The Second Night of Halloween: They Look Like People

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN ... I watched They Look Like People (2015) by Perry Blackshear. This is a micro-budget indie movie about two New York bachelors reconnecting and each slowly learning that the other is descending into madness. For Wyatt, this madness takes the form of onset paranoid schizophrenia, which has lead him to believe that most people are infected with demons and that it is his duty to prepare for a bloody war against them. Christian’s madness, on the other hand, is more of a social pathology. Due to insecurities from being bullied in the past, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of male toxicity as a solution to all his problems, which involves obsessively pumping iron and asserting "dominance" in his workplace. 

When the focus is on Wyatt's story, which it is for most of the runtime, it's riveting. This is in spite of the sometimes painful flaws due to budget limitations, which include poor audio and dubbing, spotty acting, and awkward misfires at naturalistic conversation. The film achieves this by pushing against horror audience expectations with regards to possibly delusional protagonists. Going back to the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and continuing through modern horror like the highly underrated The Forgotten (2004) and Oculus (2013) (which was part of last year’s series), when the suspense depends on the reality of malevolent entities perceived by only the hero, almost without exception those entities' existence is well-substantiated by the third act. Frailty (2001), about a father who abducts and murders people he believes to be demons, which we learn in they end they are in fact, is an example that They Look Like People parallels especially closely. All of this narrative pre-programming allows Blackshear to leave us in rapt anticipation of the outcome almost until the last second, both in terms of the truth of the demonic invasion, outside of Wyatt’s head, and in terms of whether or not Wyatt will commit to fighting the invasion by murdering his possibly ersatz friend. For this reason, They Look Like People strikes closer to the isolation, sadness, and terror of real madness than many other works of horror.

On the other hand, Christian’s struggle with male toxicity, while more topical, does not work as well, mostly because it is relegated to undercooked b-story status. We simply don’t learn enough about how Christian used to be to understand what is driving him to become macho now. We don’t even see enough of the “dominance” behavior that other characters, we are told, are angered by in the present. Maybe a different actor would have been able to sell these aspects without further narrative tangents, but Evan Dumouchel, while enjoyable to watch, is simply too puppyish. This doesn’t detract overmuch from the impact of the rest of the film’s effective exploration of paranoid delusion, though.