The Watchers: BUDDY and TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Two new horror pictures play like media studies seminars. That they manage to be both archly artificial genre commentary and functional entertainments makes for a fun time at the movies. Take Buddy, for instance. It has a great premise. What if there was an episode of Barney where the kid characters start to suspect Barney is a murderer? I can imagine a lot of ways for this hook to go awry. But there’s a total aesthetic commitment to the bit that makes the movie. It plays as a loop of episodes, squared-off, shot-on-video, late-90’s in look and feel. Everything from the primary-color sets, simple melodies, and vintage fashions down to the Comic Sans credits is just right. Buddy is a seemingly affable big orange unicorn mascot, living in a clubhouse on an astroturf soundstage. There he sings songs with and dispenses advice for a small group of kids. There’s a talking mailbox, a bunny in overalls, a nurse, a postman, and a googly-eyed train car. So far so normally absurd. That Buddy’s a murderer slowly reveals itself over the first episode, each subsequent entry becoming more deranged as the kids have to fight back and try to escape. The convincing mix of the form and content sells the curdled nostalgia at its core. 

It becomes a movie about the hidden abuses lurking beneath seemingly innocent programming, an exploded metaphor about what it feels like to watch an old show with fresh knowledge about behind-the-scenes nastiness. (Anyone successfully get through rewatching any random 20-year-old episode of a Nickelodeon sitcom since the documentary about creepy behavior toward those child stars?) The movie’s total absorption in its look and tone, like a nightmare you’d have after falling asleep on the couch with the TV on in the middle of the night, makes sense as the work of writer-director Casper Kelly. You might remember his short film Too Many Cooks, which was a viral sensation in 2014. That was a pitch perfect parody of 80s family sitcom theme songs that went on and on, mutating genres until it broke through the fourth wall into a slasher picture that finally collapsed in existential dread and apocalyptic context collapse. Buddy is a feature length version of the same impulse, stretched out with a few choice intentional swerves out of the style to create some breathing room, but always returning to the chamber of absurdity where laughs of incredulity accompany each splash of blood. 

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is a similar hall of horror mirrors, a long self-reflexive trance state. It’s also about what it’s like to like horror movies, even, and especially, bad ones. It understands the strange formative psychic tremors that the right movie at the right time has on one’s sense of self. Star Hannah Einbinder plays a young director tasked with remaking a problematic cult slasher classic: Camp Miasma. Like the Friday the 13th franchise with a soupçon of Sleepaway Camp, it has a gender-bending villain named Little Death who perpetually wakes up from beneath the lake and goes on a killing spree. Einbinder’s earnest, awkward filmmaker is told to bring the dormant franchise’s views on gender up to date. Flush with an idea, she travels to find the reclusive star of the original (Gillian Anderson with an imperious honey-fried accent) in hopes of talking her into appearing in the reboot. The older woman lives at the abandoned summer camp that was the movie’s filming location. Now, in a matte-painting winter in the middle of nowhere, they have a tense meeting of increasingly entangled psychosexual conversation and bodily awareness. 

In the film’s centerpiece of reflexivity, the two have a discussion about gender, identity, perspective—and sex and violence, or, as the actress says, “flesh and fluids”—before and after screening the original picture. It becomes a film within a film that then further abstracts into muddled memories and flashbacks and sequences. Some feel authentically 80s in their scuzzy graininess. Others get slippery with anachronisms, half-remembered impressions rich with emotional baggage. They embody how horror fans toggle their identification between victim and predator, the penetrated and the perpetrator. If it all sounds artsy and academic, so it is. But it’s also so physical and fraught in its tensions between its leads that it’s hard to shake its dark undertow of confusion and discovery. It’s also constantly winking with meta asides, puncturing but not deflating the heavy mood. If you saw Schoenbrun’s other films you’re familiar with this sense of one’s identity tangled up in the media they consume. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a vulnerable teenage girl gets lost in a spiral of internet influence. In I Saw the TV Glow, lonely teenagers get lost in the lore of a cult series that connects them. Another allegory of displacement and discovery, this new film is their broadest and narrowest, an intimate exposure and disclosure between two women desperate to filter the voids in their lives through the art that shapes them and drives them to new insights into their minds and bodies. 

Child's Play: IF and I SAW THE TV GLOW

John Krasinski’s IF is a miserable, infantilizing family film that disrespects children and adults in equal measure. It’s advertised as coming to us “from the imagination of…” the Office actor turned writer/director. If his Quiet Place movies, workmanlike horror pictures with modest charms, were enough to convince you he had one, here’s reason to doubt. It’s sloppy, sentimental hogwash about Imaginary Friends abandoned by children who grew up and forgot them. One girl (Cailey Fleming) encounters some of them corralled by a tired, impish ringleader and caretaker (Ryan Reynolds). She’s sad because she has to live with her grandma (Fiona Shaw) while her dad (Krasinski) undergoes surgery for an unnamed ailment. For all we know, he merely has a terminal case of whimsy, what with his few scenes eventually petering out with limp quips and smirking self-satisfied pauses for laughs or tears that never arrive. Since the girl’s mom died of implied cancer in the opening montage, it’s understandable that she’s leery to see her dad in the hospital, and amazing she doesn’t get more exasperated by mild japes like dancing with an IV bag on which he’s placed googly eyes, or when he hides in the closet and pretends to have escaped out the window with a ladder of bedsheets. She reacts to this struggle by retreating into her creativity. Or does she? It’s all a bit too simple to be this fuzzy.

The crux of the ostensible emotion is the group of CG creatures wandering melancholically without their former children—creatures that only the girl and Reynolds can see. They all look like Monsters, Inc rejects and have big name cameo voices that rarely register as such, while they mope about doing nothing. The movie wants us to think it’s sad that they’ve been forgotten and should be reunited. But they aren’t real characters and never do anything for anyone. Ah, maybe they reawaken an inner child of some grump for a moment of two. But to what end? It’s best scenes—anything involving Shaw, a dance number to Tina Turner, the girl’s eventual tearful, spit-flecked bedside breakdown—feel dropped in from a better movie, one without its cloying contradictions and flat staging. Here’s a movie that tries to be an ode to youthful imagination being a balm for troubled times. Instead it bumbles its way into saying that we should never grow up and put away childish things. It’s arguing in favor of a permanent immaturity. Why? Because it’s a cheap hit of feel-good when confronting adult emotions is too difficult. Yeesh. We’re not exactly a society overcrowded with maturity.

Ironically, IF’s opposite is likely playing in the theater across the hall in a big enough multiplex. Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is a slow, entranced nightmare about getting trapped in childhood nostalgia. It conjures a fuzzy, bleary vibe and rides its off-kilter tremors to an odd, grotesque ending. The intimate movie follows two isolated, disaffected adolescents in the late-90’s getting hooked on a weird television program about psychic teenage girls fighting phantasmagoric monsters. Clearly a blend of X-Files, Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Are You Afraid of the Dark? it’s easy to see why a freakish blend of kid-friendly plotting and woozy creature design airing late at night would mesmerize a young teen. These two kids seem especially prone to getting drawn into such an enveloping fantasy. One is a quiet, awkward, friendless 7th grade boy (Ian Foreman, though he grows into narrator Justice Smith) whose mother (Danielle Deadwyler) is dying and father (Fred Durst) is distant. The other is a lonely 9th grade girl (Brigette Lundy-Paine) from an abusive home. She introduces him to the creepy show, and is totally into its lore, such that it starts to become the architecture of her fantasies of running away. He's scared and hooked in equal measure. As Schoenbrun gives the interactions between the teens the kind of goosebump intimacy of lost souls connecting in their brokenness, the camera’s slowly mesmerized imagery lends a grainy, hushed suburban dreaminess and creeping dread.

It speaks directly to people who allow their adolescent obsessions to overtake their personality and identity, replacing satisfying adult pursuits with increasingly hollow simulacra of real experience. It becomes a way to avoid inner truths. Suddenly, a childish idea grows and darkens and inflates in complexity and importance. A key scene is when, late in the picture, so spoilers ahoy, our lead re-watches the show as an adult and finds something almost embarrassingly quaint. All that for this? This new view rattles and echoes off a maybe-imagined reunion that devolves into a darkly dreamy magical-realist monologue. How sad when love of a TV show seems to hide what you'd express as something truer about your identity than you’re ready to admit. And how frustrating to be unable to let that childhood comfort fantasy go. The movie’s mood is so intensely focused on the hypnotic tremors of this cultish entrapment bleeding between fantasy and reality that the final moments of the picture—clangs of hallucinatory violence followed by embarrassments, deflating and awkward—bring some kind of cringing reality crashing in. It’s about an inner hollowness that can never be filled so long as you’re chasing the unattainable—nostalgia, television, your adolescent understanding of your future, or your adult longing for youth. It’s ultimately a hazy movie feeling like a half-remembered nightmare slowly leaving your head after waking on the couch in the middle of the night, bathed in the TV glow.