This Halloween, Treat Yourself to a Neglected Horror Masterpiece

F ive years ago this week, a film no movie executive knew what to do with was dumped into theaters to die a quiet death. Though it had sat on the studio shelf for three years, its release was abrupt, coming just one week after the trailer appeared on YouTube.

It was the last-ever film to be released by 20th Century Fox, and the movie ensured that the studio that gave us everything from The Grapes of Wrath to Star Wars ended not with a bang, but a bomb. It barely recouped a quarter of its budget and was gone before moviegoers — the few who existed at the peak of the Covid pandemic, that is — even knew it arrived. That is a shame, because The Empty Man is one of the strangest, most original, and most intelligent horror films to come out in years, even decades.

Watching the trailer, viewers could be forgiven for passing the movie over. It previews what looks to be a forgettable, derivative snoozefest along the lines of The Bye Bye Man or Slender Man. Yet The Empty Man could not be more different from those cliché-ridden duds. It has almost no jump scares. It’s almost two-and-a-half hours long. It boasts a 30-minute, pre-credit opening scene. In short, it so flaunts the conventions of the genre to stake out its own vision that it was probably doomed to failure.

The film opens in 1995, with four friends ascending into the Himalayas of Bhutan on a mountaineering trip. When one of them, Paul, falls into a cave, his friend Greg descends into the abyss to find him sitting before some sort of alien or demonic skeleton set in a wall of rock. Whatever this thing is (the film never makes it clear), it’s sitting in a meditative pose with its giant bone hands strangely folded together, as though it were some sort of Buddhist monk from the netherworld.

When Greg approaches Paul to see if he’s okay, the latter whispers to him in a trance-like state: “If you touch me, you’ll die.” It’s not giving much away to reveal that Greg does indeed die — as does everyone else in the group save Paul — under a bizarre set of circumstances. How this connects to the rest of the film only becomes clear at the end.

The movie then cuts abruptly to the present-day St. Louis. There we meet James Lasombra, a former police officer turned security-store manager who has reached the low point in his life, having recently lost his wife and son in a car accident.

Lasombra is soon contacted by a neighbor to track down her missing daughter, who has run away from home leaving the phrase “The Empty Man Made Me Do It” scrawled in blood on her mirror. Lasombra finds out from a friend of the missing girl that the Empty Man was an urban legend of sorts, a bogeyman you summon by blowing into an empty bottle.

His investigation leads him to a Scientology-like cult called the Pontifex Institute, and it’s at this point that the film goes from merely intriguing to fascinating. Writer-director David Prior begins to connect the film’s supernatural elements to the very real breakdown of culture and societal cohesion we see around us.

Case in point: When Lasombra enters Pontifex HQ, he’s given a questionnaire to fill out that asks him to rate his agreement with a list of sentences. Some of them we see on the pages include:

• “Nothing is binary; everything is fluid.”
• “The scientific method is a tool of oppression.”
• “The only crime is offending prevailing social constructs.”
• “Menstruation is no basis by which to determine gender.”

In this brief scene, Prior conveys the cult’s mission as bound up in the nihilism that undergirds what would now be called “wokeism” and other far-left trends that hollow out a culture from within. (Careful viewers will notice that the high school the missing teen goes to is named after a certain famous French critical theorist.)

Putting the survey down in confusion, Lasombra enters a lecture hall to hear a speech by the cult’s leader (a brief but brilliant performance by Stephen Root), who waxes poetic about “the great, binding nothingness of things” before saying cryptically that his message comes to them from “the Empty Man.”

Lasombra remembers the term’s connection to the girl’s disappearance and approaches the cult leader to ask him what he means by it. After some new age-y Teilhard de Chardin–inspired throat-clearing about the “noosphere” and the “veil between form and flesh,” the leader answers him with a monologue that demonstrates the erudition and ambition of Prior’s script:

We’re each of us blind in our way. Distractions rob us of focus. Technology robs us of memory. Repetition robs us of comprehension. You know the child’s game: If you say your name enough times, it becomes gibberish? That holds true for whole concepts, even entire bodies of thought.

For example, take Nietzsche’s old line, “If you stare into an abyss, it also stares into you.” Right? Well, that has been rendered meaningless through repetition. It’s a refrigerator magnet. It’s cliche. It’s harmless. But when was the last time you really thought about that? What is an abyss? And if you stare into it, why? What about it calls to you?

And if it stares into you, it stands to reason something in you must also be calling to it. And that, my friend, is anything but harmless, if you really reflect on it. So the question becomes, if profound meaning can be robbed of something by so simple a task as repetition, which is more fundamental? Which is more true? Your name, or the gibberish?

That is the Empty Man.

The movie takes a bizarre set of twists and turns from here. Lasombra’s continued detective work leads him to scenes of Pontifex initiates staring blankly at black squares on a wall as a recording plays on repeat: “Nothing exists. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.” Then come decrepit campgrounds, pagan fire dances, mysterious hospital wards — Prior throws a lot at the wall in this movie, and most of it sticks.

A lot of thought and craft clearly went into this script. To take just one example: The film’s setting in St. Louis is no accident. The Empty Man recalls St. Louis–born T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” whose “dried voices” are “quiet and meaningless.” The cult’s ideas about how the Empty Man takes hold of someone echoes another famous St. Louisian, William S. Burroughs, who famously wrote that “language is a virus” that infects humanity and alters our consciousness in doing so.

Not everything The Empty Man attempts to pull off works. The big finale “reveal” about Lasombra’s origin and his own connection to the Empty Man doesn’t hit the way so many other elements of the movie do. Still, I came away at the movie’s end impressed at the courage of a writer-director to aim so high and accomplish so much in a feature film debut.

This is not a film for everyone. But if the idea of Jacques Derrida, Aleister Crowley, and L. Ron Hubbard getting together to form a supernatural cult sounds scary — and it should — then it’s worth treating yourself to The Empty Man this Halloween.