The Uncanny of Point Pleasant: Mothman, Madness, and Mourning

I am raising funds to attend the academic conference Haunted Landscapes: Nature, Super-Nature and Global Environments at Falmouth University in the UK this July. I will be speaking on Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies — one of the most underrated and misunderstood horror films of the last 20 years.

My abstract, “The Uncanny of Point Plesant: Mothman, Madness, and Mourning” has been accepted!

Y’all helped me get to Australia to speak at the Feasting on Hannibal Conference in 2016. Attending that talk changed the course of my life.

Now we’re doing it again with The Mothman Prophecies! We are using Freud once again to clear the way.

The Uncanny of Point Pleasant: Mothman, Madness, and Mourning

ABSTRACT

• The Mothman Prophecies (2002) is a psychological horror film loosely based on John Keel’s 1975 titular Fortean book, which documents paranormal phenomena that besieged the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia between 1966–67. While met with near-universal criticism due to its perceived narrative ambiguity and confusion over its ultimate meaning, the film takes on a sharp focus when read psychoanalytically. This presentation will clarify Mothman’s famously murky narrative while underscoring its psychoanalytic value as a text worthy of further examination. Two of Freud’s foundational essays, namely “The Uncanny” (1919) and “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), will be used as keys to unlock the film. While horror literature has been a benchmark for psychoanalytic interpretation beginning with Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann” (1817), Mothman has remained a neglected work that holds immense interpretative usefulness for analytic consideration. The film includes unique representations of eeriness and the uncanny; hauntings from the loss of past love-objects, but also retrocausal hauntings that spring from the inevitable loss of future ones; a shapeshifting, disaster-forecasting antagonist that functions as an entire town’s “emissary of the id” (Horsely 2009); doppelgangers, dreams, and death omens. In Mothman, Point Pleasant is indeed haunted, but the cause is not a ghost, curse, or demon. Rather, the psyche and its unconscious foreknowledge of death and disaster is itself the haunter. While the film’s professorial Dr. Alexander Leek (Alan Bates) remarks, “We’re not allowed to know,” the riddle of The Mothman Prophecies unfurls when we know we are not allowed to know.

I ADORE Pellington’s little treasure of a film. The way it captures eerieness is wholly unique. I haven’t seen anything like it in a movie before or since. I am hoping that, in some small way, this talk helps bring more attention to this neglected masterwork.

Furthermore, there are little-to-no psychoanalytic interpretations of the film, which is shocking because it is filled with Freudian themes. I hope that this talk will also encourage more analysts to see the film, as it’s an amazing resource when it comes to the uncanny, the unconscious, the id, and the darker material that Freud explored.

In a sense, the goal of this talk is to open up that possibility, because my presentation does not close the book on Mothman. Rather, it opens it.

Remote presentations are not an option for this conference.

Here’s a little bit about me —

I am an independent researcher, author, artist, and lecturer. “Independent” means I do all of the above entirely by myself, outside of university or institutional support. I enjoy doing it this way because it lets me devote myself to my passions — albeit, under my own steam. That means between shifts while working in restaurants.

(Here’s a YouTube version of a talk a gave at the CG Jung Center on Trickster Archetypes)

Events like these are a way of forwarding my career as a writer, and as expensive as they can get, they are one of the ways I get myself and my work out there in the world.

One of the things I have become devoted to is genre fiction, particularly horror and sci-fi. I don’t just love to watch it — I love to explore and study it critically like the hopeless nerd I am.

GIFTS FOR HELPING ME!

Everyone who donates will receive a free digital copy of my critically acclaimed book 3 Essays on Virtual Reality: Overlords, Civilization, and Escape!

Donate $100 or more and I will also send you an original sketch of the Mothman drawn by me in the style of the drawings in the film!

I will also be uploading a YouTube version of the talk online!

So, if you’d like to save my family from my endless monologues on why Mothman is such a great film, and help me my reading out there to a larger audience that will appreciate my obsession with delicious bits of psychological minutiae — donate today!