Horror Aughts #9: ‘The Mothman Prophecies’ and The Frisson of the Paranormal
The disquieting yet riveting thrill of believing in supernatural entities
‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.
As a thrill-seeking teenager back in the early 2000s, I used to have a favorite type of conversation. My buddies and I used to sit in dark, empty bus stops on quiet summer nights, smoking and babbling about chilling and eerie mysteries. We had no internet yet — this was the poor Eastern Europe where such a thing counted as an expensive privilege — so we were forced (fortunately) to let our imaginations run wild. The greatest hits were: Are aliens real? What if you met one? Are the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot hoaxes? Have you ever felt the presence of a ghost? Does the Blair Witch really exist?
Granted, many of these conversations originated from debating cryptic X-Files episodes — the biggest appeal of Chris Carter’s unnerving show was that it provided enough ideas to run amok with conspiracy theories — and stories from Unsolved Mysteries that ran on Sundays as a sensationalistic matinee entertainment. There was also a campfire-story element to our convos because we knew each of us had to walk home alone in alarmingly still, dimly lit streets, completely abandoned after 11 PM, because we practically lived in Silent Hill.
When you talk for hours about aliens, ghosts, and other frightful creatures in the dead of night, you will experience a spike in your blood pressure when a stray cat jumps out of a dumpster, or the wind makes an uncannily high-pitched sound, no matter how rational you think you are. That was the fun part we always laughed about the following day, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a major contribution to why I became a horror lover in my early teens.
But my most cherished part in these talks wasn’t the fear factor; it was the envisioning of the unknown. The crooked fantasies of my juvenile, thus limitless imagination — dreaming up faceless humanoid creatures with monochrome skin, bony legs, and overlong arms — transporting me to a place of horrific wonder. Visualizing the Loch Ness Monster based on (made-up) witness testimonies. Or thinking of the vicious “ghosts” my cousins and I saw one night in the backyard of my grandparents’ house that were just sinister-looking shadows of vines and branches — or were they? This was the kind of white-knuckle tingle I’d been immediately seduced by back then.
Mark Pellington’s 2002 The Mothman Prophecies — a supernatural horror based on true events and starring a brooding Richard Gere — fed into that paranormal fascination like a night spent in an abandoned mental asylum. I obsessed over it for years, but I didn’t dare rewatch it until this year because its timing was so perfectly aligned with my teen horror-brain back then that I thought another viewing decades later could only lessen the memory of it.
I was right.
That likely has to do with how I adored Pellington’s feature with a young and impressionable mind (as a sprawling, frightening web of mysteries ruled by a terrifyingly obscure avian being) than the actual merits of the film. After two decades of watching hundreds of better horrors and with a 20-plus-year older mind, The Mothman Prophecies proved a more decipherable and less nightmare-evoking piece of work than my brain made me believe in the aughts.
Although the movie hasn’t completely lost all of its alluring creepiness, it feels undeniably tamer and shallower today. After all, it’s about a grieving husband grasping at straws while chasing after the memory of his late wife by investigating a paranormal entity. That man is John Klein (Gere), a columnist at the Washington Post, who loses his spouse, Mary (Debra Messing), shortly after a strange car accident that reveals a brain tumor in her. Though the car crash seems unrelated to Mary’s fatal and rapid illness (John survives without a scratch), she begins drawing mothlike creatures with red eyes in her notebook until her death, which she apparently saw on the windshield on the night of the accident.
Jump to two years later, John finds himself driving in Richmond, Virginia, when his car breaks down. He walks to get help and meets a local man named Gordon (the great Will Patton), who draws a gun on him, claiming this is the third time he knocked on his door at 2:30 AM three nights in a row. The local sheriff, Connie (Laura Linney), is called to handle the situation, and John tells her he has no idea how the hell he ended up here in West Virginia, hundreds of miles from where he was the night before.
Connie mentions that several locals have reported similarly strange experiences in the past few weeks, in addition to seeing a winged creature with red eyes, which immediately brings back Mary’s drawings to John all over again. He soon finds out that Gordon is somehow connected to this phenomenon, too, and begins to investigate, hoping his findings will reveal something about Mary’s death. Before long, things get spookily out of control, starting with unnerving phone calls, odd witness testimonies, and unlikely premonitions related to the elusive Mothman — a being that’s as intriguing and haunting as it is frustratingly enigmatic.
That’s not a bad setup for a paranormal horror at all, but the more Richard Hatem’s script edges toward the prophecies about lethal mass accidents foreseen by some Mothman witnesses, the further we get from the mysterious nature and enticement of the being itself. That sadly paves the way for squandering and predictable twists, slowly taking us away from John’s grim yet emotionally investing goose chase to deflate the sinister beats the quietly haunting atmosphere had going for it. The result is a flow of underwhelming events that conclude in a way that offers answers for questions that fall into the least interesting category the movie posed in the first half.
And those that go unanswered are the core of what made me fall in love with The Mothman Prophecies all those years ago. The genuinely disturbing testimonies about this paranormal phenomenon that took place in West Virginia in the 1960s, eventually gathered and documented in a non-fiction book by John Keel in 1975 (which formed the base of Pellington’s film). Now, I’m not sure if I knew about the book’s existence back then (probably didn’t), but the movie surely made me susceptible to believing that some of this could’ve actually happened. It gave me an inkling to entertain the Mothman sightings at least as a thought exercise — regardless of how ambiguous or truly rooted they were in reality — and to find the final conclusion of the film fittingly vague by not offering any concrete explanation about what or who the Mothman truly is.
That simply doesn’t fly today, no matter how much I’d like to convince myself otherwise. All the sensationalistic yet lacklustre ending does is bring to mind the Final Destination films (not necessarily in a good way) and highlight that the majority of the $32 million budget was spent on that sequence alone. It’s simply ineffective and cliched, sucking out all that peculiar and bizarre air the film was permeated with in its first hour. Perhaps it’s always been like that, but my younger self’s Mulder-like wanting-to-believe mindset made it seem appealingly puzzling at the time. I certainly wasn’t alone since The Mothman Prophecies was a moderate box office success, amassing over $55 million worldwide in 2002.
But as disappointing as my rewatch ended up being two decades later, I’ll always be indebted to Pellington’s vision and Hatem’s script for nourishing my fascination with atmospheric horrors and paranormal phenomena.
