by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was the rather generically
titled Terror in the Woods, which turned
out to be a good deal better than it had seemed from the previews. The central
characters are two girls who’ve just entered middle school, Caitlin (Sophie
Grace) and Rachel (Ella West Jerrier), who form a fast friendship based on
their mutual interest in fantasy stories in general — Caitlin walks around in
an odd costume with a skeleton design in front and wings and a tail in back
that are supposed to make her look like a dragon — and in particular an
Internet meme called “The Suzerain,” a mysterious hominoid creature who lives
in the woods near their home in Atlanta, Georgia and who seems to be a mashup
of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.” He’s tall,
he has normal arms but also tentacle-like growths coming out of his head, and
he promises kids he’ll take them to live with him in his spectacular palace but
he’s really going to eat them. He also threatens to kill the kids’ parents
unless they offer him blood sacrifices. Caitlin and Rachel spend an awful lot
of time watching homemade Internet videos by other kids their age or slightly
older who claim actually to have seen “The Suzerain” — one such video is even
prefaced by one of its makers warning the viewer that if you value your sanity,
you won’t keep watching (which of course just piques the curiosity of the
intended audience!). Since this was Lifetime, I had thought the titular terror
in the woods would come from a reclusive child molester who had created “The
Suzerain” and put the character on line to lure kids to join him in the woods,
where he would molest and kill them — a more prosaic but still loathsome form
of evil — but Charles recognized the film’s basis in a true story. In 2014 two
12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin were arrested for stabbing and nearly
killing a classmate on the basis that they needed to make a blood sacrifice to
“Slender Man,” a spirit in the local woods whom they believed (like Caitlin and
Rachel in the film) would kill their parents if they did not kill someone else
for him.
“Slender Man” was an online character created by a man named Eric
Knudsen in 2012 and posted to a Web form called “Something Awful.” The
character went viral and eventually even found its way into several films. Like
more organically derived folk-tale characters, Slender Man went through various
incarnations and descriptions as people logged on to the Web site and wrote
their own variations, which they reposted on their own sites — though the
Wikipedia page on Slender Man describes Knudsen’s attempt to control the
character by copyrighting it and licensing the media rights to a third party he
has not named publicly, who arranged for Sony Pictures to make a movie,
released in August 2018, that from the online descriptions I’ve seen attempts
to make him another Mike Myers/Freddie Kruger instrument of wanton destruction
and murder. Charles got a lot more interested in this movie once he recognized
its real-life derivation, and the film turned out to be an odd combination of
vividly imaginative moviemaking and demented silliness. Director D. J. Viola
(working from a script by a writer whose name I vaguely recall as “Amber Brown”
but isn’t listed yet on the film’s imdb.com page) showed he’s seen the Val
Lewton masterworks and copied from them — there are a lot of the famous “bus” sound effects, in which both
characters and audience are startled by sounds that seem scary at first but
turn out to be innocuous — and s/he has an excellent command of Gothic
atmosphere that makes their plain suburban neighborhood seem like it houses a
steaming cauldron of terror underneath. At the same time I think Viola and his
writer really overdid the
brokenness of the families of both Rachel and Caitlin — Rachel is living with a
Black stepfather even though he and her mom have already separated, while
Caitlin’s parents are still together but her dad, Nathan (Drew Powell) is
mentally ill, unable to work and takes enough psychotropic medications he needs
one of those weekly dose trays to sort them all. At one point the principal of
the middle school — who, like so many of Lifetime’s avuncular authority
figures, is African-American — suggests that the two girls visit the school’s
psychotherapist, but Caitlin’s and Rachel’s moms both decline and the
implication is that Caitlin has inherited her father’s insanity (not that old chestnut again!).
The girl they target for their
blood sacrifice to the Suzerain is Emily (Skylar Morgan Jones), who’s
intelligent enough to realize the Suzerain doesn’t really exist but is clueless
enough to walk into the woods with her two murderous classmates — the gimmick is
that back in grade school Emily was Caitlin’s best friend until she dumped her
for Rachel — and the attempted murder is shown surprisingly explicitly for
basic cable. Eventually Emily is rescued by a passer-by in the woods and the
cops bust both Caitlin and Rachel, though their fates are kept ambiguous — in
the real-life case the girls were found mentally incompetent to stand trial,
and there’s a hint of that in the final scene of the film, in which Caitlin,
incarcerated in a mental hospital, has festooned her walls with extravagant
Gothic drawings of the Suzerain and his lair in the forest. Terror in
the Woods — an awfully generic title for
such a wild story — is that frustrating sort of mediocre movie in which we
sense a potentially great movie lurking under the surface and occasionally
trying to break through, though the kids who play Caitlin and Rachel deliver
superb and absolutely believable performances, and the whole story (and its
real-life counterpart) raises issues the film doesn’t really address of how
much responsibility the creators of a story, in print, on film or online, bear
for the crimes committed by people who buy into the fictional universe and
actually do real-life dirty deeds based on it. Certainly the way the “Suzerain”
videos are constructed seem like they’re begging their young, impressionable viewers to commit
antisocial acts to appease this nonexistent deity. Of course, Charles, being
Charles, couldn’t help but joke after the movie that we were going to be
visited by a mysterious “Quesadilla Man” who would make us do bad things!
