After my recent post about William Malone’s 2002 film Feardotcom, I decided to take a stab at his 2008 follow-up (Masters of Horror episode notwithstanding) Parasomnia. It turns out that I had already watched the first third or so of this movie once before, but something had interrupted me and I hadn’t gotten any farther. Which is probably okay, but also kind of a bummer, since most of the best stuff is in the last reel, but none of it is really worth watching twice.

I’m a little surprised that I haven’t heard more talk about Parasomnia in weird fiction circles–not because there’s actually all that much to talk about, but because of four words in the opening credits: “Conceptual Art – Zdzislaw Beksinski.” Beksinski’s work is so beloved among many in the weird fiction world that I figured his involvement–even if it seems to be more inspirational than actually direct–would be enough to attract some attention to the picture, and certainly, once you know to look for it, it’s hard to miss in the film’s surreal dreamscape images, even if they are also unduly burdened with low-budget CGI and lots and lots of spinning mirrors (plus apparently at least one monster that was scrapped from Malone’s Masters of Horror episode).

Weirdly, for all that William Malone financed this film himself and gets his name in front of the title like John Carpenter or something, this actually feels substantially less stylized than previous outings, possibly due to the budgetary constraints of shooting an indie rather than a studio feature. While IMDb doesn’t list a budget for Parasomnia, a little online sleuthing suggests that it’s considerably cheaper than either Feardotcom or House on Haunted Hill, and as a result, with the exception of the occasional foray into the aforementioned dreamscapes, the film reserves most of its visual style for the last few minutes, which bring in automata and a mesmerized string duet wearing goggles and corsets.

There are a few good gore effects, including a body that’s walled up in an abandoned bookstore bedecked with posters for old-fashioned stage magicians, but even when the film is throwing everything it has at the wall, it feels positively constrained compared to Malone’s previous films. (Though the shots of the mesmerist serial killer bad guy–a phrase that should be enough to win me over all by itself–using his powers are actually pretty cool.)

Sean Young shows up for all of a minute, Jeffrey Combs essentially revives his role from Feardotcom, Timothy Bottoms plays the exposition doctor who really needs to study up on patient confidentiality and medical ethics, and John Landis makes a cameo as a department store manager who turns out a semi-comatose, blood spattered girl onto the streets without so much as calling the cops.

Compounding any of Parasomnia‘s other problems is the fact that its central premise is pretty gross/creepy, in the way that Sleeping Beauty stories are often kinda gross/creepy, but maybe even moreso here. As our ostensible protagonist falls in love with a girl who has been asleep for most of her life and therefore has the emotional and mental development of a child; as they “bond” in scenes where, during her brief periods of wakefulness, she rubs ice cream all over her face like a toddler, plays with a doggy chew toy, or dresses up like a cheerleader; and as he bathes her sleeping body in scenes that are overtly sexual, or tells his kooky 80s movie best friend that he loves her, I found it impossible to go along with the movie’s notion that this “relationship” was on the up-and-up.

An insinuated connection between the two because they once met when they were very small, in a house that looks a lot like Elise’s house from the later Insidious movies, and a scene returning both characters to childhood in the film’s closing moments attempt to ameliorate the sexual predator vibe, but it’s really too little too late. Fundamentally, our “protagonist” may be less of a serial killer than the sinister Byron Volpe, but he doesn’t really come off looking a whole lot better aside from that.

Without the interference of a studio, Parasomnia should have been Malone’s stylistic triumph–the ultimate affirmation of Roger Ebert’s claim, regarding Feardotcom, that if “the final 20 minutes had been produced by a German impressionist [sic?] in the 1920s, we’d be calling it a masterpiece”–but instead it is so bogged down by its stricter budgetary limitations and its dedication to a problematic script that it feels like a lesser cousin to even the least of Malone’s more studio-oriented work, where, while the scripts were often still bad, the movies at least seemed less interested in them.

[This post previously appeared on my Patreon.]

I liked William Malone’s 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill, and I remember watching his 2002 follow-up Feardotcom back when I was working in a video store. All I remember about it at the time is that it felt immediately dated, and already a little too reminiscent of that year’s American remake of The Ring. (Even though Feardotcom actually beat The Ring into theatres by a couple of months, though of course the Japanese original had already been out for a few years by then.)

Re-watching Feardotcom today, it still feels immediately dated and sort of derivative of the general atmosphere that was starting to pervade horror cinema as the Asian horror boom began to make its way to American shores, but it also feels weirdly precognizant and definitely very, very of a piece with Malone’s House on Haunted Hill.

Specifically, while still being a stylized ghost movie in the House on Haunted Hill mold, Feardotcom also prefigures the rise of the torture porn genre, and you could extract almost the entire aesthetic of Saw (which wouldn’t hit theatres for two more years) from this film. Meanwhile, the titular website and some of the investigation scenes feature found-footage segments of the sort that would shortly become ubiquitous in horror circles.

While the plot is ostensibly a lift of Ringu, with a “live-cam death site” replacing the cursed video tape as the film’s deadly MacGuffin, following a police detective (Stephen Dorff) and a researcher from the Department of Health (Natasha McElhone) as they try to track down a serial killer who is torturing people to death online, while also trying to figure out why people who went to the website are dying mysteriously within 48 hours, this isn’t a movie that lives and dies by plot. In fact, it feels more like it careens from one moment to another than like it actually has a story, helped along by the unreal and dreamlike atmosphere that Malone conjures up.

Feardotcom is pure stylistic indulgence. From a prominently-featured reference to Mad Love‘s Dr. Gogol in graffiti within the first two minutes to the fact that the film’s cold opening features Udo Kier playing a character named Polidori to a creepy ghost girl with pale hair and a white ball that is probably a nod to the Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill!, we’re deep into a territory of unrealism before the movie gets very far.

In spite of the website premise, the New York City of Feardotcom is a timeless, rainy, noir metropolis that feels more like the fictional and unspecified urban landscapes of weird fiction than any real or modern place. (See also the setting of Alex Proyas’ Dark City from four years before.)

Exteriors are always the brightest points in the film, in spite of the constant rain, while interiors are claustrophobic and dimly lit, with characters trapped in pools of light like insects frozen in amber, even when they occupy otherwise expansive rooms. As in House on Haunted Hill, Malone juxtaposes grandeur and decay, as in a scene where a hallway filled with peeling paint and flickering fluorescent lights culminates in an elevator with marble panels and gilt edges.

By this point, deteriorating industrial backdrops had already become de rigueur in horror cinema, but in Feardotcom these urban hellscapes are incorporated into the proceedings in ways that make them feel as much internal as external. They are a part of the deteriorating effect that the events of the movie are having on the psyches of the characters. (In some ways, Feardotcom probably feels somewhat less dated now than it did at the time, because the fact that the internet never looked or worked like that just seems part and parcel to Malone’s odd, anachronistic setting, rather than bad artistic direction.)

In spite of sharing a lot in common with Malone’s House on Haunted Hill, however, Feardotcom is never as good as its elder sibling, mostly because it is humorless and lacks that film’s strong central premise (borrowed from the William Castle original) and the accompanying performances of Geoffrey Rush and Famke Janssen. (Also, while the ghosts here are certainly in the same family tree, there are no Jacob’s Ladder-style vibrating heads.)

Still, it’s intriguing to stack the two next to each other, and see how much Malone’s aesthetic vision influences both, for good and for ill. From the same creepy sadomasochistic montages to the same use of plastinated bodies in display cases as a backdrop, there’s even an odd fetish for desk-mounted pencil sharpeners in both films. Feardotcom also relies on a similarly regrettable use of CGI in its closing moments, although it is considerably toned down from the ending of House on Haunted Hill.

Feardotcom boasts a lot of familiar faces in its supporting cast. Besides the aforementioned Udo Kier in its cold opening, Stephen Rea has a role as the mad doctor serial killer, while Jeffrey Combs plays Stephen Dorff’s dissolute partner. (Combs and Malone seem to have had a good working relationship, as the former is in most of the latter’s handful of feature films.)

Make no mistake, Feardotcom is a nearly-plotless and often inept movie that is primarily of interest because it is so deeply mired in William Malone’s particular vision while also being such an odd harbinger of things to come. I found it fascinating in its way, but fascinating should not necessarily be confused with good.

Sadly, even if Feardotcom had benefitted from a tighter script, it seems unlikely that it would have succeeded on many more levels than it does. Fortunately, the weird stylistic decisions of William Malone are more than enough to keep it oddly compelling, at least for me, even while it stumbles around from one “spooky” scene to another. I remember his Masters of Horror episode “The Fair Haired Child” having a somewhat similar aesthetic, and I can’t actually remember if I already checked out his 2008 film Parasomnia, or just watched the trailer, but I guess it’s time to give it a look (possibly again).

[This post previously appeared on my Patreon.]