The idea of falling in love with the undead has long been mined for cheap laughs in horror-comedies. With his directorial debut The Dead Thing, Elric Kane (known to movie geeks as a host of the Pure Cinema podcast) takes this idea and plays it straight, using the concept of being in love with a ghost/zombie for an exploration of earthly isolation in an era where we seem to be more connected than ever before, and yet there's never been so much loneliness.
Twentysomething Alex (Blu Hunt) is drifting through life, working the night shift at a scanning company and spending her free time hooking up with men she finds through a dating app called "Friction." Alex believes her swiping days are over when she makes a genuine connection with the outwardly affable Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), despite some red flags (his profile picture features a cat, which he admits isn't his). After a night of good conversation and great sex, the two say their goodbyes. Alex tries to contact Kyle but receives no reply to her messages. She even stakes out the coffee shop where Kyle claimed to work, until eventually she sees him in a bar with another young woman (who looks a lot like Alex; he definitely has a type). Alex is understandably shocked to subsequently learn that Kyle was killed in a car accident before she spotted him on another date. Now that's what I call ghosting.
Discovering that Kyle's Friction profile is still active, Alex leaves a message and lo and behold, she receives a response and a date is set. When Kyle shows up he seems to genuinely have no memory of ever previously meeting Alex. Despite being freaked out, Alex continues to see Kyle, but it becomes increasingly clear that something isn't quite right with him.
One of the saddest line deliveries in horror cinema comes courtesy of Griffin Dunne when his American Werewolf in London limbo-zombie is asked what it's like to be dead. "It's boring. I'm lonely," is his response. The Dead Thing gives us a lonely figure in Alex, but it's nothing compared to the loneliness felt by the undead Kyle, who seems to be trapped in a limbo of sorts due to his surviving presence on Friction. As long as the app is alive, so too is a superficial version of Kyle, doomed to spend eternity on a series of meaningless dates when all he wants is to escape and be with Alex.
Kane captures the ethereal emptiness of Los Angeles in a way not seen in horror cinema since Thom Eberhardt's unsettling supernatural thriller Sole Survivor, a film that shares its theme of being trapped in a state between life and death. The city of angels is as vacant here as Cronenberg's Toronto or Antonioni's Rome; even the ubers that shuttle Alex between work, home and dates are commandeered by unseen drivers. People only seem to come into being when they're summoned through a dating app. There's an element of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, though here it's unclear if the dead is haunting the living, or the living is tormenting the dead. Kane's film feels more in conversation with Nobuhiko Obayashi's solemn ghost story The Discarnates than that Japanese film's recent English language remake All of Us Strangers ever did.
Alex's job sees her scanning physical documents and turning them into digital files. It's a transference from the physical realm to "the cloud," to a place that doesn't really exist, a sort of digital limbo. Are physical things kept "alive" when they become digital, or are they transferred into facsimiles? When we hold onto pictures of passed away loved ones, we're not really keeping them alive, we're merely keeping alive our memories of the departed. The undead Kyle seems to no longer have his own soul, rather he's simply whatever those who swipe left believe him to be. It doesn't matter to Alex that she was drawn to a false image of Kyle as a cat owner, she's decided to believe in that image regardless.
Western horror movies tend to be Catholic in nature, largely because that particular sect lends itself so readily to cinematic imagery. In its suspicion of idolatry, its critique of worshipping an image rather than a living thing, The Dead Thing is a rare piece of Protestant horror cinema. We live in an age when tech companies offer grieving parents the chance to keep their dead children "alive" through AI software that mimics the deceased. Some may find this comforting, but others regard it as deeply unhealthy and more than a little creepy. The Dead Thing will appeal to the latter camp.
Directed by: Elric Kane
Starring: Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes
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