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Notes -
As a child I watched the 2002 psychological/supernatural horror The Mothman Prophecies, whose virtues I think I was too young to appreciate at the time. I rediscovered the film about ten years ago and found that it was right up my alley. By the time Covid rolled around, my appreciation of the film had metastasised into a morbid obsession. Between 2020-21 I must have watched it at least ten times in varying states of consciousness and inebriation: it's one of those rare movies where you can nod off halfway through, wake up in a state of utter confusion, and have that enhance the experience of watching it. Great performances from the entire cast, amazing cinematography, original score so good that it's one of my go-tos when I need to concentrate in work: it's one of the spookiest, most atmospheric films I've ever seen, and one of the best films about the impossibility of trying to communicate with a genuinely alien intelligence (John Klein: "I think we can assume that these entities are more advanced than us. Why don't they just come right out and tell us what's on their minds?" Alexander Leek: "You're more advanced than a cockroach. Have you ever tried explaining yourself to one of them?" ).
I mentioned my obsession with this film in a thread some time ago, and someone (whose username now escapes me) recommended checking out the source material, a book of the same name by John A. Keel, marketed as non-fiction. I dutifully bought it several months ago, but only started reading it this week.
It's a funny read. While the film adheres to a broadly conventional three-act structure, with a suitably impactful climax, it's hardly the most rigorously plotted film: large chunks of the second act simply consist of the protagonist talking to the residents of Point Pleasant, West Virginia about the strange things they claim to have witnessed or experienced. This is an accurate reflection of the source material, most of which consists of disconnected vignettes, not all of which are even told by Point Pleasant residents, and which appear to be organised by commonalities in sightings rather than chronology. (Keel has a particularly irritating fondness for ellipses.) Reading the book, I have a greater appreciation for screenwriter Richard Hatem, who had to corral all of this disparate material into something resembling a conventional Hollywood thriller. Most exasperating of all is author Keel's predilection for what RationalWiki (ugh) used to call "crank magnetism". It's one thing to believe in aliens and otherworldly intelligences: it's quite another to also (apparently) believe that the CIA are in cahoots with the aliens and conspiring with them to have them harass people in West Virginia (just like they conspired to have JFK assassinated).
Absorbing enough, for all that. Best approached as a work of fiction.
I think my favorite part of The Mothman Prophecies might be the very beginning, where Keel talks about the ill-omened visitation of the strange, otherworldly devil disguised as a man upon a rural homestead...before explaining that the devilish creature was in fact himself, wearing a (then-unusual) beard and (if memory serves) in need of a phone due to car trouble, or somesuch. Even if he was a bit of a crank magnet, I think he was at least self-aware about it.
(Although I seem to specifically recall that Keel says that the CIA would not, in fact, harass random people simply for seeing a UFO, but that may not have been in the Mothman Prophecies, or I might be thinking of Vallee or one of their fellow-travelers.)
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