lt. J. Haig (Doug McClure) and Pagnolini (Michael Conrad).

They soon find the yacht adrift in the Triangle, with the corpse of a Catholic priest, Father Martin (Alejandro Rey) swinging from the main mast. When the helicopter begins to develop engine problems, Haig decides to board the ship, and Pagnolini returns to port for repairs..

Upon exploring the dark vessel, Haig discovers more oddities. In one room, a corpse seems to be levitating in mid-air, his face frozen in terror.

The only survivor on the yacht is lovely Eva (Kim Novak), a prostitute who tells Haig her strange story. She reports that the yacht encountered Father Martin, adrift and alone.  Once the priest came aboard, however, the crew abandoned ship, leaving only the captain (Ed Lauter) and the passengers.  

Then, one at a time, the passengers -- including the man that Eva was with -- began to die horribly, and some in apparently supernatural fashion.

Haig is a non-believer, however, and refuses to believe that the Devil is at work in these waters, even though Eva warns that “there is no way off this damn boat.”

Haig is able to convince her that there is no supernatural intervention by providing logical explanations for all the deaths, even the one involving a levitation (the man is speared on a sword fish…). 

Eva acquiesces, and the couple make love.

Soon, Pagnolini returns to rescue the survivors. But aboard the helicopter, J. Haig experiences his first face-to-face encounter with the Devil…

Satan’s Triangle (1975) is another one of those weird and wonderful made-for-TV movies of the 1970’s that is scarier than it has any right to be. 

Satan’s Triangle is scary beyond the meager resources that went into its making. It is scary despite the network restrictions on violence limiting filmmakers working in those years.  It remains scary, even though audiences realize the TV-movie is also, oddly, hokey.

When I study the made-for-TV film today, I assess that it works so well, in part, because of the film techniques it utilizes. 

Satan’s Triangle is in no way, shape or form a found-footage film, but nonetheless there is an almost documentary feeling to the film’s early scenes. The camera is perched in control rooms, in cockpits, and it captures all the action without much by way of dialogue or overly theatrical acting. In these early sections, artificiality is reduced.

Satan's Triangle, at first, feels more like a movie documenting the Coast Guard and a rescue mission than it does a movie about the devil. When Haig takes a rescue basket (via winch) to the deck of the stranded yacht, the camera captures it all in one long take, and water even splashes on the lens several times.  The characters don’t comment much, or talk unnecessarily, and so we are left to assess the images alone for their verisimilitude.

These moments hold up to scrutiny.

On the soundtrack, meanwhile is a weird, ubiquitous howling sound. Is it just the wind? Or is it…Satan?

The pseudo-documentary feel by director Sutton Roley changes once Haig is inside the ship; in the belly of the beast, as it were. The movie suddenly takes on a more overt (and theatrical) “haunted house” feel with dim-lighting, strange noises and odd occurrences. The appearance of the levitating body, for example, is quite shocking.  

There’s one amazing shot here in which the (levitating) face of the deceased man -- face frozen in a rictus of terror -- is perched in the foreground, and Haig and Eva are in the background. It’s a super-imposition of terror, and evil, over normality.

The movie also attempts to craft a legitimate theme, arguing rationality vs. irrationality. The script ultimately comes to explain every “supernatural” event as a factor of the natural world. The blow-back from firing a flare gun is what knocked Father Martin from the mast, and killed him.  The “levitating” man is just speared on a fish, suspended by the sword. Even the crew disappearances are explained (via speculative flashbacks.)

In short, Satan’s Triangle goes to great pains to establish that the world is not an irrational, supernatural one.  It may even convince you.

Until the bottom falls out.  

Until the movie collapses -- or perhaps ascends -- into a final scene of bizarre, utter madness. Haig finds that he has returned to the helicopter not with Eva but with the Devil.  Eva's body has been discovered on the ship with the rescuers. Instead, the pilot has brought the devil to the helicopter, in the form of Father Martin.

The Devil then attacks, and events descend deeper into chaos.  This denouement features a real dream-like, or more appropriately, nightmare-like quality.  Again, this third act functions as a very strong contrast to the almost-documentary feel of the movie’s start, and is thus doubly effective.

There are no real special effects to speak of in the finale, except an exceptionally nice stunt fall, as Haig is driven by Satan from the copter to the ocean far below. Instead of effects, the movie relies on Conrad’s ability to convey terror, and Rey’s expressive capacity to depict bug-eyed evil.

It all works perfectly.

I have peers, particularly a brother-in-law, who saw this film on ABC on January 14, 1975, and swear, to this day, that Satan’s Triangle is the most terrifying movie they’ve ever seen. Having not seen it as an impressionable child, I don’t know that I would make exactly the same claim.

Instead, I’ll just say that Satan’s Triangle, a low-budget, 74 minute made-for-TV movie, is eerily effective, and surprisingly well-made.  The film techniques save the day or at least this is "one explanation," for the movie's cult-status.

John talks AF (Abnormal Fixation) on Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner!

 

Soon AF! Two Weeks to Launch!

 

AF (Abnormal Fixation) on Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner This Weekend!

I am thrilled to announce I'll be appearing on Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner this Sunday, at 7:00 pm (1/12/25) to discuss our award-winning web series, AF (Abnormal Fixation).  

Please join us if you can!

Abnormal Fixation Wins Two Awards at Portland New Alternative Voices Film Festival

Our little indie show, Abnormal Fixation -- which premieres in just over two weeks -- picked up two awards at the prestigious Portland New Alternative Voices Film Festival.

Tony Mercer won for Best Sound Design, and Kathryn Muir won for Best Producer!  Congratulations to both, as these awards are well-deserved.  The show wouldn't be what it is without their amazing dedication and contributions.

Sci-Fi Pulse Reviews Abnormal Fixation's first episode, "The Contest"

Sci-Fi Pulse just reviewed an advance copy of our first Abnormal Fixation episode, "The Contest!"

Here's a quote:

Muir has written a warm-hearted and engaging opener. The characters are established with wit and clarity. Additionally, Muir has deftly balanced the real stakes with the comedic tone. The episode is worth it for the world-building alone. Muir gives the audience an animated sequence. Moreover, we’re treated to the delightfully earnest backstory for the family heirloom serving as Elvis’ collateral...I'm hooked."

Read the entire review here!

"The Contest" drops on YouTube on January 23!