(Warning: this month’s newsletter contains references to suicide. If you’re not feeling it, this might be one to skip.)
The Endless is a 2017 film by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Set in just-before-contemporary California, two brothers Justin and Aaron struggle to find their footing ten years after their escape from ‘UFO death cult’ Camp Arcadia. Justin the older brother makes all the decisions, but under his leadership, the time, energy, and money they sink into one day barely gets them to the next. Their lives seem like an endless (!) churn, working as cleaners, attending cult deprogramming therapy, and wondering why they can’t make connections with others or achieve more.
A videotaped message mailed to them from Camp Arcadia disrupts the cycle. Justin interprets the blithe message about ‘ascension’ as a suicide letter. Aaron is skeptical. The message reminds him of a time in which he had friends, was better fed, and didn’t have to work so much for so little. Aaron asks Justin if they can go back for just one day. Justin, determined to prove to Aaron that Camp Arcadia is a sinister cult, agrees.
They are welcomed. Nobody seems to have aged and nobody knows who sent the video, but everyone seems to be living their ideal, only semi-culty life. Which brother is right? Are these happy people about to commit mass suicide? Or are they content to live together like this forever? Spoilers ahead.
Turns out, it’s both. As they speak to the people of Camp Arcadia—especially Hal, the not-cult-leader physicist—and recuperate from their outside lives, they notice various impossibilities and anomalies. They learn everyone is trapped by an unseen, cosmic entity in looping time bubbles. It torments its captives with glimpses of the past or future via media like records, Polaroids, videocassettes, hard drives. (That’s where the videotaped message came from.) When the time loop finishes, it horrifically kills its prisoners, regenerating them in their bubbles with their memories intact. Justin and Aaron have a choice to make: stay at Camp Arcadia forever, or go back to their repetitive and grueling normal lives. Aaron tells Justin he’s going to stay at Camp Arcadia. For once, Justin abides by Aaron’s choice, and decides to join him. As soon as Justin sits down, Aaron says they can go. All he ever wanted was for Justin to treat him as an equal. Now sharing control of their precarious lives, Justin and Aaron escape.
The Endless is a movie about choice. Choices that are hard to understand, choices that are hard to make, choices that are hard to live with. Few movie productions are more familiar with hard choices than the low budget science fiction horror film. And like a radiation-eating fungus, cosmic mysteries thrive under these extreme conditions. The Endless has a really smart, tight script perfectly suited to make the most of the filmmakers’ resources.
All you really need for a mystery is a secret, and all you really need to suggest cosmic presence is evidence that something unordinary is affecting the ordinary world—clues! Think of the film Coherence, propelled by a friend group’s regrets and different colored glow sticks. Fraught conversations and interrogations are cheap places to hide secrets, and characters’ responses to everyday objects say as much about what’s happening unseen around them as what’s happening within them.
Justin has an explanation for most oddities as they arrive. The slowed-down/reverb version of House of the Rising Sun that plays on the drive is due to their broken radio antenna. The wizard’s staff-like rock formations are the remains of ancient volcanic flows. My favorite, for its simplicity, is a cheap white frame at their parent’s roadside memorial, fresh out of the plastic wrapping. That mass-produced blue-white particle board out in the dusty Southern California foothills, no cracking or discoloration? Time’s wrong. When I worked in film and theater, aging and distressing clothing was one of my favorite processes—it made something real. I’m disappointed when a dress shirt or curtain looks fresh out of the package because the production didn’t have the resources or intentionality to make it belong in their world. But I adore the choice to selectively skip that otherwise essential step to purposely communicate unreality.
Throughout The Endless, it becomes clear that Justin’s painted an inaccurate, sinister picture of daily life at Camp Arcadia to Aaron. His lies were the only way to express a bad feeling he couldn’t otherwise articulate, a feeling that drove him to escape with Aaron ten years ago. His explanations are an older-brother-knows-everything extension of those lies, transitioning seamlessly into that period of rationalization built into many horror movies and other genre-forward stories set in our world. The part when a character says the ghost-noises in the old house are from the pipes, the ‘what’s happening’ part that makes many stories mysteries, if only for a while.
While many stories transition from this period into understanding and discovery, anything cosmically tinged often adds in an extra step: the cosmic analogy. These are the folded-up pieces of notebook paper with a pencil punched through, Stranger Things’ ant on a piece of string. Cosmic analogies ease the burden of illustrating something unreal (or articulating it in a way that satisfies imagination), and instead put it into dialogue, to be considered and prodded and believed or not by various characters. Done right, they establish an investigative connection between the characters and the audience: everyone involved is just trying to figure this out together. Essentially, cosmic analogies are an admission that nobody’s got all the answers, or if they do, they don’t have the language to communicate it.
This movie’s source of cosmic analogy is Hal the not-cult-leader. He’s full of metaphors, hand-waves, and cheesy morale-boosting games like ‘The Struggle’, a game of tug-of-war with the shadows, another moment of zero-budget eeriness that I find particularly effective.
There are a few ways to read Hal, but I sort him with other ‘chill cult’ leaders in cosmic fiction: a good-ish person who cares about his community, cursed with above average insight into the situation and therefore cornered into making some terrible choices. Simultaneously super normal and super weird, his manner hints at his (mal)adjustment to his unreal circumstances.
Or did I just describe Justin?
Hal and Justin are foils, and Aaron’s choice to stay or go is functionally a choice between living under Justin’s decisions or Hal’s. Does Aaron want to keep grinding himself to nothing in California with Justin, or live more easily at Camp Arcadia in between horrific loop-restart deaths? (There are more isolated people living in nearby bubbles who have ritualized suicide to different degrees of resignation or defiance, but for Aaron, they only make the case for Camp Arcadia.)
The Endless is all about choice, but not once does anybody—the cult, the people trapped in the other loops, the brothers—mention the possibility of challenging and defeating the cosmic presence.
Of course they don’t. They’re human. It’s… not. Once again, the film’s cosmic story is a happy match for the economics of film production, and the filmmakers are sparing with the special effects, choosing to show the cosmic entity’s effect on the area with the occasional pareidolic reflection in the sky, a brief glimpse of a mirage-like dome. Contemporary low budget science fiction horror basically has two options: cerebral or camp. (Or meta, the cosmic vibe-killing combination of both.) The Endless leans cerebral, and the natural choice for a thinky mystery is to let the audience imagine the monster. To fight the entity would be to overexpose it, to drag it firmly into our world, to ruin the mystery of it.
I’m not interested in a version of this story where Justin or Aaron fight this thing, where they somehow provide the Hal with the inspiration to crack his equation or whatever and send the cosmic entity crawling back to the wormhole it came from. It would save the trapped people, and they’d share in the end result: a thrilly burst of freedom followed by a bewildering ‘what next?’ pessimistically answered by starting the movie over from the beginning.
Part of what makes a cosmic mystery feel cosmic is that the force, the entity, the intrusion, feels like it’s infiltrated or influenced the protagonist’s life. What good, then, is escape? If you ask Aaron, he’d probably say it’s the choice.
NEXT MONTH
As always, thank you for your continued interest in this weird genre experiment. Covid fatigue pushed the move back a week, so I’ll be completing the transfer from Substack to beehiiv next weekend. If you’re an active email subscriber you shouldn’t need to do anything. If you’re following me on Substack, you can subscribe between now and September 4, or just follow the link in the placeholder newsletter I’ll leave here at Substack. (It probably won’t trap you in a time loop.)
I have something a little different planned for next month. See you then.