31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 27 (She Dies Tomorrow)

Okay, so since I don't know how much analysis I can wring out of something like this, I'm afraid I'm going to have to start by just getting honest and morbid. Alright, here goes. I'm an anxious person with mild hypochondriac tendencies who's not in great shape and was born with a heart defect. Thus, sometimes I kind of feel like shit and worry it's a cardiac episode. A little pain in the left arm and oh god no I'm going to fucking die this is it. I've even gone so far as to write shit like "Tell Facebook" on a notepad, convinced that I'm going to die in my sleep and worried that the people I care about online will never know what happened to me otherwise. I told you it was morbid, but I'm being honest. I mention this because the movie I just watched is about people dealing with the sudden existential horror of their own mortality, and the anxiety that comes with the bad part of their brain knowing for sure that this is it, it's the end of their life and there's nothing they can do about it. Let's poke on that for a bit and talk about She Dies Tomorrow.

I'm going to call this an existential horror movie. There's no grand explanation for why the events happen, no greater lore to draw on. Searching it on Youtube to rent it yielded an "ENDING EXPLAINED" video, and that's the wrong lens to use in analyzing this. It defies explanation. That isn't the point. The point is the unsettling nightmare of it all, the way the various characters react to it, and the metaphors at work here. It is a movie about the existential nightmare of mortality, and it lingers on this for the whole film. We're introduced to a girl named Amy, and she's clearly depressed and in a bad way. We see her listen to the same song over and over, drink wine, touch the floor, looking at cremation urns online. It's when her friend Jane comes over that the movie explains Amy's mood. Amy is convinced she is going to die tomorrow. Jane dismisses this as Amy being drunk and leaves, but here's the really spooky part about She Dies Tomorrow. It isn't just that the existential certainty of the dark recesses of your brain has you convinced that you'll die tomorrow. It's that this goddamned horror of mortality is contagious. Jane catches it, runs to her family in panic, and spreads the horror and certainty of incoming death to them. 

There's no big explanation for this, no lore dump, nothing. This is the movie. People convinced all of a sudden that they're going to die tomorrow, and how they deal with that. How, then, do they deal with it? Amy goes off on a memory tour, and we see flashbacks of her with a boyfriend. She wants to ride a dune buggy one day, and one night they get high as fuck and order pizza when her boyfriend answers the door, and the obvious intent of the scene is that the pizza man passed on the existential dread to him. Amy goes dune buggying in the present, returning to the house where she and her boyfriend were on vacation, and finding his body. It's not really clear how he died, but he did. Jane's brother and his wife console their daughter, who soon is weeping over not wanting to die... and again, you're left to fill in the lines here yourself, but it seems fairly obvious that they go to kill Jane as revenge for passing on the existential dread to them before they die. Brian and Tilly, two guests at the birthday party of the last pair we talked about, go and unplug Brian's father from life support and lament their relationship was pretty much doomed anyway. Jane gets to end the movie bleeding to death but swimming in a swimming pool as two other girls have the existential dread. The movie ends on Amy flipping between "It's okay" and "It's not okay". Which, mood.

That's She Dies Tomorrow. Uhhh. I don't know. There's something at play here, something about depression and anxiety and memento mori. Beyond that, it's a tone piece of existential dread and horror at our own mortality. It affected me for sure. I'm fairly certain I will live through tomorrow, though. Good lord, no, that's way too much of a downer to end this one on. Uhhh. Hm. Gotta think of a good way to end the thing now. Oh! Uhhh how about tomorrow we watch a ghost story? Yeah, that sounds like fun. Okay. That'll do it for this one. Sorry the tone's fucked, but what can you do?