The Unfamous and the Rodfellows (TVT #2)

   The theme of last night's Mr. "Ant" Tenna's Marvelous Mystery Stream was a bit ill-defined, I'll admit. I've long been obsessed with weird, obscure and amateur works of art—from low-budget fan films to the very extremes of indie animation and outsider art—Tails Gets Trolled is, like, one of my favorite works of all time, and I'm entirely sincere in that fact. These works are also fun to expose others to, because either they get it, or they don't. Either way, it's a fun time. Here's what we watched last night:

1. The Unfamous (2020, all episodes, directed and written by HuntedSkelly)
2. The Rodfellows Movie (2020, directed by Dan P. Lyons, Darren A. Nichols and Jenny Wieland. Written by Dan P. Lyons, Darren A. Nichols and Alexander Mortensen)

    Overall, this broadcast was a lot of fun. Even if everyone involved seemed pretty tired by the end of Rodfellows (and we'll get to why), we were consistently engaged in what we watched and came out of the stream on a good note. Let's get into my thoughts. 

Somehow, the cover got worse.
All in attendance of last night's broadcast: AZ, K (that's me!), SP. 

The Unfamous

"When a dangerous new threat breaks free of its chains and goes after famous Scratchers, Huntedskelly must put together a group of heroes to save Scratch."
-Letterboxd

    Now, unfortunately, this one requires some context. If you know how Scratch works, you can skip this next paragraph after, like, the first sentence.

    The Unfamous was a 6-episode web-miniseries animated entirely on MIT's children's programming website, Scratch. Scratch, due to a high amount of users and the inclusion of a few rudimentary social features (you can 'love' and 'favorite' Projects (programs made by users, shared publicly); comment on people's Projects and profiles; follow users and create Studios (communal, user-run and user-moderated spaces where people can add projects and discuss in a built-in comments section)—not to mention the Scratch Forums, which is exactly what it sounds like), a thriving community unexpectedly spawned, boasting its own culture, customs, sub-communities, controversies, and, perhaps most relevant to The Unfamous, celebrities. Due to the nature of Scratch's following system—wherein, whenever you follow someone, any action they perform (loving or favorite-ing Projects, joining / getting admin promotions in Studios, following someone else, sharing a Project or basically anything but leaving a comment or Forum post) are broadcast on a small bulletin board, making every single one of their followers aware of whatever the Scratcher in question is doing. With a high follower count, Scratchers can easily rake in thousands of views, loves and favorites on their Projects within their follower-base alone, which not only allows others within their follower-base to share their Projects with their own followers, but allows them to appear on the "Explore" page—which displays contemporary Projects with high amounts of views—which exposes entirely unconnected Scratchers to their Projects. This forms a feedback loop that, so long as the Scratcher in question keeps posting, results in what the Scratch community calls "Famous Scratchers": Scratchers who have achieved a nigh-untouchable celebrity status that sets them apart from laymen and grants them something of a mythical aura. Interactions with Famous Scratchers are highly coveted, and non-Famous Scratchers sometimes engage in discussions simply about the work of Famous Scratchers.

Note: This describes the celebrity culture of the Scratch of ~2020. I've no idea what it's like now—I've long since lost interest in keeping up with the site. This is about all you need to know in order to understand The Unfamous, though, so it's fine. 

    HuntedSkelly, a well-regarded Famous Scratcher of his time, known for his detailed vector art and relatively high-production value animations, was no doubt aware of the immense social power he possessed over the Scratch community. For someone so young, it was probably a little daunting, and I imagine that he was aware of the social harm he was capable of doing with his fame—the harm he was already doing by remaining idle on the issue. In 2020, with this problem in mind, Skelly set out to create a Scratch series (a COVID-era Scratch trend of serialized animated web-series produced entirely on Scratch) named The Unfamous that incorporated hundreds of non-Famous Scratchers into its plot and production and, via metatextual analysis conducted inside the setting of a fictionalized Scratch, explored the intricacies of pandemic-era Scratch culture, the symbiotic relationship between Famous and non-Famous Scratchers and addressed the growing discontent among some Scratchers with their Famous overlords (funnily enough represented by the initial backlash Skelly received upon the series's announcement—the title "The Unfamous" naturally drew a line between Famous and "Unfamous" Scratchers, which many did not appreciate. The Scratch community generally looks more fondly upon The Unfamous now than it did at first, though). The series was highly ambitious—the Projects had whole ass loading screens (these were made on a low-power web game engine, remember)—and featured some of the best animation and writing ever put to a Scratch series. Of course, that's not necessarily saying much, but among its peers, it was seriously good. With 6 years of retrospect, I'd say that, while certainly impressive, The Unfamous falls quite short on what it set out to do.

    The plot goes as follows; HuntedSkelly (as himself) and dozens of other Famous Scratchers are out partying in the series's microcosm of Scratch when a mysterious being named the Void barges in and sends nearly all but Skelly into the Void (noun; a practically empty pocket-dimension able to be opened and wielded at will by Void (person)), effectively killing all of them. Skelly escapes with the help of some non-Famous Scratchers (here represented by real low-follower accounts, primarily operated by children, if their voice acting and art made for the series are anything to go by) and word gets out about the attack—a news report suggests that Void intends on going on a crusade with the intent sending anyone above 1,000 followers to the Void, along with anyone he otherwise would have spared who dares stand in his way. Skelly forms what essentially amounts to a military of non-Famous Scratchers, fakes his own Voiding to get Void off of his trail (incredibly funny, now that I've slept on it, since Void would most likely know for a fact whether or not he's Voided a specific person yet, but that doesn't really occur to you in the moment, so whatever) and plans numerous assaults on Void's campaign. Through some unexplained programming magic, a powerful non-Famous Scratcher is able to be sent out of the Void and relays the conditions of the Void (primarily that everyone is still alive and that escape is possible) to Skelly, who then plans to "close" the Void (with more unexplained programming magic) with hopes that its closure will bring everyone trapped inside the Void back.

    Through a convoluted series of events and multiple fight scenes, the Void is closed, setting everyone trapped inside free in an Avengers: Endgame-style portal scene and defeating Void by way of outnumbering him (closing the Void killed all of his little Void monsters). However, Void reveals that closing the Void essentially rigged its Nexus to explode, killing everyone, including Void, instantly—a contingency that was planned from the start. Through a heart-to-heart between Skelly and Void inside the Void dimension, Void reveals that he was once an ordinary Scratcher who made amazing Projects that went ignored in favor of Projects by Famous Scratchers and, through his crusade, has been attempting to make a perfect Scratch—a Scratch without Famous Scratchers. Skelly is able to talk him down by explaining that he wasn't always a Famous Scratcher, and that he knows how Void feels, but that it isn't a justification for going around (essentially) killing all of his friends—as Skelly says, "sometimes, you have to lose to win" (and, as SP said in our voice call, "Whatever that means"). Void is utterly swayed, and absorbs the Nexus's blast to save everyone else—resulting in his death. While most Scratchers are happy, The Unfamous rejects giving the viewer a happy or celebratory ending, capping off with a solemn speech of mourning and respect towards Void, essentially canonizing him as a symbol for all non-Famous Scratchers.

    Alright, alright. You could probably tell I had some issues with the ending by my description alone, so, let me ask... what was wrong with Void's point, exactly? I'm genuinely unsure. Maybe the violence is a little extreme, but Skelly acknowledges that he has an essentially irrefutable argument—non-Famous Scratchers are worse off with Famous Scratchers around. Not a single argument is made in favor of the Famous Scratchers holding their power; not even Void's violence is truly deplorable, as Skelly's rapid militarization of Famous Scratcher sympathizers—including manufacturing hundreds of guns, swords and spears to be given to an army of random children who idolize Skelly—is comparable, if not even more morally reprehensible, than anything Void was doing. Void is a radical insurgent, and Skelly is a member of an elite social order who sends hundreds of children into battle with the interest of protecting his and his friends' power. That may seem hyperbolic, but that's genuinely what happens. In fact, Void's point is proven within Skelly's interactions with his army itself—he frequently responds to non-Famous Scratchers who save his life, sometimes giving up their own for his, with "Who are you?" Part of me thinks that this is, to some degree, intentional—Skelly (the guy, not the character) is surely smart enough to recognize these inconsistencies within his work. I'd be genuinely surprised if the Famous Scratcher who ordained to respond to the social issues his series is about was somehow incapable of recognizing that his self-insert is squarely within the wrong. Even so, the series never regards Skelly or his actions with any sort of derision or even skepticism—he is consistently framed as a hero while Void is consistently framed as this reckless, dangerous radical until he flips and decides to fucking kill himself to save Scratch in the last minute of his life. Who knows, man...

    There's also a weird element of classism to this. Not that Skelly (the guy) is necessarily classist, but that Scratch fame within The Unfamous is outwardly equated to real-life wealth. In the inciting incident, while "out partying" in an exclusive Famous Scratcher club, Skelly wins against a bunch of other Famous Scratchers at Poker, winning a wheelbarrow full of follows, which he establishes as this fictionalized Scratch's version of currency in a 4th-wall-breaking remark. This reading checks out—Griffpatch (a veteran Famous Scratcher known for being above 16 and having outside-programming knowledge, who currently holds 762,000 followers and counting) is depicted as a classy man in a suit who travels only by helicopter and is constantly surrounded by a uniformed group of bodyguards, as though he's the president or some shit. This is a particularly strange theme in The Unfamous—Skelly's "you have to lose to win" line morphs from a motivational message of perseverance and hope (even if uttered in bad taste) to some shit out of Ronald Reagan. It's a truly fascinating and wholly unnecessary aspect of the work; it would've been just as good, if not better, had the follows = money line been cut out and the class commentary remained as subtext. I won't go too hard on Skelly here, seeing as this thing is almost a decade old and that means that he's had almost a decade to grow up, but it's still something I felt like bringing up.

    Don't let all that fool you—I, for the most part, loved The Unfamous. It was a genuinely well-animated series for its medium, offered more thematic complexity than any of its contemporaries (regardless of whether or not that was intentional), and its premise—including tons and tons of non-Famous Scratchers in Skelly's magnum opus, representing the fanbase and site-wide community that gave Skelly his power in one of his final works for the website—is incredibly sweet. Its flaws (primarily in voice acting and a few moments of writing) are helplessly endearing to me. This is a solid recommendation; you can watch The Unfamous on YouTube here. It seems that, nowadays, Skelly is a Mormon missionary—not a plot twist I was exactly expecting, but I hope he's happy.

Jumpscare. I wonder how he feels about getting his first Dyke Review...
(Note: I don't know if it's the first, but I hope it is.)

 

The Rodfellows Movie

"The Rodfellows Movie follows the TRF (including TDC) with their lives turning upside down by the arrival of the antagonists Zander and Zayden. They perpetrate chasing how the parts of TRF's house perform, more or less having them not realize that it was caught in a footage, causing a downhill experience of TRF's morning routines. It's up to the main TRF to subdue their experience and have their things go back to the way it should."
-IMDB 

     Let me first say; autism is a wonderful thing, and the Rodfellows Movie is a thoroughly and joyously autistic film. I'm sure you know this by now, but I don't mean that disparagingly. Whatever controversy follows the Rodfellows (I'm genuinely unsure what the whole drama is about, and, respectfully, it's none of my business—no money exchanged hands here, so I'm quietly leaving that conversation) and however the film is viewed in whatever contemporary cultural zeitgeist (looking at you, YouTubers), it'll always hold a special place in my heart, regardless of whether or not it's a particularly "good" film.

    It isn't a good film, by the way. If you're here for Kim's qualitative examination of The Rodfellows Movie, then you get one measly paragraph. Shame on ya. Anyway, The Rodfellows Movie, by every measure we can conceivably use to evaluate the quality of a film, is raw, unfiltered dog shit. The colors are flat, and shading or any form of lighting that involves more than simply turning the brightness nob down is a concept seemingly foreign to the joyous land of the Jungle Forest; the animation is boring, stagnant and lifeless, save for a scene near the end of the film (even then, it's only comparatively good); the writing is nonsensical, the plot takes about 30 minutes to even start, the audio mixing is so bad that it genuinely deserves further study, and the film has this unique, horrid soul-draining property to it that leaves even the most tolerant among us with exhaustion and a migraine when we walk out. Does all of this make The Rodfellows Movie a bad film? Yes. Does that mean I don't like it? Fuuuuuck no. That's because a lot of what I just said can be chalked up to one thing: inexperience. To me, though I'd understand if you didn't like Rodfellows on any of those grounds, I simply can't bring myself to dislike a film on the basis that it's amateur—in fact, that's my shit, I prefer it. Aside from its—well, I want to say "technical" shortcomings, but that seems a bit dismissive, considering the writing is just as bad as the technical aspects of the film—um, general shitiness, I love The Rodfellows Movie not for its quality, but for its spirit.

    If you're watching the theatrical cut—a cut of the film with a 10 minute preliminary intermission and some previews for related upcoming films before the film starts proper—you're able to catch a glimpse of what the movie is all about before it even starts. First of all, in one particularly awesome preview, you're shown a film that is seemingly a collection of train and plane footage, if the autism wasn't already apparent enough to you, as well as another preview which showcases the trailer of a film seemingly entirely produced in GoAnimate. The autism is promised from the start, and by god, when The Rodfellows Movie actually starts, does it deliver—a lot of the writing's nonsensical quality is due, I'd suggest, to an autistic writer's unawareness of what the average audience members needs explained, or even just how to write in a way that reflects neurotypical reality. Normal phrases are often altered, mangled and misremembered past comprehension; sentences that could be four words reach into the double digits with needless specificity; jokes simply never land; scenes last exactly too long, by a matter of milliseconds, and simple actions a neurotypical audience would understand on instinct are frequently reasoned out aloud by characters. None of this is a bad thing. I keep referring to "the neurotypical audience," how the film is seemingly unaware and unaccommodating towards them when they should be accommodated for—sorry, but they don't. To me, this is a beautifully autistic movie, and a version of it that's watered down and able to be wholly comprehended by the neurotypical mind is a version I would never wish to see. The pure, concentrated autism radiating through this movie makes it what it is, and, once again, I don't mean that disparagingly—it's a shame that years of open, widespread ableism, both online and in the real world, have conditioned people to think that someone calling something "autistic" is an insult, rather than a simple fact or a compliment.

    One thing that really interests me in this film is how evidently the effects of consumerism on autistic people are shown. Many autistic people have special interests or hyperfixations—unwilling and uncontrollable nigh-obsessive fascinations with nearly anything under the sun—and, given how much media is apart of our everyday lives, and given how much of that media is tied in with consumerism, it should be no surprise that a large amount of those special interests revolve around media or media franchises, especially those geared towards children. It makes sense, then, that Rodfellows, a thoroughly autistic movie, is rampant with consumerism. Characters obviously based upon the designs of Parappa the Rapper or Sylvester the Cat or Nature Cat just show up, overt references to anime like Gurren Lagann interrupt the entire plot for minutes on end, and the fact that the theatrical cut even exists—that this crew even felt the need to line its production with unpaid advertisements for random, unaffiliated companies like Coca-Cola, to form their own companies and filmographies to be shown in previews before a feature presentation, to copy the AMC roller-coaster intro in Planet Coaster and to give their films arbitrary and inconsistent content-ratings, just to feel like their film is a "real movie"—is a pure testament to this phenomenon. Consumerism has its fingerprints all over this thing, and I find that to be incredibly interesting in ways that are both kind of sad and also a little funny.

    What I do find truly sad, though, is the film's media coverage—specifically, its latest resurgence in popularity due to a few mocking YouTube videos surrounding it. Note that I intended to screen the film long before this development, and I wish this wasn't a paragraph I had to write. I won't name names here, but they're not hard to find, at least not for the moment, and all refer to the film as a "furry inflation" film, as though that's something to be laughed at and derided. The internet has been laughing at furries forever, but the "inflation" part, if you're curious, comes from the film having a few characters that look like this, complete with their stomachs bouncing as they walk and a cartoonish "boing" sound effect playing as a character bounces on them. It's most definitely fetishistic in some way, even if "inflation" falls short of describing it accurately—it could be inflation, or it could be a simple fat fetish—it's hard to tell, because the film itself is in no way fetishistic or erotic. Patricia Taxxon's commentary on the film explores this concept better than I believe I can, but, to paraphrase, autistic people generally interface with sexuality in a way more casual or relaxed and understated than neurotypical people do, and that's definitely the case here. It feels like everyone parroting this claim either hasn't seen the movie in full or is simply using the film's appearance as a fun excuse to dunk on some autistic people, or, better yet, anyone with kinks and fetishes they don't like. It's a disappointing turn of events, for sure, and it's upsetting to me that, whenever you bring up Rodfellows, if anyone knows what you're talking about, they're probably thinking of "that furry inflation movie."

This guy has become the film's designated online punching bag. Tellingly, the majority of the art used to derisively portray the film as "a furry fat / inflation fetish movie" is probably more titillating to fat / inflation fetishists than the movie itself.

     At the end of the day, Rodfellows is an interesting movie. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to most people—it takes a special kind of freak to both appreciate and enjoy it for its entire runtime (I'm not one of those freaks, though I do know one (:emoji_10:)), but if it seems like it's up your alley, then go for it. It's not hard to find online, don't worry (that Patty commentary link provides the entire theatrical cut of the film, provided you're okay with her talking over it). Whenever I look at the Rodfellows, I'm filled with a unique sense of pride that, despite all its shortcomings and transgressions, a group of people came together, despite all the odds, and made this piece of shit. What a beautiful thing, truly. Anyway, that's all! Be nice to furries and autistic people and people who have fetishes that you don't have, please.

See you next week! 

-Kim
None of this is good, HuntedSkelly. That's why it's called "war." 

Corpse Party: Tortured Souls and Slender Man (TVT #1)

It’s often said that April showers bring May flowers, but in this week’s Marvelous Mystery Stream, April showers bring… um, May BLOOD showers. Yeah, dude. Fuckin’... rad.

     Halloween may very well be my favorite holiday of all time. I don’t need to explain myself, as this is a universal opinion that everyone obviously agrees on. As with all seasonal holidays, one of the primary ways our culture signifies the start of the Halloween season is through media—specifically, horror media. Even if I’ve never been particularly scared by horror media (which, I suppose, would then categorically classify most of it as a complete failure), there’s a unique atmosphere inexplicably grafted onto even the worst of it that I just can’t help but enjoy. To me, horror is incredibly interesting conceptually, and you can spend a lot of time analyzing every work that calls the genre home from a lot of varied political and/or philosophical viewpoints. I don’t want to do any of that though—I want the trashy shit. To quote the great Ljot Swanhild, "I like garbage. It's where I DWELL!" Here's what we watched on last night's broadcast.

1. Ghost Stories (2000, episode #7, directed by Shigeki Hatakeyama and written by Ryōta Yamaguchi, ADV dub. Note that I'm not writing anything on this one. Not a lot to talk about, sorry! By the way, I picked this episode specifically to make a Kamen Rider Ryuki joke. Laughs: 0.)
2. Corpse Party: Tortured Souls (2013, episode #2, directed by Akira Iwanaga and written by     Shōichi Satō)
3. Slender Man (2018, directed by Sylvain White and written by David Birke)

    All in all, the broadcast was fun! We've definitely had better (oh, how I miss you, Kaiju board...), but that's on me, and, in any case, it was nice to return to the stream after our small impromptu hiatus. Let's get into my thoughts, because, boy, do I have some. Spoilers for the first two episodes of Corpse Party: Tortured Souls and all of Slender Man.

 This has got to be one of the worst images on the internet. Wholly incomprehensible.

All in attendance of last night's broadcast: AZ, K (that's me!), SP.

 

Corpse Party: Tortured Souls (#2)

"The Kisaragi students learn that Heavenly Host is the site of a murder incident where school teacher Yoshikazu Yanagihori allegedly severed the tongues of four children. Ayumi Shinozaki and Yoshiki Kishinuma are attacked by one of the victims' ghosts, but are rescued by the ghost of Naho Saenoki, a famed blogger who posted the Sachiko Ever After ritual online. Following her advice, they look for the murdered children's tongues to return them and lay their spirits to rest." -Wikipedia

    Honestly, I didn't have nearly as much to say about this one as I thought I would. I'd scoped out the first episode prior to screening this one, and, though useful for setting my expectations, I ended up deeming it non-conducive to a fun viewing with friends (y'know, with the hanging at the end, and all). I chose to screen the second episode, which was generally better about that, even if not by a lot; laughs were had, and even if they were nearly entirely at the expense of what we were watching, that's still a win in my book. Across the board, it was decent—it was well-animated, well-directed, and the atmosphere was great (probably better if viewing in ideal circumstances, which basically means "without the security your friends")—but there's a couple of things that caught my eye. Actually, (one) more than a couple.

 

1. The Gore

    Listen, I'm not about to fault a horror anime for having gore in it. It wasn't particularly disturbing, even if it was graphic, and that's coming from someone who's pretty squeamish—if you've seen, like, the first episode of Elfen Lied, you'll be fine. As for a lot of horror media, the gore is just an inexorable part of the appeal, and it's often something of a shorthand for "good" horror; like, sure, it's probably better if you're not solely relying on it for making the audience uncomfortable, but no one's fault you for it, at least not without being seen as something of a pearl-clutching buzzkill—in fact, a lot of people would gleefully accept it as a full-on substitute for genuinely well-crafted scares, and I find myself unable to really fault that. Part of horror's appeal is the gore, and that's all there is to it. However, I'd argue that, in the case of Tortured Souls, it's actually disproportionately integral to the experience—for example, within seconds of starting the second episode, we see a close-up of an eyeball being stabbed as blood and tears simultaneously gush and leak out of it, all while hearing the victim's screams—and it gets to the point, particularly with how cartoonishly graphic it all is, of near desensitization. The show seems acutely aware of this, as we can see one character, Sakutaro Morishige, occasionally stopping his journey through Heavenly Host to photograph the various rotting corpses and piles of organs (which are so gruesome that he remarks with amazement that "this was once a human being"), regarding them with a sort of quietly perverse amusement and using the images of their mangled bodies as reassurance that he's "still good." 

 

    This is a fairly cut-and-dry case of desensitization. He's in a high-stress situation, and to cope, he chooses to "revel in their misfortune." This spell is broken, however, when he views the pile of organs that was once his beloved Mayu, learning (via ghostly shenanigans) exactly who they used to be. The information drives him mad(der?), leading him to go on a rampage throughout the school. Mayu's death leads us nicely into our next problem...

2. The Fan-service

 

    Please keep the theme of desensitization in the back of your mind as you watch this clip. The only way to convey this scene to you is by witnessing it with your own eyes and ears. If you've seen Tortured Souls, you likely know exactly what I'm about to talk about.

 

    I don't need to explain to you the ties between the sexual (or, at least, the sexually suggestive) and the horrifying in media. They have the same aims (the arousal of specific bodily mechanisms—sexual arousal or fear, respectively)—and that's why they mix so freely. Desensitization often drives one end of the spectrum towards the other; desensitization to horror (specifically, violence) drives a piece of horror media towards sexuality (pointless fan-service, nudity, sex scenes, etc.) and, similarly, desensitization to sexuality drives a piece of sexual media (i.e., pornography) to violence ("rough" porn, choking, beating, etc.*). I hope you've noticed that women are the primary victims of this phenomenon. I feel that, in a way, the clip you just watched is the symbolic culmination of this effect; we get a prolonged, detailed panty shot of an underage girl mere seconds before she is violently dragged across the ground, half-face-down, with her own blood skidding behind her, before she is, in one fell swoop, lifted up and lunged into a wall with such force that her body immediately combusts, leaving her as nothing but a black mark, survived by nothing but some intestines that slowly slide to the ground. There's absolutely nothing funny about this scene on a conceptual level, and yet, all I could find myself doing was laughing. I'll leave you with that, I suppose; I've nothing more to say than that image. Wait, what's that below me? A clarification? You mean I have more to say?! NOOOOOOOOOoooooooo....

 

    *(Let me be clear, here, since, upon rereading, this comes off the wrong way a little in a way I can't easily fix—this is not to say that engaging in these kinks personally is inherently a bad thing, nor is it to say that you'd be a bad person for doing so; between consenting adults, in my opinion, go nuts. It's not at all my intention to imply or suggest that these kinks are the problem here—they aren't. However, you must recognize that women are commonly victimized within these settings—both in mainstream horror films and random porn—and that victimization perpetuates a lot of what women go through. It's less to do with kinks and more to do with how we engage with them in media, if that makes sense. Thanks.)

 

Slender Man (2018) 

"In a small town in Massachusetts, a group of friends, fascinated by the internet lore of the Slender Man, attempt to prove that he doesn't actually exist - until one of them mysteriously goes missing." -IMDB

    This movie was nearly unwatchable, and that's no secret—in fact, I'd offer a cash prize for anyone who could show me someone who genuinely and uncompromisingly enjoyed the film (if I had any cash, anyway). Still, allow me to summarize my general thoughts undeterred. Let me have this.

 

    I was thoroughly impressed by the film's uncanny ability to get unfathomably worse as it went on—which I now know was likely due to a lot of scenes being cut late into production, for reasons we'll get to shortly—but, overall, it was a fun time, if only because I was watching with friends. Removed from that context, I would probably have fallen asleep before the end. There was one moment that I could feasibly see scaring someone—Wren's little body horror episode in the library—but, apart from that, the thing failed to even hold the potential of scaring anybody, and, without having any fun ideas, good acting (I thought Joey King's portrayal of Wren was great. I mean, she's, like, sobbing on the floor and shit, she's really selling Wren's remorse, and... *scary noise* Wuh-oh. I wonder how King will convey Wren's reaction to the abrupt... Oh, oh. She's done crying, now. Okay.), compelling writing or evocative cinematography, the film generally fails spectacularly by practically ever measure by which we typically measure a film's quality. It's so bad that it's impressive, and, in a way, genuinely sort of beautiful. A team of people got together, worked tirelessly to make this product, and it sucked ass. That's great, seriously. Still, I left the film feeling nothing.

 

    In fact, the film was such a nothing-burger that, after the immediate departure of AZ upon the film's closing (me too, dude), me and SP had a lengthy dialogue (over my sick Emily Wants to Play gameplay, of course) that held the express purpose of coming to even the most mundane of conclusions about the movie's thematic aims. A particularly notable point of discussion started early on in the film, when SP, with consideration of the film revolving around a group of teenage girls who are all "messed-up" in some way, wondered aloud if the film had something to do with 2014's infamous Slender-Man stabbing. Not having seen the rest of the film yet (I believe they had just summoned Slender-Man), I, politely as I could, waved the idea off—it was an interesting idea, but there's no way they'd do that, right?

 

    Only later, upon finishing the film and beginning to talk it over with one another, did the idea float up again. I initially held the same reservations as I did an hour prior, but his insistence—paired with my independent realization that the stabbing and the ensuing moral panic surrounding creepypasta were valuable cultural context, given the time of release—made me finally consider his perspective without reservation or skepticism. The results of that consideration bring me to what I believe to be the most cohesive explanation of the film (which, honestly, isn't saying much). First, please read the film's closing monologue, narrated by, Lizzie, little sister of Hallie—one of the film's dual protagonists. 

  "Hallie, Katie, Chloe, Wren. There's almost always a pattern. He only shows himself just enough to infect us. The more fear he creates, the more fascinated we get. We talk and write about him—share pictures, click on links, Photoshop images—that's how a virus works. That's how it spreads. And some people cross the line and actually seek him out, like my sister and her friends did... and those messed-up people go out and do messed-up things that become more stories for people to tell. It's all spreading his word, y'know?"

    It's pretty hard to read Lizzie's monologue as being about anything but the stabbing, isn't it?

     Herein lies an explanation for the film's strange pregnancy (repeated instances of Slender-Man tendrils shooting violently out of wombs) / Christian (the blink-and-you'll-miss-it church cameo, the crosses adorning Chloe's house, the weird pilgrims/demons talk at the start, etc.) imagery, as well. If the film were to, even if loosely, center around the Slender-Man stabbing, it'd likely be in participation or response to the subsequent moral panic. The film expresses a clear culturally Christian / culturally conservative stance on youth, particularly teenagers (Wren shouts "troll!" to indicate she's messing with her friends; the film introduces Hallie and Katie by showing them watching cat videos together; Wren's first words are "Twitter poll," which she (and all teenagers, probably?) apparently says whenever she's about to ask for an opinion;), who are at risk of corruption and/or pose a significant risk of corrupting younger children by way of the horrors of the internet (Slender-Man is summoned on a sketchy, "Russian malware-y"(???) website; Katie jokingly states that she doesn't sneeze because she wants to keep demons in her soul, "if [she] had one"; Wren expresses pride and glee upon finding out that Lizzie got into trouble at school for wearing one of her implicitly obscene shirts; Wren's room has a large OBEY poster; Hallie and Lizzie's family judgmentally discuss one of Hallie's friends, Delores, and her teen pregnancy, which recently caused her to drop out of school; Wren takes Lizzie into the woods, probably (see two paragraphs from now) as a sort of sacrifice to Slender-Man (ring any bells?), leaving her hospitalized and delusional). The numerous instances of the Slender-Man-tendril-wombs are evocative of a desecration of youth, viewed from a mother's perspective, by the lurking threat of Slender-Man, here symbolic of creepypasta, or, more broadly, general moral depravity children are frequently exposed to online (or, at least, what these types think that is), and the Christianity is just the icing on the cake.

    I think, with all of that in consideration, that this reading is somewhat feasible. I'm grasping at straws, here, and that's frustrating; when I watched Slender Man, I wasn't exactly expecting metatextual analysis. Still, when I went to bed last night, that was what I had reached. When I woke up this morning, my suspicions were largely confirmed.

    Upon some further (though, still cursory) research, it seemed that a large amount of content had been cut from the film, likely in response to backlash surrounding similarities to the stabbing (a particularly notable portion of which coming from Bill Weier, father of one of the stabbing's perpetrators, Anissa Weier). Thankfully, this isn't purely the work of whistle-blowers—we have some concrete proof that multiple scenes were cut, and, reasoning with each scene's contents in mind, it's fairly obvious why they never saw theaters. In the film's first trailer, we can see a scene involving Hallie's approximation of a boyfriend, Tom, committing suicide by jumping off of the roof of the school. In the film, he asks Hallie out on a date, does a scary, is seemingly disinterested in Hallie following the scary, and disappears forever. In another scene, one of the film's four main characters, Chloe, stabs her own eyes with a dissection scalpel in front of an entire biology class. In the film, she has two notable encounters with Slender-Man before disappearing from the plot forever, sans a brief shot where she stares blankly at Wren and Hallie (y'know, to show how crazy she is). Using context provided by the film, both acts of self-harm were presumably committed because of Slender-Man's influence. Finally, another scene, featured at the end of the trailer, shows a character and scenario involving police surrounding a dishevelled girl emerging from a forest, which is entirely absent from the film. "Who the fuck is THAT," I shouted while watching the trailer this morning, much to the confusion of the guy walking his dog outside of my open window. These anomalies within the trailer align with numerous online rumors that suggest entire integral characters and plotlines—not just a few scenes and deaths—were hastily removed from the film at some point after shooting. Due to NDAs, not a lot more could be revealed—whether or not you think that's true, or just some liar's easy excuse, is up to you.

    All in all, I think that's a pretty compelling argument as to what Slender Man was really about, as well as why it doesn't necessarily feel like it. They tried to hide it, but basing your film upon such a well-remembered incident leaves you with a scent you can't really scrub off. Still, I find myself wishing that they had kept all of these scenes in—if I could tell that the film was loosely responding to the moral panic caused by the stabbing, they did such a bad job of hiding it that they might as well not have tried—because, even if its message would have been polarizing, and even if I would have vehemently disagreed with it and its goals, that doesn't mean it shouldn't have the right to exist. What we're left with is a horrible, incomplete mess of a film—where police have custody of a laptop, then Wren inexplicably has it in her possession not two minutes later; where Katie goes missing, and we care about Katie, then Chloe goes missing, and we care about Chloe instead of Katie, then Lizzie goes missing, and we care about Lizzie instead of Chloe or Katie; etc., etc.—that I refuse to believe a single person was happy with upon release. Honestly, I'm in agreement with Bill Weier; the film, under the pretense of it being based upon the stabbing, is incredibly distasteful, and if the world was mine, I wouldn't want it made, but that doesn't suddenly mean that the creative vision the film had should have been compromised in such a way. Art is allowed to talk about uncomfortable things; art is allowed to question our morals; art is allowed to disagree with you; and it's a tragedy that, in light of what could have been an incredibly interesting reflection upon the stabbing, internet culture and how we, as a society, treat our youth—even if that film would've been bad, too—we've been left with a nothing but a $10,000,000 hole in the ground.

    See you next week.

-Kim  

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