Editorials
10 New Year’s Resolutions That Could Kill You!
As we near the dawn of a new year, it’s understandable that you might want to mark the occasion by making it the first day for a brand new you. Perhaps you want to have more money, or you’d like to get in shape. Maybe you have finally grown tired of being a big jerk that everyone hates. Who knows what your problem is? But, as I intend to illustrate, it is sometimes better to accept who you are now rather than go find some “better” version of yourself. Some New Year’s resolutions are far more dangerous than they seem.
Head inside for more!
“I’m Going to Lose Weight”
Easy there, fatboy. You may get sick with disgust every time you look in the mirror, but keep in mind how much work it will take to get rid of all that flab. You’ll have to eat plants, and pretty much only plants, for the duration of your weight loss. This can lead to suicide.
But then there’s the obvious exercise. Our bodies do not like strenuous activity. That’s why working out sucks. You’re body is telling you “Ow!” You can only ignore a body saying “Oh!” so long before it blows up internally, committing suicide without your permission.
And let’s say you lose your weight and get real attractive. Guess what. Now you’re going to have a stalker problem. Often these cases end in death, if not for you then at least your pets. It’s just not worth the risk.
“I’m Going to be Nicer”
They say you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar. That’s true so long as we’re just talking about catching flies. As far as people are concerned, many find vinegar preferable to honey, particularly on salads.
If it’s people you’re after, you’ll catch more with money, which rhymes with honey and can buy honey, but in all other ways has nothing to do with honey. To get money, you need to be a jerk. Everyone knows this. If you truly succeed at being a nicer person, you run a greater risk of being poor, which, I mean, you might as well sign your death warrant right now.
Nice people face all kinds of dangers. They refrain from honking in traffic. They have to wait for things to be offered to them instead of just grabbing whatever they want. They must swallow all anger and frustration and fart out a rainbow of happiness, the process of which puts extraordinary stress on the heart. So if you don’t want to die of a happiness heart attack, stick with being a nasty douchebag.
“I’m Going to Spend More Time With My Family”
What a wonderful thought! Family, after all, is what the holidays are all about.
The things is, if this is you, your family might have already learned to get on without your presence. You can’t just jump back in the game after years of neglect and expect everyone to be happy about it. They’re just as likely to kill you dead and get back to the way things were before you got all sentimental.
“I’m Going to Quit Drinking/Smoking”
People always say this, and it’s easy to see why. Smoking and drinking is not only very hazardous to your health but affects your social standing as well. You can’t hold a job while reeking of Jack Daniels, and no one likes hanging out with someone who constantly smells like chimneys and cough drops.
But consider the difficulty of going straight. The strain of detoxing might be enough to kill you way earlier than expected. But more than that, it will make you really mean and hard to be around for a long time, a couple weeks if you’re lucky. In that amount of time, you’re very likely to get murdered.
And then there’s the point no one wants to make: Life sucks. Life without booze and smokes is nearly unbearable. Your chances for relapse are beaten only by your chances for suicide.
“I’m Going to Get More Organized”
If you’re a person with homes chaotic enough to utter these words, take heed. Things in your massive piles of unsorted crap may seem ugly and inspire nasty faces from parents and possible girlfriends, but it is your natural living condition. Going against that grain might seem nice but could easily prove fatal.
Let’s say you’re walking around with no lights on. You used to know the way around, what you had to climb over and what you had to duck underneath. Now, it’s all clear and the freedom of movement makes you walk faster than you normally would have. Whoops! You just ran into your broadsword wall display. Whoops! You just fell down the stairs. Whoops! You just tripped on a piece of furniture positioned to emit the highest amount of feng shui, and there are no twenty year old newspapers to break your fall. If you take medication, good luck finding them in an organized house. It’s hiding in one of 20-30 drawers and sub-drawers.
You need your mess. Without it, you’ll be lucky to make it a week.
“I’m Going to Learn Spanish”
Bad idea. Let’s say you go to the bookstore and buy all the Learn Spanish gear known to man: Books, CDs, Computer Software, the works. Sounds pretty harmless so far. But soon you’ll want to practice what you learned. Naturally, this urge will take you to a Mexican restaurant.
Nachos and burritos and good, but too much of that stuff will put you in the hospital. All the time you spend practicing Spanish will alienate friends and family you do have, most of whom probably love you regardless of how many languages you speak. You may be able to watch El Mariachi without subtitles, but there’s no one left to identify your body when your lungs fill with refried beans.
This fate is not limited to Spanish, by the way. Substitute which ever language and its main stereotypical food, and you’ll find the same results. In the case of Japanese, it might actually be worth it.
“I’m Going to Climb a Mountain”
Good for you! You want to do something physically difficult that puts you in the beautiful outdoors. Unfortunately, you’re probably not going to live through the ordeal, but your spirit is in the right place.
Mountain climbing is very dangerous. Obviously, you might fall to your death. But few people understand the hidden threats that come with the activity. It’s way worse than you think.
First off: The Goats. They don’t like people and aren’t shy about butting you off cliff edges. Birds of prey also don’t like you, and some are big enough to pick you up by the shoulders and drop you straight into the mouth of Hell.
On top of that, many mountains are closed for climbing, so park rangers might shoot you for trespassing. Also, those people who hunt fellow humans for fun and/or meat often take post on mountains, since climbers are so likely to die anyway. Additionally, and this is a long shot, your mountain might be alive and in the middle of battle with another mountain, as seen in The Hobbit.
All in all, mountain climbing may look good on the outset, but in reality it’s more like a one way ticket to buying the farm. Actually, buying a farm would be a much safer New Year’s resolution, so long as it has no goats.
“I’m Going to Become a Snake Handler”
So many innocent, mild mannered people make this odd and increasingly popular New Year’s resolution. They think some sort of happiness and life improvement will come from the handling of and playing with poisonous snakes.
Well, snakes are fun, but they like to bite when frightened, that fills their handlers with often lethal doses of venom. This kills you. I mean, I don’t know what else I can possible say on the matter. Don’t juggle snakes.
“I’m Going to Play More Russian Roulette”
I don’t really get where you’re coming from, but please do not do this. Your life is not worth just throwing away for no reason. Granted, it looks like something maybe tough guys do, but you have so much to live for. Just because I can’t think of anything specific, that doesn’t mean I’m only saying what you want to hear in order to dissuade you from blowing your brains out.
You may think the math is on your side, but that’s an illusion. If you’ve ever seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, you know how the math can lie to you. There are other, better ways to have fun and be a daredevil.
“I’m Going to Jump Off a Skyscraper”
Okay. Please stop making New Year’s resolutions. You clearly want to kill yourself and there’s nothing I nor anyone else can say to dissuade you. What an awful waste.
You will die when the force of gravity crushes you against whatever hard surface stops your fall. Maybe it will be a car. Maybe it will be another person. Maybe you’ll fall directly through an open manhole and become a fun bit of trivia. One way or another, this New Year’s resolution turns you into a jelly covered pancake.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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