Diving Into the Vortex

A few days back I went to Video Vortex at the local Alamo Drafthouse (yes this is installment #10,245 of “Dan Sees a Weird Thing," and speaking of which –true story – just last night a woman identifying herself as ‘the partner of a listener’ of my podcast told me that every time she goes to a trashy local screening, she thinks to herself “Dan’s probably here.” But I’m digressing already, and I’m only at a parenthetical technically still in the first sentence). 

Anywhoo… Video Vortex is one of my favorite ongoing series of oddball screenings, second only to Ridiculous/Sublime, programmed by my friend Cristina. While R/S focuses on movies whose great qualities are inseparable from their absurd ones, Video Vortex, as its name suggests, is focused on film’s diet cousin: VHS. And it casts a wide net within that extra-democratic medium. If you go to a Video Vortex, sometimes you might see a cheapo movie that was shot direct to video. Sometimes you might catch a foreign underground movie that's only viewable in the US via bootleg video. Sometimes you might see an old TV movie that only still exists because someone recorded it back in 19whateverthefuck, complete with vintage commercial breaks. Sometimes you see a “movie” that was basically some teenager’s dumb weekend project with the neighborhood kids, but it’s charming enough to have gotten wider recognition among the nation’s trash pandas. Sometimes you see a mixtape of old video ephemera that’s halfway between a YouTube playlist and an art installation. 

Some folks live in NYC because of "Broadway" or "being able to get great Pad Thai at 2 am," and that stuff is great, but it’s this sort of big city nonsense I dreamt of when I was a kid in the Midwest.

The series is always a lot of fun, partly because of its grab-bag nature (in addition to the series's variety, the specifics of what’s being shown is kept mostly-secret until the screening), and partly because of the impeccable curatorial taste of Bleeding Skull’s Annie Choi, who runs the series. 

This particular Video Vortex installment was a mixtape of stuff from W.A.V.E. Productions, a company whose business model is “Give us money, send us a script, and we’ll make it into a movie!” Or, to be more accurate, they'll make it into a “movie." (The cinematic quality is about what you’d expect from a New Jersey production company making bespoke videos by mail.)

The more jaded in my reading audience probably already suspect where this is headed: while most of W.A.V.E's movies are nominally “horror” films, the actual genre is usually “someone working out their kinks.” That's what happens when you offer to film something for pay. The arc of the universe trends towards porn.

My favorite W.A.V.E. video in this show (one the mixtape circled back to several times) had clearly been written by someone with a vore fetish – and if you AREN’T one of the more jaded amongst us, that means a fantasy about… um… eating people. Although, if it makes you feel any better, it seems to mostly not mean eating those people in a cannibal “cook a sumptuous feast to feed Will Graham” kind of way, but in a more cartoonish “swallowed whole, alive and kicking” kinda way. 

Anyway, they showed multiple clips from this “film” (my research identifies it as Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge), and I'll say this – it really put the ‘video vore’ into Video Vortex.

(Thank you. Thank you. No need to applaud. I’ve worked as a comedy writer for years.)

The featured clips from Eaten Alive all followed the same template – the protagonist (a kind of “sexy librarian” type) would confront some rival of hers, usually a nude woman who seemed surprisingly not-alarmed to be arguing with a colleague while unclothed. The protagonist would then whip out a plastic ray gun, zap the naked lady with a shrink ray that made her about 4 inches tall via all of the most amazing video effects available to a public access station from thirty years ago. Then our “hero” would pick up said naked lady and slowly lower the lady into her vore-acious mouth, “eating” her.

This special effect was certainly special. It was clearly accomplished by having the nude woman stand in front of a green screen, squirming (but not TOO much) and wanly muttering things like, “No. What are you doing? Don’t eat me. No. Stop.”

Meanwhile, the vore-lady had obviously been instructed to put her fingers together like she was picking up a tiny nudist, then slowly lower those fingers toward her mouth while chomping upward, like Ms. Pac-Man, or Homer Simpson in “all right, pie, I'm just going to do this and if you get eaten, it's your own fault” mode.

Then these two images were combined, and someone slowly pulled a second greenscreen up from the “tiny” lady’s feet, so her lower body would disappear as she supposedly slid into the giantess’s gullet. 

The resulting effect was both patently absurd and FAR more disturbing than any more accomplished technique would have been, in that way where some of the most distressing stuff in a David Lynch movie is the most intentionally janky – the stuff where he just digitally cut out a face and stuck it on someone else with Video Toaster or something, but somehow it will haunt your dreams forever.

God bless the intrepid kinkster who commissioned this picture. If they managed to get off to the end result, their orgasm was the result of more perseverance, ingenuity, and (ahem, pardon me) spunk than simply imagining a similar scenario would’ve involved.

Those vore sections ended with a short, direct appeal to anyone who'd bought the VHS, in a sequence that was kind of a combo of a special F/X “proof of concept” and a product advertisement, wherein they recycled the exact same footage of green screen ladies being eaten, but replaced the mouth eating them with an “alien” that looked kind of like a paper mache snake, with accompanying text on screen, to the general effect of “What if these ladies had been eaten by an alien instead? Write in with suggestions of who you want to see eat them in future films!”

I must confess that my mind wandered during the show’s other, longer segments. I couldn’t tell if the incomprehensible plots were inherent in the original material, or whether already barely-coherent storylines had been taken off coherence-life-support by the editing needed to fit them into the mixtape. But I kind of LIKE the feeling of my mind wandering during this kind of thing. The modern world offers so few chances to let thoughts run wild, without interference. Usually if I’m doing something even mildly-boring, I have music or a podcast or the white noise of constant phone alerts keeping me company. I wouldn’t want to live without (most of) those things, but if you ever want to actually have an idea about anything, you need the chance to drift a bit. For me, it plays like enforced meditation – I’ve stopped really focusing on what’s in front of me, but I’m in a dark theater with no option to switch focus elsewhere (at least, “no option I’ll take” because I’m not a fucking “look at my phone at the theater” monster like some in this degraded world), so my brain starts spinning.

In this case, my mind wandered its way into a premise for a new film script – screenplays being what I’ve been spending my bigger-project writing energies on these days (not that anyone asked me to write them, but I have enough tendrils in that world that I’m trying to change that).

I was very excited about this script idea. I didn’t have much more than the first act and a sense of the tone I wanted, but the acorn’s all you need to grow a tree, and I’m also experimenting with writing in a less schematic way – concerning myself less with rigid structure in lieu of seeing where characters take me. I came home high on the possibilities of the written word.

Then... I stayed up until nearly 2 am, woke up at 8 to go do yoga, and experienced a variation of what it feels like to think you had a great idea in a dream… hell, not just great, but one of the best damn ideas in the history of fiction... and then wake up, think about the idea, and realize it makes no fucking sense because of course it doesn’t because it was a goddamn dream and your brain firing random neurons is like all the pre-Shakespeare parts of an infinite monkeys/infinite typewriter situation.

Not only did the idea suddenly seem like nothing to me, but I seemed like nothing. Did I like writing at all? Was there ever any talent? With the world as it is, shouldn’t I probably stop trying to make a living in creative work entirely and just do something that's creativity-adjacent? Become a restocker in a bookstore or something?

I suspect that all humans have a bit of the manic depressive in us, and that everyone goes through similar mini boom-bust cycles where they’re screaming “Made it ma! Top of the world!” one second and being immolated by an exploding fuel tank the next (in a metaphorical, emotional sense, of course). But I also suspect that I get it a hair worse than most, through some combination of (1) creative work being particularly susceptible to peaks and valleys (2) my ADHD (3) tendencies toward some additional, undiagnosed mental whatever. 

However, the most valuable thing my wife Audrey has taught me – BEYOND HOW TO LOVE AGAIN (I turn, pandering, to the crowd, awaiting their “Awwwws) – is how much control I actually have over my emotions. It’s a shame we don’t get more instruction in emotional intelligence as children, because I was effectively in middle age before I really had a sense that, sure, emotions are a bucking bronco, yes, but one that I can deal with by strapping on my hat and spurs and jumping aboard, rather than lying down on the rodeo dirt for the mother-bucker to trample me. I’m still not great at emotional regulation, but therapy, meditation, and the aforementioned yoga have gotten me far.

So I told myself, “Hey. This way you’re feeling right now? It may not be, strictly speaking, accurate. This is probably a combination of good, old-fashioned chemical imbalance (not helped by how good you were feeling last night, using up all that dopamine) and a lack of sleep. It’s gonna suck to feel this way for an hour or two, but I bet when you wake up more, you’ll be ready to tear up your restocker resume.”

And, you know what? I was right.

I’m still not totally sure about this idea I had. It’s probably somewhere in-between the brilliance I first thought it was and the trash I woke up to, but I gotta go with my instincts and see if it’s worth anything by writing some of it. Taking it out for a spin. Because when there's no real way of knowing whether your ideas are good or bad or blah, the only thing you can do is to trust there's a reason you see something in them. Because the alternative is doing nothing, and that’s guaranteed to not work. 

Which is not to say it’s easy to trust yourself. I certainly struggle with it, especially because I’m painfully aware that the stuff that interests me is not the stuff that interests vast swaths of the world. My frame of reference is not the mainstream. On a recent Zoom call with my two older brothers, the cultural topics of conversation were Bob and Ray, Malice Aforethought, Rumpole of the Bailey, The Higgins Boys and Gruber, Night Flight, The Devil’s Ball, Twice Upon a Time, and Animalypics. Hell, I spent the first half of this newsletter gassing on about movies so obscure they were literally made for audiences of one. Meanwhile I’d be hard-pressed to name more than a couple NFL players or Pokemon. With my finger so defiantly not on America's pulse, why do I think I can write a narrative with broad appeal?

Who knows? Stubbornness, I guess. I'll embrace it.

For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!