Horror’s Hollow Men

The Empty Man and Wounds use the tools of horror to explore the hollow core of masculinity

by Saoirse Ní Chiaragáin

Horror and gender have always made comfortable bedfellows, and horror fiction that centers the destructive potential of masculinity is nothing new. From Alex Garland’s upcoming Men to the schlocky bombast of Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps, toxic masculinity has proven a fertile ground for horrors both prosaic and supernatural. But where many films have explored masculinity’s capacity to turn to violence, the films of David Prior and Babak Anvari explore the topic from an altogether different direction: its internal emptiness, and the horrors that emptiness may contain.

If you keep abreast of genre cinema and pop culture publications, you might have noticed the push last year to claim David Prior’s The Empty Man as a soon-to-be cult horror classic. These efforts to buoy the property in popular online media shouldn’t come as a surprise: the film is, after all, now a Disney property, and had initially underperformed in almost every conceivable way. After three years of production hell, the film was unceremoniously dumped onto theatre screens in the Autumn of 2020, netting a paltry $4 million worldwide, and a smattering of largely negative reviews followed. In interviews, Prior has since detailed the ways that poor test screenings, an underbaked final edit, and the pandemic served to doom the film at the box office. 

But whether you choose to believe that the efforts to resurrect The Empty Man are a cynical marketing ploy or the natural discovery of a hidden gem by genre aficionados, it remains a film worthy of examination. 

The film’s narrative follows moody and guilt-ridden ex-cop James Lasombra (James Badge Dale) as he searches for a missing teenage girl, and in the process stumbles across a mysterious cult of tulpamancers. Though ostensibly an adaptation of Cullen Bunn’s comic series of the same name, the film’s narrative bears almost no relation to the original: while Bunn’s work includes multiple cults that revere the mysterious Empty Man, they quickly become mainstream features of the comic’s world. Sinister televangelists court their flock and push the message of the Empty Man on televisions, and reverence for the figure spreads like a plague. 

Prior, on the other hand, keeps the cult singular and secretive. In place of the comic’s expansive cultic universe, the film is far more interested in examining its protagonist’s absence of personhood. Where the comic positions a woman of color as its ultimate hero, the film appears keen to address issues of gender and race through the dominant lens. Rather than faithfully adapting Bunn’s source material, thematically and narratively, the film feels closer to a film released just one year prior: Babak Anvari’s 2019 Netflix original Wounds. 

Both films can be read as addressing the void of white American masculinity, an existential emptiness carved out through decades of socioeconomic change, forever wars, and shifting gender norms. While lesser works might have struck a trite note when exploring the question of what it means to be a cishet white man in the 21st century, neither The Empty Man nor Wounds asks the audience to empathize with its protagonists. Given that horror so often operates by eliciting empathy from the audience and making us invest in a character’s peril, it’s a decision that provides us with an unusual perspective within the genre.

Both films can be read as addressing the void of white American masculinity.

In both works, ostensibly average white American men (since the release of Wounds, lead actor Army Hammer has been revealed to be decidedly not average) become vessels for a nebulous, larger being. Both protagonists oscillate between fear, desire, and rapture at the prospect of this union, before succumbing to their numinous fate. And the films are each concerned with ideas of the divine and who can serve as a conduit between this world and the next. 

An uncharitable reading of the narratives might find it suspect that in both cases it’s straight white men who prove to be the perfect messengers for an unknown higher power. But the track records of the various writers and filmmakers involved reveal this for the boorish claim it is; in fact, a reading of both works as cautionary tales of far-right radicalization is far more likely.

Prior has spoken extensively about the deliberate construction of each detail of his film, from the stark philosophical references to Nietzsche and Derrida (the latter of whom has the film’s high school named in his honor) to more subtle allusions found in the film’s recurring motifs of bridges. And it’s no accident that the teenager who James is tasked with finding is styled to look like a Gen-Z Joan of Arc. This is an especially fitting detail given the focus on divine calls to action and the film’s association of masculinity with militarism. 

Anvari’s feature debut, 2016’s Under the Shadow, serves as a cogent introduction to the director’s creative interests. Set during Tehran’s War of the Cities in the 1980s, it follows a mother and child as they fight to survive the conflict while remaining in their home. It’s an unapologetically political horror, one which examines issues of militarism and gender in Anvari’s home nation. His decision to follow this work by adapting Nathan Ballingrud’s novella The Visible Filth is a direct continuation of these same themes and interests. 

Much of Ballingrud’s work deals with the intersection of masculinity and violence. His first collection of short stories, North American Lake Monsters, features countless male protagonists who struggle beneath the weight of their genders. In the title story, a father newly-released from prison and struggling to reconnect with his young daughter finds himself transfixed by a washed-up creature on a lake shore, whose carcass has been hollowed out by woodland creatures. Later, he finds that he cannot wash the monster’s filth from his skin. Another story in the collection, S.S, follows a teenage boy who is the sole care-giver for his reclusive mother, and his gradual seduction into a white supremacist gang. 

Similarly, in The Visible Filth and Anvari’s adaptation, Wounds, we find a protagonist restless from the hollowness of his masculinity. Will (Army Hammer) tends a dive bar in New Orleans while his girlfriend composes her thesis on T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”—a detail that feels far from accidental. Although Will’s feelings of emasculation are more explicit in the novella, they are still keenly felt within the film—he is directionless and quick to anger, and attempts futilely to alleviate the frustrations of his situation by lusting after a close friend of his. When she inevitably rejects his advances, both his poor mental state and his proximity to the nebulous force at the core of the narrative are accelerated. 

Although war is never centered in either film, its influence can be felt on the margins.

It would be remiss not to single out the nods to T.S. Eliot in both films, which occur both in name and in thematic content. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” is perhaps best known for its final stanza—”This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”—but its commentary on post-war masculinity and the dehumanization of violence is highly applicable to the narratives of both films. Although war is never centered in either, it can be felt on the margins; whether that be through James’ security store, stockpiled with weapons in quiet suburbia, or the Confederate flag hanging conspicuously in the apartment of Will’s friend, Eric. And while there is no indication that either character has ever seen combat, their lives and identities have been passively shaped by wars both historical and ongoing. (Perhaps their relative safety, their distance from war, has fueled their frustration and emasculation. Think of all the Twitter chuds who lament that they have to live in the 21st century, with all its liberties, rather than storming the beaches of Normandy. To the characters, and many men like them, war is the making of a man. Without it, they are empty.)

Alongside allusions to Eliot’s famous poem on post-war masculinities and the existential dread of modernity, both The Empty Man and Wounds follow similar routes to introduce the supernatural elements of their narratives. In each film, teenagers provide the entry point to the protagonists’ journeys. In James’ case, it is through his search for Sasha (Amanda Quaill) and the suggestion that the Empty Man is nothing more than an adolescent urban legend. Will, on the other hand, finds a cellphone left behind by teens in the bar, and which contains a disturbing video depicting an arcane ritual.

If one were to read both narratives as allegories for far-right radicalization, it makes sense that the films’ adult protagonists would find the material through a younger generation—especially a younger generation that treats such serious and damaging material with irreverence, and whose hijinks on message boards like 4chan eventually spawns larger cults of conspiracy like QAnon. In both films, as in real life, counter-cultural ideas thrown around by ironic, edgy teenagers gain a strange virality, ultimately infecting those who are not in on the “joke.” (Consider also the image of Will’s girlfriend, Carrie, perched agog in front of her computer screen as a rabbit hole stretches endlessly before her.)

Both stories feature strange information disseminated by cults and mysterious tomes, but which can only safely be held by the protagonists. Everyone else who comes in contact with the Empty Man, and the force at the heart of Wounds, is somehow corrupted: the teens who called upon the Empty Man are driven to suicide; those who unleashed the force in Wounds are implied to have met grisly fates. Only James and Will, hollowed as they are by the emptiness , can comfortably accept the darkness.

As a result of these commonalities, both films are notable for their perspective in horror. Although we follow Will and James, we don’t fear for them; rather, we fear what they become. We fear for ourselves, watching, helpless, as two men succumb to their most self-serving and damaging impulses. The climax of both films is muted in its execution, depicting James and Will accepting their positions as hosts for a greater being.

Both endings are devastating in their finality, a calm close to existentially turbulent stories. Ending, as Eliot wrote, “not with a bang, but with a whimper.”