We know who the Mothman is

Hello, and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real, a podcast where we discuss all fan theories in the world of entertainment. I'm Leif Ehrich, and I'm here with my brother Torvald, and today we're going to be talking about the 2002 psychological drama, The Mothman Prophecies. But stick around to the end, because we will be joined by the director himself. Mark Pellington calls in to give us his wisdom, and also give us his reactions to our crazy fan theory. It's an interesting, very psychological mystery. Like, I don't think I've really seen a movie quite like it. The Mothman Prophecies, directed by Mark Pellington. It was adapted by Richard Hatem from the nonfiction novel of the same name, which was authored by John Keel. So just to be clear, your theory is about who the Mothman is? So that is the question at the core of this film. I mean, I kind of got the impression that like there's multiple Mothmen, maybe?

Oh, yeah. No, there are. Okay. Okay, cool. All right. Well, let's, all right. Take it away. So just real quick, what John Keel did was he researched some actual events that happened in 1966 to 1967, where there were numerous sightings of a strange creature with wings and red eyes in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Obviously, there are lots of random weird sightings of crazy things around the country. But the interesting thing about these sightings was that lots of people saw this creature in a short amount of time. And the people who were reporting the sightings were generally like normal people. Like they weren't the town crazy person. They were just like volunteer firemen. This sounds really familiar having just watched this movie. Now, Point Pleasant, West Virginia hasn't really had any Mothman sightings since then. But there is a statue of the Mothman in Point Pleasant. There's a museum of the Mothman.

And every year they have a Mothman festival. Also, there was just recently a petition to replace all Confederate statues in West Virginia with Mothman statues. Oh, that's a nice thought. They should do that. I mean, replace something horrifically evil with something horrifically evil. I mean, there's some debate about the Mothman. So you say you think you know the identity or identities of the Mothman. Are you saying as in like you have a conspiracy theory about the real-life identities of the Mothman that this guy was hunting? No. I'm just giving some background on the origins of this movie. But my theory is 100% confined to the film The Mothman Prophecies, the 2002 film by Mark Pellington. So when Mark Pellington came on to this project, it had been through many rewrites. And was, I believe, more of a sci-fi monster movie. And he said he did not want to do a monster movie or a sci-fi movie or anything like that.

He just wanted to make a psychological mystery. He made an interesting choice, which I feel made this movie, to me, stand out from a lot of other weird sci-fis and monster movies. In that nothing is really explained, no questions are answered, and everything is pretty much left ambiguous. But I think there are clues that if you want to figure it out yourself, you can. So in the commentary on this film, Mark Pellington heavily implies that he has actually included all the information you need to answer the question of who or what is the Mothman. But he does not spell it out for the viewer. From my point of view, it's pretty much one of two things. Either A, John, the main character, is like completely just, he's crazy, right? like he's just seeing things and hearing things and if you wanted to prove that theory there is ample evidence to support it or it all comes down to the fact that if we look at this character john

who is investigative journalist like his entire livelihood is based on researching and writing stories about like strange things right so it seemed to me like every single strange thing that happens in this movie revolves around him and most of the strange things only happen to him and no one else is even around when they happen right so like if for just trying to figure out like me watching the movie with a perspective of who is the mothman i'm like well if the mothman has to be anyone it's clearly john like he's clearly making up stuff so that he has a story to write about right like he went to a town that has some you know kooky stories and he researched those stories and then he made it bigger right like yeah i don't think you're actually too far off with your whole uh john klein is the mothman my theory is that the mothmen in this film are the writers of the film manifested in their own fictional world and the reason why it is omniscient

and constantly foreshadowing is because that's what writers do. I think that Richard Gere's character, John Klein, is a fictional character in a fictional universe who is interacting with his author. Right, okay. But unlike, say, Stranger Than Fiction, the results are creepy and horrifying rather than funny. So it's kind of like an Alan Wake situation. Yeah, kind of like that. I was never totally clear on what the heck was going on in Alan Wake. But for this theory, I'm going to be picking into a lot of little details that you can see in the film. And I think before I do that, I need to give a little bit of credence to everything I'm about to say. Because when I say certain things, like when I try to share theories like, oh, you know, Stanley Kubrick really meant this when he put those cans that had Native American pictures on it in the background in one scene, right? People are like, no, no one thinks like I have so many people who aren't in the world of film being like, no, no one puts would put that much thought into something.

Right. But directors do put that much thought into something. All right. Because every single set is handmade from scratch down to every detail. Like if they didn't put it there, it wouldn't be there. I mean, well, they do. There are some times where you film on location, but you choose the location. You choose what's in the frame. You know, you choose what what what is in the background. Listening to the commentary, the director put like so much work into all the little details, things that like I had seen this movie several times and I had never noticed until I listened to the commentary. So, well, speaking of Native Americans, are you referencing that scene where he buys the coffee and puts it down next to like a little Native American statue and then he picks up the coffee and then it zooms in on that statue? No, there's actually a lot of Native American imagery in this film. And I consider it to be one of many red herrings.

I think that it is to throw us off as a red herring, but it is a coal miner next to a Native American, right? So it's like the settlers next to the people who they screwed over. But then after he picks up his coffee, you don't see the coal miner. You only see the Native American because it's zoomed in. Well, no, and they're also right next to a jar of candy and propped up inside the jar of candy, which someone would have had to do are two pixie sticks in the shape of a Y which is a recurring shape in this film. Like I'm saying, no, the little details, everything was intentional. So John goes to Point Pleasant, his car mysteriously breaks down, he's waiting for it to get fixed and he's standing in front of the mechanic shop in front of a sign that says repair with a giant red arrow that points to a billboard that says, she's my gal. Now I thought nothing of this. But like, this is supposed to give us the subliminal message that there is something he needs to repair having to do with his dead wife.

That's what that image is telling us. Well, I mean, just so our audience can follow along, basically the movie starts out, he's going to buy a house, his life is good, he's a nice guy, he's living with his wife. So they buy this house, but then right afterwards something weird happens, they have a car accident, and his wife does not die from this, but they find out that she had a tumor in her brain, which was always there, and then she dies. When he was like cleaning out her room, this orderly walks up and is like, she was drawing angels before she died. She wasn't drawing angels. Like how could he mistake these for angels? What's wrong with this orderly? So this orderly is the Mothman, right? That's basically what the director is telling us. Or, you know, a personification of him in the world. And he says she was drawing angels when she is clearly not drawing angels. Yeah, no one would think she was drawing angels.

But I think that's important to my theory because, like, the writer sees himself as, like, this godlike good being writing a good story, whereas the characters in his world would see him as something terrifying, right? Yeah. And so she's drawing, like, devils. So you say this movie is a movie about writers interfering with their own story from the point of view of the characters in the story. That's your theory. as part of their meta story, they are critiquing themselves in a way. They are showing sort of the tropes and inexplicable things that writers do and how that would appear to the characters within the fictional universe. Like they're just writing stuff. And to the characters, it's just like, what, why am I here now? Or like Richard Gere even says, it's like the universe just pointed to you. And it's like, there's a happy couple. I'm going to get them, which is kind of what writers do, right? Like it's kind of what stories do. Like for no reason whatsoever,

we need this story to happen. So I'm pointing to this happy couple. Something bad is going to happen. So my story can happen. One thing that I didn't mention at the beginning when I was going over the real world mystery of the Mothman was that in 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people. Numbers show up a lot in this movie in the background. The number 35 shows up a lot on random graffiti. Also on the map that John Klein looks at when he shows up randomly in Point Pleasant, there's the number 31 and the number 32 on the routes he takes. These are important because they're building up to the 36 people who die when the bridge collapses in this movie. And in this movie, it is 36, not 46, as it was in real life. Did you notice that on Gordon's house so gordon is a guy that john klein meets in point pleasant yeah we can't gloss over this because this is my favorite scene of the entire movie so when he shows up in point pleasant

he wakes up he doesn't show up he wakes up in his car he's and his car he somehow drove like six hours but it only took one he gets out and actually when he gets out there is a random inexplicable flash in the sky over his shoulder well i i that was another scene that i rewound like three times just to look at that flash and to me it looked like a moth but it was lightning. I'm sure it was supposed to look like a moth. And when he walks up to this house, there is actually a tree in the shape of the Y which is the Mothman symbol and it's supposed to be like the Mothman is watching him. He knocks on the door and then Gordon answers and he points a gun at him because John Klein is like, oh my car broke down, can I use your phone? it's like you've been knocking on my door at 3 a.m every night for the past three nights saying the exact same thing my car broke down can i use your phone this scene was just like oh my gosh i

love this movie that's so good i love the idea of a guy who just every night at 3 a.m knocks on your door just like all casual but friendly and wanting to use your phone it just won't take the And so they call the sheriff Connie, and that's when John kind of starts to form a friendship with Connie. So Connie represents kind of an anchor in the reality of their fantasy world, right? John is, throughout this film, I believe, starting to sort of see the cracks in his reality, starting to realize that he is sort of a fictional character. He's dealing with creatures greater than himself. So Connie, she knows there are strange things going on, but she is in complete denial of them because she wants to remain happy, right? And she doesn't want John to end up like Gordon, right? Gordon eventually, spoiler alert, freezes to death because of his obsession with these strange voices and with the Mothman, basically.

You say that Gordon has been in contact with the Mothman. And this is a very important part of the movie, is that Gordon actually has a stronger connection with the Mothman than John. Yes. He talks to the Mothman more than John. He is someone who is more willing to see the reality of what the Mothman is. Why was the writer talking to him from the drain in his sink? So the writer is generally depicted throughout this movie as a omniscient watcher who is watching them constantly. He's basically in every scene in the form of two red dots that are supposed to be like two red eyes that are always watching them. My first thought, I don't know about you, when they zoom out of that drain in the sink, it's just a black dot on a white background at first. And to me, it looked like a giant eye. So I think that it was supposed to represent the omniscient watcher, the Mothman or the writer of the film itself.

Foreshadowing Gordon eventually does die. And foreshadowing that in one of the scenes where John Klein talks to him in the backyard, Gordon is standing on a giant dug up patch of dirt in the middle of the grass. It's huge. And it looks like a giant grave. And I think it kind of is implying he's digging his own grave. And he's standing on the giant grave, but Richard Gere is standing just on the other side in the grass, implying that Richard Gere is going to survive. But Gordon is not. And another little foreshadowing of that is the last two digits of Gordon's address is 38. Foreshadowing that if Connie had died, he would have been the 38th person who had died in Point Pleasant. Well, no, he would have been like the first. Well, yeah, but like a total of 38 people. They meet, they have a bit of a fight, and then Connie breaks it up and they leave. And John sleeps for the night, takes his car to get fixed.

They're like, dude, your car doesn't need fixed. And he's like, oh, okay. Then he's just crossing the street and he happens to randomly see Gordon. John and Gordon are best friends from here on out. Like they are thick as thieves. It's pretty soon after this that Gordon calls John and he's like, I had a vision and I was driving and I met the Mothman and his name was Indrid Cold. How do you interpret Indrid Cold? Is he the Mothman? Is he someone else? In the universe of this movie, he is the Mothman or just a manifestation of him. The Mothman can, of course, manifest himself as anyone. He can manifest himself as Richard Gere, as Richard Gere's wife, as Gordon, right? As an orderly. The orderly, yeah. He can take people's voices, right? But he can also appear as Indrid Cold. And I think that this is the closest we see to the real Mothman is Indrid Cold. When he shows up, it looks like an alien, which I think is another red herring,

is that they're introducing the idea that, oh, it could be aliens, but it's really not. Indrid Cold, like the Mothman, is actually a real cryptid who has been sort of sighted in different places. He's sometimes called the Smiling Man or the Grinning Man. Most of the sightings of Indrid Cold, except for one, were all cataloged by John Keel in his book, The Mothman Prophecies. Well, delving a little deeper into the character of Indrid Cold within the movie, eventually John manages to get on the phone with Indrid Cold. Indrid Cold speaks first, right? And then John Klein asks the question, are you reading my mind? So John Klein believes that either Indrid Cold is watching him, which is why he turns off all the lights, or that he has somehow the ability to read John's mind. And when John asks that question, Indrid Cold says, I have no need to, do I? Because he is the writer. He already knows this thing.

He doesn't need to read the minds of his characters because he wrote the minds of his characters. we do know that Indrid Cold knows things that he shouldn't know and he seems to be able to see events before they happen and this was John's first time talking to him and John I think is just testing his omniscience and I think this is good evidence to support the fact that Indrid Cold the Mothman is the writer because one thing as a writer that you know with your characters is their backstories like this is an extremely important information in a good story definitely but it's something the audience never sees detailed right they will probably never get to know where john klein was born or that his father worked in a greenhouse right why else does indrid cold tell john klein all this information your father was born in wisconsin you lived in a greenhouse you don't remember what your mother looked like all these things um i think it's just

to show he's the writer in order to write john klein he has to know everything about john klein This is his protagonist. He knows all these things that aren't really important. So the final thing is that Richard Gere takes out a book, right? And it is a romance novel. Indrid Cold reads a line from this book because John asks him to, to sort of prove that he, you know, has this omniscient view. Right after he reads this line, when Indrid Cold says, still more proof, John Klein, you can hear two noises in the background. The two noises you hear are the sounds of a woman moaning in pleasure twice. And the cover of the book he just read was a romance novel. And so I think that the moment where the writer is reading from a fictional book within his own fictional world, I think the two fictionalities start to bleed together. And we hear some of the sound from the other fictional world come out into the Mothman Prophecies world.

He's merging the two stories together. No, I just, I feel like it's just like a byproduct of two fictional worlds. together at the same time one kind of bleeds into the other that's pretty cool and that's actually very interesting speaking of the sounds in this scene john goes he takes the recording of indrid and he shows it to some like sound experts and it's just electrical impulse electricity and light and sound are all very important in this movie and that is kind of how the entity the mothman communicates with this world. And I think it's because that is the only way that a writer communicates with his characters is through electricity, right? Through the keyboard, through the screen, through other characters' voices. I mean, unless they're using like a typewriter or a pen. Right, sure. But like, that's not what they were using in 2002 when they wrote this. Dude, 2002 was a long time ago.

I was writing on keyboards in 2002. I don't know about you, if you were using a typewriter. So, well, let's talk about the Y symbol, right? What's the single most important thing to a writer? It's credit, right? All artists sign their work. And I think... Well, you would know. Right. Well, every movie that a writer writes is going to say, written by, you know, they love their byline. They love their signature on their work. And I think that's what the Y represents. A Y line, if you will.

Dude, this might be stretching it. But that might be a little bit of a stretch. But at the very beginning of the movie, when Richard Gere and Deborah Messing walk out of the house, did you notice that they walk on a Y-shaped path? No. Yeah, there's a Y-shaped path. And it's supposed to be like it's pointing to them, like the universe is pointing to you, like Richard Gere says later on. And I know from watching the Making of documentary that they actually worked hard to find a house in Georgetown that had a Y-shaped path on it. I bet most houses don't have a Y-shaped path. And we can just go through all of them real quick. So there's a Y-shaped mark on the front of his car where the crash happened. In Point Pleasant, one of the sightings of the Mothman was this old lady who saw the Mothman out the window in that tree and then he goes over the tree and there's a Y on it. All of the drawings of the Mothman

tend to make Y shapes as well. And then at the very end of the movie, all of the lights on the crashed cars in the water that crashed into after the bridge collapsed, they all form a Y shape. And it's a huge Y shape. So it's like a giant signature of the author, like marking his work, branding it, if you will. This is mine. But why a Y? I think the Y symbol just came out of like, What is the Mothman, right? He's a dark creature that no one really ever saw clearly that had wings. And so that's why all the pictures of him are like him kind of in a Y shape with his wings up, you know? Right. So you got the body, you got the wings. That's a Y. Yep, exactly. What originally kind of turned me on to this theory was on a YouTube channel called The Fangirl. She thought that the Mothman was actually some strange other dimensional creature living in mirrors. And it pulled people into mirrors and trapped them in a mirror world.

And then it came out and took their bodies in the real world. Anyway. That's interesting. It was an interesting theory, but I didn't exactly agree with her theory. But she did point out the significance of mirrors. And so reflections, I think, are very important in this movie. John Klein is very clearly a reflection of John Keel, right? He is a fictional version of the writer of this story. So one of the first things we see in this movie after his wife dies, we see a weird board of TV monitors in a store window. and there's a lot of crazy stuff just playing on these monitors in the middle is richard gear john klein just talking on like a news program because he's a reporter but then all around him are a bunch of monitors that are just showing an eye like an eye just a very close-up shot of an eye it's like what and then there are a couple other monitors that are showing like a game show

or like one is just showing a shot of like heavenly clouds and so i think it's sort of like the heavenly clouds and the eye are implying again that something is watching him from on high but then we go into that tv and we're transported to john who is at his office watching that same program on a tv we are supposed to wonder it's supposed to just create this sense throughout the whole movie that there are multiple johns and we're supposed to wonder is one of like are they all a dream are they all fake uh you know um and so i think that's a hint that he's a fictional character i did have a sense that there were multiple johns well i mean there definitely are a lot of johns running around i mean at least from gordon's perspective so mirrors are important because many camera angles are shot impossibly from the perspective of a mirror or a tv when richard is at the motor inn in point pleasant he wakes up he moves the

lamp away from his face and seems pretty confused because why was he sleeping with the lamp on um and uh why is it pointing directly at his face so he's sitting on the bed and then we get a shot that is from the perspective of the mirror right and this isn't the only time this happens later on we get another shot from the perspective of the mirror where we can see the back of his wife's photo that he put on the mirror right so we can see the white back of it which we shouldn't be able to see like this is a perspective that should not exist i believe with all of this they're trying to introduce the idea that there is an omniscient watcher from another dimension and i think the mirrors are trying to sort of help convey the sense that we're in a fantasy world like alice through the looking glass like it's a very common trope in the diner so there's a scene where he has he has a lunch or dinner with Gordon and his wife at a diner, and there's a scene from the TV.

The TV is literally watching them. Like the POV shot is from the TV looking down at John. Dude, that's the opposite of what TVs do in real life. Yeah, exactly. And we are in an opposite world, right? Like we're the audience watching the TV and we are in the movie world, right? In Point Pleasant, Ohio, TVs watch you. Yeah. Well, I just think that the idea here is that if reversed and you were in a fictional world, the TV would be watching you rather than the other way around. I mean, there's actually been some research into trying to actually like spy on people by watching the flickering of a lamp in a room due to vocal like sound waves. Like you can actually record the voice of a person just by watching the lamp in the room, because when they talk, it disturbs the way the lamp light shines out of the room. So maybe you could record vocal waves by watching the flickering of lights in a TV, perhaps.

Yeah. So there's this idea that John himself is moth-like in that he is constantly being drawn like a moth to the flame or the truth, if you will. But it is a flame that will destroy him if he reaches it. This world is fake. And if you realize you're a fake person, you will no longer be happy and you will die, which is what happens to Gordon. okay they constantly include these shots john seen through glass like fragmented glass and i think it's supposed to show that he's like a facet of a real person he's based on something real on john keel but he himself is just a projection of it and we constantly see fragments facets and projections of him throughout the movie the scene with the burned tree when the first witness tells her story so there's a wide shot that pulls out and they're standing by the tree and they get smaller and smaller and then it fades to the little dots of a speaker and it's supposed to show

them like disappearing into like they are becoming the dots of the speaker basically and i think like that was a very intentional shot they showed up that that what were they trying to say with that and the only thing i can come up with is that having humans shrink down and turn into the dots of a telephone like an electrical device is supposed to convey that they don't actually exist right they are just part of this electrical story that are basically conveyed to us they're a story conveyed to us through you know sound and light the one thing i know from listening to people talking about like you know film production and stuff is that if you want to do a crane shot they're super expensive and hard to set up and as soon as you mention it the showrunner will basically leap out at you and be like no no crane shots we don't have a budget for a crane shot and start you know suggesting other ways to do the shot and the only reason and the only way

to do a crane shot is if you really have like a legitimate need for it in the scene to establish And this was his legitimate need. Yeah, that gives a lot of weight to your idea, however intangible it may be. That's pretty interesting. I mean, and I even saw some of the making of when they did this shot. Like, it was a hard shot to pull off. It would have cost a lot of money. So Connie has a dream that she is in water and she's drowning and she's surrounded by presents. So when this actually happens and the bridge collapses, Connie is in the water with a bunch of crashed cars and dead people. And yes, it's Christmas and some of them have presents in their cars. But I think that the reason she's surrounded by presents in her dream instead of cars is because people want to watch something entertaining rather than watch a tragedy. So the cars and dead people, which would normally be tragic in her dream, have become presents because they are being presented in the movie to the viewer.

Right, they're making it exciting. And we wrapped it up for you. It's all, it's just what you want. I think it's interesting that the only person to survive this tragedy is literally a fictional character, right? So 46 people actually died in the tragedy. The director says he really wanted to have 46 people die in the movie. He was very adamant about that. And the guys in charge, the executives, I don't know, were like, it can only be 16 people. And he was like, no, 46 people actually died. But it's based on a true story. I know. And they wanted a horror. Like, what? Yeah, that's crazy. And like the director himself. This makes no sense. Yeah, he was pretty mad about it. He's like, we're dishonoring the memory of the people who actually died. This is like if they were making James Cameron's Titanic and he wants to say the actual amount of people who died and the production studio is like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Let's just say they all got away. Let's say everyone survived. Or like, I don't know, like a dozen people died, maybe, you know. Yeah, we can't be that dark. Like, no, it doesn't. Why make the movie the Titanic if you're going to change the facts? I agree. And eventually, the director said they came to a compromise and went with 36 instead of 46. This is the most crazy thing about this movie. This is insane. On a meta level, with the story that Mark Fellington was telling, I think he felt that he could change the fictionalized parts, but he didn't want to change the actual reality, right? Because that's part of his own world, right? He's just the writer. He doesn't want to change the actual reality of 46 people died. Well, okay. So just along with what you said, the Mothman or Indrid Cold, whatever it is, likes to tell people about tragedies that are about to happen. How is this symbolic of the writer of a book?

Yeah. So if you're a writer, your story is going to be about one thing. It's about bad things happening to your characters. Right. And as a writer, you do foreshadow it. Right. You the universe will tell them what's going to happen to them. Right. But they never see it. Right. Because it's not for them. It's for the readers anyway. Right. But so you are telling it. And it is in weird, incomprehensible ways that they would never understand, which I feel like is what the Mothman is doing. Exactly what a writer would do. He's foreshadowing, but not in any way that they understand, or at least they misinterpret, you know? Have you seen Premonition with Sandra Bullock? I worked with the producer of Premonition. Whoa. Well, but it could have been something like that, where she saw things in the real world that did indicate something bad was going to happen, and then she saw the bad thing happen, and then she woke up before it happened, right?

Like, something like that would very clearly show us that this character in this movie is experiencing foreshadowing. Right? Without some voice coming in their brain just telling them. But he's not trying to tell the story of someone who's psychic who's having a premonition. He's trying to tell the story of some sort of inexplicable, all-knowing writer god that is like just sort of foreshadowing to his characters. So you're saying because this is the story of the writer, not of the characters, the method of foreshadowing can be more heavy-handed. Yes, that's what I'm saying. okay i i would like to talk about another character that was introduced because i feel this is relevant um i feel like there was one single expert in the field portrayed in this movie and that was the professor that he was trying so hard to get in contact with what does this guy represent does he represent the writers because like is he the mothman or does he represent

like a failed main character because he heard the mothman and he saw the prophecies but he couldn't do anything about it so he gave up like what what is he what do you think so this character he's just like richard gear right i think this kind of goes along with the idea of them always showing like mirrored richard gear is there two richard gears like when he smashes his head through the mirror like was that another version of him trying to smash his way out of the fantasy right out of the fictional world you know or the fact that richard gear throughout his time in point pleasant He's sleeping in a room with double beds. Yeah, I know. I noticed that. There's room for two people. You must be paying extra for this room, dude. And you must be paying so much to live in a motel. Again, I think sort of a reminder to us that there are multiple Richard Gere's or multiple incarnations of the writer himself in this movie as portrayed by the professor Alexander Leek.

His name is Leek, L-E-E-K. What was the name of the guy who wrote the original story? Kiel. K-E-E-L. John Keel, John Klein, and Leak. No, that's cool. I didn't notice that, but that is how I took his character to be kind of like inverse John, like kind of failed John. Yeah, I think he's a John who, like John, had the opportunity to sort of see the reality, but ultimately, because his life was getting ruined by it, he decided to do what John does in the end, which is embrace the fantasy and just be happy. The director has said that if you take apart every line that Alexander Leak says in this movie, he has given you the answer, even though critics complained he didn't give enough answers. Specifically, Alexander Leak, the professor, has given us the answer. Yes, that person. Oh. And one of the first things he tells him is, he's like the nocturnal butterfly or the moth. It represents the psyche.

The professor is explaining to John how the Mothman works. And he says, the Mothman is the psyche or the soul immortally trapped in the hellish dead realms. So I don't really see why that has to do with writing. I mean, sometimes when I'm writing, I do feel like I'm immortally trapped in the hellish dead realms. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I can go with that. That's okay. They're outside. And then John says, how do you explain it knows everything? And he's like, hey, look at that. If there was a car crash 10 blocks away, he points up to a building. There's a window washer up there. He's like, that window washer up there could probably see it. Now, that doesn't mean he's God or even smarter than we are. But from where he's sitting, he can see a little further down the road. The writer is not God, right? He's just a person, just like his characters. But to the characters in his stories, he kind of seems like God.

So he's just saying, we're just normal people, right? We're just the writer. We're just a person just like our characters, but we can just see further down the road because we wrote the story, right? And our characters would see us as God. That description fits very well to what you are positing here. So I like that. I can go along with that. Can I ask you, why does he keep seeing his wife? In order to answer that question though, we have to look at Gordon again. Some interesting things to note about Gordon. As he meets and talks to Indrid Cold more and more, he starts to lose sense of his universe. At one point, actually the first time he gets a call from Indrid Cold, he has Connie rush over to Gordon's house, because supposedly that's where Indrid Cold is calling from. When Connie gets there, it's snowing outside, it's very cold. When Gordon opens the door, he's like, oh, hey, yeah, we've just been sitting at home, I didn't call anyone.

Over his shoulder, you can see that he has the overhead fan on in his house, even though it's very cold. This is because he is supposed to have lost all sense of temperature, which is, of course, how he ends up dying. What about his family? Well, I mean, his wife may have left him at that point because she does leave him. Not yet. Yeah, well, maybe that's why she left him. He would never turn off the fan. She turned off the fan. Okay. There's like a Christmas party and Gordon isn't there. So John Klein decides to go track him down and he's standing on a bridge and he says he's waiting for Indrid Cold. And he knows something that he logically should not know. He asks the same question that John's wife asked before she died. He says, hey, John, when was the last time you were happy? And this is where reality really starts to mix together for John himself. I agree with that. And so I think that sort of starts to answer the question

of what you had about why does his wife keep showing up it's because from this point on he's starting to realize that his universe is not real and so everything is starting to sort of become fake it's like after this point is when he like smashes his head into the mirror and stuff like that well it was at that point right after he's imagined smashing his head into the mirror that he actually got the phone call from gordon who was like it's all real it's all real and then he goes to find gordon and gordon's dead i mean he's referring to the mothman i think what he's saying is it's all real as in the mothman is real but everything else is not oh so he's saying literally the opposite of the words he's saying it's all fake it's all fake but like because the thing that everyone thinks is fake is the mothman and indrid cold and these phone calls and he's saying that those things all those things that they think are fake those are what's all real

yeah he's saying flip it so after gordon's funeral a guy walks up to him and is like hey john i got your message and john's like what are you talking about i didn't leave you a message in the next scene john is like calling up probably that same guy who analyzes voices and the guy's saying like it's your voice john he's like no it's not my voice this is one of the most mysterious scenes in the movie as he's walking around saying this he walks up to the side mirror that's just hanging there and his reflection in the mirror is doing different things than he is whoa yeah like it is not in sync with him at all like he turns one way it turns the opposite way and he gets really mad because of what the guy on the phone is saying and he slams the door with the mirror on it and it bounces closed and as it bounces back you just see like a weird creepy face in the mirror for a split second that but i did not notice that the mirror was doing different things that's very

interesting he's starting to realize that he's in a fictional world he's out of sync with what his character is supposed to be doing so you're saying the reflection is going through the motions of the story but he's splitting off right he's splitting off just a little bit because he's basically doing the same thing but not quite yeah but not quite that's cool i like that his wife i think at this point represents the flame right like he's a moth to the flame so you're saying if he saw her instead of going and getting coffee if he had walked to the police station like he was going to and saw her he would have died i think maybe yes i don't know exactly how or the mechanism of it. All I know is that Gordon died, right? And Gordon died of what? Exposure, right? Of being exposed to the truth. To cold. Well, but then what she said was to tell him, sorry, she ruined everything. And then Indrid cold calls and says, sorry, John, I ruined everything. The author in

this story is very apologetic at some points. I know that I am often apologetic to the characters that i write because there are so many characters who i just i create and i just love and then i just have terrible things happen to them throughout the entire movie right and a lot of my stories end really sadly with them dying and so like i do feel like sometimes i'd like to apologize to my characters and be like sorry i ruined everything you know we're at the scene where he goes to the police station which is really good so we get an establishing shot of the police station now it's very wide on one side of the police building there is another building labeled as alexander fine food hotel now i'm not sure that this is significant except that the name of the author was alexander leak and so like the author's name is on this shot yeah and on the other side of the police station there's some store i don't even know what it is but it has a marquee type board

like one of those white boards that you can put letters on some of the letters are reversed and It's a little weird. It says, question 53, at what temperature does blood freeze? And then it says 3F. Which this is right after Gordon died. Yeah. Huh. Like, no one in town would have put this up. So there's a space between the 3 and the F. Like, there should be another number in there, like 31, which is when blood freezes. Like, fill in the blanks. The writer, whose name is on this shot, Alexander, is literally telling something to the audience through text because no one in the story would have written that, right? I mean, that's pretty weird. Okay, so now we're to the point where he goes to see Alexander Leake for the last time. And basically, Alexander Leake just says, which is more important, having proof or being alive? There is no logical reason why John would die here. As if they're mutually exclusive, yeah.

So I think this is referring to, like, what's more important, living your life, even if it's a fantasy, or dying like Gordon? Or finding out you don't exist. Yeah, disassociating from your own reality because it's not real. So it's also at this point where he kind of, like, he says, screw it, and throws away all of his research. He takes the phone off the hook so that Indrid Cold can't call him anymore. He goes home, he might get a call from his wife, but Connie is trying to keep him in reality, and ultimately he rips the phone out of the wall. He doesn't answer it even when it rings, even though he ripped it out of the wall, shouldn't be able to ring. And there's actually a deleted scene around this time in the movie where there's another random like marquee type board where there's a message on it that says, Sheriff will call someone. But like he sees it at an angle and it just says, she will call.

Wow. Oh, that's so good. Why would they cut that? That's really good. So here, I saved it for the best for last. The biggest confirmation of my theory is that when Indrid Cold calls on the phone, the voice of Indrid Cold is Mark Pellington, the director. Okay. Like, he did all of the Indrid Cold voices. So it's literally him talking to his character. Yep. I mean, that's pretty indisputable there. And I think this is another big confirmation. The director says that there are several points in the movie. And he's like, you can go through and find them. where he recorded himself saying the exact lines that characters like Connie or Mary or Gordon had said. And then he changed his voice and mixed it in with theirs on a subliminal level so that you won't even notice. Because he wanted to ask the question of, are all these people the Mothman? Or is all this happening in Richard Gere's head? Stuff like that. He wanted to raise questions.

But I think he's trying to say, what I was saying, the Mothman is all of these characters, right? Because they're all his creation. He said that you would have to watch the DVD a hundred times to find all the points where he did that. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's basically everything. That's my theory is that what's on the surface seems to be just like kind of a weird unsolved mystery movie is actually a very meta movie. The writer kind of telling a story about himself. Looking at it from the perspective of this movie is like an extremely meta deconstruction of like looking at both the writer's perspective on his creation and the creation's perspective back at the writer like how they would see each other and how they would interact with each other I think it makes it a lot more fun to look at and especially knowing the small details to look for like hey that mirror is not doing what that guy is doing I think it becomes a lot more than the

sum of its parts if you look at it from from that from that point of view so I think it's a cool theory. Well, today we've got an amazing treat. We're going to hear from a very special guest, the director of such amazing films as Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies, which we're talking about today. Also a prolific director of music videos, sometimes called The Godfather of Music Videos. He directed, I think the one we would know the best, Torvald, Demi Lovato's Skyscraper, which we love that song. Whoa, seriously? That's so cool. So please welcome Mr. Mark Pellington. Thank you. Thank you. It's so funny you say Demi Lovato's skyscraper. Most people will say Pearl Jam Jeremy, yet for your generation, I bet you Demi Lovato is probably more views than Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam, that was an old one. Yeah, I guess we're a little too young. I don't really know Pearl Jam, but I know Demi. So yeah, today we're going to be talking about the Mothman prophecies.

We have a lot of questions about this movie and I'm so stoked to have Mark Pellington with us today. Great. So you'll be the first media that we tell that we're developing a Mothman series. Oh my gosh. I don't usually announce these things till they're sold, but I can give you the inside dope. That is awesome. That's so cool. I'm super stoked to hear about that. So we'll, we'll definitely want to give you time to talk about that. Sure. So, let's get into The Mothman Prophecies. This is one of my top five favorite films. Every time I watch it, I find new little details that make me like it even more. This film is like, it's old, but boy, and didn't make any money. But boy, it's still got some, it's got some fans and it's got some likes to it. It definitely has a dedicated fan base. Well, it's, it's just, it's such a mysterious and perplexing film. The people that love the movie love it for that very kind of beguiling, uncertain space that it exists in, because most movies have it wrap up or make sense at the end.

For me, this was a book source material that related all of these events that were never, some were proven, some were unproven, again, in this kind of uncertainty and with no real answer at the end. So the movie itself never really answered things, and that ambiguity, purposeful ambiguity, is what leaves it kind of still mysterious in people's minds, as opposed to everything being clear and everything being answered. Right, yeah. So I think that the power of it and the courage of it was from the producer, literally, who had final cut, was like, oh, we're not going to answer that. And so you reduce your box office. If a Marvel movie tried to do that, it would be like, what? That wouldn't fly. So Hollywood movies, and even more and more and more now compared to then, were meant to connect the dots for the people. Let's say Mothman, made in 2001, released in 2002, still probably had a little bit of a spirit of a mid-70s movie,

Because those were certainly the movies that influenced me in making it. Don't Look Now, Body Snatchers. So much of Mothman is also the time that it was made in. And we're running into some of these with the development of the TV series of like everything is recordable, right? He said this, she said this. I got text messages. So the idea of mystery is really difficult these days because everything is documented. So it's a real challenge to keep that thing going, that uncertainty. Right. That's definitely the feeling I got from the movie while I watched it. Well, I'm so glad you guys got Final Cut and got to make the movie that you wanted to. Like I said, we wanted to ask about some of the smaller details, and one of the most famous small details from this film is what I call the split mirror Klein. So there's an emotional moment in the film where John Klein is talking on the phone and we see him in a mirror,

but the mirror version of him is not in sync with his movements. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that, Mark, how you achieved this effect and maybe why you put it in the film. At the very beginning, you'll see some stuff where he sees his reflection, you know, like in a plate glass window. And one of the ideas that Richard Gere and I talked about is that, you know, we all have our ego and our id and our super eager right we all have selves of our parts of our unconscious that are on this journey that are often at odds and but if you separate them if you literally said there's two John Clines right there's there's the John Klein that is in the narrative journey traveling there but there's also the John Klein that's grieving and anytime there was any sort of reflection he played with that we were able to play with that maybe i could illustrate that in such a weird way

in such a very very subtle way that you know the simplest way would be like he's standing there and he's looking at himself and you as long as there at that time was a split line between the characters you could shoot one thing and composite it with the other right you want to offset it three frames So if my recollection is right, I probably had him do the same thing, say the same line at the same rhythm. So the audio is in sync and the picture is in sync, but it's from two different takes. Speaking of mirrors, do you know the shot after he slams the door? Yeah. The Mothman is in the mirror reflected behind him. it's only like a few frames but what it was was a guy one of the crew members with a hood on right a hoodie a hoodie on standing there okay but it looks like it's Indrid Cold in the reflection right yeah and I remember that scene the first time in the editor's cut and I just literally

jumped out of my and people think it's like a big visual effect and I mean all the stuff in that movie is is just nothing injured cold coming at you in the shape right with his shoulder hunched through the smoke people like god is that a creature the cgm it was out of focus a guy out of focus with smoke backlight shot on infrared film and the reason his head shoulders slumped was when we were scouting in pittsburgh the huge like abandoned brewery had this hole and it literally looked like a silhouette of a guy but with like the left shoulder slump right yeah so you found the hole first and then you told the actor look like this hole right so then when we're shooting in a stage later and there's the guy in the doorway the nurse in the doorway yeah It says she knew and you look at him and his shoulders kind of slumped is because we knew we had already shot the other stuff first. And so I just have the guy standing there in the doorway and just have his

shoulder lean down a little bit. Yeah, that's good. That's really good. All those things, just like one plus two plus three, a little like all the accumulation of them are like, like almost invisible. Right. But they're meant to like, just, I don't know. This makes me feel uncomfortable. Well, speaking of Indrid Cold, I wanted to talk a little bit about my favorite scene in the movie, which is where, of course, John Klein gets a call from Indrid Cold, and he's sort of testing him on how omniscient he is, basically. And I love that scene. It's just so creepy. But he opens a romance book called Electric Blue Passion and asks Indrid Cold to read it. And while Indrid Cold reads a passage from the book, of course, there are a lot of strange sounds overlaid throughout this whole film. But you hear a sound that almost sounds like a woman moaning. And it almost sounds like the romance novel is sort of coming to life as Indrid reads it.

And I was wondering if you remember, like, am I mishearing this or was this a sound that was intentionally put into the film? hello john klein you know his voice that is i do yes so i did the voice because i was standing there sitting there with the monitors and we had three cameras so i'm seeing him answer the phone and so i did it i read it to be psychologically like i could see him but he couldn't see me so i'm like i see where he's sitting i see where one camera is watching him so i could anticipate and kind of like in the rhythm and reading in a way that only somebody who could read your mind or see you could. And you would say something like, I like your sweater. I like your sweater. Yeah. Yellow, right? By having the voice there and doing that and kind of creeping him out, we'd go back. I hired the sound designer, Claude Letizia, before I hired the cinematographer i have a cameo in the movie where i play the bartender when richard gears in

dc later right yeah and if you listen when i'm walking over to look at him you hear like these he puts spurs on my feet on my foot like you are the sheriff in town i put spurs i'm like oh my god But that's the brain of Claude. That is great. He would never, he would maybe explain the idea, the interpretation that it's the romance novel come to life, completely logical, that his illogical brain might do that. Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah, that's just, that's great sound design. That was great editing, great performance from Richard. Yeah, and that's a monster, great scene. I love it. So a YouTube channel called The Fangirl did a video where she went to the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant, and they have several props from the film. They have two identical telephones that they say are both from John Klein's bedroom, like from that set, and one of them has the cord on the left side and the other has the cord on the right side,

kind of like they're two mirrored telephones. And since mirrors play a big role in this movie, I was wondering if your set designer or anyone had created mirrored versions of props. There was only one phone in the room. They most certainly would have had a backup for the phone and those cords sat in a cradle. So if the production designer wanted it in the mirror to be the same phone, he would have done something like that. Doug Fox, I'd have to ask him. you know, we were pretty, pretty fascistic. It's very possible that he could have done that. I would have to see them. And if they're really identical, it was just like, wow, then he really did his job. Well, maybe next time you're in West Virginia at the Mothman Museum. Yeah. But I wanted to talk a little bit more about, in the commentary, you say something that you recorded your own voice saying lines that other characters say in the film, and then you

overlaid your voice subliminally over the other character's lines so that you can't really hear your voice anymore. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, like why you did that? What was the purpose of that? If Will Patton was talking to John Klein, hey, John, it's Gordon. Whatever the phrase would be like, I'll see you in time, right? If I knew probably that he was actually dead therefore he was actually it was injured cold imitating him because then injured cold would have been being gordon the mothman takes form as as energy right sound light whatever so those sound waves of gordon's voice were actually injured cold yeah so i then probably said well i'll record every line and put it in so invisibly like you You know, you can put those things in for like fields and frames and like, you know, only an audio expert would have to like, wait, is that something else there?

Like you might have to look at the audio pattern or the mix, the waves in a mix to see that there's actually two tracks there. It was a really cool detail that when you said that on the commentary, I was like, whoa, that's so cool. Well, you had mentioned the character of Gordon, who I really love in this movie. Shortly after Gordon freezes to death, we get a shot of a few buildings as John Klein walks past them. And one has a marquee. And the marquee reads, question 53, at what temperature does blood freeze? 3F. And when I noticed this like weird marquee, like asking that question right after Gordon freezes to death in the background on that shot, I was just like, whoa, that is really cool. And I was just wondering if you remember that shot or why people might have designed the set to have that message in it. That's a good question for my production designer. But that's the kind of stuff that he would put in there.

Nothing in that town wasn't, we own that town. So completely weird and normal that we would put something like that in. There's, if you notice, here's another, I'm going to give you another thing you could go back and notice. When John goes earlier to see Gordon, and if you remember, he's in his backyard, and it's when Gordon is relaying to him the zone of fear when he drove there and met Indrid Cole. And if you remember, Gordon went earlier to a paint store, and so when you're in the backyard of Gordon's house and John's sitting there saying, okay, Gordon, what happened? You'll notice on Gordon's been painting his house. You'll notice two big black stripes coming down. But when you look at it, you'll notice those are the towers, the suspension towers of the bridge. Like Gordon already was possessed by Mothman and was already kind of projecting this bridge collapse there. Well, it is very cool.

So this is more of a meta question. So I'm a screenwriter and I spend a lot of time creating characters, giving them little details that make them feel human. and doing this kind of makes me really care about those characters. But then in the story, in the screenplay, I only have terrible things happen to my characters, and I kind of wish I could reach into the story and apologize to them or talk to them. And I'm wondering if you as a director ever kind of feel that way, that you've created a character so real you wish you could just reach in and talk to them and maybe say sorry, or what would you say if you could talk to your characters? I don't know. That's a really good question. I think when the movie is not made, you're like, you're constantly living with them and being with them because you're like fixing the script and trying to get it made. Right. So you're kind of like, as you grow, you adjust,

or maybe you're kinder or maybe you're a little more balanced or the character that's angry years later, you're like, you know, you've learned something. You're like, wait, I think this should be a little more mature there. Or you can be like, Nope, they're angry and they're one-sided and they're young and they're impetuous. And that's how they are. I would say write a movie, you know, where the writer interacts with his characters during the movie. That would be the best way to like explore that idea of fiction and nonfiction. And you can have a lot of fun with that kind of story. Yeah. I've written scripts like that where like, it's like a Chinese box, like a weird thing within a thing within a thing. And, Oh, but it feels like a dream. I'm like, it's not like you act like this is a real, this isn't real. Nothing is real. No documentary is real. No movie is real. So you as the creator, the author of that fiction or even nonfiction are in control of that. And

that part of the imagination is really intoxicating. I get that. Hey, I was actually wondering, since you mentioned the TV show that's coming out, you think you could tell us a little bit more about that? Like, is it going to embrace kind of these same themes that you're describing kind of be like a modern day x files maybe but even more like unanswering your questions well we're still playing with what time it's in or whether one season is present day and the next season goes back to 20 years ago kind of like true detective i'm involved with alex kurtzman who's the head of the whole star trek empire yeah he's one of the producers a guy named terry metallis who was the showrunner on 12 monkeys is involved he's a producer and he and i had written a story and uh yeah we're really excited so i would think in three to six months i'd have a lot more specific information about it i'm really excited

there's a lot of really good people attached to that it's just really got to honor the tone of the movie and we're doing it on Arlington Road, which is much further along, which we sold to Paramount Plus. It's really close to the tone of the movie, but it's its own thing for now for a series. I'm as optimistic about Mothman as I am about seeing the execution now of Arlington Road. Yeah. Well, that's really cool. That's exciting to hear. On our podcast, we try to come up with our own theories, our own solutions to mysteries we find in films. And so I want to tell you my theory for what I think the Mothman is. And of course, we don't expect you to confirm any mysteries, but just get your reaction on like, oh, that's ridiculous, or hey, that's interesting. So my theory is that the Mothman is the writer or creator. I believe that this universe is literally a fictional universe, and John Klein and the others are actually characters in a book.

And I think this is supported by characters like Mr. Leake saying that the Mothman is like a window washer. He's a normal person like them with a different perspective, just like the author of a book is a normal person, just like his characters, but he has an omniscient perspective. And I also think that the Mothman can take anyone else's voice like he speaks through Gordon, he speaks through everyone just like a writer would speak through their characters and so since you're the director i guess my theory is that you mark pellington are the moth man oh my voice is in good cold yeah not having created it only directed it but i did do the rewrite of it but there are moth men so i would say like the moth men are mark pellington they're they're john keel i do not think you are far off you know in that story and beings like you could replace the word you know writing stories would be it's like there's separation right there's different

selves right so there's a different part of you when you write something or there's a different part of you when you sleep versus you're awake right so you're we're all like these really thin transparent reflections of ourselves at any one time yes we are the authors of our own existence and we are the observers of it simultaneously and i think that's very much the kind of larger existential spiritual framework that you have to like see the mothman at yeah it's a verb it's a noun it's an adjective is fear what is fear you know what what are the great mysteries that people over the years were like oh it scares us because we can't see it or we can't prove it so but they're projecting their fear into it right the creek at night i remember when i was younger i'd hear some of the old house like i was convinced that there were people in the house that were going to kill me my father was working middle of the night i i'm home alone i crawl on the carpet

to the phone get him at work dad come home he's like what and he walks in the door like what right like i was terrified i was convinced you're you're absolutely right i wrote that story that night yeah yeah i think this is interesting because this goes along with what you said now and what you said earlier about how as soon as you start telling a story you start to control the narrative you start directing the direction of that story and how it goes and in a way you're saying that we create our own mothman right and that you created this mothman by telling this story is that that's kind of what you're saying you guys are creating your own interpretation of it as you see it that's also true yeah definitely you would create your own but there's a commonality of acceptance and saying yep well um that was most of the questions we had for you mark uh you had talked a little bit about the mothman show and arlington is there

anything that you want to promote or just talk about while you're you're on our podcast no but i would love to get a copy of this if i could because as i talked to the producers and writers of mothman like i literally would play them this i would say guys you should just listen to this podcast because like i try to communicate but just just listen and you'll learn more about mothman on a foundation listening to this and listening to my conversation with these two bright young men than than anything i mean for sure well definitely like a thing you have to like just indoctrinate people into the vibe yeah definitely great a real pleasure and let's stay in touch yeah totally thanks for coming on um we always end every episode by saying remember the popcorn isn't real would you want to play us out this time indrid cold says the popcorn isn't real john klein the popcorn isn't real see you in time that was perfect thank you so much mark

bye-bye indrid cold

Oop, oop, oop, oop, oop.