Open Season on the Human Race
Horror and the American Landscape in The Mothman Prophecies (2002) and Dark Waters (2019)
While Mothman and Indrid Cold attracted all the publicity and turned everyone’s eyes to the deep skies of night, the strange ones began to arrive in West Virginia. They trooped down from the hills, along the muddy back roads, up from the winding “hollers,” like an army of leprechauns seeking impoverished shoemakers. It was open season on the human race and so the ancient procession of the damned marched once more.
—The Mothman Prophecies (1975), John Keel
American horror cinema has always been centrally concerned with our built environment, with the landscapes we inhabit and the places we have made of them. To move through the genre’s touchstones is to wander the country itself, to see how we have colonized it, paved it over, built our roads and fences and walls, and in the process bred nightmares of every kind, encountered everywhere we turn. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) imagines the then-novel interstate highway as a path to ruin, populating the rural back roads and burned-out gas stations of the American Southwest with horrors that await the unsuspecting traveler. Halloween (1978) positions its killing spree amidst the leafy streets and huge detached houses of the prototypical American small town, an irruption of violence into a space envisioned as safe and pleasant in its very essence. The Shining (1980) and Poltergeist (1982) are situated in very different worlds—respectively, a glamorous Colorado hotel and a planned community in suburban California—but they both deploy the narrative device of the ‘Indian burial ground’ to reflect a sense that a silent reckoning is happening all around us, that the sins of our founding are waiting for us in our quiet back streets and the basements of our homes. We live in a hell of our own making, and the best of the horror genre has always met us there, building the movement of capital and its murderous accretions into the foundations of what it means to be afraid in America.
The Mothman Prophecies (2002), directed by Mark Pellington, sits uneasily among these giants of the genre, tepidly received upon release and briefly a cultural punchline for one out-of-context moment its ubiquitous trailer made slightly ludicrous. It deserves renewed attention, however, not only on its merits—as a deeply unsettling, occasionally nightmarish piece of horror Americana—but for its attunement to a certain kind of American landscape, its dread-soaked representations of certain kinds of distinctively American spaces. The title, and perhaps the marketing campaign, might have cultivated the expectation of a creature feature, a filmic introduction to the Mothman himself; this expectation the film is destined largely to frustrate, following its horrors along a much more diffuse and inscrutable path. It’s a film about forbidden knowledge, half-glimpsed and imperfectly understood, of the lethal forces beneath the surface of American life. This theme, along with the movie’s West Virginia setting, places it at the margins of another story, more terrestrial, about industrialization and its discontents, and puts it in surprisingly direct conversation with a very different—if not necessarily less frightening—subgenre of films about the terrifying externalities of American mass production.
The film opens in the DC area, where Richard Gere’s John Klein (a fictionalized version of Mothman Prophecies author John Keel, a noted ufologist and overall much more eclectic and itinerant figure) is a star reporter for the Washington Post. He and his wife Mary (played by Debra Messing) have been house-hunting, and they find themselves, late one night, making an offer on an impressive residence in a tony DC suburb, all big detached homes and carefully-manicured driveways. Setting this viewing—somewhat curiously—in the middle of the night, however, allows Pellington and his cinematographer, to drain this neighborhood of all its potentially welcoming visual qualities: on this winter’s night all the trees are dead, and their barren limbs loom out of the sucking darkness, the residential street bending out of view as Klein and his wife drive away. This archetypal setting for fantasies of bourgeois domesticity takes on an air of menace, and we are not surprised when something swoops out of the blackness, swallowing the field of Mary’s vision, causing her to crash the car. It has huge black wings and bright red eyes, eyes that will follow us through the rest of the film, Pellington’s most consistent visual motif, suggesting the Mothman in the brake lights of cars, the safety lights on an old suspension bridge. In the visual language of The Mothman Prophecies American spaces are never really safe; night skies and shadowed corners conceal potentially terrible secrets, and any road might lead to confrontation with the truly unknowable.
This theme continues to deepen as the film proceeds, with Klein—two years later—now a widower; hospitalized after the accident, Mary speaks in hushed tones of what she saw on the road that night, and after her death (from a rare and unexplained brain tumor, unconnected with the crash) Klein finds a notebook filled with frighteningly suggestive sketches. Soon afterwards he finds himself on the road to Richmond, Virginia, chasing a political story, when his car suffers a curious instrument failure and dies in the middle of nowhere. Approaching the nearest house for help, Klein makes a bizarre discovery: he is in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, hundreds of miles from his ostensible itinerary, and the outraged owner of the house claims to have seen him before, on each of the previous nights, knocking on the door at 2:30am and requesting the use of a phone. This encounter launches Klein on a truly surreal investigation of strange happenings in Point Pleasant, incorporating prophesied disasters, disturbing and impossible phone calls in the night, and of course, glimpses of the ‘Mothman’. Any attempt at detailed summary diminishes the narrative, which is incoherent as a matter of deliberate practice, incorporating elements which never quite gel but suggest a genuine ongoing encounter with the otherworldly. This particular kind of esoteric American nightmare does not explain itself, and cannot be made into the kind of story we tell when we have a choice.
Visually The Mothman Prophecies owes a transparent (and welcome) debt to David Lynch, whose work is itself not only often on nodding terms with the horror genre but deeply rooted in particular visions of the American landscape and built environment. Comparisons to Lynch are overdone to the point of tedium, and it should be stressed that the film is not especially Lynchian except in its approach to key visual signifiers: the shadowed roadside motel room, the ominous rural stoplight, the highway median vanishing into absolute blackness. Some whispers of Twin Peaks aside, the strongest resemblance is to Lost Highway, a similarly dread-soaked film about a dead wife and a truth too horrifying to confront. I have heard Lost Highway very usefully described as a film about how the American Southwest makes you insane (for reasons, we might add, Lynch and Mark Frost probed further in the third season of Twin Peaks), but of course Lynch has sought out seething underbellies all across the country, and by invoking him here Pellington and Murphy seem to agree that encroaching madness is a universal American phenomenon. Everywhere we go, there we are.
Point Pleasant and its environs constitute an effective setting for horror of this kind. The small-town Rust Belt landscape combines forbidding hollers and ghostly winter forests with the cheerless appendages of industrialization, such as a vast chemical plant belching out its smoke over the Ohio River. One plot point hinges on the plant’s intrinsic menace, its obviousness as a vehicle for calamity; we intuitively understand that these outposts of mass production are also potential instruments of mass death, squatting monstrously alongside our homes and communities, utterly inhuman. The car, too, and its attendant infrastructure shape the horror vocabulary of The Mothman Prophecies: a crucial sequence takes place in the hellish red interior of Klein’s dispiriting roadside motel room, and on the long empty roads of West Virginia the occasional brake lights of cars are a reminder and a threat. There is a sense throughout Pellington’s film that this is the kind of place where bad things happen, that these are the kind of people who live their lives at the mercy of unseen forces. And as it turned out, events gathering steam at the time of the film’s release would give ample warrant for this impression.
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Earthquakes are going to happen. People you know and love are going to die. And no matter what that voice tells you, there’s nothing you can do about it.
—Laura Linney as Connie Mills, The Mothman Prophecies (2002), dir. Mark Pellington
It's late, and the three young people—teenagers, perhaps—are rowdy. They turn their car off the road and onto an unpaved stretch that leads through the trees until it reaches a fence, which they quickly scale. On the other side of the fence there is a small lake, black and inviting, and two of the three youths strip off their clothes for a nighttime skinny-dip; the third demurs and waits on the shore, despite his friends’ best attempts at persuasion. There is a shot from beneath the surface of the lake, the camera moving through the murky waters towards the naked swimmers, as though stalking them. The shot cuts from the swimmers to the shore, from the swimmers to the shore, and now we are waiting; we have seen opening sequences like this before. Something will disturb this display of youthful camaraderie, something in the water, and we wait for the film to show us what it is. Suddenly a spotlight illuminates the two swimmers, and an angry voice rings out: “the hell you doing?” There is a motorboat, and two men in jumpsuits and hard hats, and the teenagers are quickly chased away. Once they are gone the men continue their work; they are spraying something into the water, and as they spray they hurriedly shut off the light. They do not want to be seen.
Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters (2019) is not on paper a horror film, despite the filmic language of its cold open (and despite its title, which it shares with a 1994 Italian-Ukrainian nunsploitation horror film and also—almost—with a Hideo Nakata masterpiece from 2002). It belongs instead to a particular subgenre of legal thriller that also includes the likes of Michael Clayton (2007) and A Civil Action (1998), focused on the chemical by-products of industrial production, and on corporate efforts to avoid accountability for murderous acts of malfeasance. As these examples illustrate, this genre boasts a range of possible tones and approaches to this material: crushing cynicism is a common posture, but not an automatic one, and there is even potentially a kind of brisk men-at-work satisfaction to be gained in the accumulation of key facts, the triumphal progress through key procedural milestones, the burgeoning certainty that justice will be served. Dark Waters is not a film like that. The truth Mark Ruffalo’s Robert Bilott chases through the film is too vast and terrifying to be palliated by a new box of evidence or an intellectually robust court filing, and the film’s atmosphere is correspondingly oppressive, its cinematography (by storied DP and Haynes regular Edward Lachman) dull and morose, its spaces cheerless. Exterior shots carry an omnipresent blue-green tint, as though the air itself is poisoned; which, in time, the film will reveal that it is.
Already some correspondences with The Mothman Prophecies, both stylistic and thematic, are emerging, and if not belabored too heavily the full list of these correspondences is striking. Both films make the early stages in the hero’s journey—a frequent touchstone of both the legal thriller and the investigative horror film—into something dangerous, even potentially catastrophic. Where the cynical hero of a cheerier film might find himself reluctantly thrust onto the trail of something just, something righteous, Klein and Bilott are drawn despite themselves into the yawning orbit of a truth that might cost them everything, Klein by his wife’s sketches and whispered invocations of an impossible creature, Bilott by a friend of his grandmother’s whose cows are mysteriously dying. Both films find further menace in the glum and barren landscapes of a post-industrial America, leafless trees, unprepossessing rural homes, the looming smokestacks of a chemical plant. Indeed, the landscapes of Dark Waters and The Mothman Prophecies are not merely similar, they are essentially identical: both are set in virtually the same stretch of the border between Ohio and West Virginia. Point Pleasant and Parkersburg, the West Virginia towns haunted by accelerating doom in these two films, are separated by perhaps an hour’s drive through the Ohio River valley.
If the chemical plant in The Mothman Prophecies is a site of potential tragedy, here the threat is all too concrete. Responding to a strident demand for help from his grandmother’s friend, Billot finds a cattle farm that has been transformed by chemical runoff from an adjacent DuPont landfill into a macabre mass grave: almost two hundred cows dying with massive, hideous tumors, their teeth stained, their once-docile temperaments transformed. In another scene with clear horror antecedents, Billot and the farmer find themselves under sudden attack from one of these cows, which huffs and shuffles ominously, like a creature possessed, before charging; Billot cowers in terror while the farmer kills the cow with a shotgun. A shot from Billot’s point of view during the confrontation shows the farmer’s dog furiously chasing its tail, as though beginning also to succumb to whatever claimed the cow. It’s a moment that almost invokes the extended Iraq sequence at the beginning of The Exorcist (1973), which depicts evil as something miasmic, ambient, prone to almost metastatic manifestations in the surrounding area. Whatever poison Billot is investigating seems to exert an almost supernatural force; the land itself makes monsters, now.
Why, exactly, this structurally boilerplate investigative thriller should have some stylistic trappings of a horror film—which fade to some extent as the movie progresses, but are, as has been seen, pronounced at the outset—is a question to which Billot’s investigation provides the answer. What DuPont has been burying in the land adjoining the farm turns out to be PFOA, or C8, an unbreakable fluorocarbon chain known by the company, since at least the 1960s, to produce a range of cancers and birth defects. DuPont has concealed this fact from the public, with the help of a ludicrously starry-eyed regime of corporate ‘self-regulation’, for a very simple reason: C8 is the key chemical used to manufacture Teflon, a billion-dollar-a-year product for DuPont. It is hard to join Billot in this realization without feeling a sickening lurch in your gut; in a film of this kind there are always victims, farms ruined, children diseased or stillborn, but this is Teflon, this is everywhere, in your kitchen, your carpets, your clothing. The film’s most masterful sequence sees Rob laying out the conspiracy to a series of audiences in different venues: to his wife, to the managing partner of his firm, to the chief legal counsel of DuPont, to the farmer who started the case. His methodical recitation of the facts is intercut with shots of his wife being brought back to give birth, Billot trailing along beside her in a state of panic, terrified that the damage has already been done.
To a significant extent, of course, it has. DuPont has not simply poured C8 into one landfill adjoining a luckless cattle farm in Parkersburg, nor just brought it into our homes in a thousand different ways; they’ve poured it into the Ohio River, blasted particles of it into the air. The film’s photography has that ugly blue-green tint for a reason, the poison is already everywhere; you are watching, in a sense, a crime procedural in which one of the victims is you. The Mothman Prophecies grapples with the fear of sudden catastrophe, its titular prophet (prophets?) foretelling the mass casualty events of our everyday nightmares, an earthquake, a plane crash, a bridge collapse. In Dark Waters the disaster is slower-moving, more diffuse, immeasurably harder to see, but it proceeds with the same sense of fearful inevitability. Its engineers at DuPont Chemical are anything but invisible; as the film observes, they are omnipresent in Parkersburg, the town’s largest employers, funders of the community center, sponsors of the local baseball team. Their reach and their influence are all too plain. The mechanisms by which they have poisoned the world, however, are no more in reach of normal people than the Mothman, whose bright red eyes are all around, whose movements follow a logic all their own.
The moral arc of the legal thriller bends towards justice, and so Dark Waters becomes gentler down the stretch, as the horrifying immensity of a world-historic crime gives way to the somewhat narrower question of restitution for Parkersburg, for Billot’s friend the farmer and thousands of other poisoned West Virginians. (This includes the people of Point Pleasant, where the DuPont settlement funded C8-related upgrades to two water treatment facilities in 2009.) That Billot will win, against the odds, is virtually a structural property of the genre, and allows the film to end with the crowd-pleasing dollars-and-cents closing crawl that so often follows a legal denouement. But this text before the credits tells us something else, too: that C8, a ‘forever chemical’ which living organisms cannot process, has been found in virtually every living thing on earth. The monster is not dead, not really. Michael Myers will return; the family who buys the haunted house will find the box in the attic. Relief, in horror cinema, is almost always temporary, and night will always come again.
Towards the end of Dark Waters there is a series of establishing shots that crisscross the built landscape of the film: a Benihana, a gas station, the skyline of Cincinnati, the mechanized hellscape of the DuPont chemical plant by night. Parkersburg, West Virginia under darkness, with the shimmering expanse of the Ohio River curled around it. This, the film seems to suggest, is what it’s all about: the places we have made and the prices we have paid for them, the interconnected world that stretches from big cities to exurban chain restaurants to rural hollers sodden with death. That The Mothman Prophecies lives in virtually the same places is both a coincidence and not; a particular kind of nightmare haunts the post-industrial landscape of America, the fear that a bill is coming due for our prosperity and our neglect, and that innocent people will pay it. But American horror has a nightmare for all of its spaces, and the roads and highways that tie them all together teem with things that whisper and move through the air, things that can only be seen at the end, things that kill. There is no escaping them in this world we’ve built, nowhere to run where something isn’t waiting. We’ve seen to that.
Damn dude! I’ve been yearning to revisit Mothman! Excellent.