I still remember the terror that ran down my spine in the summer of 2017 as I flipped through the famous “Dear David” thread. He was on the New York subway, sweating because the broken air conditioning on those trains was his most reliable attribute. And yet I had chills, literal chills.
The ghost story that caused a stir on the Internet back then has now been adapted into a feature film. But can a movie capture the unique emotion of the original Twitter story? Coming from Anna and the Apocalypse director John McPhail, there was reason to hope that Dear David could be as terrifying as other disturbing Internet-centric tales, like Levan Gabriadze's Unfriended or Rob Savage's Host. Now that I've seen the movie, my hope is deader than Dear David.
Director: John McPhail
Writers: Adam Ellis, Evan Turner, Mike Van Waes
Stars: Justin Long, Andrea Bang, Augustus Prew
I regret to report that Dear David lacks the stomach-churning suspense of its origins, instead offering a painfully mediocre ghost story.
In 2017, a particularly snarky corner of the internet found itself choked by a Twitter thread about a disturbing apparition in New York City. Adam Ellis (under the name @moby_dickhead) was a Buzzfeed cartoonist, known for capturing the quirks of adulthood. Even if you don't know his work, you've probably seen him in memes like Let People Enjoy Things. All of this is to say that Ellis was known for his comics, his observational wit, and, as a creator during a particularly bad period of Internet interactions, a reputation for not suffering fools or trolls.
Scripted by Mike Van Waes, the film adaptation unsurprisingly mines a lot of detail from Ellis' yarn. Focusing on Ellis (played by a swaggering Augustus Prew), Dear David recreates photographs from the thread, recreates dreams and various night terrors, and even includes a flurry of comic panels from the artist. But while it charts the familiar terrain of questions asked of a dead child in a rocking chair, this film can't live up to the common thread.
Part of the problem is that what was exciting about Ellis's story was its concision. While the thread overall was long, the tweets were brief and at times almost clinical due to Twitter's character limits. Whether intentional or not, this made each of Ellis's tweets seem like a missive, a whisper in the dark, or perhaps a shout from a late-night walkie-talkie. Out of context, the photos he posted were banal; The ghost boy cartoon was crude. But as a piece of the puzzle of what could be disturbing, they were compelling, drawing us in to make sense of this mystery along with the frightened victim at its center.
Additionally, the thread was mostly kept in Ellis's apartment, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere while he reads. Sure, he could go somewhere during the day, but no matter what, he'd come home to Dear David. In the film, Adam leaves his apartment often, wandering around quaint Astoria, exposing his friends on walks, or wandering around the Buzzfeed offices, which are populated by uninspired archetypes like the needy coworker (Tricia Black ), the boastful boss (Justin Long) and the office best friend (Andrea Bang), who has no personality beyond being a plot device to stimulate Adam's emotions. He seems surrounded by opportunities for escape. And while the movie works on details to make even these trips spooky, it's never all that stressful.
Also helping the thread was the fact that it played with the reader's imagination, inviting us to imagine the dreams and obstacles on the nights he described. The film simply drops them before us in a series of tedious clichés: a flash of a creepy child in a window reflection, a woman's face abruptly contorted Ring-style (for no apparent reason), a jump scare involving a light flickering, a A man is dragged from his bed by an invisible force. These are all things we've seen before, and stacked on top of each other, they bury the intrigue of Dear David until all that's left are lazy tricks and a half-hearted warning about not being a moby on the Internet.
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