I Am the Doorway (Collected Within Night Shift)
Dream Director: Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin)
This one’s a doozy. “I Am the Doorway” looks at an astronaut who goes into space, encounters aliens, and that encounter ends up allowing them to use his body as a portal of sorts. At first it’s just eyeballs growing on his finger so they can see what’s happening on Earth, but soon they’re outright inhabiting and using his body as their vessel. There is some truly disturbing material here (including a particularly grisly murder of a young boy at the hands of the unwilling astronaut) as the astronaut still has his thoughts, but not his body, and has to just “watch” and process what he’s being forced to do. Also the degree of torture he puts himself through is considerable, at first trying to burn off the clutch of eyes on him (they grow back) and then ultimately trying to kill himself so the aliens can’t further gain information on us and doom the planet. This sort of internal struggle and will of minds seems like a story tailor made for adaptation, with it not being too difficult to convey the trauma in the protagonist’s head, with there still being plenty of weird effects to highlight, too. Plus, there is plenty of this story’s skeleton to expand upon, putting the astronaut through an even more torturous inhabitation. It’s the sort of paralyzing story that Jonathan Glazer (seriously) or Christopher Nolan (channeling his work in Following) could knock out of the park.
