Editorials
The Films That Unknowingly Predicted the Horrors of 2020
Genre films have been holding metaphorical mirrors up to our faces for as long as they’ve existed, uncomfortably (but necessarily) forcing us to examine our surroundings as well as ourselves through ways we can accessibly grasp. Thoughtful and reactionary, we’re astutely aware how much horror, especially, pointedly imitates life and historical context— everything from Nosferatu to Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Dawn of the Dead is evidentiary to that— but it’s even more chilling when genre precedes reality, unknowingly predicting the real-life horrors that would follow in its wake.
And 2020 has felt like one, long, nightmarish film reel of real-life horrors that few could’ve seen coming— with the exception of some filmmakers whose recent releases feel unbelievably on-the-nose, as if they had possessed a cinematic crystal ball before writing and directing their latest features. The Beach House, She Dies Tomorrow, and Rent-A-Pal were our horror forecasters for the year 2020— alarmingly so— and even their creators are surprised by this.
Jeffrey A. Brown’s timely The Beach House could’ve fallen into the hole of countless other contagion movies that feel too far-fetched and impersonal to affect audiences that never endured anything of the sort. However, what Brown calls his “confrontational” film, which Shudder released this summer, hits a little deeper considering the current state of affairs.
When a young couple arrives at a relative’s remote beach house, the unnamed town feels…off. Deserted. Eerily quiet. Apocalyptic, even. These sequences of desertion are nothing new; 28 Days Later and A Quiet Place depict doomsday all the same, yet, viewing the opening sequence of Beach House within this specific timeframe immediately recalls the initial months of our own early 2020 quasi-apocalypse, as everything was closed and everyone was subjugated to the indoors, with American towns completely devoid of activity. By placing the film inside a beach town— transforming a typically idyllic setting where many of us would be spending our summers under normal circumstances into a backdrop for fear— it has begged us to heed its warning to stay home. For the first time in our lifespans, watching the latest end-of-times on film felt tangible, succeeding at what these kinds of movies have imbued all along, as Brown describes: “Any possibility at joy and fulfillment becomes a fleeting pipe dream when your home and life is disrupted by yet another cataclysm. Then it’s down to base survival.”
He explains, “Throughout writing The Beach House, I was dealing with my own fears, broken down and recombined into a horror narrative, to somehow keep these alligators at bay. Before Covid, I would watch science documentaries and skip the pandemic/contagion episodes because they freaked me out. Dealing with these anxieties through a creative outlet was an honest exploration of my nightmares in seductively comfortable settings, which is how I see my life. That the alligators are now at the door is horrible.”
The characters in the film become exposed to a very wet, very slimy contagion that is transmitted through the ocean water (and air) leaving lesions, gross infections, and seemingly slow, painful deaths to those affected. As overheard on a car radio, the disease is “entirely unknown” and a mystery to all, tragically leaving a few characters with the choice to either suffer through it or take their own lives. What’s scarier, though, is the few answers we’re given: the film’s disease is rather mysterious and unexplained, much like Covid still remains a mystery to us. While we, at least, become more cognizant and continue to discover more about Covid’s uncertainties, the characters of The Beach House never stand a chance. The filmic, unnamed infection ravaging through the town is reminiscent of a nature-fights-back contagion— almost a punishment to humans for years of neglecting their surroundings. (Even though Brown suggests that this contagion is less vindictive and more so a product of cosmic horror realms.) Vengeful or not, this thing is just unnecessarily cruel— like our own very real situation.
“I’d hope a viewer of The Beach House ultimately feels less alone by the movie, to know I am having similar anxieties, and we are having a conversation about these concerns through the characters and the imagery,” Brown says. “Even in trying to figure out how all the pieces add up in the end— that’s the conversation I wanted to have with the audience.”
Reversely, Amy Seimetz’s contained psychodrama She Dies Tomorrow doesn’t depict a thrilling fight for survival, like other contenders in the pandemic subgenre would. Instead, it looks at how those infected choose to live their remaining days after already accepting their deaths as imminent.
When a woman named Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) contracts a viral sickness, convincing her she will die the next day, she confides in friends before inadvertently passing the belief on to them, until their collective worriment spreads like a disease. The film follows how each person handles their own self-destructing grief for, what they presume, is the end of their lives: some try to protect their children; others get drunk and demand their corpses be turned into leather jackets. Less cataclysmic on a grander scale and more introspective, She Dies Tomorrow is the embodiment of what a personal apocalypse feels like (and what 2020 has felt like for each of us, individually) in 84 minutes: absurd, existential, unusually morbid, and internally anxious for not knowing what the next day, week, or month is going to bring— the only harsh exception being death.
As Seimetz explains, her film was intended to be a metaphor for grappling with anxiety: “It’s a weird conundrum, because when you have anxiety, you should share that with people. (But) I always feel like I’m burdening them with it. So there’s the irrational fear that I’m spreading my personal shit with everyone.”
She continues, “In addition to that, there is something with words— you say it out loud, and then fear (spreads.) If you think of it like a virus— I think of fear as a barbed presence— even if you can laugh it off in the moment, somewhere in you, it sticks in.”
Even for those of us who may have never been diagnosed with anxiety before can probably connect to it this particular year, as adjusting to every hiccup within our plans, schedules, and routines has been challenging, to say the least. She Dies Tomorrow does, however, offer a glimmer of hope and comfort, positing for us to stop pressuring ourselves to have it altogether. During the film’s final moments, a character whispers to herself, “It’s okay; I’m not okay”— reminding us that, “It’s okay to not be okay,” as Seimetz says. “That always brings me a bit of solace. It’s correct to feel those feelings of anxiety.”
A consequence of quarantine, solitude has become our uninvited friend during 2020. The cancellation of social gatherings and physical proximity has led us to utilize tech-friendly means of communicating to fill the void, even when zoom calls and social media interactions could never be as fulfilling. While Jon Stevenson’s Rent-A-Pal may take place 30 years in the past, its morality tale is more relevant to the present: A lonely bachelor named David (Brian Landis Folkins) stumbles across a “Rent-A-Friend” VHS tape while searching for companionship and becomes addicted to his one-sided, pre-taped “friend” Andy, (Wil Wheaton) pushing away the few IRL relationships he has. Like most of us in this very moment, David feels trapped in the confines of his home, caring for his elderly mother full-time with little freedom and nothing to look forward to. But turning to technology to aid his loneliness backfires, as his friend inside the VCR proves to be nothing more than a toxic influence on him, leading to his downward spiral.
David’s downfall becomes a warning for us too. Subsisting our recent loneliness with an over-reliance on time spent online has been detrimental to many of us— warping our realities and getting consumed with daily Internet trivialities, i.e. doom scrolling, Twitter drama, and/or validation-seeking from all the wrong sources. David clings on to the “conversations” he shares with Andy, which, at first, seem fixed and impersonal, before escalating into violent and offensive. Similar to our feeding off of bad news and negativity online, David has allowed technology to give him all the wrong, unhealthy ideas about what constitutes legitimate connection. Stevenson considers Wheaton’s Andy to be an allegory for all of these things: “Andy is a predator who preys on the vulnerable; vulnerable people seek validation through whatever sources they can find. For most people, the closest and most immediate source of validation is their device, so it’s no surprise that predators flock to the Internet.”
Stevenson was all too familiar with isolation, well before the pandemic. Initially inspired by the real 1987 VHS service “Rent-A-Friend” during a dark time in his own life, Stevenson felt compelled to write a horror film based on how that tape made him feel. But he didn’t expect it to be released during such a time when it would be so connective to audiences: “When I wrote the film, I was completely isolated myself, albeit for very different reasons. So now that everyone is isolated, both physically and emotionally, a movie like this might resonate with people. There’s so much relief in knowing you’re not alone in whatever struggle you’re going through.”
2020 may carry a heavy load, and as we process the traumas and curveballs it has thrown at us, there’s an odd comfort in watching movies that parallel our experiences, making sense of similar issues. And that’s what they’re there for: “Films are amazing in that they can help people articulate their own feelings, in the same way that nightmares help us work out our anxieties and fears,” Stevenson says. “So, it seems weird that a horror film might bring people comfort, but it can.”
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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