Dating sucks in “The Dead Thing” (Fantasia 2024 review)

The horror genre, at its best, seeks to interrogate our times. What, at large, is the public’s illness? The genre asks what fears, worries, and burdens we collectively carry around with us, and then expands them to fantastical, terrifying endings. Lately, the genre has been resembling an old classmate of mine from the interpersonal communication field, examining the real-world horrors of modern dating. Cat lovers, FreshAnd Run, darling, run were absurd, scathing indictments of dating in the digital age. Elric Kane’s solo debut The dead thingwhich had its world premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, is the latest in a series of films that are more likely to inspire a night at home alone. It’s not really worth going out for, is it?

The dead thing begins with a familiar but no less striking montage that will prove more terrifying than anything else in the film – a Tinder screen. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Most of us have been there: Our love and sex lives reduced to a kind of smartphone mini-game, where we treat potential suitors like prizes on a claw machine to be won – if you play right, you might even win a good one. The erosion of social third places, spaces outside of work or school where people might have met a partner at some point, and the incessant urge to socialize plague Alex (Blu Hunt). Online dating is good for sex (and, to his credit, The dead thing is a refreshing middle finger in the debate about sex in films), but not much else.

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Alex’s boring life as a casual date ends when she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen). Kyle is charming, sexy, and exactly the kind of man you want to find online – a rare breed indeed. Until Kyle ignores Alex in disbelief. The dead thing is a horror film, however, and while ghosting is pretty scary in and of itself, Kyle’s disappearance and subsequent reappearance has a whole host of nightmarish, catastrophic consequences.

A mixture of possession horror, social criticism and a pinch of slasher violence. The dead thing doesn’t always exceed the sum of its parts, but as an indie with the verve to tread familiar ground, it’s regularly engaging. Elric Kane shows a brashness that is too often missing from the independent horror scene. Sex and gore are welcome digressions in a horror film, especially when they’re in the service of a larger, more meaningful thematic leitmotif, and The dead thing has plenty of both.

The social commentary may be slight, repeating critiques of contemporary hookup culture through a gendered lens without adding much new, but I’ll never scoff at an indie that swings and hits pretty confidently when it’s on the beat. Still, for all The dead thing does it right, some annoying characterizations limit its most effective moments.

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There’s a rule in fiction when it comes to writing main characters. There has to be some normalcy before the descent. Blu Hunt is fantastic and the supporting cast is just as good, but as a character Alex never comes across as well as she otherwise would have. Detachment and exhaustion are key to the film’s thematic motifs, although they do make Alex seem rather one-note. Splashes of color with Kyle provide structure, but Alex is too downcast from the start to really connect. The characterization may work thematically, but that comes at the expense of cinematic tension.

I like indie that is sexy and bloody at the same time, and at its core The dead thing is just that. Elric Kane’s debut is a confident, if familiar, plunge into the horrors of modern dating. It’s over-the-top, violent, and perhaps it’s better to just leave it on “read.” Ghosting is one thing – what The dead thing in stock is another.