Obsession

This week, obsession and fandom with Annie Wilkes, zombie tone, and mesmerizing eco-horror in the Arctic (real spoilers  in 1-3, light spoilers in 4-5) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Misery, dir. Rob Reiner, 1990.

1. Author Photo. Sometimes a single element of art direction conjures a whole world. We see the author photo of James Caan's Paul Sheldon on the back of a book and in the newspaper, and it's really something. It’s black and white, sculptural, and his intense eyes are set in shadow. This is 1990, and the author is someone romantic, someone superior—even an author of crowd-pleasing, commercial fiction like Sheldon. Kathy Bates's Annie Wilkes is obsessed with the superior being in the photo. Today things might be different. It’s not that this conception of the author no longer exists but that it exists alongside plenty of others. Fans today are just as likely to approach an author as a friend, an intimate, or a guru (each a problem in its own way) rather than as the brilliant mind of the Sheldon author photo. Annie Wilkes’s relationship with Paul ultimately does have a romantic aspect, but its starting point is that she’s caught a god in a bottle—an experience so thrilling that of course she won’t let him go.
2. Scheherazade. A bizarre aspect of fan culture, especially in the creative arts, is that all the obsession over artists misses the fact the the very thing that’s drawn all the attention—the performance, the song, the film—is already entirely available to everyone. Fans want to meet the author, or actor, or pop star, but what more can these people really offer? Beyond the special thing that is the beloved work, there’s maybe an interesting and talented person—but there are many of those in the world, most of them not famous. If there’s an essential inadequacy here—an inability of the human behind the art to serve as its extension—it’s no surprise that Wilkes doesn’t just want Paul the man. She wants his work. She wants a kind of control. This is a problem for Sheldon because it adds a new, dark aspect to his captivity and because Wilkes’s problems with his work become imminent threats to his physical safety—but it also gives him a kind of Scheherazade-like power. He can send Wilkes to town for paper. He can make requests to support his process. He can withhold story secrets from her. He can hurt her, too, by burning the pages he’s written. Sheldon’s a victim of Wilkes’s overflowing obsession with his books, but it’s this uncontained obsession that makes her vulnerable to him as well.
3. Calling for help. Horror movies have had to reckon with mobile phones, with a world in which calling for help is frictionless for most of us most of the time. Today in horror there’s the requisite explainer line of dialogue: noting the lack of signal or the absence of a phone. Or there’s more elaborate plotting to separate characters from their phones. The suggestion has been made that there are so many horror period pieces now because it’s just easier to work in a mobile phone free world. In Misery though, in the landline era, there’s also a lot of worrying over phones. Wilkes convinces Sheldon the phones are down so she can’t call for help. Later, she convinces him that she’s called his agent and daughter from town. Sheldon, on one of his white-knuckle escapes from his room, goes for the phone only to find that it’s insides have been removed. Misery's a reminder that anxiety around communication is a set feature of horror. The ubiquity of mobile phones presents a new, heightened version of an old problem—a difference of degree more than kind. Horror has always had to isolate its characters, remove their means of communication. Today it's just a little more difficult.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ Cold Storage, dir. Jonny Campbell, 2026.

4. Posting through it. The zombie-ish threat in Cold Storage arises out of a failure of federal bureaucracy and a denial of the reality of climate change. Its underlying drivers then are very real, very current factors in the crises we are facing right now. This is a horror comedy though, and the tone is a light one. Our protagonists care—they are not detached or ironic—but they and the filmmakers approach it all with good humor. It's a vibe that reminds me of our engagement with the world through our social media feeds. Awful things are happening all around us, many of them perpetrated by our government, and here we are all posting through it. This is an expression of privilege of course, but a testament to the fact, too, that we cannot only weep.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ The Last Winter, dir. Larry Fessenden, 2006.

5. Arctic sublime. This week I’m recommending what has become my favorite eco-horror movie (at least right now, as I write this). Fessenden’s snowbound, Alaska-set horror movie cannot help but channel The Thing, and its sense of paranoia in isolation is pure Carpenter. But The Last Winter has its own set of preoccupations. This is a movie about (again!) climate change, human conflict, and ghosts, and it balances its human and supernatural dramas just about equally. Its world feels lived in and solid. And it manages leaps and twists that are both surprising and justified.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

Bombings of oil and gas facilities in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran amount to chemical warfare against a civilian population. This is an environmental and health disaster for the people of Tehran, the consequences of which innocent civilians will be living with for the rest of their lives.