Editorials
“Marianne” Creator Samuel Bodin On What He Had Planned for Season 2 of Netflix’s Series [Phantom Limbs]
phantom limb /ˈfan(t)əm’lim/ n. an often painful sensation of the presence of a limb that has been amputated.
Welcome to Phantom Limbs, a recurring feature which will take a look at intended yet unproduced horror sequels and remakes – extensions to genre films we love, appendages to horror franchises that we adore – that were sadly lopped off before making it beyond the planning stages. Here, we will be chatting with the creators of these unmade extremities to gain their unique insight into these follow-ups that never were, with the discussions standing as hopefully illuminating but undoubtedly painful reminders of what might have been.
For this installment, we’ll be taking a look at the unproduced second season of Netflix’s brilliant yet sadly cancelled French horror television series Marianne. Joining us is Samuel Bodin, the creator/co-writer/director of Marianne, who will be clueing us into what was meant to transpire after the first season’s chilling final moments. Along the way, Mr. Bodin will discuss why the show was cancelled, whether or not it could still be renewed in light of its considerable international reception, and if the story of Marianne, Emma and Co. could possibly live on in other media.
And for those who haven’t yet seen Marianne, make certain to remedy this quickly. The show is excellent, and the following discussion will be spoiler-filled.
Victoire Du Bois as Emma Larsimon
Premiering in September 2019, the first season of Marianne quickly garnered stellar reviews (it sits at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing) and a fanbase all too happy to sing its praises. With its positive reception and a finale that begs for further installments, a second season would have seemed a foregone conclusion for this dark little gem of a show. And yet, Netflix ultimately made the choice to cancel the series. Mr. Bodin explains: “At first, we didn’t know which numbers that Netflix were considering to give a green light for a second season. We didn’t know if it would be the international numbers, or the French numbers. When you create a horror story in France, you count on international distribution. It’s in the international that you can find your audience. There are horror lovers in France, they love it a lot, but it’s a little niche. So when you start to create a horror story in French, you create it to open it to the world. What we have learned after the opening of the first season is that Netflix, for a French series, only looked at the numbers of French people who had finished all of the season. Marianne went very, very well at the international level, and I am so happy that Marianne was so watched and seen, but the number of French people who finished the show in France was not big enough to justify a second season. So they cancelled the second season.”
As it stands then, we have only the one season of Marianne. But what was the initial plan for the series? How many seasons might the show have gone, and how much planning and writing had gone into blocking out those follow-up seasons? “At the time, I really wanted to do three seasons. The story in my head takes three seasons, three acts for me. Three big chapters. With Quoc Dang Tran, my co-writer, we had started to work on the second season because Netflix loved the show, and they asked us to start writing very soon after Season 1’s release. So with Quoc and another writer, Julien Honoré, we started working.”
Lucie Boujenah as Camile
So what would the second season’s story have entailed? Mr. Bodin notes here that the plot points are a bit messy, as the writers’ work had just begun. “With the first season, the theme is friendship, and forgiveness. What we wanted to say was that you can be friends with people for a long time if you can forgive. If you can forgive very bad things, you will be friends forever. To accept friends as they are, with the mistakes they’ve made. For the second season, we really wanted to talk about love. Because in the first season, Emma tells herself that she’s in love. But she’s not in love. It was the idea of love in her head. In the second season, we wanted her to really fall in love. She would really fall in love with an older woman – a very classy, sophisticated novelist. [Emma] hated what she wrote, and she meets this person in a strange circumstance, and falls very, very deeply in love. Also, the story of the second season is about what mistakes you can make when you really fall in love. This woman will use her in a diabolical, evil way. Camile [Emma’s assistant], tries to save Emma and open Emma’s eyes to the love between [she and Camile]. It was her arc in the second season.
“The second thing – we really wanted to expand the universe. We really wanted to go in the city that we talked a lot about in the first season. A big part of the second season would be in the city, near the sea. She would meet her friends who were cursed or dead in the first season. We really wanted to explore that.
“For us, the second season starts with Emma, nine months after the end of the first season. Emma is not pregnant. She has a normal belly. In her bathroom, there are a lot of pregnancy tests – all negatives. At the end of the first season, the test was positive. But after this one, there has not been another positive test, they are all negative. So maybe, she thinks, it was all in her head. During the first episode, she sleeps with a guy during a party. At this point, at the end of the first episode when she’s making love with this guy, her belly begins to grow, taking the shape of a pregnant, nine month belly.
“At the very beginning of the first episode, she received letters from a facility, saying they can help her with ‘her situation’. But, she has no situation…until her belly starts to grow. After that – ‘Okay, I need help! What do I have in my belly?!’ And Camile takes her to the facility to see what they can do for her. It started like that.”
Mireille Herbstmeyer as Mrs. Daugeron
Given the show’s title, one imagines the eponymous villain would be returning for this second season. But, wasn’t Marianne defeated in the final episode of the previous season? “Yes, she was defeated. [But she would have come back], because Emma wanted to get rid of what was in her belly. The baby, in a way, is Marianne’s baby. So Marianne haunts Emma, and follows her, saying ‘No, don’t hurt my baby.’ The whole thing about what women can do with their bodies, the liberties they have, the violence they have been subjected to for ages. It was all of this, and adoption…it would be very complicated, but we really wanted to ask those questions. We really wanted Marianne to be a feminist show, and those questions are very important for us.”
With Emma’s baby belonging to Marianne, in a way, one wonders – what of the dark figure who appeared to have fathered Emma’s baby while appearing to her as childhood friend Seby? Was that the devil? “It’s a demon. It’s a really particular demon in demonology. He lives in the city near the sea, where there are many demons. We would have met him in human form. We would love to have had a lot of demonic discussions with him. What is a demon? You can do spiritualism scenes, exorcism scenes – but when you can really talk with them, hear what they have to say, their position on everything….we wanted to dive into this mythology and talk about that.”
Speaking of Seby, how would he figure into the second season? Would Emma have continued pursuing him romantically? “No, no. Seby was just a projection of love for Emma. We hadn’t planned to see Seby again. At the beginning, we said – ‘Okay, she tried to convince herself that she loved someone.’ But in Season 2, she really falls in love with someone. We would have seen Emma really in love, and it would have been a different Emma than the one we’d seen in Season 1.”
In the first season, Emma was presented as a successful novelist, having written a number of novels starring a character named Lizzie Larck, in tales inspired by her childhood dealings with Marianne. However, Mr. Bodin notes that Emma’s abilities as a writer would have begun to fail her in the second season. “In the first season, she wanted to stop writing those stories. But it’s like a ego thing. ‘I can write something better, more sophisticated.’ When the second season starts, we realize that she has tried to write something else, but maybe she is not good enough. So she goes back to Lizzie Larck, but even what she writes [for that character] is not good enough. Her publisher tells her that it isn’t good. In the first season, it’s easy for her to write, but because maybe there is something about Marianne in that. Something Marianne gives her, in a way. So now Marianne is not here to write, and Emma struggles a lot with that. She will realize ‘Oh my God, I don’t know how to write at all.’ It’s a problem. ‘I could write in the past because I was possessed, in a way. But I don’t know how to write at all.’ So in my mind, I really wanted to make sequences with a voiceover like in the first season, but with bad [writing]. By the end of the second season, she starts to write Lizzie Larck again, but in another style. So we had to work to find a way to make the audience understand the new style, because we love to talk about literature in Marianne. It’s a part of the series.”
While the second season of Marianne wasn’t fully realized at the writing stage, one still wonders if any thought had gone into where the story would have gone even beyond Season 2, and what the overall plan for the series might have been. Where would the story of Marianne and Emma have ultimately ended up? “I have to be honest…we don’t know. When I write a TV show, I project myself into a [limited] matter of time. I say, ‘Oh, now we have a season. I really want to write three seasons, but now I have a season. I’ll put everything I have into that.’ Because when you write it and shoot it, a character can change. Their contact with reality, contact with the people with whom you will work…the series transforms. So if you project too far in any way, things will change. So I can’t tell you where we would have arrived in the third season. I have no idea.”
Mr. Bodin, who at the time of this interview was just beginning to prep production for his upcoming Lionsgate feature Cobweb, finished up our interview with his final thoughts on Marianne Season 2: “We really wanted to talk about love with a character like Emma. We really wanted to share this depiction of love with her and the audience of Marianne. It would’ve been so cool. Horror stories are always about love, in a way. When you are in love, you can be scared. Very, very much. But that is the game. We will find a way to talk about love in another story. We are already so happy to have been able to share this first season with you. To tell you this story. It’s been an opportunity and a joy. Thank you all so much!”
Very special thanks to Samuel Bodin for his time and insights.
Samuel Bodin
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
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