#skylar morgan dunbar

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/21/2019: TERROR IN THE WOODS

I consider this to be the second Slender Man movie that I viewed this blogtober season. Previously, I wrote about THE TALL MAN, a twisty 2012 thriller by Pascal Laugier, the writer-director of 2008′s MARTYRS, which is coincidentally about a pair of traumatized young women who are driven to violence by the belief that they must placate a monstrous supernatural entity. THE TALL MAN does not share that similarity with the Slender Man mythos, but it makes a familiar proposal: A tall shadowy male figure emerges from the forest to abscond with children, for reasons that may be either murderous, or that may instead offer lonely and dejected little kids an escape into a sort of gothic Neverland. This odd killer-savior dichotomy reflects the pathos at the heart of Slender Man fandom, an obsession that thousands of ordinary young people shared with juvenile attempted murderers Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier. Their story is so well-known that it feels a little embarrassing to explain that the eerie Slender Man is the fictitious product of an online Photoshop contest. His first appearance, surrounded by young victims and/or acolytes, was captioned thusly:

“We didn't want to go, we didn't want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted us at the same time… “

The images’ combination of spooky shit and childhood innocence would have felt pretty cliche even in 2009, but the conflation of victimization with salvation is a potent one. It evokes both the escapist bent that is so pronounced in children, and also the death drive--the psychoanalytic idea that people are subconsciously attracted to their own inevitable and perhaps cathartic conclusions. Maybe someone has already named this form of suicidal ideation that represents both the desire for everything to stop, and the hopeful fantasy that death could be the beginning of something else; If so, I would love to read about it. For want of that, we have the sadly overexposed yet still poorly understood story of 12 year olds Moran Geyser and Anissa Weier attempting to make a sacrifice of their supposed friend Payton Leutner to the Slender Man. A thinly-veiled version of this story is articulated successfully in the Lifetime original movie TERROR IN THE WOODS.

The generic title gives no hint of what this well-acted and psychologically realistic production is like. While no names are named, including the Slender Man’s, Ella West Jerrier and Sophie Grace play extraordinarily convincing stand-ins for Geyser and Weier, as the awkward, isolated little girls who become increasingly obsessed with a Creepy Pasta-like website where they find out about a demonic creature called the Suzerain. Like the Slender Man, the terms of one’s relationship with the Suzerain are complicated. Once you have its attention, you have to make a blood sacrifice, or else it will annihilate your family. However, making the sacrifice brings the strange reward of being accepted into the Suzerain’s remote mansion, where you live forever as his slave. That might not sound too good to just anybody, but an unhappy, confused, and powerless person sees in it an escape from the ravages of the mundane world, and also a relief from the painful burden of personal responsibility, as the Suzerain becomes your ultimate and eternal authority. This is where the Payton Leutner character comes in (played perfectly by Skylar Morgan Jones), an even more naive and immature classmate who was being edged out of girls’ triangle before the Suzerain “chose” her for sacrifice.

While I feel concerned about some of the oversimplified causes that TERROR IN THE WOODS seems to identify--chiefly, well-meaning but absent parents who are too concerned with their personal dramas to notice the murder plot hatching under their noses--the movie nails perpetrator’s personalities, keeping the focus appropriately on their emotional turmoil and complex delusions. Minus the acerbic comedy, TERROR sometimes feels like a Todd Solondz picture, with true to life characters rendered in agonizing detail, especially Skylar Morgan Jones, who is as unlikable as she is undeserving. Their vulnerability, their tackiness, and their juvenile pretensions are all beautifully fleshed-out. One rarely sees an honest, warts-and-all portrayal of young children in anything besides obnoxiously arty, explicit indie dramas, and this quality puts Lifetime ahead of the curve (as they often are) in terms of a certain kind of domestic realism. Even the attempted murder scene pulls no punches, graphically depicting the savage stabbing of a little girl who ends up drenched in blood and rolled in forest floor detritus.

As I just suggested, I object somewhat to the easy-out presented here, that all of this could have been prevented if only the parents were more attentive to their children’s internet activity, and more suspicious of their perceived emotional states. Today I watched the two hour 20/20 special about the crime, in which a lot of professional adults say a lot of incredibly stupid things about the “obvious” problems with Geyser and Meier. “Is ‘I want to die’ a normal thing for a child to write?” blusters one expert rhetorically about a diary entry, at which I nearly screamed “OF COURSE IT IS!” Anyone who never experienced such exaggerated feelings of emotional exhaustion as a young teen would have to be either extremely sheltered, or sort of a psychopath themselves. Throughout the special, grownups who think Apple Jacks should taste like apples spar over whether Geyser and Morgan are just fundamentally bad people, completely ignoring the complex and detailed psychology laid out in the Slender Man literature itself. On one hand is the threat of family annihilation by this creature in whom the two girls manifestly deeply believed. On the other hand, respite from a continued life of bullying and rejection from all of their peers. Fear, sadness, alienation, and actual mental illness permeate this tragic story. In fact, the girls were ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia and shared psychosis, respectively. However, even with all that on the table, some individuals remain happy to go on TV post-trial speculating frothily that these kids just wanted to know what it felt like to commit murder, and that maybe in this story we have discovered “that rarest of things--an evil 12 year old!”

It isn’t that I don’t think evil 12 year olds can exist. I don’t believe in the patent innocence of children any more than I believe that parents are completely capable of knowing (and changing) their child’s every thought and feeling, down to the ability to determine that something as outrageous as a blood sacrifice is a real life possibility and not just a relatively normal morbid musing for a normally emo-y kid. Trying to imagine that level of domestic detective work reminds me of the superior documentary DEPROGRAMMED, which details how the filmmaker’s rebellious brother had his life ruined by parents who convinced themselves that he was a legitimate and dangerous devil worshipper. Life just isn’t that simple, and this urge to find simplistic causes and solutions for unpredictable events is no more rational or mature than the urge to find solace in an imaginary kingdom with no parents and no homework. At this point, I feel like I should apologize for failing to address this movie, which I really liked a lot, as much as I addressed the story of the Slender Man stabbing. TERROR IN THE WOODS is roundly well-acted, appropriately sympathetic to all parties, and soberly told. It’s just hard for me to separate the story from the movie, as both have potent things to say about how we underestimate the psychological complexity of childhood. I don’t have solutions to propose, except that I think a good place to start would be with responsible adults relinquishing their own shallow certainty about what can happen and what we can do. 

[malsrp]

LIST FOR RANDOMISING

1. ADDISON CARVER 2. ALEKSEI MYCHALOVICH 3. ALEXANDER LIGHTWOOD 4. ALIA MAXWELL 5. ALYX HUMPHRIES 6. AMADEJ MORALIS 7. ANGEL DEVARIS 8. ANTHONY HIGGINS 9. APRIL OLSON 10. ARCHIE ANDREWS 11. ARLAN HAVERNATHY 12. ARRON CASTILLO 13. AVA HUNTER 14. BASTIAAN MORGAN 15. BELLAMY BLAKE 16. BELLE FRENCH 17. BELLE LANDRY 18. BENTLEY FRENCH 19. BLAIR MCKENZIE/MCKENNA 20. BLAKE ANDERSON 21. BOBBI DOWNES 22. CALEB ALEXANDER WHITTON 23. CALEY GREENE 24. CASEY FINCH 25. CASTIEL NOVAK 26. CATY WHITE 27. CELESTE GOODMAN 28. CERIN Ó'CAOIMH 29. CHERYL BLOSSOM 30. CIEL PHANTOMHIVE 31. CLARKE GRIFFIN 32. CLARISSA FAIRCHILD 33. CLAUDE DONOVAN 34. CLEOPATRA ISIS MERCIA 35. COREY HAMILTON 36. DAENERYS TARGARYEN 37. DALTON FULLER 38. DANA BELA 39. DEANE TRAGER 40. DEANNA SCOFIELD 41. DESTIN RUMANCEK 42. DMITRY ALKAEV 43. DOROTHEA LIGHTWOOD-BANE 44. DOROTHY BAUM 45. DYANA ROY 46. EDEN FARLEY 47. ELEANOR BLACKBURN 48. EVA COLEMAN 49. EVA ROSALES 50. FAYE JENNINGS 51. FAYE MCKENNA 52. GRACE QUINN 53. HAILEE LEWIS 54. HARLEY QUINN 55. HARPER FINCH 56. HARRY HOOK 57. HAYLEY MARSHALL-KENNER 58. HAZEL ARDEN 59. HOPE LEHANE 60. HUNTER HARRIS 61. ILIA TRENT 62. IMELDA NAVARRO 63. ISIS MONOHAN 64. ISRAEL PRESTON 65. IVY ROMANO 66. JACQUI VALO 67. JELLYBEAN JONES 68. JEM CARSTAIRS 69. JENNA ORMOND 70. JERIAH JONES 71. JERICHO LEFÉVRE 72. JETHRO JONES 73. JIMMIE SOUEN 74. JOAQUIN DESANTOS 75. JOAQUIN NERO 76. JOSHUA ABEL HOPE 77. JUDE GODFREY 78. JUGHEAD JONES 79. JUICE ORTIZ 80. JULIET GODFREY 81. JULIYN GODFREY 82. KADE WESTFIELD 83. KAILYN HOWARD 84. KAMERON GRAINGER 85. KAYLAH ROBLES 86. KENZI MALIKOV 87. KEVIN KELLER 88. KIAN WESTFIELD 89. KILLIAN JONES 90. KIRA CONNOR 91. KIRAN WILSON 92. KIT 93. KLAUS HARGREEVES 94. KODA WESTFIELD 95. LAGERTHA 96. LEAH HOLT 97. LEON Ó'CAOIMH 98. LEXA KOM TRIKRU 99. LIAM DUNBAR 100. LOLA PORTER 101. LUCAS ABBOTT 102. LYDIA MARTIN 103. MACKENZIE GREYR 104. MAJESTAS UPRITI 105. MAL 106. MARK BLACKTHORN 107. MARK WESTLOCK 108. MATTEUSZ VILLEGAS 109. MERCEDES ABBOTT 110. MERIDA DUNBROCH 111. MIA ALLOWAY 112. MICKEY MILKOVICH 113. MIHAI FENRIRSON 114. MIKA TANAKA 115. MONTY GREEN 116. MORGANA PENDRAGON 117. MURPHY MCMANUS 118. NADIA LOWE 119. NEAL CAFFREY 120. NIKKI HOWE 121. NIKO KING 122. NOAH LAMONT 123. OCTAVIA BLAKE 124. OLIVIA OCTAVIAN 125. OLYMPIA GREEN 126. PARIS DUPONT 127. PETER RUMANCEK 128. PHOENIX MONSOON 129. POPPY MARTIN 130. PRESLEY LOWE 131. QUINN SIMONS 132. RILEY BOWMAN 133. ROSA HURLEY 134. RUBY 135. SABRINA SPELLMAN 136. SAMUEL SILVER 137. SASCHA TRENT 138. SCARLET PATTON 139. SHANE HOLDEN 140. SIMON LEWIS 141. SKYLAR MATTIACHI 142. SOPHIA TULLOCH 143. SOPHIE WINDSOR 144. STILES STILINSKI 145. SUZUME AHUMADA 146. SZYMON TRUJILLO 147. TABITHA MERSEY 148. TAYLOR BEAUFORD 149. TEN-K 150. THOMAS ESCAMILLA 151. TIBERIUS BLACKTHORN 152. TINKERBELL 153. TJ HAMMOND 154. TONI TOPAZ 155. VERONICA BECK 156. VERONICA LODGE 157. VIOLET ADDISON 158. XAVIER CAMDEN 159. YALENA "DUTCH" YARDEN 160. ZAID KYLE 161. ZAKARIAH FRANCO 162. ZARINA 163. ZOE COLE

[malsrp]

1. Aaron Roeder 2. Alexander Lightwood 3. Amadej Moralis 4. Angel Devaris 5. Anthony Higgins [ Race ] 6. Antoine Neuhaus 7. Archie Andrews 8. Arlan Havernathy 9. Árni Sveinsson 10. Arron Castillo 11. Austin Valero 12. Bastiaan Morgan 13. Beau Amarante 14. Bellamy Blake 15. Bentley French 16. Blair McKenzie/McKenna 17. Blake Anderson 18. Broderick Boyer 19. Buddy Wiltsie 20. Caleb Whitton 21. Casey Finch 22. Cerin Ó'Caoimh 23. Christopher Candler 24. Ciel Phantomhive 25. Claude Donovan 26. Cody Chester 27. Connor Dreyer 28. Conrad Benham 29. Corey Hamilton 30. Curt Wagoner 31. Dallas Ference   32. Dalton Fuller 33. Dana Bela 34. Deane Trager 35. Destin Rumancek 36. Diamond Turk 37. Dominik Aaron 38. Doyle Barish 39. Dwight Apolinar 40. Elden Pointer 41. Eliot Waugh 42. Emilio Youngberg 43. Ezequiel Hanby 44. Felix Tenner 45. Finn Jagger 46. Forrest Nilges 47. Gino Warkentin 48. Harper Finch 49. Harry Hook 50. Hunter Harris 51. Israel Preston 52. James Carstairs 53. Jamie Kostelnik 54. Jared Rubio 55. Jaskier Pankratz 56. Jason Kleinman 57. JC Garner 58. Jed Achorn 59. Jeremy Lindsay 60. Jericho Lefévre 61. Joaquin Desantos 62. Jonathon Pruette 63. Joshua Hope 64. Jude Byrom 65. Jude Godfrey 66. Jughead Jones 67. Julio Guarnieri 68. Julius Satchell 69. Juliyn Godfrey 70. Kade Westfield 71. Kammy Milkovich 72. Kareem Mauriello 73. Kendrick Slabaugh 74. Kian Westfield 75. Killian Jones 76. Kiran Wilson 77. Kirk Rich 78. Klaus Hargreeves 79. Koda Westfield 80. Lennox Hamilton 81. Leon Ó'Caoimh 82. Liam Dunbar 83. Liberato Pisani 84. Lucas Abbott 85. Makkai Barnabás 86. Mark Blackthorn 87. Mark Westlock 88. Matteusz Villegas 89. Matthias Brewer 90. Maxxie Oliver 91. Micah Martin 92. Mickey Milkovich 93. Milosz Sheehan 94. Monty Green 95. Morgyn Kennedy 96. Murdock 97. Murphy McManus 98. Neal Caffrey 99. Neil Crowley 100. Nicholas West 101. Nikki Howe 102. Niko King 103. Noah Lamont 104. Orion Kirk 105. Oscar Ellinger 106. Otto Feehan 107. Paris Dupont 108. Patrick S. Knudsen 109. Paul Mann 110. Peter Rumancek 111. Quentin Coldwater 112. Reino Kantee 113. Remi O'Reilly 114. Reo Calhoun 115. Rhys Gray 116. Riian Floyd 117. Romain Plourde 118. Rory Gearheart 119. Rupert Fulgham 120. Sammie Brandes 121. Samuel Silver 122. Seren Haines 123. Shane Holden 124. Shayne Fox 125. Simon Lewis 126. Skylar Mattiachi 127. Spencer Henderson 128. Stiles Stilinski 129. Szymon Trujillo 130. Taylor Beauford 131. Thomas Escamilla 132. Tiberius Blackthorn 133. TJ Hammond 134. Valentin Sainz 135. Vigo Oldbuck 136. Wendell Bray 137. William Croxton 138. Xavier Camden 139. Zaid Kyle 140. Zakariah Franco