In the song “Back3School” by Porches, the start of a new school year is used as a metaphor for rebirth as an adult. It’s a simple, heartfelt sentiment wrapped in 127 seconds of brilliant micropop. When I listen to the song, I feel renewed and inspired.
Beware! The Vanishing Family hits me the same way.
Somewhere on planet Earth, Ethan escapes a bickering family and heads into a gloomy twilight. Soon after, Ethan falls asleep on a park bench while thinking about a lost loved one. Dreams upend reality as our protagonist faces pixelated monsters, ominous memories (“Remember when he’d take you on walks with your metal detector?”), and an undead doppelgänger who’s out for blood. At one point, Ethan wakes up in a first-person shooter that looks like a 16-bit bootleg of House of the Dead. There’s also a remake of a famous scene from Ringu. At first, it’s not clear how any of this ties together. But then it clicks. And like the second season of Twin Peaks, the work we put in is ultimately rewarded.
Confrontation takes courage. Especially when you’re grappling with internal demons. Beware! The Vanishing Family is a 32-minute, nonlinear collage that uses trash-horror visuals to assist in the performance of a psychological exorcism. It’s an undiluted stab of raw expression, and there’s not a single moment that isn’t totally mesmerizing.
Written and directed by non-binary filmmaker Luca D’Andrea and available to watch for free on Vimeo, Beware! is filled with overlays that look like Game Boy Advance cutscenes on acid, droning Casio dirges, ketchup gore, flanged-out guitar feedback, desolate locations, and phantasmic demons. But the movie also has an emotional core; it’s not just a no-fi Halloween tone poem. This is an intoxicating video experiment that deals with the loss of innocence and trauma without alienating the viewer. In fact, Beware! has the opposite effect. When someone opens up emotionally, we’re more likely to share something of ourselves. That’s not something that happens after watching Trash Humpers. But it happens after watching Cecelia Condit’s Possibly in Michigan. And it also happens here. The fact that D’Andrea utilized actual VHS footage to capture these feelings—rather than the faux-VHS plug-ins that plague almost every contemporary horror film from V/H/S to Malignant—makes the movie resonate even more as a phantom of space and time.
Towards the end of Beware!, Ethan says, “None of us have control over anything but ourselves. So don’t waste it.” It’s a surprisingly profound and hopeful statement from a movie that features a scene of someone brushing their teeth with a razorblade toothbrush.
Watch this immediately.
