The New Cult Canon: ‘The Empty Man’

An unusual horror film taps into an of-the-moment sense of disconnection and confusion.

“There is no such thing as disunity. There is only the great binding nothingness of things.” — Stephen Root, The Empty Man

In Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 political thriller The Parallax View, Warren Beatty stars as Joe Frady, an investigative reporter who pokes into the assassination of a congressional candidate atop Seattle’s Space Needle. His ex-girlfriend, a TV journalist, had witnessed the killing and comes to him in a panic three years later, because six other witnesses have since died under mysterious circumstances. As he starts to follow various leads, he stumbles across an organization called the Parallax Corporation, which has been recruiting certain unsavory types as “security” operatives. He successfully infiltrates the group—first by signaling his psychopathic bonafides, then by submitting to a suggestive propaganda video—but what he discovers is an extralegal force too powerful, wide-reaching and nefarious to expose. He finds there are hard and ultimately fatal limits to being an individual in a seemingly free society.

Of the paranoid left-wing thrillers that came out of Hollywood around the Watergate scandal—The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor and Pakula’s All the President’s Men are three other significant examples—The Parallax View is perhaps the most chilling in its suggestion of a secret, unaccountable force that dictates that what happens in our ostensible democracy. (The assassination angle makes it spicy for JFK conspiracists, too.) We live at a time when Deep State paranoia is an obsession of the far right, but no matter one’s political persuasion, Watergate had a corrosive effect on how the public understood our institutions. The Parallax View reflected a terrifying absence of control that citizens have over the fate of the union—and, by extension, their own fate as well. The JFK assassination and Watergate had shook the foundations of the country.

Now consider the plot of David Prior’s The Empty Man, a studio horror curiosity released to tepid reviews and nonexistent box office in late October 2020, when theaters were trying with little success to bring audiences back to theaters half a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. James Badge Dale is in the Beatty role as James Losombra, a former detective brought back into sleuthing by his neighbor Nora (Marin Ireland), whose teenage daughter Amanda (Sarah Frolova) has gone  missing, leaving only a blood-streaked message on her bathroom window reading “The Empty Man Made Me Do It.” Among the items James discovers in Amanda’s room is a pamphlet for the Pontifex Institute, which leads him to a pseudo-spiritual death cult whose members, mostly young people, believe in a singular, centuries-old being who dispenses “a secret truth” to them like a signal. All that’s needed in material reality is a human transmitter. As with poor Joe Frady, all this sleuthing gets James in trouble. 

One of the fascinating aspects of The Empty Man, a compelling viral whatsit that only nominally feels like a horror movie, is how much it’s like The Parallax View if the politics were stripped away and replaced by a modern-day existential malaise. Instead of a conspiracy of powerful men dictating the direction of the world, The Empty Man is about a pervasive environment of loneliness and disconnection, particularly among the teenagers and young adults who have inherited this destabilized future. Keep in mind, people are streaming into the Pontifex Institute actively looking for answers to their lives, which isn’t like the Parallax Corporation, which recruits operatives on the sly. That points to a need that a cult could satisfy, though perhaps more comprehensively than anyone who walks into the place could anticipate. They go in seekers wanting answers and leave as soldiers engaged in the violent upending of science, rational thought, and civilization itself. That’s a lot more than what it says on the pamphlet.

Yet you’d never guess in a million years that The Empty Man was headed in that direction, because the opening is hokum of a more familiar sort, albeit more enigmatic and chilling than run-of-the-mill horror fare. In 1995 Ura Valley, Bhutan—a location that gets 4.5 stars out of five on TripAdviser, though the sample size is small—two young American couples are backpacking through the mountains when one man, Peter, hears a strange, guttural, mesmeric sound and soon after drops into a crevasse. When a friend repels to rescue him, he’s found in front of a ghoulish skeletal tableaux jutting out from a cavern wall, silent save for one line: “If you touch me, you’ll die.” The group manages to bring Peter back to the surface, but suffice to say, things get quite a bit worse for them.

Prior stages what feels like an impeccable reel-long short feature over these first 22 minutes before the title card even appears, and then the action resettles in small-town Missouri in 2018. It’s here we catch up with James, who’s grief-stricken by the recent deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident, and it’s also here that the mysterious force in the opening section has developed into an urban myth made real. The students at Jacques Derrida High School know that if you walk onto a bridge at night, find an empty bottle and blow into that bottle while thinking of “the Empty Man,” you’re in for a three-day ordeal—first you hear him, then you see him, then you feel him. James isn’t the sort to buy into such nonsense, but then he discovers what happens to Amanda’s friends and starts to experience some weird hallucinations of his own. 

One of the exciting—and, to audiences, surely perplexing—aspects of The Empty Man is how little it commits itself to one genre or another. The opening section surely qualifies as white-knuckle horror and there are scattered sequences throughout that amp up the tension, but once James gets involved in the case, the film turns into a procedural more along the lines of David Fincher’s Seven. The sun never shines in Prior’s Missouri, just as it was perpetually overcast and raining in Fincher’s urban shithole, and the shocks we encounter, like a line of teenagers who have hung themselves under a bridge, are no more or less bracing than Fincher’s Deadly Sins. In both films, it’s implied that the world itself has manifested these horrors rather than having these horror thrusted upon it. The time is right for The Empty Man to thrive. 

Though it’s a tiny, semi-comic bit in the film, there’s a moment when James kidnaps someone in broad daylight, throws him in the back of his car, and looks around, only to see all the potential witnesses staring blankly at their phones. Nobody notices each other, even in a public space. It’s the type of world in which James and Nora, who has also lost a spouse, are alone in their grief, and Amanda can lose herself in nihilistic dogma. “Nothing can hurt you because nothing is real,” she says to James in the first scene they have together, before waxing philosophical about truths going through people “like a signal traveling down a wire.” At a certain point, the concept of “The Empty Man” as a mythical monster like the Candyman starts to seem too limited to describe what’s going on. Someone or something needs to transport the “signal” Amanda references, but it’s the signal itself—the idea—that’s truly apocalyptic in scope. 

The Empty Man isn’t as wholly realized as you’d want a great horror film to be, especially one so suggestive at times of occult classics like The Wicker Man and The Seventh Victim. James Badge Dale feels too much like the stock boozing ex-cop, giving the film a lead as colorless as the visual palate, the twist ending is a head-scratcher despite a long-winded explanation, and Prior’s occasional sops to slasher audiences, like a sexy Halloween II-hot-tub-murder-esque knifing at a spa, feel out of step with the more audacious work he’s trying to create. But the film is mostly uncompromising in depicting a present where reality is untethered to facts, family, meaning or anything graspable. Quotes straight from the Greek philosopher Gorgias are copy-pasted into Pontifex Institute forums: “Nothing exists. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.” There’s an eager audience for such thoughts now, the film implies. The Empty Man—and The Empty Man—is transmitting the signal to them.  

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