The Moth Diaries

I didn’t care for this film, but it made me very interested to read the book at some point.  This is a movie that’s clearly intended to give us a sense of ambiguity.  Either there’s a vampire, or our narrator is crazy.  That works when you’re reading from a diary, but it’s quite another thing when we watch a girl walk through solid glass.  You can say that the film was only showing us what was in the head of our protagonist, but it’s harder to accept when we were shown a visual image.

Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) is a student at a boarding school.  She was sent there after her father committed suicide a few years earlier, and she continues to struggle with the loss.  However, she’s begun to find solace in her friends, most of all her roommate Lucy (Sarah Gadon).  Into this mix, however, comes Ernessa (Lily Cole), a mysterious girl who seems to quickly ingratiate herself to Rebecca’s friend group, and grows especially close to Lucy.

Coincidentally, Rebecca’s literature class is reading Carmilla that semester (in fact, the short book seems to be the only thing they study in the entire semester), and she starts to suspect that Ernessa may be a vampire.  She doesn’t speak this out loud, but the idea of “Lucy” being targeted makes the concern obvious for any horror fan long before Rebecca even vocalizes it.

I complained earlier about the film showing us Ernessa walking through glass.  To its credit, the film is successful in making many of the other scenes ambiguous.  One or two could be written off as dreams, if not outright hallucinations.  Also, the only time we witness an “attack” on Lucy could be viewed as a shadowed sex scene.

Aside from Lucy drawing further and further away from her, Rebecca finds herself isolated from her other friends as well.  One (Valerie Tian) is expelled for throwing a chair out of her bedroom window while high.  Another (Melissa Farman) either committed suicide, fell out her bedroom window by accident, or was killed by Ernessa.  As Lucy grows sick, Rebecca finds herself completely alone.

As for Ernessa, at minimum she is peculiar.  She seems to hate water, like looking through windows, never eats, and walks around the school grounds barefoot in the middle of the night.  She claims that her father killed himself as well, but she “inherited everything from him.”  A major portion of the vampire mythology, or at least the version that Rebecca comes to accept, is that vampires are created by committing suicide while alone, and thus she believes Ernessa attempted to end her own life like her father.

Obviously, this could be interpreted as projection.  Rebecca keeps the razor her father killed himself with in her diary, and contemplates ending her own life.  The idea that she’d become a powerful immortal seems to make this idea somewhat easier for her to tolerate.

Lucy’s illness begins with her isolation from her other friends.  First, she shows the same lack of appetite as Ernessa.  One night, after Rebecca witnesses what appears to be the attack, Lucy is suddenly sent to a hospital and isolated from everyone except Ernessa, who Lucy asks to see, further angering Rebecca.  After she takes a turn for the worst even Ernessa is cut off from her, and Lucy makes a sudden recovery.

With that point in the film, either the supernatural becomes even more overt, or Rebecca completely snaps.  Reunited, Rebecca witnesses Lucy and Ernessa disappear into a cloud of moths on the school grounds one night, but moments later Lucy’s dead body reappears.  After mourning her friend, Rebecca sneaks into the school basement, and discovers a journal in which Ernessa confesses how she became a vampire a century earlier.  On her second trip to the basement she finds Ernessa sleeping in a coffin, and lights her on fire.

We end the film with Rebecca being taken by the police to explain why she set her school’s basement on fire.  However, she is now content that Ernessa is at peace.  I think I would prefer the interpretation of madness, honestly, but as I said before it’s harder to accept that when my brain has witnessed the supernatural events directly.  So, the film is a bit harder for me to stomach.

I don’t really dislike this movie, though.  It has plenty of good points.  It also succeeds in creating a somber atmosphere, without creating soulless or uninteresting characters.  I guess I shouldn’t recommend the book if I have yet to read it, so I’ll simply say that I suspect I would recommend the book if I had read it.

Fear Itself: Episode 7 Community

This episode convinced me that I like Brandon Routh. Playing Superman isn't really much of a challenge, so seeing Routh in literally any other role tells me a lot more about his acting ability. He's a charming guy, with good energy.

That said, I find myself baffled by what this episode was going for. The ending just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the story, unless I missed something major. I believe that either some important plot-point was cut out, or the writers wanted a twist ending and had no idea where to go with it.

The premise of the episode is decent. Bobby and Tracy (Routh and Shiri Appleby) are a couple who want to have a child, but don't want to raise it in their current apartment. A miracle seems to happen when they're offered a great deal on house in a planned community called The Commons. They're told The Commons are a planned community, that accepts only couples that fit the exact criteria they believe will help to create their ideal community.

Once they move in, however, they find that the community is incredibly controlling of it's residents. Infidelity is punished by public shaming, there are cameras in every house, and the community has the right to foreclose on them if they fail to conceive a child within six months. It's strongly implied that The Commons' goal is to create a perfect environment for raising successful children, loyal to their community, to expand their wealth and influence throughout society.

Eventually, it becomes clear that residents who don't properly toe the line are either killed, or terrorized into submission. It's strongly implied that this happened to the previous resident of Bobby and Tracy's house, and that their neighbor Phil (John Billingsley) had his leg amputated for his discontent. While it's unrealistic that they could get away with this, it's nothing compared to The Washingtonians, so I can't really complain after praising that episode.

The ending is where the episode really falls apart. Bobby and Tracy attempt an escape with the help of their outside friends Scott and Meryl (Charlie Hofheimer and Alexandra Fatovich). Meryl wears a wig and pretends to be a sick Tracy while Scott gets the real Tracy to safety. They're found out, but Bobby manages to run with the help of Phil...then, Scott and Tracy come back, having decided they want to live in The Commons, and help capture Bobby, whose legs are amputated.

So, why the sudden change of heart for Scott and Tracy? I literally have no idea. It seems like some kind of mind-control, but how did The Commons could use mind-control on people whose location they didn't know, while being unable to use it on Bobby when he was right there? A friend of mine suggested that the community seems to use mind-control on the women, while blackmailing the men, but that still doesn't explain Scott, and some of the women in the episode seem quite resistant as well.

Also, cell phone communication seems to be the only form of privacy that The Commons doesn't interfere with. I was expecting something to come of Bobby's use of a cell phone to coordinate the escape, but it never did. Apparently The Commons got the hard parts of totalitarianism down, but forgot about the basics, like phone tapping.

Overall, the episode is very “meh.” It's a good premise, with a bad ending, but a good lead actor. I think expanded to feature length this could have been an interesting story, but at it's current length the ending just seems rushed.

On a final note, I did notice that this is the only episode of either Masters of Horror or Fear Itself to be directed by a woman (Mary Harron, director of American Psycho). I didn't notice a great deal of influence from that, but there was a brief shot showing a group of kids re-enacting the public shaming of an adulterous woman, with a little girl in a pig mask playing the role of the punished. The scene is pretty uncomfortable to be sure, especially since punishment of the man she was cheating with is never seen or even mentioned.