Starry Eyes (USA, 2014)
The idea of sacrifice has always been a potent one in horror, perhaps because we all can relate to the idea of undergoing some painful or stressful process in order to get something we want. Much like those studies showing how people who luck into large amounts of money or high-paying jobs quickly come to believe they’re more deserving of it than other people, people who have sacrificed something to get ahead will immediately believe there was no other way to achieve their goal. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—plenty of good things don’t come without hard work and sacrifice, after all—but we all innately believe there’s a certain line that shouldn’t be crossed, even if we can’t agree on where that line is. For you, it might be hurting someone else to get what you want; for another person, maybe taking a gig purely for the money feels inappropriate. Luckily, Starry Eyes is well aware that we all probably draw the line at murder. (And if you don’t, please never approach me.)
A film that deals with the psychological effects of putting personal gain above all else, Starry Eyes is remarkable, and not just because you get to watch a girl vomit up live worms. The movie tells the story of Sarah (an impressive Alex Essoe), another in the endless procession of hopeful young actors trying to make it in Los Angeles. Instantly familiar without becoming a stereotype, Sarah navigates the normal casting calls, embarrassing paying-the-bills day job, and emotional insecurity of an industry where your total worth is evaluated (and usually discarded) in a heartbeat. Soon, however, a chance encounter with a casting agent in a bathroom lands her a plum audition for a lead role in “The Silver Scream,” a serious movie by a reputable production house. Sarah is offered the part, but only via the humiliating and degrading casting-couch maneuver: she has to sleep with the wizened producer to get the job. She initially refuses, placing her self-worth above that of a sex-for-a-job trade-off. But returning to her regular life feels like more of a failure than she can handle, and soon Sarah is back at the producer’s house, where it turns out getting the role is going to cost her a lot more than just a night of unpleasant sex. Cue the black-robed cultists, the physical changes, and the aforementioned worm-vomiting. Starry Eyes offers all that and more, a veritable smorgasbord of bodily and psychological horror.
The movie is well worth your time, a sumptuous character study of a fracturing mind, but the real rewards lie in the philosophical underpinnings of the story. Soon after she’s granted the role that will supposedly vault her into stardom, Sarah begins feeling sick, and calls her new producers in a panic. “Did you think it was going to be easy?”, the voice on the other end of the line asks. The fame and fortune that she craves, the stripping away of her old life en route to a newer and better one, isn’t something that simply falls into her lap, he says. There are serious, and painful, consequences. And while the film’s version of these consequences are ten times more horrifying than the usual process of acclimation for the newly minted famous among us, each step of Sarah’s gradual transformation rings eerily true. The gradual severing of the old life—old friends, old places, and especially old mentality—here takes on physical characteristics, as our protagonist begins to literally change, not just psychologically.
Each of us has made a similar change at some point in our lives, where we cast aside an old life and began a new one, even if it didn’t feel quite so transformative at the time. Going away to college, moving to a new city, starting a new job... each of these can often be the impetus for a new phase of our lives, with new friendships and new understandings about ourselves that color the future choices we make. And these transitions are rarely without growing pains, often in the form of losing touch with old friends or becoming different people in how we view and interact with the world. We hope for the best with these changes: ideally, we’d like to grow and become better people, learning from past mistakes and maturing with experience. But it’s easy to look around and see that the reverse is equally plausible. How many friends of yours have ended up in jobs or relationships that don’t seem to have done them any favors, personality-wise? But if you asked them about it, they certainly wouldn’t cop to being shallower, or meaner, or more self-serving than they were in the past; in their minds, the new circumstances dictate new behaviors and attitudes, even if the justification was retroactive. Changing almost always feels like maturation to the person undergoing it, even if it looks to the rest of the world like they’re taking a giant step backwards.
Starry Eyes takes these painful adjustments and renders them terrifyingly literal. Sarah is actually becoming a different person, and it’s not fun or easy. The movie depicts her relationships with fellow female actors as an uneasy bond of ostensible support, shaded with psychological undermining and passive-aggressive emotional abuse hidden as concern. The guys, by contrast, are shown to be filmmakers and camera-men, their gaze always subtly altering the frame of the situation. The movie is smart enough to allow these hoary stereotypes to operate as a sort of auto-critique of patterns and social pecking orders that many of us unconsciously allow ourselves to fall into, even as we overtly rail against them in our politics or our lifestyles. I can’t recall the number of times I’ve been at a dinner table where one or two men ended up monopolizing both the conversation and the social space, even while loudly touting their progressive bona fides. The rest of us let it happen not because we’re okay with structural sexism, but because we were polite; we didn’t want to create an uncomfortable situation, let alone make ourselves the center of attention by trying to wrest the setting away from its dude-bro conventions. The movie slyly suggests that such attitudes will eventually have unpleasant consequences for those who participate in them, regardless of good intentions. Let’s just say Sarah eventually has to stop emotionally cutting her old gang out of her life, and instead actually cut her old gang.
The movie is filled with sharp and funny performances—it’s not all bleak nightmarish visions and edge-of-your-couch tension. Character actor superstar Pat Healy appears as the boss at Sarah’s waiting tables job, a well-intentioned guy who nonetheless degrades her in his own way. Noah Segan turns in a nicely honed portrayal of Danny, the nice guy who just doesn’t get it, and lets her down when push comes to shove. In perhaps the starkest example of a fair-weather male friendship, when Sarah gets ill and begins behaving erratically, her friends decide to let her walk it off by herself, not exactly the gesture of empathy one would hope for. Danny exhibits concerns, and turns to Sarah’s roommate, Tracy. “What’s wrong with you, she’s sick!” he says, raising our hopes. “Go after her,” he then tells Tracy, immediately reminding the audience that even nice guys often see caring for others as important, as long as it’s someone else’s job.
Of course, it’s a horror film, and the movie isn’t all subtle character study and deconstructions of sacrifice and gender. Directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer also deliver terrific entertainment, grim and unsettling. The body horror is worthy of Cronenberg himself, and there’s a winking homage to Rosemary’s Baby near the end that brought a smile to my face. Sarah’s breakdown moves along at a solid clip, pausing just long enough to register the emotional beats of the characters before launching itself into another creepy, slightly surreal nightmare. It’s a great horror movie, flexible enough to be crackerjack Saturday night midnight-movie manna or a thoughtful arthouse conversation fodder. It’s one of the better horror films of the past year, and further evidence that indie horror is crushing it these days. Did we mention the part where she barfs up worms?