‘The Mothman Prophecies’ Create A Flutter

As I am sure you are well aware, given the advertising blitz surrounding Mark Pellington‘s The Mothman Prophecies, the film purports to be “based on true events.” These “events” are two: the structural collapse of the Silver Bridge connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, in December of 1967, and the chain of reported sightings of the “Mothman”, something looking like a six-foot-plus winged creature, for a year leading up to the disaster that claimed 46 lives. The stories of the Mothman sightings were a national sensation in 1966 and ’67.

After the AP picked up the Point Pleasant Register‘s coverage of the Mothman, thrill seekers from across America showed up in the small town on the Ohio River, and not surprisingly, “sightings” increased. It was, one could argue, much more likely an experience of mass hysteria than any prolonged encounter with the supernatural. This influx of tourists also unwittingly contributed to the disaster. Surely the 40-year-old suspension bridge was taxed by the added weight of rubberneckers and international media crews traversing its span for the year. On a December night, due to some non-working traffic lights on the Ohio side, the bridge was jam-packed with vehicles at a dead stop on the westbound side.

The Mothman Prophecies doesn’t tell the story of the Mothman sightings, which is a good thing, for the more likely story as I have sketched it above would make for a far less exciting film. Instead, writer Richard Hatem, who bases his script on the John A. Keel book of the same name, focuses on the supernatural aspects of the story. The Mothman Prophecies furthers the Mothman mystique by connecting the Point Pleasant stories to a folkloric tradition of supernatural encounters with similar figures worldwide. The Mothman, we are to understand, is just one more unknown.

Pellington and Hatem further update (and change) the original story by setting The Mothman Prophecies in the present. This adds an urgency that retelling the events through survivors or flashbacks would have been hard-pressed to achieve. The Mothman Prophecies also adds a more directly involved (and fictional) character in John Klein (played by Richard Gere, who has made some pact with the devil as he continues to get better-looking as he ages). John seems somehow fated to bear witness to the Mothman himself.

This fate is instigated by the sudden death of his loving wife, Mary (Debra Messing, who has all of 20-minutes of screen time). John and Mary are the perfect couple until one snowy December evening when Mary suddenly and inexplicably loses control of their car, whacking her head on the driver’s side window. When she wakes up in the hospital, she is dismayed that her husband didn’t also see the startling visage of the Mothman that caused her to veer off the road. During a routine post-head injury CAT scan, doctors discover a huge cancerous brain tumor that they cannot remove entirely. Mary then spends what little time is left in her life obsessively drawing pictures of what she saw before the crash.

We jump two years into the future: John has become a haunted shell of the man he used to be after Mary’s death, though he is a highly respected “star reporter” for the Washington Post. On another snowy December evening, he drives from DC to Richmond, Virginia, to interview the governor the next day. Yet he ends up, a mere hour and a half later, some 400 miles west of DC in the little town of Point Pleasant. Thus the real mystery begins. How and why has John ended up here? Somehow, this Mothman creature is involved.

That John is a reporter is important. He’s all about facts, after all, and so his inability to explain the events that befall him, try though he might, extends an aura of “truth” around his account of the mysteries. He decides to stay in Point Pleasant to solve the mystery. With the help of police sergeant Connie Parker (Laura Linney), Klein investigates other strange goings-on around town, interviewing some of the many locals who have seen the shadowy Mothman. He experiences nighttime visitations that become increasingly threatening; most hint at the disaster that will occur in Point Pleasant in the near future.

Eventually, as John begins to question his journalistic rigor and even his sanity, some inconsistencies in the stories of the Mothman become apparent. Several characters allude to the nature of time and the Mothman’s presumed ability to move in time. This, I guess, is how the creature can be privy to information concerning the disasters it warns against. But why does it care to involve itself in human affairs?

At one point, the eminently down-to-earth Connie counsels John that even if the Mothman is warning of future disasters, there is nothing we can do about it; things will happen, she tells him, and people we love will die. Against her human fatalism, the Mothman’s prophecies are confusing. If it is a harbinger of doom for Point Pleasant, why does it reach out all the way to Washington, DC, to bring John Klein into the mix? Why bring him all the way to Point Pleasant?

Whatever, let it go. There is much to enjoy in The Mothman Prophecies, provided you don’t look too closely at such details. There are several moments when the film could easily fall into standard horror or psycho-thriller fare, but Pellington shows restraint and admirable resistance to generic clichés. The Mothman Prophecies never gives up the ghost, if that is one possibility, for what the creature might be. Alien? Supernatural entity? Who knows? It makes the scary stuff even scarier not to have “the answer”, and makes for an affecting film that leaves you wondering long after the credits roll.