Cult Of Nightmares

What if dreams and reality merged into a limbo state? What if we could no longer tell the difference between them? It's kind of already true. No matter how horrifically improbable a nightmare might be, we always believe it. Until we wake up. And waking up is such a relief.

Cult Of Nightmares is my waking nightmare, my paranoid fear that facts and lies are becoming indistinguishable--that the truth, for whatever it's worth, is devolving into a point of view.

My love of horror and science fiction is rooted in something that doesn't get talked about quite enough. Horror is the manifestation of the dread we can't articulate, and science fiction is the paranoia surrounding the future we're terrified to predict. Moviegoers who cling to romance and light-hearted comedy seem to forever harbour the belief that genre filmmakers must be demented and live in dungeons. Although this may be true, what we know of the Masters is that they're socially conscious and pretty damn smart: John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, take your pick. Movies like "They Live", "Invaders Of The Body Snatchers" and "Night Of The Living Dead" were social commentaries that affected me growing up.

My inspiration for Cult Of Nightmares is what I sense all around me. As newspapers vanish into oblivion and cable news disintegrates into sound bites, Facebook and Twitter have been fostering a new human child. It is a monster with a memory as vast as last week and an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish. It has an opinion on absolutely everything yet only reads the headlines. It likes, it shares. But it is very angry and would rather fight with its family and friends than meet them halfway. It loves anonymity, despises human conversation.

Cult Of Nightmares is a movie about what the Western media and its minions are slowly doing to us. Talking heads with plastered faces make us trust them but sell us half-truths and false narratives. Truth tellers, like scientists and whistleblowers, are being side-lined by gossip and endless trivia. The world has been at war since 9/11, yet most of us forget why, and some of us think it's the reason we're still there. Half the world lives under a fear that the other half can't even grasp--as our climate relentlessly collapses.

But David, we know all this and we do care. So don't make a movie about it, it's annoying. And your ending doesn't even have a solution, so why bother? It is this that is my Cult Of Nightmares. There is a cult in it. And some nightmares. But when Carol's TV tells her that she's reached the Lucid Divide, a dangerous state where realities intersect and nothing can be trusted, her time is up. There's no turning back. Because in my movie, dreams and reality have merged into one. And Carol's cell phone is tracking her. And soon enough, she'll just be another headline with twenty "likes" and ten comments. Shared then forgotten.