Medium-wide: The Veil Between Form and Flesh—The Empty Man

After a rewatch, I can confidently say that The Empty Man is a rare case: a film that is so unendingly dour and tapped into darkness that I was baffled. I don’t often get scared by a horror film anymore unless it's something tapped into my fears (i.e., this year’s Talk to Me, which I wrote about here and here) or generally reprehensible and vicious (like my beloved Terrifer 2). So, why does The Empty Man qualify as a nightmare, as we’ve defined it during this whole month of discussion? It’s because I couldn’t sleep the night after watching it. It’s because images from the film's most horrific sequences still hang in the back of my mind like distant trauma.