The Scare Salon

But then a weird thing happened. Once the film dropped on streaming, it quickly started to develop a cult following, and subsequently got something of a critical reappraisal. Through word of mouth, its reputation slowly improved, so much so that it began appearing on “best of” lists around the internet. The reasons for this about-face aren’t really clear to me; it’s possible audiences were expecting the movie to be more of a creepypasta-style flick akin to Slender Man or The Bye Bye Man, and were confused at The Empty Man‘s more inscrutable, cosmic-horror-tinged narrative. At any rate, it’s nice that this movie got a second chance at life, because it’s really a fascinating piece of work.

I first saw The Empty Man a few years back, not long after it arrived on streaming, as I’d heard a bit of the buzz surrounding it. I liked it well enough, but I admit it didn’t leave a lasting impression. Recently, though, a couple of people recommended it to me out of the blue, and I decided I’d like to give it another look, especially since the goodwill surrounding it has only grown stronger since then.

And I have to say I liked it much better the second time around, and really admired the ambition behind it. It’s definitely not a straightforward horror film, and it’s also quite long (about two hours and twenty minutes), but there is a sort of eerie power to it, and the acting performances are great.

In the extended pre-title sequence, we’re following four friends in 1995. Greg, Fiona, Ruthie, and Paul (Evan Jonigkeit, Jessica Matten, Virginia Kull, and Aaron Poole, respectively) are on a hiking trip in the snowy mountains of the Ura Valley in Bhutan. Not long into their trek, Paul starts hearing a soft whistling sound that the others can’t discern, and he wanders off to follow it, but falls into a small crevasse.

Greg rappels down to help him, and finds that although Paul is not injured, there’s something almighty strange going on down in the cave he fell into. For one thing, there’s a big skeleton—human but not quite, sort of like the Space Jockey from Alien—in a shrine against the cave wall, and for another thing, Paul seems completely mesmerized by it, refusing to answer Greg’s questions and just sitting there staring as though he’s in a trance.

When Greg approaches, Paul creepily tells him, “If you touch me, you’ll die,” which of course Greg doesn’t quite believe, though he does hesitate to put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. Finally, though, Greg loses his patience and tells Paul to get off his ass and stop fucking around. He touches Paul’s arm, and Paul closes his eyes sadly, as though his fate has been sealed.

Because Paul is so out of it, Greg is forced to carry him out of the cave, and a bad snowstorm is on the horizon. Luckily, the hikers come across an abandoned house where they can wait out the weather. Paul seems comatose, and no one is quite sure what’s wrong with him; he’s not physically hurt, but Greg thinks he might have just lost his marbles. It’s implied (from scars on his wrists) that Paul has had some mental health issues in the past, so the three friends fear that he might have had some kind of breakdown.

A day or two passes, and Paul’s condition does not improve, though at one point we see him whispering something to his girlfriend Ruthie. Ruthie also sees a terrifying, Grim Reaper-looking figure out in the snowstorm that runs toward her, but disappears once she gets back inside the cabin.

One morning, the friends wake up and find Paul gone; his coat is missing, and there are footprints in the snow. When they find Paul, he’s sitting in the lotus position and staring out at the mountains, and Greg starts laying into him, telling him to stop trying to be “special” and snap out of whatever ridiculousness this is.

Suddenly, Ruthie straight up whips out a knife and starts stabbing the shit out of Greg, then she slashes Fiona’s throat before throwing herself off a cliff, leaving Paul the only one alive. Now what in the snow-choked Hell was all that about, you might be wondering?

Well, you’re not going to find out just yet, because after the title screen, the movie takes off in what seems to be a completely different direction. It’s now 2018 in Missouri, and we’re following a new character named James Lasombra (James Badge Dale). We eventually learn that James used to be a police detective, but now runs a shop selling security cameras and self-defense stuff like mace and what not. We also discover through vague flashbacks that James recently lost his wife and son in a car accident.

James has a neighbor named Nora (Marin Ireland) who he once had an affair with, and the two have an uneasy friendship. Nora’s teenage daughter Amanda (Sasha Frolova) drops by to see James one day, ostensibly to check on him, and says some sort of esoteric things, but nothing particularly alarming.

The following day, though, Nora discovers that Amanda has completely vanished, leaving nothing but a message written in blood on her bathroom mirror: “The Empty Man made me do it.”

Nora calls the cops, but since Amanda is eighteen and obviously packed her stuff and left of her own accord, the police don’t make finding her much of a priority. So James decides to step up and investigate her disappearance himself.

He finds out from Amanda’s friend Davara (Samantha Logan) that a couple of nights before Amanda went missing, she and a bunch of their friends were hanging out on a big, creepy bridge in town. There was an urban legend going around the high school, Davara says, that if you’re on a bridge and find an empty bottle, you blow into it and think of the Empty Man, who will show up three days later and presumably kill you. Of course the friends did this on a lark, though Amanda seemed to be taking it pretty seriously. After they all blew into the bottle, Davara says, they heard someone coming toward them on the bridge and hightailed it out of there. Davara also tells James that the last time she saw Amanda, Amanda was at the mall whispering into the ear of their friend Brandon.

James thinks this is all pretty weird, and he later goes out to the bridge to get the lay of the land. But while he’s there, he discovers to his horror that all of the friends from that night—with the exception of Amanda and Davara—have hanged themselves beneath the bridge, leaving the same “Empty Man made me do it” message. Not long afterward, Davara also turns up dead, stabbed in the face with scissors in what appears to be a suicide, but was actually carried out by the Empty Man.

James also discovers that all the friends, including Amanda, have flyers and stuff relating to a place called the Pontifex Institute. James does a bit of research and finds out that this is a sort of cult that is obsessed with tulpas, beings manifested from thought. James goes to their headquarters and listens in to their weird-ass spiel, which initially seems somewhat harmless if frustratingly obtuse. James talks to the head of the Institute and learns more about what they believe the Empty Man is, and ominously, the guy tells James it’s nice to see him again, even though James is sure he’s never been here before.

A member of the cult tells James on the down-low that Amanda was at the Institute but got “promoted” after a fashion, and has gone to some remote camp the cult owns out in the wilderness. James goes out there and finds a seemingly abandoned cabin with all kinds of files, including ones for all Amanda’s friends who died, and a folder marked with his name, though it’s empty. A group of cult members spots him and gives chase, but he’s able to escape and drive back home.

From this point, shit gets stranger and stranger as the true nature of the cult, as well as James’s and Amanda’s role in it, starts to become clearer. We also learn what the connection is between the events in Missouri and the earlier incident with the four hikers in Bhutan.

As I mentioned before, the resolution of the mystery flirts with cosmic horror territory, and as such, some viewers might not really vibe with it if they were expecting a standard urban-legend type of story (which is how the movie was originally marketed, much to its detriment). But I actually really liked the original spin this film took, being structured almost like a paranormal detective yarn with a dark new age flair. It slightly reminded me of something like The Void or The Endless, with some similarities to Apostle and A Dark Song as well, so if you liked any of those, I imagine you’d probably enjoy The Empty Man too, since it covers some of the same occult-style themes. It’s not for everyone, and some people might find it too slow and character-focused, but I thought it had a spooky, hypnotic feel to it that drew me right in. I’m really glad I decided to give this a second watch, because I feel like I appreciated it much more this time and picked up on a lot more of the nuances of the story. It’s easy to see why The Empty Man eventually got the cult following it deserved.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.