Reviews
REVIEW: Who’s Watching ‘The Watcher’?
As someone from the New Jersey suburbs, who recently moved back to the suburbs after living in NYC for ten years, I was thoroughly obsessed with the story of The Watcher. I feel more like I’m in a horror movie since moving back than I ever did in NYC. In NYC, everywhere is so busy and loud that the suburbs feel creepily quiet and dark. So, to say I was excited about the Netflix series would be an understatement. I even have an ex who lives near the actual house—657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey, and I live about 45 minutes from the house.
I’ve read The Cut piece on the whole ordeal numerous times. It’s one of my favorite horror stories. I’ve gotten stoned and fallen down many a rabbit hole on theories about the true identity of The Watcher, thinking I can solve it. The wildest thing about the whole story is that there really is no obvious conclusion—it could be anyone who sent those ominous, threatening letters to the Broaddus family. Any new information on the story, which there rarely is, leads nowhere.
The story itself is terrifying to the folks it happened to, yet to outside perspectives it might feel a little dull. The Broaddus family bought their dream home for 1.3 million dollars in 2014, a six bedroom home with more than one fireplace. But Maria and Derek Broaddus, along with their three kids, never even fully moved into the home. One night, when Derek was at the house painting, he went out to check the mail and found a letter addressed to “The New Owner,” and it was like something out of a horror movie. The first letter was threatening right out the gate, reading:
657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out… Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children…Who am I? There are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day. Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one. Look out any of the many windows in 657 Boulevard at all the people who stroll by each day. Maybe I am one.
It was signed “The Watcher” and immediately, understandably, it terrified Derek. That first letter alone would have been enough to make me lose my shit if I never figured out who wrote it—But also, I can’t afford a 1.3-million-dollar mansion, so what do I know.
The letter, the writing, and the whole giving themselves a spooky name, truly feels like something fictional. As a kid, I always thought every robber, murderer, and crime boss gave themselves a fantastical name because I read too many comics and watched too many horror movies. So, this thing that felt like a real-life horror movie appealed to me, even as someone who does not get into true crime. Other than the letters and a list of possible suspects that included nearly every person in town (ranging from “angry realtor” to every person living on the street), there isn’t much evidence which only makes it feel more horror movie like—The Watcher feels like they could be Ghostface or Michael Myers (although the latter not quite being that verbose). The only substantial evidence in the case was when they identified the saliva on the envelope as belonging to a woman (I am not a forensic analyst, so I have no clue how that even works).
So, when Ryan Murphy got his hands on the story, I was both happy and worried. I am not Mr. Murphy’s biggest fan (but if I ever get hired to write on one of his projects, I will deny deny deny) and have only fully gotten through three seasons of American Horror Story. But the story of The Watcher was one that felt like it would incredibly work well as a Netflix limited series.
The Saturday after the show was released, I was very hungover and decided to binge the entire thing. I was as excited as someone with a paralyzing hangover could be. The show works well sometimes and other times does not. I think the biggest problem going into the series was that I felt like I could recite it by heart. So when the first episode presented every neighbor as a whacky cartoon villain and added more to that first letter, I was annoyed. But I persevered like the brave soldier I am (I am not). I loved and hated how often we saw a figure run by in the background.
The show became very Ryan Murphy with the addition of the “the neighbors might all be in a blood cult” storyline that went nowhere and the John Graff (played by Joe Mantello) of it all. Graff was a character who I’d thought was wholly made up as he felt like a character ripped right out of American Horror Story: Asylum. John Graff was first introduced in the series as a mysterious man who visits the home and has a creepy chat with the fictional main character of Dean Brannock (Bobby Cannavale). We later learn he is a former resident who murdered his entire family in the home and then vanished. I rolled my eyes at the big reveal that he was this murderer—until I googled it and found out the character was also based on a true story. John Graff was based on a real-life murderer named John List who lived in Westfield, murdered his family, and then vanished. The Ryan Murphy of it all was that he did not live at 657 Boulevard and his murders happened in 1971—he also never visited the home, as he was caught 18 years after the murders he committed.
The thing about The Watchers as a series is, aside from spooky letters, nothing else really happened to the family. Which is for sure spooky enough for real life, but for a show? It leaves you feeling a little empty. The show gave us episode after episode of Cannavale’s Dean and Naomi Watts’s Nora accusing nearly everyone on the entire stacked cast of being The Watcher but the only thing we end up knowing for sure of these fictionalized characters was that it wasn’t Watts’s Nora or Jennifer Coolidge’s eccentric realtor character Karen Calhoun.
A lot of folks in town, both in the series and in real life, felt it might’ve been a hoax done by the father. And, in both real life and in the series, we do know the father wrote at least one letter that was sent to the neighborhood. He owned up to it in his interview with The Cut. But they never sold their story anywhere and took a loss on the house—the series only happened when the extensive Reeves Wiedeman piece for The Cut was bought in a 7 figure deal from Netflix.
So, while the show doesn’t really give any new insight into the case and, spoiler, ends the way the real-life case ended—with the family selling the house at a loss, never finding out the identity of The Watcher, it still makes for a fun, albeit a little frustrating watch. Even to a horror fan who knows the story like he knows all the lines to the first Scream movie.
Maybe one day while staying up late, after smoking ridiculous amounts of weed, I’ll crack the case myself!
Return to Silent Hill is one of the most misogynistic horror films to grace the silver screen since 2006’s The Wicker Man. The bar that has to be cleared to earn that title isn’t just being overly violent or dismissive towards its female characters. A truly misogynistic film has to structure the world it contains and the way the characters within it respond to bow in service of the ideology, whether intentionally or otherwise. Its very cinematography, how it presents the characters through the very lens of the camera it’s shot on, has to comply to really make a film misogynistic.
I highly doubt Christophe Gans and company wrote and directed an adaptation of one of the most acclaimed video games in human history with the explicit intention of pushing a misogynistic narrative. After all, the first Silent Hill film he made is actually competent and generally tries to keep some cohesion with its source material. But there’s a level of tone deafness to how the film presents that would be impressive if it weren’t so infuriating. SPOILERS AHEAD for both the game it’s based on (Silent Hill 2) and the movie.
Silent Hill 2 Versus Return to Silent Hill Is Barely a Fight
For the unaware, the game Silent Hill 2 follows the tortured James Sunderland. After receiving a mysterious letter from his dead wife Mary, he’s spurred to go to the place he could never take her: Silent Hill. He ends up in a dark version of the small town, smothered by grey smog and infested with monsters— his only human company being those unfortunate enough to be stuck in Silent Hill as well. James journeys through the nightmarish town and slowly begins to uncover the truth of what happened to Mary, and why he was drawn to that place she saw in her restless dreams.
These surface level plot details are poorly captured by Return to Silent Hill, with much of the film being a visual and narrative downgrade that attempts to speedrun a retooled version of the games story. Our live action James here runs through a world of greenscreen, and it’s poorly composited greenscreen at that. The monsters are all pale imitations of their game selves, feeling more like cheap Resident Evil mini-bosses than torturous psychosexual abominations.
And the humans of Silent Hill, the emotional core of James’ time in the town, are all horrifically crushed versions of themselves in bad cosplay. Any sense of agency or urgency the characters have is surgically excised, resulting in a plot that runs from set piece to set piece with all the jerky motions and bad pace of a bubble head nurse responding to random noise. Its raw visual and audio stimuli that barely begins to get a single one of your neurons firing off by the time the credits roll.
A Film That Manages to Be “Killing Your Wife” Apologia
You need some context to fully understand how scoured of purpose and meaning Return to Silent Hill is. At the end of the Silent Hill 2 game, James fully remembers what he did: he has been to Silent Hill before. He took Mary there when she was ill.
He killed his wife in Silent Hill.
He smothered her to death with a pillow, unable to watch her waste away. She fought back as much as she could, but it was no use. He took her life. The guilt, the shame, the fear, it consumed him entirely and drove him back to that place. There are no official, “canon” endings for the game, simply the ones dictated by the player’s choices and playstyle. But one thing is certain across all endings: James killed her, and he can’t change what he’s done.
So, of course, Return to Silent Hill elects to change the story completely to try and justify our main man killing his wife, and rewards him for it. It’s a script that wrings its hands and speaks in a poorly convincing tone and mealymouthed smile; it’s a public relations officer spitting in your hand and telling you it’s sanitizer. Return spends a lot of its time trying to get you on the side of the killer, chained so tightly to the classic American melodrama formula that it doesn’t realize how unhinged the narrative its crafting is. James from the game is compelling because he is an unstable and sick man, unable to find closure or absolution for the awful thing he did. But that’s too complicated a concept for a film that merchants in game iconography and masculine heroism at a discount.
We’re Being Held Hostage by Melodrama
There must be a hero in Return to Silent Hill, so it is James. There must be a villain, so Mary’s disease is unambiguously not a disease: she’s a member of one of the cults infesting Silent Hill, whose rituals involve torturing and bleeding her for nonspecific reasons. She’s decaying from the inside for the benefit of an even more nonspecific, predominantly woman led cult that is the real abuser here (again, are we sure this isn’t Wicker Man?).
Ignore that her father handed her over to them, making her a cheap rehash of Alessa from the first game and film. As a matter of fact, why don’t we make all the films major female characters literally the same person to match their one-note dialogue? Angela and Laura in the film are really just aspects of Mary. Except for Maria, Maria is an evil seductress generated by the town to try and slow James down.
In a shockingly mean-spirited sequence, James commands Pyramid Head like a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure stand to violently impale Maria so he can finally find out what happened to his wife. It’s shot in a way that suggests this is a necessary evil, if it is at all evil in the eyes of the film. The fact that a symbol of sexual violence and the embodiment of James’ cruelty takes center stage for this act is egregious. What’s more egregious is that it isn’t framed with any sort of horror or fear in mind. It’s a damning choice for whatever notions of righteousness the film toys with, a damning choice indeed to make the hands of Silent Hill’s unknowable evil an RPG summon for the spouse-killer.
If You Can Believe It, Return to Silent Hill Does Get Worse Somehow
And in the most insulting iteration of the story changing, James is able to remember what he did, with some caveats: Mary fully consented to and asked her husband to kill her. It’s framed in a way that’s almost romantic, and certainly heroic. The dirty, raggedy pillow he used in the game is replaced with a wet cloth he used to tenderly wipe the blood from her nose; the murder weapon turns out to quite literally be a symbol of how much he cares, and at this point I was starting to wonder if I was being intentionally messed with. Instead of a darkened musty room filled with the sounds of ragged breathing, light and music fill the air as he relinquishes her soul to the unknown.
Remembering the truth, James here takes the films equivalent of the “Water” ending, driving into the lake and killing himself to be reunited with his wife. When he dies, he returns to the very first moment he meets Mary. James prevents them from ever going back to Silent Hill in the first place, thus nullifying the events of the film in what I can only assume is an effort to make the audience feel like they really wasted the entire hour and forty-some minutes that just passed them by. You’re never getting that time back by the way.
Return to Silent Hill’s Revisionist Ending
Forget Abstract Daddy, that’s the real horror.
In the realm of David Lynch films that weren’t made by David Lynch, Lake Mungo is the preeminent. Now, I’m not saying it’s “Lynchian” in the modern internet vernacular (see: a lazy, anti-intellectual label people slap onto anything with strange visuals and uncanny characters). I’m saying that Joel Anderson’s 2008 feature film gets to the core of what makes Lynch’s stories, and the philosophy of Lynch’s mysteries, so incredibly compelling.
The existential grip of mystery, the hold confusion has over us, is at the heart of Lake Mungo. An all-time great horror drama, it awaits all those who haven’t seen it with a story of finding paradoxical peace in the unexplainable and immense suffering in those aspects of life that we can understand.
Lake Mungo: A Mockumentary About Death and Life
Following the tragic death by drowning of their daughter Alice, the Palmer family is in ruins. The already cracked foundation her parents June and Russell stood on has turned to dust. Their relationship with their son Matthew is barely better. But after mysterious bruises manifest on Matthew’s body in the night, the family begins to wonder if Alice’s spirit is trying to contact them.
Presented as a documentary, the Palmer family films their experience trying to uncover the mystery of Alice’s death, and then the even bigger mystery of her life. As a single thread is pulled by supernatural encounters, soon the whole shocking tapestry of what happened to Alice is unraveled, leaving the Palmer’s to confront the ugly truth.
When the Answer Hurts More Than the Question
It’s hard to discuss this Lake Mungo’s plot any more than the synopsis I just gave without spoiling the fundamental beauty of its narrative. There are a number of different readings you can have of the film, but every single one that I’ve seen tends to agree on one thing: it’s a film about running from the answers you have in search of answers that hurt less.
The story of the Palmer family is an emotional vampire of a film from start to finish. And that drain is in part due to that subconscious awareness you have as an audience member. You know that no matter what is uncovered, nothing can change what happened to Alice, and the desperate search for something less painful only makes what we know more agonizing. The more clear things become, the more frightening and grotesque the questions they prompt feel. And the muddier the details are, the closer things feel they are to the truth.
A Perfect Melding of Narrative and Medium
There’s a beautiful relationship that Lake Mungo plays in with its found footage framing, a play between the narrative and the medium it’s presented in. There’s an inverse relationship between the clarity of footage and the difficulty of the truth that makes the film so purposeful in its presentation.
As the quality of the found footage deteriorates, things become clearer and feel more real. With the polished footage we get in the documentary, the thicker this air of doubt is in every character and every twist of the plot. There’s tension present in the very way we’re seeing what’s happening, tension baked into the footage. It’s a masterclass in melding narrative and medium, with the two inextricably linked and made stronger by that fusion.
The intricacies of Lake Mungo’s cast and how they react to interview questions, new information, and the most horrifying moments of the film are unrivaled. On a recent rewatch, the realism, the downright verisimilitude of it, was a breath of fresh air. Having sat through hours of unconvincing and clammy dialogue on film this year, I couldn’t have asked for more. The cast of lesser known actors really do stand out as one of the strongest to ever grace a horror film.
The Heartbreaking Spirit of Lake Mungo
In the past I’ve used an analogy to describe David Lynch’s work, but it’s even more appropriate as an analogy for what director Joel Anderson does with Lake Mungo. This movie is the equivalent of being in a forest and seeing a tree root going into the ground. That feeling of becoming suddenly aware that you’re standing on miles and miles of interconnected life. And moreover, becoming aware that you can’t fully see and can’t fully grasp the intricacies of that living, breathing connection.
Lake Mungo doesn’t just play in visual oddities and torrid secrets. It understands what makes that mystery not just compelling, but truly heartbreaking and horrifying. What Anderson achieves in the film’s 88-minute runtime is the greatest ghost film of all time, and arguably the best found footage film of all time. But beyond that, it’s a mystery that eats at the soul and begs for answers from the audience as much as it does from its characters.
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