The Films of 2002: Feardotcom

Feardotcom (2002) looks and sounds like a remake of a Japanese horror film that never was. This 40 million dollar horror film was released to terrible reviews in the dog days of summer 2002, months before the premiere of The Ring (2002), actually, and has never really seen its dreadful reputation rehabilitated.

The William Malone film’s antecedents or inspirations have been rightly tagged by horror scholars as Ringu (1998) -- the source material for The Ring -- and Kairo (2001), which was remade in America in 2006 as Pulse.

Like all these films, and indeed, their remakes, Feardotcom expresses two horror film tropes that were popular circa 1998 – 2008.  

The first involves technology. In many of these films, technology -- VCRs, cell-phones, or even Internet web sites -- house evil supernatural entities. Thus technology itself is a portal or gateway to evil.

Secondly, the horror films of this period eschew the American horror paradigm of the 1980s: vice precedes slice and dice, and propose a replacement aesthetic. 

In American slasher films of the Reagan Era, those who transgress by having pre-marital sex, or smoking weed, die horribly. But in the J-Horror and J-Horror Remake Epoch (again, circa 1998 – 2008), the crime or transgression has been altered drastically. 

The crime now is simply watching. This seems a comment, contextually, about the boom of 24 hour cable news stations in the 1990s, the affordability of camcorders, and the advent of the Internet.  Web sites, CNN, and cheap video cameras enabled audiences to “see” things from across the world, but respond to them as entertainment, not in a more human dimension. These movies all want top punish those who are but passive observers of human suffering.

Feardotcom is very much of this school, although it handles both modern tropes very poorly. The movie’s style is hyper and overwrought, which makes it, at times, actively unpleasant to behold (an unintentional comment, perhaps on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC…). 

But even beyond that deficit, Feardotcom never overcomes several plot holes and questions of motivation.

“Do you like to watch?”

Even as a fiendish serial killer -- a surgeon named Alistair Pratt (Stephen Rea) -- abducts his latest victim and plans to broadcast her torture and murder live on the Internet, metropolitan detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) investigates the strange death of Dr. Polidori (Udo Kier), author of the monograph, The Secret Soul of the Internet.  

Polidori’s corpse is found in a subway station, with bloody eyes.

Before long, more dead bodies are found, also having bled from the eyes and nose. At first, health inspector Terry Huston (Natascha McElhone) suspects a hemorrhagic fever, like Ebola. But then a strange clue emerges.

All the victims died exactly 48 hours after viewing a specific, and gruesome web site: Fear.com. 

A police investigator, Denise (Amelia Curtis) visits the site, and suffers the same terrible fate. Angry, Mike visits the site too, and appears to go crazy.

Looking deeper into the mystery, Terry views Fear.com and learns that it is a game site. The goal of the game is to find the site host, a beautiful woman, before 48 hours runs out. 

Terry investigates and finds that the woman on the site is actually long dead. Terry visits her mother and finds out that the girl, a hemophiliac, died at the hands of the serial killer, Pratt, but that her body was never recovered. 

Her name: Jeannine Richardson (Gesine Cukrowski)

Terry seeks out Jeannine's corpse, hoping to grant her spirit rest. 

Unfortunately, that spirit doesn’t want rest. She wants revenge.

“Play the game. Find me.”

Feardotcom makes it plain that those who watch, but do nothing to alter the events of the world are quite culpable for the atrocities of the world. 

When Terry texts with Jeannine, the host of the Feardot.com site -- a ghost or spirit, essentially -- she is told that she is “guilty.”  

Guilty “of what” Terry asks.

“Watching,” the spirit replies.

This is the core ethos of the J-Horror film genre, transposed to Feardot.com. New technologies, such as the Internet offer not a place of connection or community, but rather voyeurism and sadism. 

For example, Pratt has a web site too, and is planning to kill his latest victim “live” on that murder site. A second season episode of Millennium (1996-1999) called “The Mikado” handled the same concept better in 1998, but it is clear that this concept is something the culture was grappling with at the turn of the century.  

If you give an “evil” web site your hits, or “clicks” are you responsible for that evil site as it grows more popular?  As a voyeur, are you taking part in the atrocities, or just passively “watching?”

I appreciate how Feardotcom explores this notion, and ties the crime of "watching" to a sickness or virus in the human eye. 

All those who visit the Fear.com web site develop Ebola-like symptoms, bleeding out of their tear ducts for watching the horror and not helping.  

At one point, Terry notes “We’re probably all infected,” meaning that with the ubiquity of 21^st century mass media everybody is likely “contaminated" already.  The media is all-too easy to access.

The voyeuristic impulse is explored in the film through the site, which is a “live cam death site,” where one can find about “death…before it’s your turn.”

Fear.com thus promises its users a peek at how they will die, which it delivers. One character, Denise, dies surrounded by bugs, and at one point, the camera captures an insect literally crawling out of a desktop computer. That visual implies, simply and effectively, that the Internet is a place of pestilence and death.

I credit Feardotcom, too, with a sincere attempt to link the beginnings of the horror genre with the 21^st century cyber-age. The name Polidori comes from Shelley, obviously, and the entire washed-out color palette of the film suggests German Expressionism to a high degree.

And yet, there is so much visual noise here -- lightning flashes, quick cuts, superimposition, distortion lenses, and cockeyed angles -- that the film grows increasingly unpleasant and jarring to watch. There’s too much of this noise here, and it detracts from the movie’s narrative and message.

Additionally, it seems that the screenplay could have been developed or honed a bit more to reduce implausibility.

For example, the dead girl/spirit, Jeannine -- who seeks revenge for her own murder -- was a hemophiliac. 

Female hemophiliacs are extremely rare, for one thing (uh...menstruation would be a factor right?). But more importantly, no responsible mother of a hemophiliac would permit her adolescent daughter to play in a rusty, broken down steel mill, as Jeannine's mother does. 

That is the location where the Jeannine is abducted by the serial killer, but it doesn’t really make sense that Jeanine would be allowed to go there. Why would the parent of a hemophiliac send a kid out at all, let alone to a pace with rusty metal and jagged corners?

Secondly, the movie goes to some lengths to establish that the Fear.com web site works in a specific manner. You log into the web-site, you watch, and you have 48 hours to find the body of the dead girl, or you die. That's the pattern.  That's the formula. There should be no deviation.

At the end of the film, the web-site is brought to the evil surgeon, and he watches it, thus becoming exposed. 

But it doesn’t take 48 hours to kill him. Instead, the ghost leaps out of the Internet and kills him then and there.  If this was Jeanine's intent all along, she should have just e-mailed herself as a virus to Pratt, and when he opened that virus up on his computer, she could kill him.  

Perhaps I should be more basic in my criticism. 

How does a spirit create a web site in the first place?

Character motivations in the film are not very sensible, either. It is established, early on, that if you log into the web site and play the game, you will die in exactly 2 days.  So when Denise dies, what does Mike do? 

He immediately logs on, thus marking himself for death.  

And then when Terry learns what Mike has done, what does she do?  

She immediately logs on too, starting the cycle for herself.  

We don’t see the characters hesitate or weigh the options, they just leap into decisive, and indeed, suicidal action.

The performances in Feardot.com are poorly calibrated too. Stephen Rea hams it up as the serial killer Pratt, and the great Natascha McElhone is oddly light and flirty with Mike Reilly right off the bat. This is just one more quirk that makes the film difficult to praise.  Feardotcom takes a good cast and misuses them, attempts a German Expressionist style, and makes your eyes bleed, and is nonsensical in its story of how “watching” makes one culpable.

The great value in Feardot.com is, without a doubt, historical. Here’s the film that beat The Ring to theaters, and tried to tell, essentially, the same story: of a female spirit bent not on resting in peace, but executing revenge from beyond the grave.

But in terms of specific, Feardot.com is not particularly scary, in part because of the lousy, headache inducing editing, and in part because the story and characters never hold our attention, despite the film’s use of a new, 21^st century paradigm in horror storytelling.

The Films of 2002: Wes Craven Presents They

The umbrella franchise title “Wes Craven Presents” promises a lot, but doesn’t often deliver. I carry great fondness for Wes Craven Presents Wishmaster (1997), for example, a fun rubber-reality horror movie that seems imported directly from the late 1980s era of Hellraiser (1987). 

Contrarily, Wes Craven Presents Carnival of Souls (1998) is one of the worst horror movies I’ve had the misfortune to sit through.

This film -- Wes Craven Presents They -- occupies the middle space between those two poles. It isn’t fun at all, but nor is it a jaw-dropping train-wreck.

Being of more recent vintage, They at least looks good, even if the script and characterizations can’t quite keep pace with the cinematography. Except for the (poorly-rendered and dated) CGI monsters, this Roger Harmon looks of apiece with other genre films from the same time period -- the early 2000s -- including Mothman Prophecies (2002) and The Ring (2002). 

Alas, They is not frightening or effective, like those efforts. It's a bit muddled, actually.

I understand that the film apparently went through extensive testing, re-shooting, and even had an alternate script, at one point, so I suspect such creative disruptions are the cause of the film’s maddening vagueness.  I enjoy a good, ambiguous or mysterious horror film as much as anyone, but there’s no ‘there’ in They. Nothing seems to connect, make sense, or build to any meaningful conclusion.

The idea underlying the film is good, however. Basically, They is all about psychology, and and childhood trauma. Those things that scare us as children, the movie warns, return in adulthood, causing depression, isolation, and even suicide.  Other people can't see or detect these "monsters," but you know they are there, right at the edges of periphery.

That’s not a bad, general template for a horror movie, though not an overly original one, either. They touches adeptly on its core concept -- of childhood monsters coming back -- a few times, but basically functions as a series of not-terribly-effective or intriguing jump scares that lead, finally, to a baffling and unsatisfactory conclusion.

“They come for me when it’s dark.”

One night, a little boy, Billy, begs for his mother to save him from the monsters in his bedroom.  She doesn’t, and something terrifying drags him under his bed.

Twenty years later, Billy (Jon Abrahams) is a depressed, drug-using adult. He calls a friend, Julia Lund (Laura Regan) to a diner to meet with him, and confides in her that the monsters from his childhood have returned.  He recommends she stay in the light, and then commits suicide

After Billy’s death, Julia, and Billy’s friends -- Sam (Ethan Embry) and Terry (Dagmara Dominczyk)  --meet with her, and report that they are also experiencing a return of their childhood night terrors.  

Soon Julia experiences this phenomenon as well, even though her boyfriend, Paul Loomis (Marc Blucas) tries to convince her that she is just experiencing stress related to her school work.

Julia goes back to her childhood therapist, Dr. Booth (Jay Brazeau), to see if she can help uncover the truth about these monsters.  

But when Billy’s friends begin to die, Julia knows he was right; that the monsters have returned...and want to take her away.

“Something that scared us as kids has come back to collect us.”

The opening scene or set-piece of Wes Craven Presents They hits the trifecta of childhood fears. 

Young Billy must contend with a thunderstorm, a closet door that won’t stay shut, and a monster hiding under the bed. These are the specters all children contend with, and the landscape, indeed, of the bed-time or night-time ritual. They's prologue is effective and creepy, and succeeds in one very profound way:  It reminds what it feels like to be “five years old again," as one character notes later in the action.

I was not prone to nightmares as a child, but I always had to sleep with my closet door shut, and I would cower under the bed-covers during thunder and lightning storms.  I still recall one night, after a long trip away from home, when I saw strange lights dancing on the wall of my bedroom, and became terrified that they were sinister. I had to call for my Mom to help.  One composition in They -- of a toy shadow moving on the ceiling -- reminded me of that occasion.

As children, we don’t truly possess the necessary governing mechanism to always control these fears of what lurks in the dark, or under the bed, or inside the closet, so They’s opening is fertile territory for a horror film. One thing that strikes me about the meticulously paced and orchestrated scene is how uncaring and unconcerned Billy’s mother seems by his terror, especially in the face of his comment that “They” are in the dark waiting for him.  She is just a blank slate. She is mildly comforting, I guess, but mostly seems to not want to be bothered.

One has to wonder if this lack of caring, or help, for that matter, is the childhood trauma underlying all the aforementioned bedroom/night-time fears.  What these things -- the creature under the bed or int he closet -- seem to be really be about is the fear of being alone, of being in the dark with no one to help. At one point, Billy cries out for his mother…and she doesn’t answer.

The creepy prologue is probably the high-point of They because it establishes a nice alternate reality. In this cinematic world, childhood night terrors are real. Monsters are hunting and taking children from their bedrooms for some dark purpose.

The rest of the movie doesn’t really work because we never learn that purpose, alas. 

We never even get a hint of it. Why are Billy, Julia and the others selected in childhood for abduction? What makes them special?

If they are abducted (as we see in the prologue) as children, why do the monsters send them back to our world and come for them again in childhood?  What's with the wait time?

And if the monsters want these particular people so badly, how come they don’t instantly grab them once the young adults have entered their domain? One scene reveals Julia wandering into another dimension, where the monsters lurk and wait. But they don’t attack her for a few minutes. They don’t even notice she’s there. They don't seem interested in her at all, a fact which goes against the idea of tagging and retrieving certain people.

If they are tagging and marking their victims (as the film makes plain), these monsters might at least notice when their victims happen into close proximity. Instead, the monsters seem sleepy and quiescent at first.

Although an attempt is made to link the monsters of They to the folklore of the incubus, it seems half-hearted, in some way.  Incubi and aliens are often linked to night terrors, it's true, but the monsters of They seem to boast a complex m.o that those mythological beings do not; one including capturing, releasing, tagging and abducting.

They works better on a metaphorical level than it does on a literal level. 

The kids who experienced such traumatic night terrors grow up to be…terrorized.  Billy -- described by Paul as “permanently freaked out” -- has sought out drugs (like Prozac) and battled depression to contend with his demons.

 Sam has become a morbid painter, creating huge black canvases of nihilist art. 

And Julia seems in denial about her past, at least at first, but everyone suspects she is having a psychotic break from reality.  

Issues like abandonment, perhaps, from their youth, have returned to spoil their adulthood.  

And things not handled in childhood have a way of coming back, affecting the present, don't they?  The monsters are therefore the personification or manifestation of such unresolved issues.

But again, as much as one can read all this psychology into the narrative, the plain fact is that the movie doesn’t provide literal explanations or motives for the creatures.  

They aren’t well-delineated in terms of their behavior, either. We see hints that they possess technology, for instance (in their tagging ‘darts’) but again, their behavior in the dark world makes them seem more like animals than beings with distinct motives and the capacity for reason or intelligence.

After the scene in which Billy establishes the rules -- that the creatures hide in the dark, affect lights, phones, and power, and  that crying children serve as a kind of an early warning system --- They hits the skids, featuring numerous encounters with the monsters, but no real rhyme or reason as to when, why, how, or where they appear to their victims.

I suppose the question I most want answered involves the disposition of the victims. Why do the creatures take them in adulthood? 

What do they do to them once they have them? 

What finally becomes of those they abduct?  

There are no clues really, and so They, as noted in my introduction, seems maddeningly vague at times. We know there are monsters in another dimension and that they tag kids, and abduct those kids as adults.  Anything beyond that is all speculation, and there aren’t even good clues here to go by.

They fails too, because the main character, Julia, as played by Laura Regan, is a bit insipid.  She is slow on the uptake, quick to panic, and just sort of irritating. Her boyfriend, Paul, is an unimaginative dullard, and one cruising on automatic pilot. His sole duty is to ignore and disregard Julia's stories of monsters terrorizing her.  Sam and Terry show more life, but exist mostly to form the movie’s victim pool. And Sam's loft apartment looks imported straight from The Ring.  I always wonder, when I see a setting like this, how a starving artist can afford such digs.

When you throw in the lousy CGI monsters, They proves remarkably unsatisfying. Like The Mothman Prophecies, They features numerous God’s Eye views of modern cities, with the camera peering straight down from a tremendous height. In Prophecies, these shots suggested a force “above” human sight and identification. Here, they add nicely to the feelings of isolation and abandonment.  

Several times in the film, we also see newscasters discussing “rolling black outs,” and this is not only an historical reminder of the Gray Davis/Enron Era in the early 2000s, but a sign that our technology is being manipulated by the monsters so they can more easily access our world. Modern society, in other words, proves as neglectful as Billy’s mother proved to be in the film’s prologue. There is no help for these people in childhood or adulthood. Nobody cares enough to actually prove helpful.

I can see why the late, great Wes Craven would produce and present a concept like They.  The notion of a group of people joined by their night terrors is highly reminiscent of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and the concept of psychological disorders appearing as ‘monsters’ is also familiar from his film canon.  But given the pedigree declared by its title, They should be more than a half-explained outline of a familiar story.

It’s weird that a movie called They never decides, even for a moment, who “they” actually are, or what they want with their victims.