I'm proud to say that I've always been a voracious reader, but I will freely admit that my choice of reading material may have at times been dubious. When I was a kid in grade school, I'll admit to be an avid reader of books on the paranormal and the shamelessly speculative. I regularly made trips to the library to check out books on U.F.O.'s, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the search for Noah's ark, and the Lincoln conspiracy. You young whippersnappers out there probably don't realize that during the 70's we also had our own environmentalist wackos, though back then they were all waiting for the return of the ice age or for planets to align in destructive ways. As I grew older I came to the realization that all this stuff, sadly for my romantic imagination, was a bunch of hokum. Reports of mysterious phenomena by people are at best simply mistaken impressions of run of the mill things or at worst outright hoaxes or delusions. But for a while this otherworldly stuff was big. At one time our most hapless President, Jimmy Carter himself, even claimed to have seen a U.F.O.
In the hands of an imaginative (yet, by definition gullible) writer, however, some of this spooky stuff was downright scary for an eight- or nine-year old boy. The illusion that it could be true was enough to bring a frission of fear from the creepier tales. One of the books I remember most distinctly was a book by John Keel that came out in the early 70's called The Mothman Prophecies - a book that quite literally gave me chills when I read it as an impressionable youngster. The book purports to tell the story of weird goings-on in a small West Virginia town in the late 60's. Residents claimed to have seen a mysterious gigantic black creature with glowing red eyes in addition to more generic U.F.O.'s. Many claimed to have been tormented by mysterious phone calls, power outages, and staticky voices coming through TV's. The men-in-black also put in an appearance; though in U.F.O.-lore these are people of unnatural and cadaverous appearance claiming to represent the police while clearly being agents of "them". The icing on this gruesome cake came in the form of a real tragedy that befell the town of Point Pleasant while the hysteria was taking place.
The movie savvy will recognize this long digression as an introduction to the movieThe Mothman Prophecies released this weekend. Though I was happy to see that a movie version of the book that I still remember as scaring the bejeesus out of me was being made, I nonetheless never expect too much from Hollywood anymore. Still, initial reviews were somewhat favorable so I dragooned the missus into watching it this weekend with me, and I have to say that I liked it. It's not a cinematic masterpiece and the source material probably could have been mined to much greater advantage, but it's still a pretty good movie. And while much of the material in Keel's book was jettisoned, the obsessions of his that made the book so eerie have been retained.
The Mothman Prophecies is odd in that a lot about it can be divulged without really giving the uninitiated any information as to what it's about. At the same time the less one knows ahead of time, the better it is. All I told my wife was that it was like the "X-Files", and I'd leave at it that for those deciding whether or not to go. In a nutshell, Richard Gere plays a reporter for the Washington Post. Early in the film, a car accident ends with personal tragedy and an introduction to the shadowy Mothman. Later, while driving to Virginia, he is mysteriously drawn hundreds of miles off course to end up in Point Pleasant, W. Va. The residents of Point Pleasant are also seeing the Mothman. Some residents are hearing voices that tell them of imminent disasters. Some residents are having frightening dreams. Gere's character himself starts receiving bizarre phone calls from some otherworldly source. It soon becomes clear that something terrible is going to happen in Point Pleasant, and everyone may be powerless to stop it.
What makes the movie work so well, despite some shortcomings I'll discuss below, is that despite the downright eerie nature of events in Point Pleasant, it is not clear why the supernatural has manifested itself there. The warnings of impending disaster may be read as an attempt to prevent it, so maybe the signs are an attempt at benevolence on the part of the Mothman. Late in the game, Gere's character is diverted away from Point Pleasant, so maybe the warnings are a tease meant to bring more tragedy into his life. Maybe the manifestations are downright diabolic and actively cause the death and destruction they foretell. This ambiguity is all Keel's, and it does the screenwriter proud to have hit upon this most disturbing aspect of his book. I don't know too much about John Keel, but I'll take him at face value and assume that he is simply a credulous and naive man who believed that all the crazy stories that he heard in his travels were true. He wrote other books about the bizarre stories that he dug up all over the world as well, and he seems to have convinced himself that they are all proof of some supernatural interference in human affairs. The belief in a transcendent intelligence is strongly ingrained in humans, and sparks our craving for religious belief. God's benevolence has been the driving force behind many of the world's religions. To convince oneself that a superhuman intelligence is malevolent is to be driven to extremes of paranoia. What makes The Mothman Prophecies so memorable after the credits roll is its insistence that a transcendent intelligence exists coupled with a refusal to tell us what side it takes.
In the interests of full disclosure, I need to also point out the shortcomings of The Mothman Prophecies. First of all, it is undeniably too long. Clocking in at nearly two hours, it is too flabby for its own good. There are just too many shots of empty Washington parks, towering Chicago buildings, and driving, driving, driving. Just to point to a specific instance, Gere's character drives to Chicago to talk to a Mothman expert (Alexander Leek, Keel spelled backwards), drives back to West Virginia, discovers another reason to consult the expert, and drives back to Chicago. Shots of dark highways are atmospheric once or twice, but repeated again and again just seem like filler. It's also disappointing that even though the scriptwriter captured the spirit of Keel's book, he and the director didn't make use of it's eerier aspects. The eponymous Mothman himself is a surprisingly small part of the book and movie both, so the fact that he barely shows himself in the film is not necessarily fatal. The apparition in the book, however, was described in vivid and frightening terms, so it still is a little disappointing that his appearances in the movie are so fleeting. Other creepy events in the book are also abandoned in a somewhat misguided attempt to introduce a touchy-feeling subplot concerning Gere's character's attempts at getting over his personal tragedy. The subplot itself is not necessarily a bad idea, but it is treated with such sentimental reverence that all the apparitions associated with it are entirely benign and boring. It just seems that some eerier material could have been inserted in its stead.
I also have to give the movie kudos for a small niceness that is entirely lacking in nearly all Hollywood products today. At one point in the movie, one of the secondary characters declares himself to be "a good Christian" and crosses are prominently displayed on the walls of his home. This is a one-time throwaway line and nothing more is mentioned of it in the rest of the film. Still I rolled my eyes at this because anti-Christian bigotry is so extreme in Hollywood that typically a display of Christian faith is movies is shorthand for marking a character as dim-witted, pathologically up-tight and intolerant, and, in extreme cases, psychotically disturbed. Here, however, I was pleasantly surprised that this secondary character is portrayed downright sympathetically. As I say, this has very little to do with the movie, but it was so unexpected that I have to give the movie credit for being thoughtful on this score alone.
It seems Mothman still has a rather surprising following on the internet. In addition to the graphically impressive but rather sketchy details on him at the movie's official site linked to above, this article at the Prairie Ghosts website is also quite informative. It mentions in passing the most likely explanation for the Mothman sightings in the form of a flock of sand cranes that had strayed into Point Pleasant from their natural habitat in Canada. I implore you however that, if you want to see the movie, stay away from learning too much ahead of time. The Mothman Prophecies is in some respects a mystery and a reason for the paranormal events in Point Pleasant is not provided until the end of the movie. The movie does a fairly good job of keeping that reason a secret right up until the climax of the picture. I knew what would happen because I read the original book, but I think that a lot of reviewers have been pretty thick-witted in giving away the ending of this movie. They wouldn't dare let slip the name of the culprit in a traditional mystery, and they should have collectively held their tongues for this film as well.
