A TV Mystery Solved, Brad Renfro, Lonelygirl15, and My Rewatchlist Recap

A few pop culture rabbit holes for your Saturday

Hey! Welcome to the second issue of Microfascination. Here you’ll find a scary story, a revision, a memory, and a resolution.

Shoutout to Nickelodeon for My Childhood Trauma

What’s the scariest thing you remember seeing on your TV screen as a kid? My instinctual answer to this question will probably always be Jaws (an experience I touched on in my review of Gina Nutt’s brilliant essay collection about horror movies, Night Rooms). But something else has lingered with me for years, and this month I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to identify it once and for all. My memory of the story itself was foggy, but I could clearly recall the image of a girl trapped in a mirror. I specifically remembered the girl being sucked through the glass by the force of her own greed — she saw something she wanted on the other side and so fell prey to her own desire.

The convenient thing about trying to identify a fuzzy media memory from your childhood is that someone else with the exact same memory has probably already posted about it online. On the other hand, I quickly learned through forum threads that the mirror-trap trope’s a lot more common than I thought. (I watched Return to Oz this month on a whim, and a girl’s trapped in a mirror in that film, too!) But eventually I clicked the right hyperlink, and oh MAN was it rewarding to finally match the image in my head with the one onscreen.

Apparently I am just one of many millennials traumatized by “The Tale of the Lonely Ghost,” a 1992 entry in Nickelodeon’s horror anthology show Are You Afraid of the Dark? Each episode offers a story within a story — kids sitting around a fire spinning spooky tales — and this one features a haunted house, a mean cousin, and an unexpectedly resonant tale of maternal grief. Yeah, pretty sure that image of the girl in the mirror with a backwards “HELPME” written everywhere is seared into my brain forever. Not to mention Beth’s bangs.

Anyway, I’m a firm believer in the benefits of confronting your childhood trauma as an adult, so I took one for the team and rewatched the episode. Know what? Still creepy! Looks like the full season’s actually up on YouTube here if you want to join me on the trip down memory lane. (“The Tale of the Lonely Ghost” starts at 23:25!)

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Fifteen Years Without Brad Renfro

I’ve been thinking about Brad Renfro this month; but then again, I think about Brad Renfro a lot. It’s been one year since my first viewing of his final film, The Informers, which was released posthumously and dedicated in his memory following his death by overdose at just twenty-five. The Informers isn’t a movie I recommend, exactly. It’s a critically panned adaptation of the eponymous Bret Easton Ellis novel, a glitzy but hollow narrative about beautiful people generally incapable of making good decisions. But ever since I saw it, I haven’t been able to get Renfro’s character arc out of my head. (Obligatory spoiler warning for this 2008 movie.)

In the film, Renfro plays a doorman named Jack who dreams of being an actor, or at least distancing himself from his past. Unfortunately, his nightmare uncle crash-lands into what little he’d managed to build of a normal life, looping him into a kidnapping scheme by using Jack’s home as headquarters while he sorts out the young boy’s ransom. A sequence of bleak events ensue, the end result of which is Jack’s uncle deciding that the kidnapped boy must die. There’s a sad and terrible moment where we think Jack really has killed the boy; he returns to the getaway van with his face smeared in blood, looking grim. But as they barrel away from the crime scene, Jack gazes surreptitiously into the side mirror — and that’s when we catch a glimpse of the little boy, very much alive, escaping into the night.

Apparently the original ending planned for Renfro’s character was a shooting death in the desert at the hands of his uncle, according to a 2012 tweet from Ellis himself. Ellis calls this cut a loss, but I feel differently. The way I see it, Renfro’s final scene in a feature film was one full of hope.

I have a tendency to map fictional narratives onto life as a way of making sense of chaos, so unsurprisingly this scene has stayed with me. Renfro touched on his struggles with addiction in interview after interview, often in the form of a warning for younger, aspiring actors: “Not many people are lucky enough to traverse through things like that and come out on the other side, you know — a lot of people don’t make it.” Director Roger Bordeau once said, “If he gets away from his demons, he’s golden.” For me, it’s impossible to separate the arc of Brad’s life from that final moment before the camera. I wish he could’ve saved the boy he was.

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Revisiting Lonelygirl15

Remember YouTube’s first viral sensation? Bree was a sixteen-year-old girl with a webcam who told a story so compelling that many viewers began to question its authenticity. Lonelygirl15 was eventually revealed to be a scripted project crafted by a team who saw the opportunity to seize a burgeoning medium to tell a story in an entirely new way. I’ve spent the last few weeks revisiting the particular era in 2006 when she achieved mass popularity, and I guess I hadn’t realized just how formative the webseries was on my prevailing interests in technology, storytelling, and the ways they can work together.

I happened to stumble across The Creative Influencer’s interview with Lonelygirl15’s co-creator Greg Goodfried, who provides a pretty eye-opening behind-the-scenes look back at early YouTube and the sheer amount of effort that went into creating this unusual little series. (Secretive auditions, a fake Myspace…) Thinking back to my own memories of watching Lonelygirl15 in real time, their work absolutely paid off. It really does seem like they captured lightning in a bottle.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember whether I thought Lonelygirl15 was “real” in that two-month period before the big revelation of her identity. Did I buy the story that an actress was delivering from a bedroom that looked so much like my own? I’m not sure. Maybe I didn't think of her in terms of “fake” or “real” at all. Maybe all that mattered to me was that she told a compelling story. In the end, I think Lonelygirl15 embodies a kind of earnest reach for connection using whatever means you have at your disposal. From that perspective, I guess it makes sense that the series reached such a wide audience.

If you’re curious, The Guardian caught up with everyone involved a few years back and published a pretty comprehensive recap. And if you missed Bree’s videos back when they first took YouTube by storm, you can still check ‘em out here. Quite the time capsule these days.

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Rewatchlist: A Recap

At the start of this year, I made a list of my favorite movies and decided to rewatch as many of them as I could. Not only has this done wonders for my mental health, it’s also enabled me to draw deeper connections between the art I love and just generally reminded me why I want to tell stories in the first place. (Here’s my favorite scene from Dead Poets Society, which I may have watched more than once.) I’ve had so much fun with this project that I think I’ll be carrying it into 2023.

I guess if this was the kind of newsletter that offered advice, mine would be: Go toward what moves you. Follow your curiosity. Chase good feelings. Watch fifty-two of your favorite movies, or twenty-six, or even just one. 2022 was rough at times, but it also brought a lot of joy. So much of the latter reminded me why I love art and why I keep doing what I do.

Thanks for joining me on that journey, y’all.

Couple updates for ya! This month we released the Wayback issue of Longleaf Review, and as one of the fiction editors I can’t recommend these stories enough — be sure to check ‘em out.

I’ve already posted a more in-depth recap of my 2022 publications elsewhere, but here’s the whole year in a paragraph if you’re interested: An actress who is PERFECTLY FINE in Litro. A werewolf moves to the city in Catapult. A meditation on Angela Carter’s unwritten Jane Eyre sequel in Autofocus. A conversation about female friendship with Deirdre Danklin in Longleaf Review. A conversation about art with Abigail Stewart in Write or Die. A translator unravels in DIAGRAM. A conversation about female empowerment with Isabel Kaplan in Electric Lit. A King Kong rewatch in Paranoid Tree. A conversation about the monarchy with Barbara Bourland in The Millions. A conversation about Predator with Ander Monson in Cleveland Review of Books. A story about time and nostalgia in Maudlin House. A conversation about art school with Chelsea Martin in Chicago Review of Books. And a peek behind the scenes of a very scary movie in HOAX.

See you again in a month, and happy new year!