Category Archives: horror

Diving into the layers of Obsession

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Obsession is one of the most talked about movies in recent times. What’s left to say about it?

I’ve got a couple things…

First, the basics. Obsession is an indie horror movie written and directed by Curry Barker, produced for $750,000 that could hit a $300 million gross. Insane. The premise is straightforward and not particularly original. Bear has a massive crush on Nikki, a childhood friend, coworker and member of his friend group. Unable to admit his feelings for her, he makes a wish using a novelty toy called One Wish Willow. His wish: that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world.

It works.

Almost instantly, Nikki becomes obsessed. Bear finds it odd and hard to believe, but he goes along with it. Naturally, hijinks ensue. By hijinks I mean horror.

As I alluded to, there’s not much particularly new about the premise. Obsession is a classic monkey’s paw tale, where a wish leads to horrible consequences. Plotwise nothing surprised me. And I could see the jump scares from miles away.

What makes Obsession shine is Barker’s level of craft. The world feels real, in the most tangible of ways: the sets, the look, the feel, all of it had a richness and a sense of claustrophobia. The acting was uncanny. How the hell did Inde Navarette prepare for her role as Nikki? The things she could do with her face and body and voice were chilling and funny and heartbreaking, sometimes all within a space of a minute. Michael Johnston as Bear had a tougher role—he’s the straight guy. The “victim” (though not really). His role was more reacting to Nikki’s antics. Plus he’s playing basically a loser. How do you inject sympathy into that role? I don’t know, but he did it. You might not be on his side, but you can see his side.

At least in the first act.

In the aftermath of this movie’s surprise success (Is anyone shocked that people don’t want another franchise garbage film?), there’ve been dozens, hundreds, thousands of podcasts and x posts and Substacks analyzing Obsession.

So, of course, why not one more?

Most of what I’ve seen focuses on things like Bear’s selfishness and Nikki’s lack of consent and what these say about modern culture. That bores me. Politics mostly bores me.

What interests me is the human condition, and Obsession tackles two.

The first is loneliness.

One of the media’s current bandwagons is about the so-called male loneliness epidemic. Here’s a tip: avoid bandwagons. Anything I’ve read on the topic turns out to be a backhanded way to bash men and masculinity. Instead, we should view loneliness not through a male or female lens but through the lens of the individual.

Obsession uses Bear to highlight this issue of loneliness. The opening scene is a tight shot on his face as he’s gushing out his feelings for Nikki. He’s nice looking and hopeful and scared. He’s relatable and sympathetic. He lives alone in his grandmother’s old apartment with his cat. No other family is mentioned, so I assume he’s been left alone. Early on, he comes home to find his cat dead. There’s a great shot of him sitting on his bed sobbing. The contrast of those two scenes really got to me. He’s a character who is aching and needy and alone.

But his tragic flaw is that he cannot get himself to take action in his own life. He’s paralyzed by fear.

A lot of criticism against Bear concerns the one action he DOES take: making that wish. First, a defense. Who hasn’t wished for something? Plus it’s not as if he truly believed the wish would work. The act of making that wish doesn’t make him the bad guy, and it’s a stretch to say that the wish was a sign of weakness or villainy.

But a case could be made that Bear’s culpability grew as he ignored the blaring signs that all was not right with Nikki. Even after he realized the wish did in fact work, he was still trying to find a loophole.

Still, I have a lot of sympathy. One of the roughest scenes emotionally is when Nikki is sleeping and she says something like, “she’s asleep, kill me,” (implying the real Nikki was trapped inside—she was), and his response was along the lines of “what’s so bad about loving me?” (probably misquoting but you get the gist). This told me that Bear’s pain was so intense that he couldn’t even see Nikki’s.

Horror can work as a morality tale, and this was one of the morals: loneliness can blind you to the truth. It can corrupt you. It can ruin you. Bear’s loneliness definitely did that for all involved.

What about Nikki’s story?

To see it clearly we’ve got to strip out the supernatural. It’s not cheating; horror works on metaphor. It examines human fears by exaggerating them.

Looking at it from this angle, Nikki’s story becomes easier to discern. It doesn’t take a genius to do so (hint: look at the title). (In her wishcast state) Nikki is obsessed with Bear. She acts out in the most creepy, disturbing, horrifying and violent ways because of her obsession. Almost everyone has dealt with, known of, or experienced themselves, a nasty case of obsession.

But what interests me most about Nikki’s story is that it operates on twl levels: an exterior and an interior.

First, the exterior. I’ve read some deep dives saying her behavior mimics borderline personality disorder. I don’t have a background in psychology so I won’t comment on whether this is truly BPD-like behavior. But the mood swings, the intense focus, the possessiveness, the anger, the desperation, and the terror of rejection all ring true to life. Watching Obsession called to mind Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s non-supernatural yet still horrifying true account of his dealings with a stalker.

This is what makes the horror so intense. Yes, we all know that Nikki’s obsession was caused by a supernatural spark and thus not genuine, but her actions feel so real because of the emotional truth behind it. As a writer, I respect how Barker was able to convey this true-to-life experience in such a cartoonish setting and have it hit.

While the exterior experience of Nikki’s obsession is riveting, what intrigued me the most was Nikki’s interior experience. In the movie, the real Nikki is an unwilling participant in this obsession. She wants no part of it. But she’s trapped. An observer. A puppet with no control.

This is horrifying. She does not want this. Yet she’s forced to witness all of this.

But let’s pull back from the supernatural and shift to the real world. Oftentimes someone who’s in the grip of an obsession (or an addiction), knows logically that what they’re doing is either harmful or utterly pointless, yet they’re still compelled (or possessed, much like Nikki is possessed). One part of you acts out the rituals of your obsession/possession (as in the shrine she built to Bear). Another part of you watches as your compelled to do things you don’t want to do.

You cannot stop yourself. You’re trapped by your obsession and forced to witness your compulsion.

What is this if not horror?

Anatomy of a Story: Little Lamb

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Sometimes you need a little blood to make a story come alive. I’m not recommending you take out a razorblade and cut yourself, or someone else, but do it metaphorically.

I used this mindset in the crafting of my short story, Little Lamb, which was just published here by Epoque Press. The story follows Drew as he ventures to a very bizarre late night beach barbecue at the behest of his friend, Patrick, who in many ways is his Jungian shadow. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say there is definitely blood involved.

Let’s rewind first. Credit where credit’s due. As I’ve written here before, someone (Virginia Woolf?) once said books beget books. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was a riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’m a staunch proponent of writers having to READING fiction in order to truly be a great writer (many of them don’t). First, it gives you an insight into great writing and storytelling, and second, it inspires you.

For the past five years or so I’ve been giving myself my own MFA in the craft of the short story, so far covering writers like Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Carver, just to name a few. Reading them. Dissecting them. Hand-writing passages from their stories. Another one of these writers was Yukio Mishima.

Mishima, from Japan, was one of the most prominent mid-century writers. I haven’t done too deep a dive into his bio, but he was an interesting and complicated cat. A difficult human, but also one who put his soul into his writing. You can feel the man’s pulse when you read his work. One of his stories, Raisin Bread, jumped out to me. It resonated. It haunted me.

I knew I had to grapple with it. I wrote passages longhand, over and over, and then I examined the characters and the setting and the plot. I took it all apart in my mind, and then I wanted to reassemble it all into something new, something different—take his set-up and veer off in a wildly different direction.

And that is how Little Lamb came to be born.

It’s weird, this deep dive into the craft of the short story I’ve undertaken. I’ve come to get so attached to these long-dead writers: Flannery and Ernest and Yukio, and I want to show them what they’ve taught me. I can’t do that, but I can share it with the world.

Image source: Epoque Press

Power Prompts: Episode 8

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The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Fashion victim, A foul-mouthed parrot

Genre: Fan fiction

Setting: Midtown Manhattan

Trope: The last thing I remember

POV/tense: 2nd/past

And the result:

You’ve been stabbed a total of seven times. The first time by your gay boyfriend Billy and Stu at that house party. You survived other stabbings, by your cousin, by Billy’s mom, by your long-lost brother, and by those crazed fans, all donning the ghostface mask. You swore you’d never return to Woodsboro, so you fled to the biggest city in America, no longer Sydney Prescott but some anonymous girl working at the Clinique counter at Macy’s.

And you were late.

In one hand you had your coffee and another a bagel. Tourists swarmed around you. Not just any tourists, but Halloween tourists. Freddys and Jasons, all these wannabe killers and it made your side clench. Which stabbing was that? You couldn’t remember. Too many of them.

PTSD is for pussies. That’s what Gayle Weathers told you, and yeah, she’s a bitch but she has a point. You decided the best thing for you to do was duck through an alley and avoid everyone. As soon as you stepped into the alley your heart calmed. But then halfway alley past the reeking dumpsters a man popped up. At first you thought he was homeless but he was too clean. He wore a cut off t-shirt and Cavarichis and Capezios, looking like some 80s fashion victim.

“Hey baby,” he said to you.

You rolled your eyes. “Not today. I’m late for work.”

He smiled at you. “Aw, come on. I just want to play a game.”

“I’m not in the mood for games.” Behind you you heard people shouting. They seemed far away. So far away. You reminded yourself how you dispatched several of the lamest serial killers who ever lived. This bridge and tunnel twerp was nothing. Still, something about him threw you off. “Just get out of my way.”

He scratched his chin. “Funny, last thing I remember was I was watching a tv program, one of those true crime things. And someone in one of the episodes kind of looked like you.”

“I look like a lot of people.”

“Nah,” he said. “It was definitely you.”

“So what if it was.”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Fine, bitch. Be that way.”

You watched him turn and walk off and your heart settled. Then you hear another voice, this one high pitched. “What’s your favorite scary movie, bitch?”

You looked up and down the alley. No one was there. Then you saw a gostface mask flying through the air, and something white, and something sliver.

“Are you fucking deaf? What’s your favorite scary movie?” the flying mask said.

It hovered in the air in front of you. You pulled the mask off to reveal a white parrot holding a knife in its talons. It lunged the knife at you. It stabbed you in the shoulder. You dropped your coffee and your bagel and reached into your purse and pulled out your revolver and shot. A plume of feathers flew through the air. “You hit me, you whore,” the parrot screeched. Then it dropped to the ground, still clutching the knife.

You walk up to it. The bird lay still. Then it sprung back up and stabbed you in the stomach. You aimed your revolver at the parrot’s head and blew a hole right through it.

Dead. Finally.

“I fucking hate scary movies,” you said as you pressed your hands against your two latest stabbing wounds.

Anatomy of a Story: Time Turns Blood to Dust

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If you’re lucky, some stories come at you all of a sudden like an electric shock. The premise blazes in your brain. The bones of the architecture rise. All in a single moment.

This is what happened to me for my horror story, Time Turns Blood to Dust, just published here in the magazine Uncharted.

Not to say the story was an easy one to write. On the contrary. There was a puzzle I had to solve in crafting the narrative, and it took me what felt like forever to get it just right.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning. Much like the four protagonists in my story, I was spending an aimless day wandering Manhattan when I saw this tiny nondescript bar. I decided to go in for a drink. The bartender was your average hipster white dude. I took a seat and got an IPA.

And then I went to the bathroom.

Right at the urinal someone had scribbled on the wall: DON’T LOOK UP.

Being both superstitious as hell and a not-quite-nonbeliever of things that go bump in the night, I definitely DID NOT look up. I left the men’s room, finished my beer, and went on with my life.

Of course I knew instantly what just happened: I’d been gifted with the premise of my next story. What if I had looked up? Was there some sort of monster up there waiting to consume me?

But premises are everywhere. Plots are harder to come across. My first question: what happens in the story?

My biggest clue was the graffiti. In my story it was a warning. I had to figure out WHO wrote it, and why. Early on I knew I’d be writing four different perspectives. I wanted the challenge of crafting four complete characters in a tight timeline. I also knew all four characters would be men, since another challenge I set for myself was to capture four different emotional experiences from a distinctly male viewpoint.

But which one would be the graffiti author? How does he do it and why? Where should he be in the order of the four?

Another puzzle was this: how to get to a resolution. The great thing about horror is that it opens up new imaginary worlds. The bad thing about horror is that there’s often no real story arc. I used the four stories within a single story to create a story arc, with the first story setting the tone, the second one amping up that tone, the third shifting, and the fourth going in a different direction, all the while giving the horror its due.

And then came the last challenge. What to name it? Don’t Look Up was the obvious title but there was a movie (that I never saw) with that same name. I thought about Obsidian. I love one-word titles but it left me flat. Then, while reading a Flannery O’Connor novella I came across the phrase “time turns blood to dust.” Bingo. It has the word blood in it (always a plus for horror), it captures one of the themes of my story, and it’s slightly pretentious. Everyone should try and be a little pretentious now and then.

Weapons: A movie on the verge of greatness, but not quite there

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What makes a horror movie truly great? 

That’s not an easy question. Off the top of my head it’s got to be scary, innovative, well acted, well written, visually interesting. Some of the horror flicks that make this greatness level for me would include, Night of the Living Dead, Alien, Hereditary and Pearl, just to name a few (I could probably list a few dozen if given the time).

What those movies have in common is that they either brought something new to the genre, or they nailed every single facet of storytelling.

Why am I going on about this? Because I wanted so so bad for Weapons to be among one of these movies. It had a lot going for it, a great trailer, a strong premise, and a lead actor who I absolutely love. If you haven’t watched the series Ozark, watch it, for nothing else than the terrific acting by Julia Garner. When I saw she was starring in this, I could barely wait until it hit streaming.

My post-viewing verdict? Weapons is a strong movie. It’s solid and entertaining. But it doesn’t quite make the canon of the greats.

Quick recap of Weapons: one night at 2:17 am all the children of a certain classroom, except one, awake from their beds, leave their houses, and vanish.

Killer logline, right?

And the visuals in the trailer of kids running quietly in the night with their arms extended like airplanes. Simple, strong, creepy.

What Weapons has going for it is its different take on the protagonist (or protagonists) Julia Garner’s character, Justine, is the teacher of the class. Suspicion falls on her for somehow being involved. We have sympathy for her, but we also see another side of Justine. She’s a messy drunk. With a history. She’s not pure and plucky like many horror heroines. While she’s easy to root for, she’s also self sabatoging. I liked this twist.

Also, there are other characters, Josh Brolin plays Archer, the father of one of the missing kids. He’s kind of a dick, but again, we’re on his side. Alden Ehrenreich plays a cop and Justine’s ex. He’s a recovered alcoholic who slips up in many ways. And finally, we’ve got Austin Abrams, who plays the town junkie. Both of these characters cross paths and do things that we should dislike them for, but the way they’re written and acted, their flaws are somehow made relatable.

And finally, on the plus side, we have our villain, Aunt Gladys, played by Amy Madigan. She’s the aunt of Alex, the sole child who did not disappear. Visually she’s an A+ as a horror creature. She’s got major wicked witch vibes.

So we’ve got an interesting premise, compelling characters, solid acting and visuals. What’s holding me back from loving Weapons?

One thing is how they chose to tell the story. It wasn’t exactly linear. They’d focus on one character in turn, telling the story from their perspective, then backtrack to another character to tell it from their perspective, filling in the gaps. I liked this puzzle box method, but for me it kept on breaking the tension. It either didn’t belong in a horror movie, or it needed to be finessed.

A second thing was the tone. Sometimes it felt like I was watching a psychological thriller. Sometimes a body horror flick. Sometimes a Tarantino movie from the 90s. And toward the end it was almost a satire of horror movies. All of these elements were well done and interesting, but this inconsistency kept pulling me out of the movie.

But the final and most significant stumbling block I had related to the mythology of the movie. 

(Let’s put aside the meaning of the movie. I’ve read online that Weapons is supposed to be a critique of American society or something. I hope not, because that to me is so trite and boring and lazy. To be honest I’d rather see a movie take on critiques of American society. That would be something novel).

Anyway, all speculative stories have a mythology. What’s the story behind the thing we’re seeing or reading? How did it come about? What are the rules of this universe?

Now I don’t need to be told all the whys, or see all the hows, but I want to have the sense that the writer knows. And I’m not sure if the writers knew why Aunt Gladys did what she did. Was she a garden variety witch? Was she some kind of parasite? How exactly was she using the children? If the writers gave us just a little more of what she was and the hows and whys, she could have risen closer to the pantheon of unforgettable horror villains.

With all that said, watch Weapons. Yes it’s imperfect and slightly disappointing, but it’s tons of fun.

Problematic Protagonists: I Saw the TV Glow

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Recently I checked out the 2024 indie film I Saw the TV Glow. Ask me what genre it is and I’d have to take a moment. Somewhere in the dark contemporary fantasy camp. Not quite horror but wishing it could be.

First off, what it’s about.

High schooler Owen befriends an older student, Maddy. They bond over a cult TV show called the Pink Opaque, which is about two psychic girls who fight bad guys. Owen is too young to watch the show at home, so he sneaks over to Maddy’s house. Stuff happens. Maddy is a lesbian and Owen is apparently asexual (more on that later). Owen’s mother dies of cancer and he’s stuck with his ignoring father. Maddy runs away then returns claiming that they are really the characters from the Pink Opaque and have been trapped in this fake world, then she’s gone again and Owen is left to figure out what’s what for himself.

My overall take is that there are things I enjoyed about it. The movie had a fun retro indie shoestring vibe (I mean that as a compliment). It had heart. It was a little goofy and it played to the tropes. Also, the show within the movie, the Pink Opaque, was clearly a callback to one of my favorite TV shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including the font used in the credits, and a cameo by Amber Benson, who played Tara in Buffy (Fred Durst, the Limp Bizkit frontman, also has a very small role).

And I didn’t mind that the ending is left vague. In fact I liked that ending. And the writers earned it.

What hold the movie back, massively, is the character of Owen.

I’m of the camp that protagonists are make or break to your story. They don’t have to be likeable or noble or superhuman. They don’t even have to be relatable or identifiable. But there is one thing that every protagonist absolutely must have. He or she must WANT SOMETHING. It can be a small something (to go get a Slurpee) or a big thing (to save the universe from collapse), but there has to be something.

Poor Owen. He didn’t seem to want anything. Clearly he was disconnected from the world. He tells Maddy in a key scene that he doesn’t have any sexual feelings whatsoever, like he’s been scooped out hollow. If he was just a normal human like one of us that would be sad and probably a cause to get therapy. In a piece of fiction? It’s a huge red flag. It signifies your character is disconnected from his own wants and desires.

Now this could be a great launching point. How does that character reconnect with his internal desires? How does he take concrete action to fix this?

But that’s not what we get in this movie. Instead Owen drifts passively through life. His voice rarely rises above a whisper. His facial expression barely changes. Clearly this is a guy with some serious low-grade depression. Again, normal in the real world but do we want to watch this play out for two hours?

By the time we get toward the end of the movie, after Maddy returns and tells Owen that he’s really one of the characters from the Pink Opaque, trapped in this fake identity, we’re aching for Owen to do something, but all we get is nothing. Even after the climactic scene, the one where you can make a case that a) yes, he really is that trapped character or b) no, he’s just seriously mentally ill, Owen is back to being the same old mopey Owen we all know and don’t love.

Like I said, there was a lot of goofy charm to this movie. I really wanted to like it. But poor Owen left me not caring in the least what happened to him. So my take: give your protagonist a purpose. Give him a goal. Make us root for him.

Watch This Movie: Pearl

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I got into a horror kick recently. Why do I love horror? The thrills, the inventiveness, the over-the-topness, the almost cartoonish quality that stylized, fake horror, when done right, can have. Pearl came up on my Amazon Prime feed. The promo image was a Wizard of Oz riff, a Dorothyesque girl climbing a Scarecrow mount. It honestly confused me.

I almost passed it by. So glad I didn’t.

Pearl falls into the category of what I call Sunlit Horror (I don’t know if that’s a real genre. Now it is). Like Midsommar, the bulk of the action and the terror takes place in the daytime on perfectly sunny days. Instead of Be Afraid of the Dark it’s just Be Afraid.

Here’s the basic plot: It’s 1918 rural Texas. Pearl is a farmgirl with a stern German immigrant mother, a disabled father and a husband off in Europe fighting WW1. Pearl hates her dreary life. She dreams of being a star in the new film industry.

Sounds like a fun movie, right?

Well, it is, but not the way that that summary implies. Add to the plot some crushed dreams, a hungry alligator, and we’re off in a wholly different direction.

There are so many great things about Pearl. First, the visuals. Pearl such a beautiful movie, filmed in bright colors like old Hollywood classics on acid. It plays with the Wizard of Oz allusions but twists them and even perverts them in one of the weirdest and best scenes in the movie. Just for the visuals alone, Pearl is worth your time.

Another great thing about Pearl is the entire cast. The director Ti West assembled a strong ensemble to play characters who are well written to fill the tropes we love and expect in horror films (yes, tropes can be a good thing). The standout for me was Pearl herself. I’d heard of Mia Goth but never seen her in movies, only knowing her as the girl with no eyebrows. Turns out she does have eyebrows, they’re just very blonde. She’s perfect in this role, pretty but not too pretty, striving and failing. Goth is great at showing her desires, frustration and ultimately her rage. There’s an audition scene that, if there was any justice in the world, would have won Goth an Oscar. And there’s a scene at the end, a closeup of Pearl’s face, where Goth manages to portray a range of emotions from rage to happiness to madness to pure ridiculousness.

So my bottom line is: Pearl is one of the best horror flicks I’ve seen in a long time. Watch it.

And then watch X. Also starring Mia Goth, X is the first movie in this trilogy, but it’s set in 1979 Texas as a porn crew ventures to a run-down Texas farmhouse to film a movie.

Guess who owns the farmhouse.

Trope or Choke: Episode 9

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The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines:

Setting: Haunted House

Genre: Romance + Adventure

Trope: Love in rehab

Characters: A woman missing three fingers + a blind baseball player

POV: 3rd/past

The result:

Love Is Just Another Drug

Oliver dug his claws into Nina’s shoulder so hard she almost smacked him. God she hated that parrot.

“He’s gone, you know that.”

“He’s here,” Nina said. “I’ll find him.

“Careful. Your next door might be your last.”

She sighed because it was true. “One more door. I swear.”

“One more bump, you mean, right, girlie?”

Nina rested her hand on the knob. It burned. She let go, then grabbed it quick and twisted. Inside a swirl of mist coalesced into a woman with wild hair and a mouth pried open. “Devour!” she yelled.

The parrot squawked furiously. It released from Nina’s shoulder and bit off her pinkie finger. She tumbled back and shut the door behind her.

She lay on the floor and stared at her bleeding hand. “How could you?”

“I saved our lives.”

“Well don’t do that again.”

“If you simply exit,” Oliver said, “I won’t need to.”

“You know that’s not happening. Not until I find him.”

Oliver settled back on her shoulder. “Tragic. The baseball player who lost his sight and lost himself to heroin.”

“He kicked,” Nina said. “Like I did. And now we love each other.”

“Love? He doesn’t even know what you look like.”

“His words were true.”

Oliver squawked. “He’s a liar. Like that Helen Keller. You know she was a communist?”

“Jared’s no communist. He’s a good man. One more door.”

Nina shuffled deeper into darkness. She stopped before a black oak door and opened it. Inside a little girl sat at a desk drawing. Nina tiptoed closer to get a glimpse. The girl scribbled furiously, an exploding sun that devoured the earth. She looked up at Nina with black eyes. “You’re next.”

Oliver screeched. He flew up and around and before he settled back down he nipped off part of Nina’s ring finger. Nina screamed and ran out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

“Why did you do that?”

Oliver mimicked her words then cackled. “I warned you. Let’s leave.”

“No. Jared’s here somewhere. I feel him.”

“A love for the ages,” Oliver mocked. “The dark ages, that is.”

“I’m not leaving here without my happily ever after.”

“Don’t you know that love is just another drug?”

Nina ignored him. She climbed the staircase and rested her forehead on the first door. “This has to be it.”

She gave the knob one mighty twist. Inside, dusty furniture crowded the silent room. Two steps in and a hooded figure roared out from the shadows. “I’ve been waiting for you,” it moaned.

Before she could think she was on the other side of the shut door with one less finger. She screamed. “Stop torturing me.”

“Stop torturing yourself and give him up.”

She stalked back down and faced another door. This would be her last. She opened it and shielded her eyes from blinding sunlight and looked down. There he sat, all golden and mellow, a baseball clutched in his hand.

“I’ve missed you so much,” Jared said.