The Agenda From Beyond The Stars—or, Thoughts on The Empty Man (2020)

This piece contains spoilers for the film in the title as well as for Friday the 13th (2009) and Come True and Underwater (2020). The discussion is briefly NSFW. Content warning also for a good bit of exploration of potential transphobia in The Empty Man and the real-world implications.

From The Empty Man, specifically one of its best horror sequences. Source.

            Let me officially join the chorus of voices proclaiming that The Empty Man is a great film. Its title, trailer, and even a basic plot synopsis don’t do it full justice, in part because doing so means spoiling the things that make the movie special and because what is actually so meaningful and interesting about The Empty Man is also what makes it hard to market to a wide audience. It’s a horror movie, yes, and one in the tradition of other supernatural-horror-as-contagion tales like The Ring series or (yes) 2017’s The Bye Bye Man, but it doesn’t actually prioritize that story as much as you might think. In practice, The Empty Man is much weirder and more ambitious, going to some interesting but also off-putting places narratively, thematically, and in terms of its visual storytelling. It gives way to (potentially) frustrating subjectivity in the end in ways that may put off the literal-minded and/or those who engage with films as puzzles to be perfectly solved (all dots perfectly connected). Backing up momentarily, however, the film’s superficial link to The Bye Bye Man may be one of the biggest obstacles in the way of folks reluctant to check it out. The similar premises and titles and even the way that The Empty Man’s title is initially presented in the movie, in an angry-looking font with a goofy blank space in the lettering, all suggest a similar tone or quality. While I haven’t seen The Bye Bye Man, my appraisal, having been exposed to the plot via synopsis and to the memes and some reviews, is that The Empty Man is in a whole other league. It sometimes resembles a surprisingly big-budget art-horror film, which may be less appealing than The Bye Bye Man to the wrong audience. That being said, I still think this movie is straight-forwardly thrilling enough to please and that its over-two-hour runtime goes by quite quickly. This feels like a true rare treat: a big-ass horror movie that is genuinely inventively creepy and also has Things To Say.

            Getting into specifics, then, The Empty Man feels at least in part like a subversion of audience expectations. The first subversion comes from the opening 20-ish minutes that effectively function as a prologue. We’re introduced to a group of characters who go through their own little horror film before most of them are killed off and we see the title in all its spooky glory. In this way, The Empty Man has something in common with the 2009 Friday the 13th film, of which I am a defender. That movie also begins with what could be our core group of characters but who give way, messily, to the true main cast and plot after a surprisingly beefy opening segment that leaves a single lone survivor who becomes important to the rest of the story. Where Friday then falls in line with expectations, however, The Empty Man only seems to settle in before swerving once more. James Badge Dale’s James Lasombra, an ex-cop with a sad backstory, gets caught up in the case of a missing teenage girl and her friend group, who we see perform the kind of silly ritual to summon the titular Empty Man in a flashback. In another horror movie, this would be our core cast, and we would spend the rest of the runtime watching them try and mostly fail to evade death, but the teens are almost entirely done away with quite quickly as well, leaving just one, the initial missing girl Amanda Quail (Sasha Frolova), with an increasingly unsettled James Lasombra in pursuit. Of course, Lasombra almost casually performs the summoning ritual himself at one point, which puts the Empty Man on his trail too. This silly act has an explanation, but, in the moment, Lasombra seems like just another dumb horror movie protagonist inviting more danger than he bargained for. Rather than focus on a series of almost formulaic deaths, The Empty Man is all about Lasombra and the cult he quickly locates. My experience with The Ring series is limited, but my understanding is that the original Japanese novels similarly do not limit themselves to a simple haunting-as-contagion story and spiral in bigger and increasingly weirder ways as the initial concept is taken further and further. The Empty Man is bigger as well in the sense that it is actually more cosmic horror than it is conventional supernatural horror. Lasombra has three encounters with the Empty Man that fulfill the rules of the legend (first, hearing, then seeing, and then being taken), but these sequences of Conjuring-style nocturnal antics are quite brief compared with the cult stuff, which ultimately comes to dominate the story. The actual Empty Man figure spends a lot less time onscreen than you might suspect.

The movie’s stand-out scene of horror (in my opinion) is perhaps equal parts silly, unnerving, and genuinely frightening and involves Lasombra being pursued by a whole horde of cultists through a campground and forest at night. Lasombra’s verbal reaction to the group turning to look at him before advancing as one, the way they throw themselves (and the ever-present empty bottles) at his vehicle as he desperately tries to get away—It’s a perfect moment of obvious horror in a movie that generally focuses on being creepy over jolting the audience out of their seats. It has its rare surprising moments (another near-comedic one being when the Empty Man pops its head up from a crouched position outside Lasombra’s bedroom door at night), but the movie often plays more like a conspiracy thriller with horror elements than as an out-and-out horror film. Like the recent IT duology, the story here is just too big and ridiculous to truly function as horror, but the audacity is so good to see from a film in a genre that otherwise often seems to play very conservatively—with its approach to scares, with its monster designs, with the scope of its stories—because of budgets but also in the name of genuinely scaring audiences. The Empty Man takes risks, and I think that’s wonderful. When it goes full-horror, such as in a climactic sequence where we see the Empty Man’s freaky ghost-alien design somewhat clearly as it chases and then possesses Lasombra, the film still handles itself well.

Interestingly, The Empty Man’s 2020 release (after being delayed) coincides somewhat with the release of a film I feel it resembles: Come True, a movie I watched a while back and which ultimately disappointed me. Watching The Empty Man was a bit like watching an alternative take on Come True that doesn’t squander its potential. In brief, Come True is about Sara Dunn (Julia Sarah Stone), a teenager who is currently homeless and who volunteers for a sleep experiment in order to have a safe place to go at night for a bit. The experiments are eventually revealed to be attempts to understand the nature of a frightening dreamscape and shadowy figure which all sleepers eventually encounter without remembering. The shadowy figure is either explicitly (or implicitly—I don’t recall now) meant to be the same one reportedly seen by real people who suffer from sleep paralysis. While the landscape and figure are a bit conventionally “creepy” for things meant to exist throughout history and across many cultures, the mystery is an intriguing one. Of course, things go wrong, and while Sara leaves the experiment prematurely, she can’t escape the cascading weirdness that has been unleashed. By comparison, The Empty Man is also about a deep and ancient and shared thing. A member of the cult Lasombra violently interrogates at one point claims—and I am both summarizing and paraphrasing heavily here—that there exists a sort of mental reservoir on another plane, “the sum of all consciousness.” The movie is focused on the power of human will to manifest thoughts physically and also on the idea that those same thoughts could come fully-formed from somewhere else. This is essentially how the “contagion” of the Empty Man operates: It’s a truly invasive thought from somewhere else that becomes an obsession that results in the host willing it into existence, and then it either takes over the person or maybe can interact with them physically on its own—or the physical interaction is sort of imagined (like a teenage girl holding herself aloft and stabbing herself in the face while believing the Empty Man figure is doing it). Within that reservoir of thought exist other consciousnesses, “other minds” that are “ancient and angry,” with which the cult wants to communicate. The cosmic horror becomes evident as this element of the narrative comes into play over time, as while the terms are kept vague, the implication is that these other consciousnesses are those of something like the elder gods of typical cosmic horror, strictly Lovecraftian or otherwise. The Empty Man exists between man and these beings and seems to be an emissary or enforcer doing and communicating their will. The cult has conducted experiments to attempt to communicate with and understand these… outer/old thoughts, which exist well beyond the scope of human understanding and history. While the present-day legend of the Empty Man says blowing on a bottle summons him, our characters in the prologue encounter something different—a sort of antique little pipe that is blown in a similar fashion, though it does resemble a bottleneck enough that it may just be a broken piece of a particularly old bottle. In either case, the point still stands.

Both The Empty Man and Come True are about shadowy figures that operate outside human understanding and function as a sort of infection that can cause their host to do things against their will. Both protagonists—Sara and James—are essentially infected and struggle to understand what is happening to them as their reality falls apart. The difference is that Come True ultimately abandons the question of the shared dreamscape and figure entirely in favor of focusing on Sara’s personal odyssey. Those other threads are not so much left dangling in a tantalizing and ultimately satisfying way as they are severed. After something apparently really bad goes down at the hospital where the tests are being conducted, we never return to the scientists as a group or to the nature of the shadowy figure. The movie ends by revealing that Sara has been in a coma for years and that the unusual events of the past “days” have been the result of attempts by her caretakers to reach and treat her. There is still mystery left here, like whether any of the events of the film actually happened (perhaps if Sara entered her coma at some point we witnessed, and if so, when) and maybe if the message she receives at the end bluntly revealing the nature of her situation is even real (or if she is simply doomed to move forever in a state of uncertain wakefulness while just going deeper and deeper into nightmare); however, the larger mystery of the connected dream world and its mysterious denizen just feels unceremoniously neglected in this conclusion. Meanwhile, as I’ve said already, The Empty Man makes the nature of the shared connection a focus while still ultimately prioritizing the specific experiences of its protagonist. It takes the other place and the mysterious figure somewhere interesting, whereas Come True abandons them.

From Come True, specifically one of its most moving sequences. Source.

Ultimately, I really enjoyed The Empty Man, though that enjoyment turned a bit sour when Lasombra first visits a sort of center belonging to the cult (formally known as the “Pontifex Institute”). There are major Scientology vibes here with the way that the definitely-not-a-church has this New-Age-y, self-help-flavored quality. They give Lasombra a form to fill out that includes information about himself and his beliefs, and among those belief statements—one of which questions the validity of the scientific method—are some statements about men and women and gender. The cult believes in a sense of oneness, a conflict-less and boundary-less ideal existence inspired by that otherworldly reservoir, the motivating concepts presumably being that there exists no physical distinction between the beings there and that the thoughts projected from that other realm are shared by all humans regardless of any other individual differences. The cult—the evil cult—is basically advocating for abolishing gender norms and moving beyond other divisions that result in conflict, like race, perhaps. That these real-world progressive ideas are given totally over to a patently evil organization in The Empty Man is troubling for obvious reasons. The association is a condemnation of those things, and there is therefore a reactionary undertone to the film. Googling “the empty man transphobic” reveals a little criticism of the film on those terms, as well as at least a little positive interpretation of the film’s handling of these elements, though the total criticism seems very low, in keeping with the movie’s niche or “cult” (ha) status.

After recognizing a potentially troubling (albeit also interesting) element of the film introduced in those fleeting shots of certain questions on the cult’s forms, I decided to do some thinking and some reaching to see if I could find other evidence of related retrograde messaging in the movie. What I came up with and shared on Twitter as part of an initial short thread responding to the film is how gender norms feature so prominently in the film’s concluding sequence. The big reveal to end all big reveals is that Lasombra doesn’t actually exist. Or, more accurately, he has only existed for the three days he’s been trying to find the missing Amanda. He's actually a “tulpa,” willed into existence by the cultists in order to artificially engineer a human vessel receptive to the influence of the outer thoughts and able to become their “prophet.” Such antenna-like humans do naturally arise over time—and such was the case with the lone survivor from the prologue—but housing some part of the will from beyond the stars (or whatever) degrades the host. The cult’s current antenna man, the surviving member of the prologue’s ill-fated group of hikers, lies in bed in a hospital in a permanently comatose state and is apparently running out of time. Rather than wait for potentially hundreds of years to establish another direct link with the world beyond, the cultists have taken matters into their own hands. James Lasombra was not born, and he was never a cop. How much he’s even genuinely experienced over the past several days is called into question, as the house where he thought he lived is revealed to be unfurnished and empty (maybe). He had thought he was working closely with Amanda’s mother, Nora (Marin Ireland), and had multiple conversations with her (Nora) about both the developing case and his findings and also about their shared personal history, but when he tries to call her again, she no longer knows him, suggesting very little of what the audience has witnessed in the film once we switched to Lasombra’s perspective can be taken as the truth.

This is the point where things get weird and subjective as Lasombra’s mind, having already been probed by the Empty Man over two days, is finally taken over. We see the possession happen via the Empty Man vomiting/pouring itself into Lasombra’s mouth, but the event is likely not physically or literally happening that way. Lasombra, who was at the hospital before but has been instantly transported (maybe) to the dank tunnels beneath the Pontifex Institute building for the possession, runs all the way home to find his house empty. As he travels, we get a montage of the events that had defined the fake man’s life. They are, predictably, the death of his young son and wife while he was having an affair with Amanda’s mother following the funeral for her husband. Pretty standard grizzled ex-cop stuff, in other words. The key here, I think, is in the extreme, nearly archetypal, predictability and heteronormativity on display and in how the film both lingers here and then proceeds afterward. We know these memories that have been flickering for the whole film but now come into something like perfect clarity are not real. They don’t actually matter anymore, but, still, we have to watch Lasombra’s son and beautiful wife swerve to avoid a deer and plummet from a bridge to their deaths while Lasombra and Nora either passionately fuck (clothed) or get ready to fuck, including a kind of goofy (kind of hot) and very on-the-nose moment where they seem to be kind of making out through the sheer fabric of Nora’s black camisole, that material which covers Nora’s face in this moment creating the impression of an old timey widow’s funeral veil and really driving home the immensity of the sacrilege here—her husband’s corpse not even being cold in the ground and whatnot. Throughout this sequence, music evocative of religious reverence is playing. Arriving on the other side of these memories, exploring his empty house, what Lasombra finds is the antenna man in his hospital bed. Lasombra then shoots the man repeatedly in the head before exiting the room to find himself now back in the hospital, where a small group of people fall to their knees and then bow in worship of either him or, possibly, the entity he now carries within him.

My argument lies, once more, in the associations. A painfully traditional straight male existence has defined this character, and it’s what has essentially been taken from him by The Left. I mean—by the cult. Er… by the Pontifex Institute. Right after languishing in the memories of wife and of son and of sexy mistress, Lasombra violently extinguishes the life of his predecessor antenna, the being perhaps most responsible for the loss if responsibility flows upward through the cult hierarchy. Remember that the cultists are also the ones here pushing the Trans Agenda. Whether Lasombra actually pulls the trigger or not is in question—both whether he (or instead the Empty Man) does it and if the murder is even literal and physical at this point. However, this is theming we’re talking about here. What matters are the images and their order and what those images and their organization might suggest. Without wife, son, and lover, Lasombra is an empty man. It’s giving “retvrn” trad nonsense, is what I’m saying, at least in part. Lasombra, a very conventionally cishet-looking guy, responds to the loss of these essential, vital parts of his life via murder, and this sort of badass reprisal is one I can imagine a certain type of audience member (likely within Lasombra’s demographic) feeling an emotional resonance with. The sort of over-the-top pining for the good old days that might be suggested here is not entirely dissimilar from the rhetoric employed by reactionaries and outright white supremacists who argue that a progressive world is lowering (white) birthrates, eroding traditional (white) values, and so forth. The sinister implications of transness, in this reactionary mindset, do include a belief that it’s an “ideology” that makes men less masculine and women less feminine and that contributes to those declining birthrates and prevents us as a society from returning to the perfect world of the 1950s, or however far back trad freaks imagine that we need to go in order to fully, properly RETURN.

 

A visualization of the reactionary theming of The Empty Man, according to Monty.

You can continue to push on these elements of the film, I feel. The whole idea of the Empty Man as a contagion that arises from invasive thoughts and that can potentially be caught by interacting with the wrong people recalls the notion spread by so-called “gender critical feminists” (aka trans-exclusionary feminists, or TERFs) that transness is a sort of social contagion. You’ll find stories from mothers online who ascribe to these beliefs about how they try to isolate their children in order to protect them. If they can keep their “sons” or “daughters” from interacting with trans people, then they can stop them from “catching” gender dysphoria and from wanting to transition. This idea that LGBT people are predators who don’t just molest but also convert “victims” is not new. The current “grooming” obsession that conservatives are leaning into hard is essentially the same old homophobia with a new coat of paint and, critically, casts a wide, wide net, roping in not just trans people but also anyone LGBT or any ally that might want to normalize those identities and help other people (especially children) understand the feelings that they, by all accounts often, begin having well before they have the language to understand themselves. These stories of childhood ignorance that come from grown LGBT people characterize this denied understanding as painful and cruel, in contrast to what conservatives see as the blissful innocence of a childhood unsullied with “adult” ideas. Substance abuse, self-harm, risky sexual behavior, and a sense of not belonging anywhere are actions and feelings often associated with this sense of a self denied. Alleviating those feelings even somewhat by offering understanding (even just the language to understand those feelings) is seen by conservatives as predatory and as something that actually afflicts the person in question with gayness or transness, thinking that is of a kind with a conservative stance on racism that suggests invoking racism is itself the crime—that it is essentially spoken into existence and doesn’t exist until it is named. That this notion of predation or infection by a sinister organization of perverts parallels somewhat the dangerous alien-sent, cult-facilitated thoughts of The Empty Man is… interesting, and troubling.

My own thoughts start to reach a tenuous point with the relationship between Nora and Amanda and with how Amanda is eighteen but still needs her mother’s protection. The interpretative waters here are murkier, but there is a fear early in the movie that Nora has been taken by the cult, while the police point out that she is eighteen and can legally do what she wants. The link to trans debate stuff here lies with the widening age range within which transphobes—or, you know, people “just asking questions”—feel that trans people should not be able to transition because they’re too young. Trans folks have rightfully been pointing out that discussions of denying (non-surgical) transition to minors would not end there, and now we have states looking to control transition even past the point someone should most obviously have legal control over their body. There was a tweet that circulated one day recently where the author suggested that even thirty was too young, and prominent conservatives obsessed with trans people, like What is a Woman? (2022) star and “political commentator” Matt Walsh, have been pretty upfront about the fact that they think no one of any age should be allowed to transition. The end goal is, of course, the total elimination of transness, or at least the restriction of trans people’s ability to alter their appearance and live their lives to the point that existing publicly is impossible, which is more or less the same as elimination. The old “Won’t somebody think of the children!” and “grooming” bits are just convenient rhetoric with the faintest hint of civility deployed to try to win over moderate skeptics and shift the Overton window enough that out-and-out elimination slowly becomes an acceptable topic of conversation. But it all starts with the idea of protecting children, and in The Empty Man the cult and their evil (trans) agenda have lured Nora’s daughter away from her at the onset of the story. Furthermore, the concept of emptiness, of a hole, recalls somewhat the sensationalist image on the cover of Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), where a young girl is shown with a round, empty void in her lower abdomen and groin region. There is an obsession among transphobes with the ability (or lack thereof) of young people to reproduce—something they conveniently share with the aforementioned white supremacist trad weirdos—and one might imagine the bodies of trans people “empty” from this perspective, assuming the steps they pursue to change themselves even actually render them impotent, which is not even always the case.

The title of The Empty Man film is playful and malleable—equal parts silly and sinister even without the transphobia angle. Lasombra is a man empty of life by design and a fit vessel for the being of the same name because of that emptiness. Meanwhile, aside from the actual Empty Man, there’s the playfulness with the method of summoning it via an “empty” (bottle). It’s very nearly literally called the empty bottle guy. Or maybe it’s an empty man in an eldritch sense: a man—or just the vaguest shell-like veneer of one—from an empty place, where there are only thoughts and powerful wills wanting to exert their influence on humanity. That The Empty Man inspires this sort of critique in me is, from my perspective, a good thing. Whether the movie means to be truly, vehemently transphobic or if the questionnaire is just a little dig, a fun little “what-if” for some transphobic mind behind the movie, I couldn’t say. All of what I’ve outlined above is reading into the movie, but that it offers anything to read into in the first place is good. Having more cosmic horror in film, and especially cosmic horror that eschews anything so conventional and boring as a giant octopus-dragon-man—I’m looking at you Underwater (also from 2020)—is great. Maybe The Empty Man provides a template for getting art made on a somewhat larger scale these days. It’s apparently technically a comic book movie, though it seems like it has little in common with its source material and is mostly its own thing. In the end, it’s a wild and weird thing and very much worth seeing, even if you don’t plan to read into stuff like the fact that the high school in the film is named for Jacques Derrida or that James Lasombra only having just been born three days ago is kind of meta because that’s the exact point the character was “born” for us as viewers and since he literally does just exist as a movie character without a real past or memories and in service of this one prescribed role in a story outside his control… Undoubtedly, there is still other interpretative work that could be done with such a text, and that is just not something I would have expected from a film called “The Empty Man” of all things.