Dating Sucks in ‘The Dead Thing’ [Fantasia 2024 Review]
The horror genre, at its best, endeavors to interrogate our time. What is ailing the public writ large? The genre asks what fears, anxieties, and burdens we are collectively carrying and then stretches them to fantastical, terrifying ends. Recently, the genre has been akin to an old interpersonal communication classmate of mine, probing the real-world horrors of modern dating. Cat Person, Fresh, and Run Sweetheart Run were absurd, scathing indictments of dating in the digital age. Elric Kane’s solo debut The Dead Thing, which had its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, is the latest in a string of features liable to inspire a night home alone instead. It’s not really worth going out, is it?
The Dead Thing opens with a familiar, yet no less impactful montage that will prove more terrifying than anything else in the film—a Tinder screen. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Most of us have been there, our romantic and sexual lives reduced to a kind of smartphone minigame where we treat potential suitors as claw machine prizes to be won—play correctly, and you might even win a good one. The erosion of social third places, realms outside of work or school where people might, at one point, have met a partner, and the ceaseless push to connect plague Alex (Blu Hunt). Online dating is good for sex (and, to its credit, The Dead Thing is a refreshing middle finger to the no-sex-in-movies discourse), but little else.
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Alex’s hum-drum casual dating life ceases to be when she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). Kyle is charming, sexy, and exactly the kind of guy one might hope to find online—a rare breed indeed. Until, incredulously, Kyle ghosts Alex. The Dead Thing is a horror movie, however, and while ghosting is pretty scary on its own, Kyle’s disappearance, and subsequent reappearance, yields a bevy of nightmarish, disastrous consequences.
Merging possession horror, social commentary, and some dashes of slasher violence, The Dead Thing doesn’t always exceed the sum of its parts, but as an indie with the gusto to tread familiar territory, it’s regularly compelling. Elric Kane exhibits a brazenness too often missing from the independent horror scene. Sex and blood are welcome detours in a horror film, especially so if they’re deployed in service to a larger, more meaningful thematic throughline, and The Dead Thing has plenty of both.
The social commentary might be slight, retreading contemporary hookup culture critiques through a gendered lens without adding much new, but I’ll never scoff at an indie that swings and, pretty confidently, hits when up to bat. Still, for everything The Dead Thing does right, some nagging characterizations constrain its most impactful moments.
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There’s a rule in fiction when it comes to writing main characters. Before the descent, there needs to be some normalcy. Blu Hunt is fantastic, and the supporting cast is just as good, but as a character, Alex never resonates as well as she otherwise might have. Detachment and exhaustion are key to the movie’s thematic motives, though they render Alex as considerably one-note. Pops of color with Kyle add texture, but Alex is too downtrodden from the get to really, truly connect. The characterization might work thematically, but it comes at the expense of cinematic intrigue.
I like an indie that’s both sexy and bloody, and at its core, The Dead Thing is just that. Elric Kane’s debut is a confident, if familiar, plunge into the horrors of modern dating. Stretched to extreme, violent ends, it might be better to just be left on read. Ghosting is one thing—what The Dead Thing has in store is another.
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The Dead Thing
Summary
Cinema should be bloody and sexy. Luckily, The Dead Thing is both.
