Inhuman Monsters - Part Two

 

This is Part 2 of a listicle exploring the variety of inhuman movie monsters.
As a quick reminder, there were three rules, and two guidelines:
1. No Ghosts
2. No Animals
3. No Talking

a. Avoid Parody
b. Avoid Repeats

For my reasoning as to why, check out yesterday's post. But, for now, no more dilly-dallying, let's continue the list! This is...

The A.W.N.'s TOP 10 HORROR MOVIES ABOUT INHUMAN MONSTERS (5-1)

5. The Mist
The Monster: Volatile Alien Atmosphere
If you want to talk about inhuman, well, this is it. I liked the idea of exploring alien monsters, but I wanted something that hinted at the truly unnatural, and I couldn't go past this movie about a weird mist. After a thunderstorm, several of the locals from Bridgton, Maine (do I even need to say this is a Stephen King adaptation?) meet at the local supermarket to pick up supplies, but whilst there a strange descends on the town. There's a warning siren and most of the people decide to stay inside the store and wait, since the mist is too thick to navigate. However, when anyone goes outside, they're attacked by carnivorous tentacles that drag you into the mist, or killed by giant insects or monsters.
See, this isn't just any miasma, the mist is in fact an alien atmosphere from an alternate dimension populated by otherworldly wild animals that seeped into our reality. The aliens aren't evil, they're just hungry animals seeking out a new (and abundant) prey that can't defend itself, so it's not merely these weird creatures that are the monster. Rather, it's this invasive atmosphere which the creatures tend to remain within, likely because they can't breathe our atmosphere. The movie heavily implies that this mist appeared because of a military experiment (called the Arrowhead Project) that opened the portal to this dimension in the first place, but either way, the idea of being overrun by an alien dimension is just incredible. Instead of a military invasion from an an advanced alien species that want to take over our planet and so flew here from outer space, this is an accidental invasion from several primitive alien species that are just hungry, and they're only here because some idiot left the door open for them. And, you have to admit, there's something fundamentally horrifying about being surrounded by monsters you can't see until they're jumping out at you.

4. The Stuff
The Monster: Carnivorous Diet Yoghurt
This is a fascinating movie, but I fully admit that this wins its placement on the list from concept alone. So, what's the idea? Killer dessert. After quarry workers discover natural pools of a white, cream-like substance, they discover that the goo is both sweet and addictive. Soon after, a dessert company starts selling it to people as a diet alternative to ice-cream, as people who eat it lose weight, and they call it "The Stuff". I have to admit, if there's one issue with this movie, it's the name, but I'm not really sure what you'd call this stuff either... see, the Stuff is an organic parasite and the reason people lose weight when they eat it is because it's feeding off them from the inside, draining their nutrients and lifeforce from the inside. Also, the reason it's so addictive is because it creeps into your brain to control your mind, making you eat more until it drains your body of nutrition, turning you into a hollowed-out zombie full of more of the Stuff.
I don't know if I can recommend the movie since it's a little slow, and one of the main characters is a paranoid, militant right-wing bigot, who is portrayed as one of the heroes, despite being openly regressive and racist. Also, this does lean a little into the comedy, but the comedy isn't as impressive as the satire - this predatory foodstuff is clearly an allegory for the insidious and predatory practices of the food industries, especially for confectionery and desserts, doing anything to spread their products, or market their food as "healthy" so long as it makes them more money. Sure, the Stuff is predatory and it seeks out food when any living thing gets close to it, but it wouldn't have been able to spread anywhere near as far as it did, if it weren't for greedy corporations packaging it, selling it and distributing it worldwide.
But, as much as this film is clearly an allegory, I still don't think you can beat a concept as disturbing as a foodstuff that, when you eat it, it gets revenge by eating you right back.

3. Final Destination
The Monster: Death Itself
We're in the final stretch now, and we continue the list with one of the most inhuman of monsters I've seen portrayed in a movie. In Final Destination, a teenager recieves a deadly premonition, and in his panic causes a commotion that saves several other people from a tragic explosion. Following this, all of these people begin to die in unusual accidents and it's revealed that by cheating fate, they've interrupted Death's Plan and Death itself is trying to correct its mistake. It's even revealed in the crash investigation that the cascade failure in the plane would have killed everyone off in a particular order, and and the order in which they're dying now is the same as that original design. Death is not personified in this film, although it does appear as shadows, and reflections, sometimes even foreshadowing its redesigns as Death rewrites fate. Despite this, Death has something of a personality, one that's almost playful as it puts its devious plans into action, although it does seem to get vindictive the more people resist its plans.
Whilst some of the sequels had poor writing, leading to unrealistic characters and deaths so ridiculous that it felt more cartoon than creative, the original film had a great premise, well-executed and portrayed death as a dedicated master of fate that only turned monstrous if you stepped out of line. Now you may think "but wait... if this is the most inhuman monster, why is it only number five?" Well, this is the most interesting inhuman monster, in my opinion, but ultimately, I don't think it's that scary. In all the movies it's made clear, you can't beat it, and taking away the hope of survival makes it (in my eyes) less scary, which is part of the reason I hate the sequels so much, it's a foregone conclusion. But, the first one is still a bloody good film, which is how it gets to number three on this list.

2. Christine
The Monster: A Hatred-Driven Car
There have been several stories about living cars, even several about living cars that kill people, but they pale in comparison to the ultimate monster motor vehicle, Christine. What sets Christine apart is threefold. Firstly, the story is a powerful tale of obsession and corruption. The story follows Dennis, a highschooler whose dorky friend Arnie buys a broken-down old Plymouth Fury for just $250 after the previous owner killed himself. As Arnie restores the car, his personality starts to change, until he's obsessed with the car, and the whole while the car kills anyone that gets in its way, or hurts either it or Arnie. Dennis starts to worry that his friend is going down the same path as Christine's last owner - that he's soon going to become yet another one of her victims.
Secondly, what sets this apart from other cars is that Christine is not haunted, it's not possessed by a demon, it's not even a secret alien transformer or machine - Christine is just Evil. That differs a little from the novel where apparently the car is haunted, but unlike the The Mangler where I felt they changed the story for the worse, I think this improves the story greatly. From scene one, at the Plymouth car factory, Christine is already shown to have a taste for blood and vengeance. It's implied that this car is inherently hateful (dare I say, full of 'Fury'?), only ever using its drivers to feed off their lifeforce until she's powerful enough to rebuild herself - and that's another difference, that she lives off her owners, rather than her previous owner living on through her - in fact, that seems to be her greatest ability, after feeding off of Arnie's lifeforce for long enough, Christine becomes powerful enough to repair herself. In fact, Christine will often resort to damaging herself on purpose, just to chase down one of her victims, which I think helps to evoke just how much she is driven by her hatred.
Thirdly, this is the best living car movie because, despite being made in 1983, this still holds up today. This is yet another John Carpenter film, and it's just as thrilling, creepy and action-packed as ever. Perhaps it's just because a tale of obsession leading down a path to madness and death is a timeless one. After all, what dangerous paths could the sweet seduction of power not lead us down? I don't know, but in this film, danger is a highway, and Christine will drive you all the way to the end.

1. Oculus
The Monster: A Reality-Warping Mirror
I like monsters with teeth. I like creatures that will stalk up behind you, and attack, but when it comes to inhuman monsters I'm much more mesmerised by a monster that doesn't even need to touch you. And I think the epitome of that is the Lasser Glass, from the movie Oculus. In this film, a man named Tim is released from psychiatric care, after finally coming to terms with shooting his father eleven years prior, only to return to his sister, Kaylie, who has finally finished all the necessary steps to steal an expensive, antique mirror, and set up and elaborate trap for it. Tim has gone under extensive care to unveil all of his false memories, and deconstruct all of his childhood trauma, to disabuse him of his belief in magic, ghosts and monsters. However, his sister is there to rope him into a plan to prove that the real thing that killed their parents was the Lasser glass, a cursed mirror that has killed 45 people including their mother and father. This has all the makings of a fantastic psychological thriller, and the movie is done well, mixing flashback with present day, reality and hallucination...
See, the way the Lasser Glass works is that it feeds of living things near it including plants, pets, even electricity and light sources and, of course, people. As it feeds it grows its power so that it can manipulate people into dying near it, capturing their image in the mirror to be used for its manipulation. Because, when a human is near the mirror, it can make them hear things that aren't there, see things that didn't happen, feel things that aren't real, and if it's allowed to feed off them long enough, it can even cloud all of their senses at once, to delude them into percieving a reality that doesn't exist. It can, and will, drive you insane. This is how it kills its victims, by tricking them into doing dangerous things by hiding the danger, or hiding the tragedy that it's making them commit on others. But, despite the mirror using the images of the dead to trick you, and despite Kaylie referencing the glass itself as "haunted" at one point, I don't accept that the Lasser Glass is merely haunted. Just like Christine before it, this mirror appeared to be cursed long before it's first blood. It's called the Lasser Glass because the first victim was called Phillip Lasser, but he merely hung it in his house until he died - he didn't cast any spell on the glass, he wasn't supernaturally noteworthy, his only characteristic of note is that he was the Earl of Leicester, but for all we know he was merely the first member of the elite to die, he may not have even been the first victim. His wasn't even the most tragic or horrific death in the long list of this mirror's victims, so there's no canonical explanation as to why the glass does what it does.
But, the mirror is just made of glass, it's quite fragile, you'd think it would be easy to just smash the damn thing, but it uses coercion, deception and trickery to protect itself if anyone approaches it with ill intent. The mirror can see into your head, as easily as you can see into its reflection. But I think what's scariest of all is what Kaylee and Tim's father says, just before he dies. This isn't much of a spoiler, but when Kaylee tries to tell him that he's lost his mind, he looks in the mirror and says: "This is me. I've seen the Devil, and he is me..."
So, what is this mirror? Is it haunted by dozens of tragedies? Is it cursed to reflect your inner demons? Is it a cold monster that feeds on the warmth and life of living things? Is it the devil, seducing anyone who looks into it to evil? I don't know... but what I do know is that this is the best inhuman monster I've ever seen in film. I highly recommend it.

- - -

And that's my list. What do you think? Do you disagree? If you think there's a greater inhuman monster or a greater movie that features one, tell me about it in the comments below. In the meantime, the main point I want to make is that movies don't have to be about serial killers or crazy people, they don't even have to be about aliens or creatures. Your monster doesn't even have to be a living thing - it could be an evil elevator, a predatory plant, an alien atmosphere, even a monstrous mirror.
The only limitation is that no matter what you choose for your villain to be, you should do whatever it takes to make your story interesting.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd and Until Next Time, I've been exploring these aspects of horror, but I wonder if there are examples like this in real life. Sure, robots are not your enemy, but something doesn't have to be your enemy to be your antagonist - I might need to look into that.

Inhuman Monsters - Part One

I wanted to write a "listicle" for this Halloween Countdown, because all of this talk about technology, philosophy and society is all very heavy. I wanted to find something that was a little easier to write and a little easier to read, that wasn't so intellectually dense.
However, I hate content aggregation [i.e. stealing content from other creators, in the name of "sharing"], so I insisted on doing my own research. This resulted in me doing even more work for this listicle than I did for the first two AI posts combined.
I enjoyed the research, it was fun, but it was exhausting. So, I genuinely hope you enjoy this, because it was way more work than I anticipated.

The idea is simple. I wanted to find some of the most inhuman villains in scary movies. I'm not just talking about immorality or insanity, since the maniacs, monsters, aliens and the undead are probably more common than humans in popular horror movies.
No, I wanted things that are so inhuman, we can't really understand how they think, or why they do what they do. One of the things I truly love about fiction is the freedom. If you want to write a story about a cheese grater, you can and someone has probably already written erotic fanfiction about it... "shred me, daddy"
Anyway, so, those were my rules:
- No Ghosts (that's just dead humans)
- No Animals (too related to humans)
- No Talking (language is a human invention - also, talking monsters tend to be written like humans, because writing something inhuman is hard)
There were two other minor rules.
+ Avoid Parody - I looked at all kinds of strange, inhuman things, like Killer Sofas, Killer Condoms, Killer Jeans, Killer Colonic Polyps, Killer Refrigerators & Killer Tyres, but they're often written to be stupid on purpose, not actually exploring the concept too deeply. I didn't watch most of them, so I can't say they all suck, but it wasn't what I was looking for.
+ Avoid Repeats - If I really wanted to, I could have filled the list with killer dolls, there's a LOT of them... (note to self, I might save that for a later Halloween Countdown). So, to make it interesting, I tried to make each item as unique as possible. I really wanted to explore the possibility of what a monster can be, and what kind of fears you come across when you're facing a monster unlike anything you've ever known.
So, let's do this, starting with the Honourable Mentions. Let's get these out of the way, they're interesting ideas, but they broke my rules.

i. Jack Frost (1997)
The Monster: Evil Ice
The fact that this is full of cheesy jokes might have relegated it to "parody", but despite that it's actually kind of clever. This isn't just a snowman wobbling around with a knife - it's killer ice. What makes Jack Frost dangerous is that he can melt, change and refreeze himself. He can slip through doors, he can grow sharp icicle teeth and claws, he can turn to steam, he can freeze people and in one scene he even crawls down someone's throat like a killer slushie.
More importantly, since he can refreeze himself, the obvious solution of "melt the monster" isn't an option. This is a cool concept, so why is this off the list proper? Jack Frost is human. He's a serial killer who gets melted into goo by "chemicals", and merges with the snow. Also, he talks... this is what inspired my "no talking" rule, actually. I realized that most talking monsters were basically humans, with a gimmick.

ii. The Happening
The Monster: Angry Plants
The idea is simple, people start randomly killing themselves all over the globe, and nobody knows what is happening - Title Drop! And the twist is that the thing causing these suicides is plants. They evolved some toxin, with vague suggestions that it has to do with humans ruining the world or something...
Setting aside the fact that that's not how evolution, plants, suicide, or basically "anything" works, the idea of some suicide-triggering bio-toxin isn't unworkable as a concept. But, you have to do it right. To me, this is scary for the same reason suicide is scary, it's an alien concept to neurotypical people.
If you did your research, you could write a story that explores suicidality and self-mutilation, the emotions and reasoning associated, and perhaps explore actual treatments. Instead, this movie, and others like it that explore "suicide-triggering attacks" (I'm looking at you Bird Box) is so poorly written that the characters aren't suicidal, they're just "self-destruct zombies". Replace the suicide toxin with "deadly poison", and you don't change any of the emotional impact of the movie. So, interesting idea, but the movie was so bad that I had to take it off my list.

But that's enough of that, so let's get things going with...

The A.W.N.'s TOP 10 HORROR MOVIES ABOUT INHUMAN MONSTERS (10-6)

10. The Caller
The Monster: A Time-Warping Telephone
In my research, I tried looking up a killer phone, I'd heard of movies like Murder by Phone; One Missed Call or even The Black Phone, but none of these were inhuman monsters, they were either ghosts or regular serial killers (and the black phone isn't a villain, those ghosts try to help). But then I found The Caller. Mary, a divorcee trying to rebuild her life, moves into a new apartment, and finds a black rotary phone that she likes the look of. But, she starts recieving calls from this phone, from a strange woman who claims to live in her apartment. Although scared at first, Mary befriends the woman until she learns that she committed suicide several years ago, and the woman she's talking to is calling from the past, and her actions are changing the present. The more they talk, the more Mary learns how mentally unstable this woman is, as she keeps changing the past, even killing people.

It's a creepy idea. It's still low on this list because the main horror element is definitely the crazy woman in the past, but the main antagonist, and threat, is definitely this phone - a phone that calls itself from the past. The killer didn't create this phone, she doesn't even realize how it works at first, and without it she wouldn't be anywhere near as dangerous. But, I admit, this might be less horror and more "sci-fi adventure" if someone else had picked up the phone, which is the reason it's the lowest on the list.

9. Down / The Shaft
The Monster: A Cyborg-Enhanced Elevator
Elevators are already kind of scary, a claustrophobic box, moving up and down a massive shaft - if those cables snap, you'd plummet to the ground. Real elevators are very safe, but what if one was evil... a true "hellevator". In this movie (called "Down" in America, and "The Shaft" in Australia) a lightning strike causes the elevator of the Millenium building to start malfunctioning. The next day, an elevator traps several women inside, after freeing them the owner calls in elevator servicemen, main character Mark and his senior co-worker Jeff, but they see nothing wrong with it, so they leave. The next day, a blind man and his dog fall down the empty shaft and that night one of the security guards is decapitated after getting his head caught in the doors. Mark becomes obsessed with investigating, since the elevator seems to have a mind of its own. He pairs up with sensationalist tabloid writer Jennifer after she quote-mines him for an article, and they start investigating. Now, I'm going to spoil one of the twists here, so I hope you're ready for this, it's a doozy... the elevator company has been trying to cover up the cause of these murders, because they're responsible - the elevator was a secret experiment by one of the research scientists at the elevator company, who used one of his failed military experiments, a bio-chip. This chip that uses dolphin brain matter to create a densely-packed, powerful microchip. But, after the lightning strike, the elevator grew an entirely new brain, causing the elevator to literally have a mind of its own, and apparently its out for blood. That is insane, and kind of hilarious, but it also makes for an interesting movie. If this thing had a higher budget, it would be amazing. But, as it is, I had to put it low on the list.

8. The Mangler
The Monster: A Deified Laundry-Machine
I'm just going to warn you up-front, I looked at a whole lot of movies based on Stephen King stories for this list and quite a few even made it on. King seems to adore inhuman monsters, from vengeful trucks powered by alien radiation, to accursed hotels built on Indian burial grounds, all the way to the inevitable passing of time itself. These are some amazing stories... unfortunately, a lot of the movies are poorly done. I decided to focus on movies I enjoyed, and this one is pretty clever. This movie is based on one of King's short stories, and it's about an industrial-grade, old-fashioned linen press, called a mangle. After a series of industrial accidents, the mangle begins to act strangely, and it's revealed that some of these unusual accidents involving a young woman would have spilled "the blood of a virgin" into the machine, as part of a demonic ritual, awakening the monster. Unfortunately, this doesn't have the same horror ideas of the original short story, as they changed when the demon was first summoned, but I still enjoy this story.
Industrial factories and machinery are often  inherently dangerous, and there's a huge risk of horrific accidents. It's been used in horror before, like the industrial accident that kills and horribly disfigures the corpse of Herbert in The Monkey's Paw; in the movie The Machinist, one character has an arm mangled in a machine and another has toes for fingers after losing them to a lathe & a lot of the more horrific traps in Saw are inspired by factory machinery. Industrial accidents are horrifying, and in this movie, the villain is an industrial accident incarnate. If that doesn't deserve a place on this list, I don't know what does.

7. In the Mouth of Madness
The Monster: Cursed Horror Novels
I'm not gonna lie, I love stories and books, so I was looking everywhere for some villainous books. I found some evil books, but none of them were actually villains - the Book of the Dead from Evil Dead; the pop-up children's book from The Babadook - these are all vectors for the actual monster to come out, they don't harm the reader directly. Then I found In the Mouth of Madness, a movie by John Carpenter about special investigator John Trent, who was hired by the publishers of world-infamous horror author Sutter Cane to retrieve his latest manuscript, the titular book "In the Mouth of Madness".
And the publishers are worried because they know they have a frantic readership willing to pay a lot of money, there have been riots outside of bookstores that ran out of pre-orders for the book, people are fanatical about these books. The idea here is that Sutter Cane writes cosmic horror, about alien creatures, otherworldly gods older than the universe and these books are driving people mad because his horror series is basically the Lovecraftian Bible, and the fanaticism and belief of his fandom is making these monsters stronger.
If you're wondering whether Sutter Cane himself is the human mind behind this, fear not - he's as much a puppet of these beasts as the rest of us, they're not his fiction so much as his revelation. But, I won't go into too much detail here because the movie is actually really good'; it's John Carpenter after all and there's a cool metafictional aspect as well. but the idea of books that drive you mad is genuinely an inhuman monster and I'm glad I found them to put on this list.

6. The Ruins
The Monster: Prehensile Parasitoidal Vines
There aren't many movies which have plants as a movie monster, and those that do often play it for laughs. Little Shop of Horrors is a comedy musical more than a sci-fi horror (and the original 1960 film was also horror comedy). And whilst I do like The Day of the Triffids, they're more aliens than plants and I was trying to avoid aliens for this list (although, admittedly, that might have made my job easier). Also, the triffids in the movie (and the original book they're based on) aren't really that scary. However, the monster in The Ruins is. A group of Americans are on vacation in New Mexico, and another tourist offers to take them to some secret ruins that are "off the map". The group gets to an ancient Mayan temple covered in vines, and they're taking photos when they're surrounded by several locals who shoot anyone who dares to step off the ziggurat.
In time, they discover why. The vines covering the temple aren't ordinary plants, they're aggressive, carnivorous and parasitic. If you get close, they slowly wrap their vines around you, absorbing you and slowly feeding off your nutrients. If you touch one of their thorns, it seeds tendrils under your skin that grow, feeding off your blood as they spread throughout your body. They're even shown to have limited intelligence, allowing them to lure in prey to be ensnared by vines, or infested by thorns.
This was not a popular movie, because people found it poorly written and excessively gory, but I think the plot is pretty good (it's apparently based on a book) and I think this did a great job at making something as docile and beautiful as a plant actually kind of scary.

- - -

Alright, this is taking way too long, and way too much effort, so I'm going to have to split this one in two. Come back tomorrow to see the rest of the list.
Until then, why not leave a comment about some of your favourite inhuman monsters from films, I'd love to learn about more. Can you guess which will be the top five of my last, particularly number one? (I honestly couldn't  have - until I was reminded of it in my research, I'd actually forgotten about that movie). So, tell me about any of the inhuman monsters you know, especially the ones you've forgotten, and I'll see you in Part Two.

Failed Films (Pt. 2)

Finally, it's time to conclude the post I began two days ago, thank you for your patience. But, I have six movies to get through, so without further ado, let's get back into:

THE A.W.N.'s TOP 10 MOVIES THAT FAILED (6-1)

6. MONOLITH
This is a sci-fi movie with a simple idea, a young mother gets a very secure, high-tech smart car that is designed to be completely safe and totally impenetrable… but she accidentally locks her son in the car in the middle of the desert, and she has to get him out before he dies in a hot car. It’s an interesting idea, because it's taking a thing which can be quite scary for a new parent (i.e. locking your kid in the car), and takes away the easiest solutions. She can't get help, because she's in the middle of a desert; she can't wait for help, because she's on an abandoned road; she can't call for help because her phone is in the car too & she can't just break the window or rip open a door, because the security of this high-tech car is really advanced, and she can't bypass it.
So, this film is basically taking a simple adult fear—locking your child in your car—and takes it to the extreme. It's a brilliant idea for a film.
Where it Fails: This is a sci-fi movie. Yes, the concept relies entirely on that simple fear of locking your kid in the car, but after trying to break the windows, she doesn't really do anything. She runs off looking for help, but can't find it, then comes back and tries to light a fire in the hopes the car will be forced to open the doors (because of some AI fire suppression system, I guess), but beyond that, she doesn't really do much to actually try to save her kid. She finds a plane in the desert; she fights a coyote with a rock... but this movie spends more time with dream sequences than with her actually trying to get into the car, and the reason for this is because everything they did to force this premise also made the movie boring. They made the car impenetrable... but, because the movie is about her trying to get into the car, all of her efforts seem pointless. The victim has to be a kid, that's the basic idea, but because this is a movie, I knew the kid couldn't be in actual danger - killing children in your movie is generally frowned upon. There can't be any outside help, because otherwise she wouldn't feel helpless.
But, what this really failed to do was actually dive deeper into the theme. Because you know what the real fear is here? It's failing as a mother (or, parent, but this movie was clearly aimed at motherhood). I like how, the reason why she can't call for help is that she gave the kid her phone, to watch dumb cartoons and keep him pacified; I'm sorry, but I see that as poor parenting. And I thought the film would explore that in-depth. Like, here's three more scenes this movie needed: How about she tries to get her kid to unbuckle his own seatbelt, so she teaches him how to do it - he struggles at first, but when he finally pushes the button, the car bleeps a warning: "UNDERAGED SAFETY SEAT TAMPERING" or whatever. Or, what if her son is getting upset because he's hungry, so she tries to talk to him, to calm hi down, but he gets upset and starts screaming, so the car (assuming she's a stranger scaring the child) makes the windows go opaque, and soundproof. Or, what if she waits for the car to go into some kind of power-saving/stand-by mode at night (solar power? I dunno), so she can open the bonnet and reset the computer. But, when she touches the engine, the car re-activates, slams the bonnet shut and sets off the car alarm, waking up her son, who was sleeping. These are just three ideas I came up with, sitting here, and all of them in some way explore how she was trying to make her son more comfortable, and attempting to save him, but the car "protected" him, by being overprotective, and making things worse.
I'm not saying I could write this movie better than the original writer (although, I do believe that), but I'm saying, the premise here was exploring the fear of locking your child in the car - which is ultimately the fear of being a bad parent, and by deliberately comparing and contrasting this "instant-gratification, fix the immediate problem, give the kid the phone" approach against this "overbearing, overprotective" approach. Both of which are, in their own ways, extreme forms of bad parenting.
But no, this film basically became a series of scenes where a woman fails to get into a car, because "the designers thought of that", until she finally manages to get into the car, because "well, the designers must not have thought of that."
The worst part is, I sought out this movie because it sounded interesting, I really wanted to see how someone would explore these concepts. But, I liked this movie a lot more before I watched it.

5. UNSANE
This movie actually has two key concepts. Firstly, can you film an entire movie just using mobile phone camera? Phone camera quality is so high these days, you can easily get an HD movie on an iPhone 7 Plus (which is how they filmed this movie). But more importantly, and thematically, Are you crazy?
It's a simple question, but it's not exactly an easy one to answer. After all, if you're crazy, how would you know? And, if you're not, how can you prove it? What even is 'crazy'? As a person with chronic anxiety, I have occasionally deigned to ask myself whether I am crazy. In this film, a woman gets sent to a psychiatric hospital, and finds that she becomes trapped inside, even though she's perfectly sane... or, is she?
Where It Failed: In order to justify the premise, the plot of this film had to shoot itself in the foot. See, there was a fascinating experiment done in the 1970s, called the Rosenhan Experiment, wherein the first stage of the experiment, several mentally well people were put into a psychiatric hospital, and then attempted to have themselves released. The purpose of the experiment was to show that psychiatric hospitals are biased against letting people go and make it more difficult to get out than to get in, and it's true that some people weren't let out for several weeks, and only on the condition that they declared themselves to be mentally unwell, and take anti-psychotic medication, even though they suffered from no mental afflictions or symptoms. It's a fascinating study, but both it and this film have the same fundamental flaw. In order to get put into the psychiatric hospital, the participants in this study lied about having a mental illness, in the case of the study it was hallucinations. In this film, it begins with a woman being put into a mental institution for 24 hours because of her severe paranoia, after she unknowingly signed a voluntary admission contract. Also, due to traumatic stress being caused by a stalker, she genuinely does have paranoia and anxiety. That's a great concept... what isn't is that she then gets seven more days added to her 1-day stay, because she becomes aggressive and violent towards staff and fellow patients. I know it may seem harsh, but dude, I 100% agree with the decision to make her stay longer. So, when the story then develops into this whole "is she or isn't she crazy?" plot, with her convinced that one of her doctors is her stalker, that was a cool idea, but I couldn't help feeling like that was entirely her fault. She acted crazy. She's constantly acting antagonistic towards her doctors and nurses, and I don't blame them for treating her the way they did, which is not the way you want your audience to feel, when you want them to second-guess her sanity. I wasn't second-guessing her sanity, because she confirmed from the outset "yes, she's definitely got chronic paranoia, and violent tendencies"; I'm not a psychologist, but the way she acts is the textbook definition of paranoid and violent.
And, more annoying in my eyes, even when I was trying to get into the story, when they start revealing that this guy might be the stalker, I couldn't get invested because the film was hideous. I've seen good film-making on a phone - a lot of my favourite YouTubers have utilized mobile phone footage in their videos, but this whole film looks poorly contrasted, starkly lit, and because they often had to resort to setting up the phone camera perfectly still on a tripod, makes most of the shots and scenes look flat. So, both of the "big ideas" in this film - exploring a real issue whereby mental institutions profit off the forced incarceration of the mentally unstable; and filming an entire film with a consumer-level camera - failed horrendously. This film isn't the worst story on this list, it's got some interesting ideas, but it's one I least want to see again because it was so unappealing to look at.

4. BODIES BODIES BODIES
This is the most modern movie on the list, as it's still in cinemas, at time of writing, so if you want to see it without spoilers, skip this now. I wanted to see it simply because, I love murder mystery, and I am going to ruin the mystery if you read on. See, I saw that this film was a murder-mystery, comedy-horror film, and as a fan of all those things, I decided to watch it after seeing a trailer for it online. After I started watching it, I was even more intrigued - this film is actually inspired by the party game "Mafia" (you might also know it as "Werewolf"; or you may recognize the gameplay as near-identical to the videogame Among Us), a fun game where some players are secretly and randomly selected to be secret killers, and after killing someone during one phase of the game (often called the Night phase), players then must discuss who the potential killer is, and if they win a majority vote to kill a certain player, they die and must reveal their innocence/guilt. In the movie, during a thunderstorm at a secluded mansion party, they playing a version of this game called "Bodies Bodies Bodies", where characters wander freely around the house in the dark, and there's only one killer, but the game comes to a halt when one of the characters dies by getting their throat slit, and when the other partygoers fail to escape the house, they quickly start suspecting one another as the actual killer - especially as more and more of them start dying.
Where It Failed: There are a few problems with this movie, but I believe its biggest downfall was tone; specifically, this film shouldn't have been a comedy. Like with a lot of movies on this list, all of the attempts to fit the premise also helped make this film more boring. See, the reason why the Mafia party game is so much fun is, whilst it's ostensibly a game of guessing the killer from the actions at the table, it always ultimately becomes a game of pop-psychology, as players usually start guessing who the killer is based on the personality of every other player (it's why Among Us is such a clever videogame, by adding "minigames" to the gameplay which aliens can't do, it gives players who don't know each other the opportunity to see how others act when they're lying). But, because this is a comedy, all of the "discussion" scenes, where characters are talking about who the killer might be, seem to devolve into jokes about how these young characters are all self-obsessed teenagers, who represent the worst of modern internet culture's stereotypical douchebaggery. There's joking references to gaslighting; peer pressure; narcissism; drug addiction; victim-blaming; virtue signalling; self-diagnosis; anxiety & body dysmorphic disorder. Yes, they are making fun of all these things. I did genuinely find part of the "gas-lighting" joke funny, because there's some truth in it (it is an overused term), but the abusive relationship it hints at is pretty gross, and the rest of these "jokes" are pretty tone-deaf to the experiences of real people. As a big fan of PushingUpRoses, a mental health transparency advocate, and chronic BDD sufferer, I found these tongue-in-cheek references to body dysmorphia particularly distasteful, but when they were joking at the expense of the characters, I didn't find any of these "jokes" funny. But even if these jokes hadn't been so tasteless, the fact that they were making the most fun part of the game (the table discussions) into a series of jokes at the characters' expense, meant they were deliberately wasting the potential drama of these interactions by trying to make them funny.
And perhaps worst of all, the absolute climax of the game - learning who the actual killers were - and what I thought would be the dramatic pinch-point of the film, is ruined. I usually don't like spoiling murder mysteries, but trust me this doesn't spoil the movie, the movie spoiled itself...
See, the actual killer is... (are you ready for this?) Nobody... or, I guess everybody, in a way? The last scene of this film are the final two survivors finding the phone of the first victim, and finding a video of him attempting to film himself opening a bottle with a sabre, and failing so miserably that he slits his own throat in the attempt; and all the rest of the deaths were caused by either the paranoia of the partygoers after they "voted" to kill someone (although this decision was rarely democratic), or people dying accidentally, from misadventure, overdose & even a gun misfire. So, there was no satisfying answer to this mystery, and again, I feel this is because it shouldn't have been a comedy - but based on the actual solution to this mystery, I feel like the writers started with the idea of making this a comedy about people killing themselves because of paranoia, and just used the Mafia party game as a framework around which to build this comedy concept. But, the best part of this film was the horror, the blood and the somewhat realistic characterization of these people as they tried to figure out who the killer was, and that's mostly because of the talent of the actors. But, every time the film tried to be funny, it just undermined the horror since the tone was so off, every time I found myself asking "What was the writer thinking?"
I'd love to see a film that uses Mafia as the basis for a murder mystery (especially if it was like real Mafia, with two or more than one killers [I think ~20% of players are meant to be killers] meaning twice the mystery, or more). I'm also not opposed to another comedy-mystery that indulges in that premise of the killer-free twist in an And Then There Were None style plot (although obviously, I wouldn't want to know about that spoiler before I see it). But, by trying to indulge in both these concepts at once, this film ultimately failed at achieving either in any meaningful or enjoyable way.

3. SERENITY
I am not talking about the Joss Whedon movie, the film version of the cult classic Sci-fi Western, Firefly. Whilst that film has somes flaws, it didn't fail to achieve its goal of bringing Firefly to the big screen. No, the film I'm talking about today is actually a thriller starring Matthew McConaughey as a reclusive fisherman, who live on a gorgeous, island paradise escaping the hustle and bustle of modern society, as well as a "dark past" as a war veteran that he doesn't like talking about. But, things take a dark turn when his ex-wife comes to the island with her new husband, a vile, abusive criminal; and so the fisherman's wife asks him to do the unthinkable... take her husband out on a fishing trip, and murder him, to protect her and their son from this abusive monster. There's also a subplot about the fisherman trying to catch a massive, legendary fish in the surrounding oceans that he's failed to capture several times in the past; as well as a plot about how their son has become a reclusive shut-in, playing and creating videogames as he tries to escape from his dark reality.
Where It Failed: The Twist. Oh my god, the twist of this movie is so ridiculous, it has to be seen to be believed. Seriously, if you've never seen this movie, you should go and watch it, to see what the actual twist is, because it's so unexpected, so weird, so... well, wrong - it is an absolute shock to behold.
But, in order to talk about why this failed, I have to talk about the twist, so if you're intrigued by what kind of a twist could turn this neo-noir thriller set on a tropical paradise into a failed film... now's your last chance.
We good? We ready? Don't say I didn't warn you... okay, remember how I described the plot of the film, and threw in a part about how the kid of the main character has become a reclusive shut-in that plays and makes videogames. That's not just a throw-in, that's the crux of this film. See, the character Matthew McConaughey plays is actually dead - he's not a war veteren, he's a war victim, he died in Iraq, but he's not a ghost... rather, the character we're watching on screen the whole time is a videogame character, in a game this kid created to help remember his father, in a simple "Stardew Valley" style island paradise fishing game, with the goal of catching a mythically massive fish.
So, what's all the neo-noir stuff? Well, the stuff about the abusive father is all meant to be art imitating life, because the kid's step-father is actually an abusive piece of crap, who beats him and his mother. So he programs that into the game, ostensibly as a kind of "murder simulation" so that if the kid manages to kills the guy in the game he created, he presumably will garner the courage to kill his step-father in real life.
The problem is, looking back on the plot, this isn't just a twist for twist's sake, this is the point of the movie. It's meant to be a film about how characters realize they're in a videogame because the serenity of their peaceful island paradise is shattered by the interruption of the murder simulation mission is so out-of-character for the game that the game itself is fighting back against the new coding, typified by a man in a business suit who keeps interrupting the neo-noir thriller, to try to offer the fisherman a new piece of technology, which is effectively the game trying to coax him into returning to his fishing missions, by offering him a powerup that will make it possible for him to catch the big fish... It's a fascinating concept, but it's so poorly done that I'm left speechless when the neo-noir plot comes to a crashing halt whilst the main character becomes nihilistic about the unreality of his videogame reality. Not to mention... this game is meant to be programmed by a young boy, who looks to be a preteen, yet we're supposed to believe that he somehow created a videogame with hyper-realistic graphics, and artificial intelligence that's indistinguishable from the real thing. I think the fact that this focuses on a little kid makes the plot unbelievable, but at the same time, it had to be a "young kid" to justify the fact that he feels powerless, and doesn't know how to ask for help.
I actually really enjoy the idea of this movie, it's a whacko premise but I like out there ideas that try to push the envelope. For that reason, I'm not actually sure if this kind of premise is possible to do properly, but if there is a way to make a movie with a twist reveal that it's actually videogame characters fighting against their programming... this is not the way to do it.

2. THE BOOK OF HENRY
This movie is incredibly strange, but a fascinating attempt at deconstructing a "Family Film" trope, the Child Prodigy. There have been fascinating films about child prodigies who manage to solve complex problems, such as Matilda; Home Alone; Pay It Forward; Getting Even with Dad & doubtless several more. This film takes that premise, and takes it to an extreme - what if one of these child geniuses was forced to use their precocious talents, to plan and execute a murder plot? Oh, also, Trigger Warning for child abuse, child death & sexual assault.
Where It Failed: This movie is tonally schizophrenic, and its confused plotting fails to justify its own existence. Full-disclosure, there was another movie that I was going to put on this list, somewhere near the middle, but after doing research I realized... that movie wasn't a failure (it succeeded at what it set out to do) I just didn't like it. So, I decided to swap it out for another movie, and I remembered hearing about the awkward premise of this movie, and I sat down and watched it. I think it goes to show how much of a failure it was that a last-second substitution made it's way to number 2.
See, this film is about a precocious jerk called Henry (and that's not me being rude for no reason, he is constantly belittling others, especially his own mother; he bosses people around; ignores other people's opinions & never listens when others tell him to stop being rude). He has a crush on the girl next door, and this means he is hyper-aware of her well-being, and thus he is the first to notice the telltale signs that she's being sexually abused by her father. After trying and failing to get police, school administrators & child protective services to help her, he takes matters into his own hands and plans out an elaborate scheme... I mean, I say elaborate scheme, it ultimately comes down to: Step 1: Buy a Gun; Step 2: Shoot the Guy.
Henry is apparently willing to undertake this scheme, until he has several seizures, it's revealed he has an inoperable brain tumour, and soon after he dies in the hospital. He spends his last days writing the titular book (although it mostly takes the form of tape recordings), and he asks his mother to do it for him instead.
So, she buys the gun, she gets ready to shoot the guy. But, the big twist of the movie? The ultimate ending, the message this was all leading up to?
Whilst looking at him through the sniper sights on her gun, the mother character suddenly realizes "Henry's just a child", puts down the gun, and decides it's probably a bad idea to murder someone, just because your dying son asked you to.
This film has two basic premises, neither of which make sense. Firstly, it is deconstructing the child prodigy trope by showing how their prodigous, rube-goldberg engineering; precocious wisdom and youthful genius betrays their inexperience, lack of emotional intelligence, and naïve, black-and-white morality. However, by constantly showing Henry to be arrogant, disinterested in children his own age & controlling... it already shows the flaws of the child genius. Smart people are arrogant, and anti-social smart people tend to be unempathetic, so of course he's flawed that's blatantly obvious, so the big "twist" where we learn that smart kids "aren't that smart", isnt really a twist. I figured that out after the second time this jerk treated his mum like crap. But, the second part, the premise of putting a child prodigy to the extreme, by showing how one plans out an assassination... that's a bad idea, and the film knows it's a bad idea!
Remember: The "twist" in this film is the character realizing that the murder plot is a bad idea. So, what you have is a movie where the basic premise of the movie is "a smart child planning a murder" and the moral of the story is ultimately, "a smart child planning a murder is a bad idea". Presenting a novel, terrible idea, and concluding that it's a good idea to avoid that, isn't clever; its just stupidity with extra steps.

1. STAY
I've just realized that the top 4 films on this list all have a premise that hides it's thematic goals behind a twist which either hinders or harms the execution of the premise. And I don’t think a film can better illustrate this flaw, than Stay - trigger warning for heavy themes of suicide. See, the premise of Stay is that it's a psychological thriller about a psychologist whose latest patient, a deeply troubled young artist, and car crash survivor, says that he's going to kill himself in three days time. He also says he can predict the future, hears voices, and slowly the psychologist gets drawn into his patient's dark perspective, and he starts to lose his grip on reality.
Where It Failed: On every conceivable level, this movie fails to have a point. In this film, the first scene shows the car crash on the Brooklyn Bridge that the patient, Henry (played by Ryan Gosling) was the lone survivor of. After the psychologist, Sam (played by Ewan McGregor) learns that his patient is suicidal (because of his guilt) he tries to get to know him better, understand his past and save him. But reality starts unravelling, as Sam talks to his patient's "dead" parents, old psychologist and girlfriend, and the whole way through, surreal editing and cinematography gives the whole film an unreal, dreamy feel until the final scene where strings of reality litetally unravel as Henry finally prepares to kill himself, on that same bridge where he had his accident.
What happens next? Well... we cut to the scene where Henry had his car crash, and was the lone survivor... but instead of surviving and walking away, he is left bleeding out on the road, as several people rush over to help him. During the scene as he lays dying, several of the characters throughout the movie reappear, and several of the strange pieces of dialogue are shown in their proper context. See... the entire movie was all the dying dreams of a man that just had a fatal car accident. None of what we saw happened, it's all a tangled mess of his dying moments.
Now, quickly, what do you think the purpose of this story is? Is it about suicide? Is it about reality slipping away in our final moments of mortality? Is it about the importance of wearing a seatbelt?
Well, according to one source on IMDB, the main point of this film is meant to be an exploration of survivor's guilt. But how is that the theme? How does trippy-drippy surreality help evoke guilt? How do Ewan McGregor's character's poorly tailored trousers help illustrate the blame one feels for outliving another?
Now, I don't actually know if that's the genuine theme, but I find it convincing because if that's the case, it sort of explains the title: "stay" as in "stay with me" (something people say to someone who's losing consciousness due to blood loss), or even "why did I have to stay (live), when everyone else had to go (die)", a bit more on the nose, but it does kind of make sense. I can't tell you if that's definitely right, though, because the film is such a mess. The only way I could possibly say this film was not a failure is if the intended goal of the writer was "show how confusing and surreal dreams are". If that was the goal, congratulations, you did it... I mean, I already knew that, dreams are surreal by definition but good job if that was your intent. I looked up who the writer was, and apparently its David Benioff... you night recognize him as one half of the writing duo that ruined Game of Thrones (I guess he always sucked ay writing), but he never explicitly states what the point of this movie was.
So if you ask me what this film was about, why it was made, all I can do is shrug. Everything about this movie seems designed to obfuscate any kind of meaning, theme or purpose, and left me confused. So, if your goal was to make an entertaining movie, well, you failed at that as well, and that's why it's number 1 on this list.

- - -

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd and, finally, those are the Top 10 films I've seen, which failed. Let me know if you've seen these (or if I spoiled them for you... I did warn you). And, can you think of any films that failed to achieve the filmmaker's goals? I'd love for you to let me know in the comments below.

 Until Next Time, we have one day left in the countdown, Halloween approaches and it's almost time for the scares... but I still have one more post before the devil's night is upon us. I look forward to seeing you then.

Failed Films (Pt. 1)

I own a lot of DVDs... at least 800, easily. I'm not bragging, most of them I bought at op shops for about a dollar or two; and I literally buy any movie that catches my interest. So, I've seen a lot of movies.
In fact, I have this system where I watch the DVDs I own, and if I don't really enjoy them, I add them to the donation pile, so I can send them back to an op shop for someone else to buy.
Because of this, I only keep the movies that are really good... or, really bad. See, because I buy these at op shops, a lot of these movies are kind of bad. I'm talking low-budget family movies; poorly filmed horror; high-concept fantasy or sci-fi movies that fail to explain their premise. I've seen the full gamut from amazing, classic and thought-provoking cinema... to absolute dogshit. But, when a movie is really bad, it can be more entertaining - you've probably heard of the term So Bad It's Good. A film could have Dialogue or action that's accidentally funny, plot points that are absurd, special effects that look ridiculous, acting so bad it makes primary school plays look good or scenes that are so over-the-top they become awesome.
But, as with most things in life, films aren't simply "bad" or "good", there's a spectrum; meaning there's a whole variety of bad films. From the "Mockbuster" to the "Exploitation Film" to the "Passion Project", bad films come in all shapes and sizes... but there's a specific kind of bad film I want to talk about today and that's the "Failed Concept".
See, even a film like Sharknado, whilst it is a dumb movie that a lot of people enjoy ironically it's not a failure. They set out to make a movie about a tornado full of sharks, so whether you loved or hated that film it succeeded at its goal. It's arguably a dumb goal, but they met it nonetheless.
That's the defining feature of a Failed Concept - it has a clear target, an idea or concept it wants to explore, but by the end, it fails. This doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad or unenjoyable film - I may well list some movies here that you enjoy - but it does mean that the writer or director had a vision in mind, and they failed to really bring it to life on screen.
If you're still not sure exactly what I mean by that, allow me to show you some of the most pertinent examples that I've seen. Also, because I'm talking about how these films failed, this list will contain HEAVY SPOILERS - if you wish to avoid that for any of the titles listed, you may have to skip its entry in this list. With that out of the way, let's get into...

THE A.W.N.'s TOP 10 MOVIES THAT FAILED (10-7)

10. JOKER
Well, this is a great way to annoy the internet, tell a bunch of comicbook nerds, and a bunch of men, that their opinion is wrong. That's going to go over well... but I'm not the only person who didn't like this movie. See, Joker is an origin story for the character of "The Joker", Batman's arch-villain and a supervillain, known for his tenacity, in some incarnations brutality, insanity and (of course) his dark sense of humour. This film chose to be a dramatic piece, losing the colour and flamboyance of comicbook superheroes to present a sombre, dark and personal piece about how an underprivileged, mentally ill man is pushed to his breaking point, so we can finally understand how this simple man became The Joker.
Where it Failed: Who is the Joker? Seriously, the character from the movie, who is he? Is he an activist? Is he a criminal? Is he a madman? Is he a victim?
Uh, kinda, not really... I mean, he's a bit of this and that, but he's not really any of those things, so it's hard to tell. But, that makes no sense. This is meant to be an *origin story*, the whole idea if which is elucidating upon a character, so we can understand what defines them, what guides them, and who they are. But, this movie utterly fails at that because it doesn't seem to know who the Joker is and in its attempt, it just muddies the waters. A lot of people have pointed out how this film's script is basically a remix of "The King of Comedy" & "Taxi Driver" with Batman iconography thrown in, and that's not necessarily a bad thing (I like homage as much as anyone else), but because this film is busy recreating the themes and concepts of these two films, it fails to fundamentally create its own identity, and so it cannot help to identify the Joker.
But, the Joker isn't that complicated... obviously, he can be, you cam add complexity to anything - but the basis of the Joker is - he is a character that finds crime funny. That's the heart of it. Now, you can have it that he finds it funny because he's so good at it, so to him it's a lot of fun; you can have him be so twisted that his morals are effectively backwards and he enjoys pain and bloodshed; or, you can even have him be a nihilist and an absurdist who delights in shattering the veil of civility - that's kind of the way Heath Ledger played him in The Dark Knight, he sees civilized society as a mockery of brutal human nature, and fragile human psychology.
But... this character doesn't seem to find crime funny. Sometimes he's angry and commits crime for vengeance, at one point he brutally kills people because he's crazy and the film makes it clear he's "off his meds", which is particularly tone-deaf considering how common mental illness is. And by the end of the film he kills one character for no established reason at all...
When I first watched this film, I was excited to learn about who the Joker was, what drives him, why he became a villain. As the credits rolled, the only answer I was left with was "he did it because he's crazy". What?! That's not how origin movies work, that's certainly not how criminals work... that's not even how INSANITY works! So, no, this film failed to truly explain who and what the Joker is, and since that's the whole point of an origin movie, that is why it failed.

9. CHERRY FALLS
This is a slasher horror movie, set in the fictional town of Cherry Falls, where a killer appears in town, and starts killing several young teenagers. But there's a twist, and this is the main conceit of the movie - the killer has a calling card where they carve the word "VIRGIN" into the thighs of their victims, and so the only lead the police have on the killer is that they do, indeed, appear to be targeting teens that are virgins. After a town meeting where police warn the parents, teenagers learn of this, gossip spreads quickly, and all the teens at the local high school realize that, if they simply have sex, they won't be targeted by the killer.
So, the whole premise of this movie exists as a conceit to show a lot of gore, blood and murder, as well as nudity, sex and softcore pornography. Honestly, that's a clever idea for a movie, especially if you love blood and boobs.
Where It Failed: This cheeky horror film has a lot of sexy blood, but it barely has any bloody sex! The main character, played by Brittany Murphy, is a virgin, and whilst she nearly sleeps with her boyfriend on two occasions, she ultimately fails. And, when the school as a whole learns about the "only kills virgin" thing, they organize an orgy at an abandoned hunting lodge in town. Now, I want to remind you, this is meant to be an orgy - a wild sex party with several people - and they refer to it as a fuck-fest, or an orgy, several times in the film. So, when the camera cut to a scene of the hunting lodge, and I saw dozens and dozens of teenagers paired up, slow-dancing, I burst out laughing. Sure, some of the teens kiss and make awkward sex jokes, but it feels like this "orgy" was written by a prude. Sure, these kids aren't exactly "leaving room for Jesus", but it's the most sexless orgy I've ever seen. In a later scene, when the killer attacks this "orgy", they gatecrash several people in their underwear, making out under blankets, and they go running out of the house in bras and boxer shorts. So, this movie, where a major plot point is losing your virginity, and includes several scenes at an orgy, has no sex scenes in it.
Now, obviously, you don't need sex in your plot to make it interesting, and I did find this movie kind of interesting, but this movie was being sold on the horror and sex. The copy of the DVD I own has a quote from Playboy saying "It's American Pie with a body count." and the advertising all focuses on that idea of whether you'd give up your virginity, if it could save your life.
Now, this isn't a bad film by any stretch. The killer has long, black hair, and wears dark clothing, and when Brittany Murphy's character describes them to a sketch artist, the police identify the killer as a woman called Lora Lee Sherman, a rape victim who failed to receive help, because her rapists were four popular high school boys - that's darkly realistic and relevant. And one of my favourite scenes in the movie is when one of these rapists is killed, the words "VIRGIN NOT" is carved into his forehead, which dials up the danger, as we realize that the "safety" the kids are (apparently) seeking out by having sex, is nothing but false hope.
I also want to make it clear, this wasn't entirely the film-maker's fault. This film was classified as R in Australia, and NC-17 in America, but according to the writer, they had originally devised the "orgy" scene to have a lot more nudity, and originally was written to have them all writhing under blankets, but they had to change it in order to avoid an X Rating.
I'm not going to lie, one thing I found disappointing is that the killer is eventually revealed to be a man in women's clothing, with some hints that he is crazy and enjoys dressing up like a woman; and frankly, I'm sick to death of the "depraved, trans killer" trope. But, it's mostly implied that they dress up mostly as a dark reminder of the woman raped by some of the popular boys, who have now become important men in the town's community, so that's not a deal-breaker. And the film is deliberately playing with tropes, since horror films have a history of killing anyone even slightly promiscuous, so there was a lot of potential here which they managed to play with. But, that doesn't change the fact that this film failed its ultimate premise.
In fact, Ken Selden, the writer of this film, is quoted as saying he first wrote this film because he was "interested in writing a teen orgy scene", but he also thought Hollywood would never go for it until he came up this idea of it being an orgy interrupted by a slasher killer. This was the heart and soul of this movie... and for the sake of avoiding an X-Rating, it was changed. So, whilst I do not think this film is a bad movie, it definitely failed at its premise of being all about sex and violence, because people who are incredibly weird seem to find sex more offensive than death...

8. THUNDERPANTS
This is a very silly family movie. The basic premise is that this is the story of a boy who farts too much, because he was born with two stomachs. I mean, that doesn't make a lot of sense because farts are developed in the intestines, not the stomach, stomach gas develops burps but it's not really worth getting into the science of why that makes no sense, because this is clearly meant to be a comedy film, you're not supposed to think too much about it. I think the only reason it was even slightly popular was because it co-stars Rupert Grint (the actor who played Ron Weasley) one year after the first Harry Potter film, so it was probably trying to cash in on his celebrity... speaking of which, besides Grint this same film has several famous stars in smaller roles, such as Paul Giamatti,  Stephen Fry & Simon Callow. And the effort on display is incredible. Most of the film, as most of the film is set in this kid's English hometown, has a green tinge to all of the set dressing, costumes and several of the key props. But, what's it really "about"? Well, it's about how it's difficult for the main kid to make friends, because he farts so much, until he makes friends with Grint's character - a child genius called Allen A. Allen who has no sense of smell. And, the story seems to be about how even the least-appreciated among us can find their place, and make a difference in the world.
Where it Failed: If this film has a message at all, that message is that being a child genius will change the world. Look, I like a good fart joke, but I don't think these fart jokes are funny, since they're often presented as so extreme, it literally causes injuries to the people around Fart-boy. But, I'm not here to critique the comedy, comedy is (for the most part) subjective, and this is for kid's, kids might find this funny. No, my issue is with how this film treats Fart-boy like an object, a tool to be used, not a person. Fart-boy is the main character (his real name is Patrick, but I'm gonna keep calling him Fart-boy), we see his point of view and his struggles, but in the story after meeting his friend who can't smell, it's his friend Allen that develops a pair of pants that contain his farts. And, after NASA loses some astronauts in space, it's only by poaching his genius friend to help them fix this problem that he comes up with a way of using his friend's farts to power a rocket. Yes, there's some talk about how he joined a group of "talented children" to solve difficult problems... but, all of the other talented children are also geniuses in their own right. Fart-boy does have this monologue about how he's finally being seen as useful, but that's the thing, he's being used. They create a rocket which literally has a seat for him to sit on with a pipe in it. He's not piloting the rocket - he's presented as a naive, simple boy, not stupid but nowhere near smart enough to pilot a rocket. So, he's just the fuel tank.
And whilst they pay lip service to the idea that children can be uniquely suited to solving problems, I also got the distinct impression that Allen manufactured this whole situation just so his friend could help. After all, this is a space-rocket, we have those... it's not like this was a new invention that required a special fart-based fuel system. So, I get the distinct impression that the real hero here is Allen, the boy genius who saved some astronauts, and his friend in the process. Oh yeah, did I mention that Fart-boy was going to be executed? I can't remember why, this film is pretty forgettable, but this kid goes to court, is declared guilty (although he was innocent) and was about to be judicially murdered before his friend intervenes to get him poached for this NASA child-genius project.
I think this was trying to take some logical extreme, "hey are you bullied for being ugly or stupid or weird? Well, look, this kid farts so much, he can clear a room, and can even fart with the pressure to injure people, and he found his place in society... surely, you can too."
Aww, isn't that sweet? NO. This kid's "place in society" is as a piece of machinery, with his arse stuck to a gas-pipe, he's an interchangeable cog in a machine. That's not inspiring, it's horrifying. I mean, he was necessary for this single task - save the astronauts. What next? Either he will have to move on, continue living his life, relying on the assisting technologies of his genius friend so as to exist in a world of people without a crippling fart-disability. Or if (for reasons that defy science as I understand it) his farts are in fact the future of rocket propulsion, is he doomed to having his anus surgically grafted onto a gas-pipe, so he becomes a permanent fixture of a rocket, or a rocket-fuel factory - in either case, little more than a machine component - either for the rest of his life, or until they inevitably find a way of recreating his farts in the lab, by which time he again is forced to live life with his fart-disability. And that seems more likely than not since, according to this film, his farts come from having two stomachs... so, basically, his job could be done twice as well by any modern cow.
So, I hope you found that inspiring kids! If you're not a child-genius, and not seen as worthless by society, you're doomed to being judicially murdered or (arguably worse) being seen as little more than a disposable machine-part.

7. AFTER.LIFE
This is a weird movie. If you've not heard of it, this movie is about a young teacher called Anna (played by Christina Ricci) who gets into a violent car wreck, and wakes up on a slab in a funeral home. There, she gets to know the mortician named Elliot (played by Liam Neeson). The mortician informs her that she is dead, but he has a supernatural gift that allows him to talk to the dead. He explains that his gift allows him to prepare people for their transition from death to the afterlife, so they can come to terms with their death. At first, Anna doubts this, but as he shows her that she has no pulse, that she is numb to the world around her and she can't move without his help, she starts to come to terms with what Elliot has told her, and accept that she is dead. Alongside this, there's a parallel story about her soon-to-be fiancé, Paul (played by Justin Long) who is struggling to come to terms with the sudden death of his girlfriend in the prime of her night, on the night when he was going to propose. So, he's in denial, struggling to accept that his girlfriend is truly dead. Or, are things not as they seem?
Where it Failed: This film relies on a ridiculous premise. When I first bought it, I was excited about the idea, because I thought it was going to be about a character coming to terms with their death. Now, that's my fault, not the movie's, but what is the film's fault is that it pretended to be about that for the majority of the runtime. See, what this film is actually about is a girl who is taken to a mortuary and told she is dead and that all appearance to the contrary is being caused by one guy's supernatural ability to talk to the dead, and all throughout it's meant to be a mystery whether she is actually dead, or if she's alive and this is all an elaborate lie on the part of the mortician. And that subplot on her potential fiancé is part of that, asking whether he's just a grieving boyfriend who won't let go, or a hero uncovering the machinations of a disturbed serial killer. And, the problem with this premise is two-fold. Firstly, both of these premises are interesting. A story about a woman dying, and struggling to accept her premature death, but coming to terms with it because of a caring, gifted mortician, that's kind of sweet and beautiful. A dark story about a mortician that tricks people into believing they're dead so he can bury them, because of a philosophy about people so useless they're "as good as dead" is darkly fascinating. But, because this film spends most of its runtime maintaining the thin veneer of a mystery, thereby flip-flopping around the potential between the two, it means it never commits to either until the end. But that's the second and more fundamental problem with this premise - the mystery is stupid. This movie ends with the revelation that, yes, Elliot was a serial killer this whole time. He pretends people are dead so that he can bury them, and have them suffocate in the casket as a kind of sick punishment for living unhappy, unfulfilled lives. But, wait, are you telling me that every single one of his victims believed not only that magic exists, and that ghosts exist, but that they were themselves were unliving corpses, despite all evidence to the contrary?!
What really annoys me are that at first, Anna lays stiff on the slab motionless, only able to speak, but eventually she's able to get up and move around. And not a single other one of his victims questioned this? Yes, she has no pulse, and feels numb, but even though she can move, Elliot claims he doesn't want people to see her like this because "you look like a corpse". So, what is meant to be happening when they get up? Is he witnessing their "soul" whilst their body is actually on the slab? Or, are they stumbling like zombies, but only he can hear their voice? Also, the reason she's numb is because of an injection Elliot gives her of a (fictional) drug which actually slows her pulse so it's unnoticeable, and numbs her body. When Elliot injects her, he claims that the chemical "loosens your muscles, and prevents rigor mortis", but that makes no sense! This woman is meant to be a teacher, yet she doesn't know that injections like that don't work without a pulse?
Look, I know this is a movie, and I've seen plenty of movies where people talk to the dead, ghosts are real and magical, mystical things are possible. But, the main character doesn't know she's in a movie. I can't empathize with this character because it makes no sense that she would find the evidence convincing - all the "evidence" that she's dead make no sense in a world where magic doesn't exist. And this guy is a serial killer. At one point, he takes a photo of Anna, and he adds her to a collection of hundreds of similar pictures of his victims, pinned to his wall. You're telling me not a single one of these people realized that they were, y'know, not dead?!
In my opinion, the best way to have made this movie would have been to save all this for the end, spend the whole movie playing it straight - this is a film about a man trying to convince a woman that she's actually dead, only for it to end with a Shocking Twist that she's alive, and he's a serial killer. That wouldn't really resolve the fundamental "Failed Biology 101" aspects of this movie, but at least they'd be less noticeable! Because this was a mystery, I was basically being asked by the movie to think about this, to judge for myself whether this was at all possible. So, when it finally reveals the reality, I'm left angry and annoyed by how much of it doesn't actually make sense. But worst of all, this film spends a lot of its runtime pretending it's actually about grief, and coming to terms with loss, acting like it has a message of "it's troubling to come to terms with your own death, or the loss of another, but you can come to accept it in time"... but, with the reveal that the girl wasn't actually dead, it turns from a story about coming to terms with grief, into a story whose ultimate moral is left as "If you're in denial about the tragic, premature death of a loved one... it's because you're right, they're not actually dead! GO SAVE THEM YOU FOOL! Don't come to terms with it, that's just a lie to keep you from finding out the truth!!!"
Yeah, uh... that sucks. I did enjoy this movie for the most part, it was well-made and well acted, but ultimately it tried to be too much all at once, and after spending so long pretending to be about a premise that I found interesting, when it revealed what it was really about it just left me feeling betrayed.

- - -

Saved by the bell... it's nearly midnight, and I have to get this posted. Well, I guess we'll have to continue this next week. I was really hoping to get at least five written before I ended, but I had way more to say here than I thought I would.
Come back tomorrow night, where we'll discuss the top 6 (I guess) films that I think ultimately failed at their premise.

Until Next Time, I'm going to keep writing, so I don't run out of time for tomorrow's post...

I'm the Ab

My Abandoned Writing Projects (Pt. 2)

In yesterday's post, I listed the first five of ten of my most interesting abandoned writing projects. It's a lot of fun, you should check out that post here.

But, without further ado, allow me to continue with the Top 5:

THE A.W.N.'S TOP 10 STORIES I CAN'T WRITE (5-1)

05. THE GUY IN THE TREES
This one is kind of embarrassing. Not to talk about, no, but because this one is something I nearly completed. And first thing's first, it was a story, but it wasn't a novel or a short story... this was a YouTube series. See, I am a huge fan of Night Mind, a youtuber who presents dark ARG; unfiction & horror series from the internet, for people to learn about and discover for themselves. I had seen a lot of these really creative video series, and since I'd done a course of Film & TV in university, and helped write a successful student short film, I thought it would be a fun challenge to do something like this for myself. At the time, I didn't have a job, and I was at home, alone, for a few weeks, so I came up with a plot for a horror series. The concept was pretty simple... it starts off as my character, played by me, discovering that there's a homeless guy living in his neighbourhood, whom he just calls "The Guy in the Trees", since he seems to spend most of his time in this little collection of trees (that actually was in my neighbourhood, at the time). He decides to confront him, so he goes to his tent late at night, and the guy is missing, but instead he discovers a creepy notebook. The homeless guy returns, and he has to run off, and jump in his car to escape. He gets home, and reads the notebook, it's full of mad ramblings. But, what intrigues my character is how it talks about "a creature that controls me", some kind of monster which he appears to fear as well as worship, which killed his whole family - and there are several pages torn out of the book, which the guy finds. The character then recieves a threatening message, from the Guy in the Trees demanding his stuff back. So, he encounters him, and they get into a fight which my character manages to get out of, although he's covered in blood, but I didn't show (firstly, because it was just me, there were no other actors; secondly, because it was important to the plot). After this fight, my character reveals that he's lost sleep, and managed to get the missing pages off the guy, which reveals both some important names of his family, and the ritual to call upon the monster. After attempting the ritual; my character disappears, reappearing hours later, and tells a weird story about slipping into another dimension. Then there's a knock at his door, he answers it, and the story ends shortly after. So, what was this about? Well, I really only had ONE idea... basically, yes, there was this evil monster, but the reality was, that all happened after the guy became homeless, he was just an unfortunate drunk... after the fight in the woods, my character had killed the Guy in the Trees, hidden his body (stolen the pages from his corpse), and that's why he was losing sleep, and investigating this mystery, he was looking for some justification for his murder, proving that the Guy in the Trees killed his family, or that he was trying to summon a demon, but he wasn't. The knock at the door which he answers was the police, coming to arrest my character.
Unwritten because... actually no, that's a lie, this is written, I wrote it; and I filmed it. . But, in the editing process, I realized that this was not that great of a story. So, uhh...
Unpublished because: It had only one gimmick. I had a lot of fun filming this whole thing, and creating the notebook prop, but it all relied on the whole "he secretly killed the Guy in the Trees" thing, which I thought was clever... but it's not clever enough to rely on for a whole story. Also, I don't have any skills with special effects, so I couldn't really make the monstrous demon thing that I wanted to, it just looked like a crappy power-point animation... which it basically was. And, without the monster thing, it lacks that necessary misdirection, of the guy trying to find a monster, when in reality he was the monster - the murderer - the whole time. A year after filming this, I came to admit to myself that the only reason I created this wasn't because I had a cool story that I wanted to tell, it was because I could, and I wanted to be able to say I'd created a cool youtube series. But, after looking back, my major inspiration was "I want to create a YouTube thing", and that's not a good reason to create. That's why I say this one is kind of embarrassing, because it's only as I approached the finish line that I realized, I didn't have a good reason to run the race. Whilst I still admit that I enjoyed the hell out of acting, filming and creating this short series, and I do recommend that kids try creating short films, it's a lot of fun... but, don't do it for clout, and don't do it because you want to post something to YouTube. Do it because it's a lot of fun to bring a story to life. I'm not opposed to creating any kind of YouTube series... in fact, I created a pair of videos for my Halloween Countdown a while ago. But, that was because I created something that needed to be on video to show it off in its full glory, not created for the sake of creating it, and that makes those videos something I'm still proud of, to this day.

04. COLD VIRTUE
Remember how I said I love a good murder mystery? Well, Crooked O'Hare wasn't the only time I tried and failed to write one. The difference is, rather than a series, this one was planned as a novel. I still think it's a pretty good idea... see, I wanted to set this in a dystopia. I was inspired by the prevalence of YA dystopia novels at the time - see Hunger Games; Divergent; The Maze Runner - and I thought it would be a great place to set a murder mystery story since, well, all the crime - and who doesn't like a couple of pseudo-futuristic technologies thrown into the mix? So, the concept was simple, a kid is being trained for the youth police (yes, very much Hitler Youth, I said this was Dystopian, right?), but just before he graduates, even though he is basically top of his class (or near, I didn't want to be too cliche), his father is declared a traitor to the state, and executed. His father was a mid-to-low-tier member of the political party, and so he'd been given many benefits of the 1% - free housing, cheap food, low taxes, household servants.
This means that after his death, not only is their family name horrendously besmirched, but they lose their home, their income and their food security in one fell swoop. The main kid and his mother are forced to live in government housing (i.e. slums), so they're crammed in a tiny apartment with a dozen other people, and since this kid lived his whole life of privilege, he walks, breaths, talks and smells like money, so as soon as he walks through the streets, he is targeted and attacked, he defends himself, but he gets a hard and nasty lesson about "justice" in the slums - Criminal gangs, drugs and murder are rife in these densely packed, low-income facilities. So, to earn some money and hopefully clean up his neighbourhood, the kid sets up an "office" in the burned ruins of a state-banned church - no roof, and little-to-no security, but it has privacy - and so he starts working as a private investigator. The idea was that he would solve a few small time crimes, but the story would focus on a series of 5 or 6 murders; starting with victims of crime, moving up to slum-lords, state police and eventually to a politician visiting their slums. He'd make a few enemies when he refuses to ally himself with any of the street gangs, until he manages to find himself a space as someone who turns a blind eye to non-violent gang activity, and eventually he makes enough money to afford a smaller (like, the size of half a room), but nonetheless private home for his mother and himself (I didn't decide what, but his mother would find work, probably as a servant in a richer household).
The whole idea was showing, from the ground up, how the system was forcing the lower classes into desperation, and the upper classes into classist paranoia. And of course, the novel would end with the kid uncovering the mystery of whether his father was truly a traitor, and who betrayed him to have him executed. It was a cool idea, one I still think would make a fantastic story, of dystopian murder mystery.
Unwritten because: Dystopia relies upon worldbuilding, and this requires a lot of worldbuilding and politics that I am not the best at parsing. Out of fear I'm starting to sound lazy, I want to clarify, I'm not against doing research. The problem is that I really need to have some foundation upon which I can build - Stephen King, as a writing teacher, is famous for his oft-quoted lesson: "write what you know", and people unfortunately misunderstand this advice horrendously. They think it means "only write something if you've experienced it" which would make for a lot of boring fiction, every writer would write about what it's like to be a writer... no, what "write what you know" means is, write stuff you can understand. I am not a murderer, but I can understand murder, I can understand the emotions and motives and opportunities and biology of murder, I can understand what it is that leads to a murder victim, in a murder mystery. But, I don't understand politics and socio-economic strife (at least, not very well); and I don't understand how to represent the lifestyle of people living in slums and gangs and political strife. Basically, I don't know enough about this setting to really bring it to life, even though I think it's a clever cross-genre concept. And hell, if I threw in a love triangle subplot, I'd have hit every one of the necessary tropes for dystopian YA of the era... I think I've kind of missed the mark on that particular "pop culture" moment, but I insist that murder mystery is awesome, and I'd love to see someone turn this into a real story. I'm just not the one willing to do it...

03. TRANSYLVANIA
The idea here was pretty simple, it was the idea of doing a Frankentein rewrite with a transgender theme. The story I had was that in this version, Frankenstein had an Igor that helped him from the beginning to develop the methods of creating life, as he was inspired by Frankenstein in college to work with him. But, as they discovered the keystone to the research, the alchemical/electrical (or whatever, as the plot needed) element to finish, Victor and Igor celebrated, and Igor finally admitted the truth... (HEAVY TRIGGER WARNINGS for discussion of Gender Dysphoria & Suicidal Ideation - it's a huge part of this story, so you may need to skip to the next list entry if that's too much for you, but it's a huge part of why I couldn't write this story, so it's important)
Igor is a pre-transition transgender, and she loves Victor. She was inspired to work with him because, as a male, she is incapable of carrying children, and the idea of creating life inspired her. She admits all this believing that, as they've gotten so close (and with his love of science, she hoped he'd understand her). However, Frankenstein rejects her out of... well, basically "Trans Panic", and attacks her.
Then, Igor dies... I'd originally planned, as suicide because she basically gets her gender thrown in her face, but I thought maybe it could be murder or manslaughter.
But, when Victor calms down (or, when he discovers Igor's body), he realizes how wrong he was, so he decides to resurrect IGOR with the science they uncovered together. And, as per her wishes, he actually uses the corpses of women to surgically transition Igor.
I hadn't decided the name, and this was all in the planning phase, but for the rest of this, I'll refer to Igor as "Irina". The idea here is that Victor and Irina would work together, and at first Victor is simply sympathetic to Irina's plight, and wanted to save his old friend, but in time Victor would fall in love with Irina, but there would be complications as the townspeople learn of this resurrected person turned into a woman, and would rally against the doctor.
I hadn't decided the ending, but it would be very much fire and pitchforks.
Unwritten because: Do I even need to explain it? The key feature of this whole idea is Unfortunate Implications. Part of the inspiration behind this is that I love science and medicine and knowledge, and the idea of showing how science can turn a person assigned male at birth into a gorgeous, feminine woman is the epitome of that; and the inspiration for this was seeing how many - even modern - movies tend to write sci-fi horror as "man should not wrestle in god's domain", as though toying with nature is inherently evil, but I think that's nonsense. The real monster is ignorance, and this kind of story would thrive on that... However, it also thrives on:
  1. Representing Motherhood as the pinnacle of Womanhood
  2. Turning a transwoman into a creature literally called Frankenstein's Monster.
  3. Trans Panic as a Plot Device (for a main character no less...)
  4. Suicide/Murder as plot device. (Yikes... I never decided which but pick your poison, both suck.)
And whilst I personally like the juxtaposition that Irina would be seen as a monster, but the real monsters are the townspeople who fear her; the problem therein is that it requires a delicate equipoise of understanding the inherent reading and counter-reading of the "monster" metaphor, which idiots like JK Rowling have already shown to be completely incapable of.
Also, do I have to mention that I'm cisgender? This is me looking from the outside at the trans experience, and trying to write a story to represent that from experiences that are entirely academic. I don't think I can, or should, attempt to write a piece of literature designed to define the transgender experience. I've considered writing this by working heavily with a sensitivity reader... but I realized, I'd have to rely on them so heavily that clearly I'm the wrong person to write this story, if indeed it can be written at all without going against everything I believe in. I don't know how to resolve all of these unfortunate implications, even though I think this is a cool story idea, so I'd rather just admit defeat, and step away from the concept altogether. I do plan on writing stories about transgender persons, but I want to do so in a way that doesn't have so many unfortunate implications.

02. THAUMATURGUS
Y'know, this one is a little hard to explain, and that's because it's an absolute mess of a concept. It's easy to understand in principle... when I was younger, I realized that I had a LOT of story ideas, and I mean a whole lot, so I decided "Hey! What if I took ALL of these ideas, and put them together?" so, I did. But, this was before I realized that you could, and should, cannibalize, frankenstein and remould ideas to make them fit, so I basically took whole story ideas, and slotted them into this story wholesale. The basic concept was that the story would follow this young boy and his sister, who live with their grandfather, and the boy discovers  a magical world, and has to fight a big, bad evil wizard... very generic "2000s YA Urban Fantasy" schtick. But, I threw in all these other concepts wholesale. So, the grandfather owns a dozen weird cats with weird names, because I had this "kennel for familiars who lost their witches" idea; the kid meets a teen boy who has a living car with a personality, because I liked this "living, magical car" idea; I threw in a wise, old cat called Tembley, from my "Cursed Cat of Cecil Street" idea (which I also used for a "hyperlinked story" project at school, that's why that story's so short, had to fit a wordcount); they also encounter a dozen strange freaks on the street, because I threw in my 'Nocturnals Gang' idea; the kid works in a burger joint that gets attacked by a shadow monster, because of my 'We Never Close' story idea; one of the characters would be a late night jazz musician, because of my "Smokey Jones" idea, and I think I even threw in a DJ at a magical radio station, because of my "Wizard Radio" idea; and two of the characters were identical twins, and vampires, because of a "Sinister Sister" idea I got from my cousin... hell, even the title comes from an unused story title I really liked, so this world was heavily populated with all of these fascinating characters and stories, I figured it would be like a crazy, fantasy amusement park ride of adventure!
Unwritten because: I realized that this would basically be like an amusement park ride. Specifically, a dark ride. Sit in the car, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle as we drive slowly past hollow, plastic, lifeless scenarios, where cheap representations come out and play out some distilled version of their full character before sliding back into the dark so we can drive past another fake scene. I thought I'd come up with a clever way to use all my unused story ideas, but I wasn't using them, I was abusing them. I had to just ignore major parts of these ideas to fit the main story... I still like a lot of these ideas, and I think I can reuse them (and like I said above, some of the ones I really like, I'm not sharing, since I either can, or already did, alter it to work in another story), but throwing them all into a story like this simply turned the story into a junk drawer. And if I strip all of that away, all I'm left with is a generic urban fantasy premise - child discovers magic; child learns of magic threat; child defeats threat... blah blah blah. I'm not against urban fantasy by any stretch of the imagination, but without the junk drawer full of unused ideas, there really isn't anything left.
So, I'm not going to write this story. If someone else wants to try, they can... heck, you can even throw in your own unused story ideas. Or, hell, you can take some of these individual ideas and turn them into something... heck, even though I already wrote "The Cursed Cat of Cecil Street", you could try that too. Write a better one - I made that for a school project in like 2007, surely you can do better than teenaged me.
But no matter what, learn from my mistakes. Ideas are incredibly adaptable. Take, for example, the idea of a living car... that's a cool concept, but why? You might have a lot of reasons why you think it's cool, but I like it for three reasons. Firstly, I like the idea of exploring an inhuman mind (how would a car think?); secondly, I have always enjoyed the A Boy And His Weird Pet trope, since it's about friendship and forming a unique bond; lastly, I really like the idea of having a Cool Ride. Knowing this, I can adapt this idea to fit in literally any story. If I wanted a (somewhat) realistic romance story, I could have an unusually smart horse; if I write a sci-fi, the obvious rendition would be a space-ship with a quirky A.I.; if I wanted it in a horror, well, that's basically just the plot of Christine...
That's why I find that idea cool, but if you have an idea, but you're struggling to find a way to make it fit your story, break it down into it's fundamentals - why do you like the idea in the first place? And, can you adjust those things so that you can include the parts you like, and leave out the parts that don't fit your story? I know I spent half of this entry talking about writing advice, but that's really what this idea is... the idea is "find a way to put your unused story ideas to use, in a single story". If you want to give a try for yourself, well, I hope you do a much better job than I did.

01. THE UNSPOKEN KING
This is the biggest one... because all through high school, this was my magnum opus. For literally eight years, this was the only story I ever thought about, it was going to be a middle-to-high fantasy series, and the premise was simple. It was about a knight in the middle-ages, called Sir Graham, who died in a battle against a dark, evil monster, but came back as a mindless zombie, because of the evil lord's magics. As he had once saved the king from an assassination attempt, the king had a soft spot for Graham, and so had the poor man buried in a stone sarcophagus, in a far, secluded corner of the cemetery. over 100 years later, for reasons unknown, Graham's mind returns, his mind is alive, in a dead body. So, Graham pries himself from his grave, and decides to seek out who or what resurrected him... kind of like an anti-murder mystery, if you will. But, since he's a corpse, he's reviled and rejected by society, meaning the only people he can turn to for help are similarly abandoned outcasts of society: a half-demon cursed man, a mad wizard, a pirate ghost... all kinds of fun monsters, some who are friend, others who are foe, he doesn't know who to trust. And the first story was all about how the same evil monster that killed him hard returned (yes, very "dark lord returns"... it's a trope for a reason, people), so he's the first suspect in Graham's undead anti-murder mystery, so he decides to confront him first...
Unwritten because: Well, two reasons really. Firstly, I am not a historian. I decided to set this in the actual middle ages, as in the year 1472, meaning I had to do research on all kinds of medieval things from that specific year... and it kind of slowed down most of my research. But that's not a huge issue, this is clearly pseudo-fantasy, I could get away with a lot of this by leaning on magic... but then I hit a terrible snag, and this is only the second time this happened to me.
I had philosophical issues with this story.
See, I started working on this in high school, before I'd fully come to terms with my own beliefs regarding atheism, absurdism and dualism, which means at the time, I still believed in ghosts... albeit in the form of souls, or spirits, whatever you want to call it. Now, as an adult, I don't believe in souls or the afterlife. Part of what initially appealed to me about this story was exploring the ugly side of life, death, and since Graham was asking "why am I not dead?" there was some philosophical discussion of  death, and what death even means, why does anyone die. I mean, one of the main characters was going to be a ghost. And, without going into horrendous spoilers, my plan was effectively that Graham was going to be a "ghost" trapped in a "zombie" which the "Anti-Murderer" (no spoilers) had basically fused with magic back into a single body, for some reason relating to later stories.
But, since I now don't believe in souls, I'm kind of... well, philosophically opposed to the main conceit of this story. I could potentially rewrite it to refit my philosophies, but I would have to change the story so drastically that, it wouldn't be "The Unspoken King" anymore. I'd have to lose my ghost pirate (what a shame, he was cool), I'd have to change the villain and his whole deal (he was basically a poltergeist, so that's a whole thing...), I'd have to change the philosophical and thematic underpinnings of the story, and I'd have to change how the main character... works.
So, I've basically abandoned this story, thrown the pieces onto the recycling pile. I still do like some of these ideas, which is why I'm actually sharing the subtitle, not the series title. It's not a huge secret, I mentioned it before on this blog even, but like I said, if it's in this list, it's up for the taking, and I still like that title enough that I'm not willing to just give it out to anyone. But, this story - like its main character - as it is, is dead, and even I can't resurrect it after the damage my philosophical maturation has done to it.

- - -

So, those are my abandoned writing projects. It's kind of bittersweet looking back at this list, because when creating this, I had to look at a lot of projects that I haven't worked on in a while, and for some of them, I could say "no, I still want to write this, I want to keep it. This is a good story.", but for some, I really had to bite the bullet and admit, yes, this is a failed project, I can't write it anymore.
Especially those top two. Both are projects I spent literally years working on, but I couldn't manage to pull it all together, until I finally realized that it was beyond saving... for me, at least.

But, I hope you found this interesting, and I especially hope that this list can help inspire a writer out there to make something of these unwritten projects, to create something upon the stained workshop table where I was broken. If any of these ideas inspire you, or you'd like to know more about them, feel free to ask me in the comments below. Just because I failed, doesn't mean you can't succeed.

Speaking of which, I want to finish this by saying that, whilst these failed projects are works that I have abandoned, I do have some stories that haven't failed, and this whole experience of listing my abandoned projects has inspired me to let go of the failures, and turn towards my successes.

I'm the Absurd Word Nerd, and until next time, I'm going to work on some projects I haven't abandoned.