Tag: mental illness

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A Mental Hellscape: Alan Resnick Horror Shorts

A postmodern-horror-video-delivered-in-a-postmodern-medium sighting! Alan Resnick emerges!

Resnick is a video artist whose first YouTube creation was an uncanny video series on the tutorial genre. “alantutorial” oscillated between hilarious and disturbing as a high-pitched, odd character demonstrated how to eat a bag of chips or pick up a blue chair off the ground. His seemingly useless tutorials often escalated in unexpected and weird ways — like when he starts crying and throwing a tantrum when he can’t actually figure out how to pick up the blue chair off the ground.

Resnick proceeded to create short videos for Adult Swim; his combination of dark humor with uncanny horror became his signature. In “Unedited Footage of a Bear,” the frame opens on a literal bear. He is majestic, calm, and free. It’s the only moment of peace in a video that quickly devolves into chaos, panic, and violence.

But first, the footage fades into an ad. A mom sneezes and looks miserable as her kids beg to play — she happily pops a pill and get back to her regular life!

Screenshot “Unedited Footage of a Bear” YouTube

If you let the video continue to play, the mom gets into her car, smiling widely. She is still performing for the “commercial” as a cheerful female voice lists off a barrage of side effects in rapid succession. Slowly, as the voice fades, the mom’s facial performance drops. She drives back into her “real life,” looking exhausted as she rolls through her neighborhood.

Yes, that ad and that performance was a little postmodern Russian doll!  This is media embedded in media, a video that sprawls beyond the typical YouTube format, an ad and a performance of an ad embedded into a larger narrative. If the viewer clicks “Skip Ad,” it actually directs them to a fake website for the drug the fake commercial was touting, Claridryl.

The rest of the video imagines the mental breakdown of this mom, as her Claridryl alter-ego — spun out on pharmaceuticals that triggered total darkness rather than enhanced health– hijacks her life. There is one scene where the mom is literally beaten and run over by this alter-ego, suggesting a total lapse of control.

This is reminiscent of the postmodern body horror we discussed in Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts. The horror is located in failure of the body to adhere to societal standards, an ambiguous loss of control and the tension between mental illness and demonic possession. This all appears the case in UFOAB as the alter-ego proceeds to ransack the mom’s house and threaten her children while the mother writhes on the ground outside the house, beaten and bloodied, able to witness the destruction but not get up or control it.

Mom (right) is beaten in the street by her alter-ego (left). Screenshot.
Mom does not have the power to stop the horror inside the house. She crawls on the ground outside but cannot get up. Screenshot.

This postmodern narrative is set within an equally postmodern media format that combines nested video footage with an interactive website. As users click around on the Claridryl website, they will find surprising hidden “easter eggs.” For instance, you’ll notice a house in the background of the main banner image. If you click on the house, it draws it slowly into the foreground — and then it takes up the entire screen, but becomes an interactive, click-able image-scape. You can actually enter and explore the house as it appeared in the video in scenes where the alter-ego took over.

Entering the house from the video via the Claridryl website. Screenshot.

Linger on the main part of the website for too long, and it will slowly fade to grey…with a tiny GIF of the alter-ego perpetually running towards you.

Screenshot Claridryl website with alter-ego running figure.

Resnick achieves a totally creepy experience by layering his content and diversifying his mediums. The horror or Claridryl spans beyond the ten minute video; that horror builds and builds as you click through the nauseatingly designed website, as you find the house discover other uncanny imagery within it, as you are left with so many unanswered questions as blue and red police lights descended on the mom’s still bloodied body.

 

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Manipulation of the Innocent

After finishing A Head Full of Ghosts, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the multitudes of times innocent characters were taken advantage of and manipulated.  For starters, the most obviously manipulated character can be seen as child Merry; she always feels tricked by her sister, she gets roped into an entire TV show exploiting her young life, and the producers themselves almost seem like they’re only using her too. Perhaps the most shocking manipulation was the very end when Merry was tricked into poisoning her family. This also happens to be the part that I’m unsure who the manipulator actually is. I have doubts that the father actually had the poison in his possession ever, yet how would Marjorie get a hold of it on her own? And if it was from Marjorie, then why would she eat the sauce too?? My best option here is to guess at a couple things about Merry:

Potassium Cyanide …. found here
  1. Merry is not recounting the events correctly at all. For example, she even claims she knows the police report says how they found her with curled next to her mom, yet still has a vivid memory of the doors being open and her aunt finding her. Also, older Merry says police found no traces of searches for poison on the family computer’s hard drive-> how can this be if Marjorie showed her images of it from an internet search?? (pg. 272)
  2. Merry might also suffer from an undiagnosed mental illness. I find this theory very provoking because familial links in disorders runs much higher than the prevalence in the general population. Also, how could any child raised in the environment Merry was in, end up completely ‘normal’.
  3. Maybe Merry’s sister and dad were both ill. That would explain him having the poison and the different ‘tricks’ that her sister did throughout the book. (Note here that I am a complete skeptic about possession and such and look for ways to explain these phenomenon through science).

If my last guess is true, would that not make all of them (Merry, her sister, and her dad) innocent? If they are all innocent of blame because they truly did not know better or what they were causing, then who is the real manipulator or the cause of the family’s deaths in the end? It is this manipulation of the innocent that made me keep thinking and pondering this book long after I had finished the last word.

 

 

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Victim or Villain: Marjorie’s Mental Illness

The other day in class, when Dr. Sample asked which of us thought Marjorie was actually possessed, I said “I hope she is.”  I felt that way for two reasons.  The first is that demonic possession is cool and scary and very entertaining to read about.  I find supernatural horror incredibly fun.   But the second is that if Marjorie is simply mentally ill (which is the conclusion I’ve arrived at upon finishing the book), I look at the entire story differently.  Instead of a creepy tale of demons and magic, we’re left with an incredibly sad story of severe mental illness wreaking havoc on a young woman and her family.   (That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy this book – it was an incredibly fun read – but I found myself disturbed by Marjorie’s story).

Beyond being let down that this novel is more tragic than terrifying, I’m also conflicted about Tremblay’s portrayal of mental illness.  On one hand, I find it falling into the tired and problematic trope of mentally ill people as monsters.  But on the other, I think it raises awareness of the gross mistreatment of people with mental illnesses.

Statistically, people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it, and any violence they do enact is most likely self-directed.  Nevertheless, mass media consistently portrays the mentally ill as murderous.  The recent movie, Split, drew a lot of criticism for sensationalizing Dissociative Identity Disorder and suggesting it to be a cause of violence.

James McAvoy as the DID patient in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2016 thriller, Split. Source

So Marjorie’s threats to her sister and graphically detailed attack on the priest during the exorcism somewhat strike me as playing into that stereotype.  She rips a chunk of flesh out of a man’s forearm with her teeth.  That’s a pretty horrifying, animalistic sort of violence.

However, I also see this book as a critique of the treatment of the mentally ill.  Marjorie is clearly unsatisfied with her care from Dr. Hamilton, whom she describes as having “the fastest prescription pad in the east” (124), and her illness is not discussed candidly among her family members.  Marjorie’s illness is treated as shameful and taboo, and she therefore lacks the familial support to recover, noting that her illness was probably caused by stress in the first place (124).

Therefore, despite Marjorie’s display of violence during the exorcism, I found that scene to be the culmination of the misunderstanding and mistreatment she faced during the novel.  Already seriously ill, she was restrained (as the mentally ill often are) and left cold and frightened.  Marjorie had, in comparison, far more abuse inflicted upon her than she inflicted upon others.

The true horror of A Head Full of Ghosts is not Marjorie’s illness, or even the shocking revelation in part 3, but a depiction of the very real cruelty, misunderstanding, and abuse people with serious mental illnesses experience all too frequently.

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Locating the True “Horror” in Head Full of Ghosts

***ENDING SPOILERS DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE BOOK***

Image still from YouTube by user cccomaaha in which a pastor explains how you can tell the difference between mental illness and “possession”

Where was the real horror located in Head Full of Ghosts? Marjorie’s struggles — true to postmodern style — blurred the boundaries between authentic/performed, paranormal possession/earthly illness.

During the final few pages of the book, we discover that the Barrett family’s fatal end was dealt by Merry’s small, childish hands. The demon was not a paranormal, external force that snuck up on the undeserving, innocent Barretts. The demons were entirely human and interior to the family. This aspect of the book is espeically postmodern (and therefore, makes for an not entirely surprising ending): the monster is already inside of us and we are to blame for the tragedy it deals.

There were several earthly demons — or modes of human “horror”– running rampant in the Barrett household. Merry experienced the final, ultimate possession by Marjorie’s manipulation, her older sister capitalizing on their sibling bond and Merry’s naiveté.

The rest of the characters were possessed by their own fatal flaws. Their father became possessed by religion at the hands of Father Waverley and failed to help his mentally ill daughter. His fragile ego and emasculating job loss blinded him to the fact that he could be wrong about Marjorie’s condition. The reality TV show producers and crew exploited this situation, using the Barrett’s financial woes to ensnare the parents and then escalate Marjorie’s illness.

Their mother tried to step up and get Marjorie more psychiatric help but ended up deferring to her husband’s insistence on first the TV show and then the exorcism. Whether from a combination of depression, exhaustion, or weakness of character, she was the only adult in the situation who could have actually helped Marjorie and she failed.

These adults all failed so miserably to help an extremely mentally ill teenager that I nearly cheered when they died — what useless, spineless parents!

For me, the true horror comes from acknowledging that there was never any possibility of paranormal possession in Marjorie’s case. She was mentally ill and it escalated out of control because all these demonic adults were possessed by the concept of possession itself.