The Final Mystery of Chain Letter

Last time around I established, by thoroughly watching a thoroughly unwatchable film, the identity and motive of the killer in 'Chain Letter'. But in researching that article I came across a mystery that even I couldn't solve. Take a look at this-

That shot appears at the end of the opening credits. A bald man has a chain wrapped around his neck and a gun pushed against head. Who is this man? Why is he being murdered? By whom?

It seems like a complete non-sequitor, except for one thing. This man appears in one other scene. In fact, the chronologically first murder scene in the film!

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Chain Letter (Part 2)

While researching two further articles on the subject of Chain Letter I happened to notice that when compiling my first article concerning its endeavors into the field of fake journalism I'd missed a number of examples of same featured in the stage-setting opening credits montage.

This article, while purporting to be about an elite special ops team being ambushed is, upon closer inspection, just a wikipedia article about POWs during the invasion of Iraq. There are a few puzzling notes, however - first off, the correct date of the invasion that appeared in the wikipedia piece (2003), has been replaced in the fake newspaper with the year 1998 - when there profoundly wasn't an invasion of Iraq. Also, what does 'North National' mean? Is that supposed to be a city? An area of the country?

Who Was the Killer in Chain Letter?

Today, in my first-ever 'inspired by a google search' post, I've decided to answer the question that went unaddressed in my three other posts on the subject of Chain Letter, or in theAvod that the Divemistress and myself recently recorded about it: Who, exactly, was the killer in the movie Chain Letter?

When the Divemistress and myself discussed the film privately she made the (rather persuasive) argument that it doesn't matter who the killer was, since the film's plot wasn't a mystery, and it wasn't written well enough to to have 'meaning'. She's not wrong, but still, as a public service, I've assembled all the evidence below, and laid out a case for what was going on in the film, should you have been confused by the proceedings. And really, given the film's woeful incoherence, how could you not have been?

Adventures in Fake Journalism: Chain Letter

Regular visitors to the Castle will be familiar with my love of the fake books, newspapers, and websites that the crew has to throw together - often on short notice - to add a sense of verisimilitude to a film. Generally it's a morbid kind of love, where I gleefully chronicle the various misspellings and terrible sentence structure that are the hallmarks of hastily-written filler text. Every now and then, though, I encounter legitimately well-written sections of text, where someone has gone out of their way to make an article look and read like something that might appear in the real world - even though they know full well the results of that work will only ever appear onscreen for a maximum of 2.5 seconds, tops.

Which I guess is the real reason I write these things - for those rare occasions where I get to shower some appreciation on the people whose work is almost never recognized by the filmgoing public.

Although mocking typos is fun, too.

Chain Letter Doesn't Make Even a Little Sense

Hey, remember when I was complaining about the terrible anticlimacism of Chain Letter, well, while I was typing that up I noticed everything else was wrong with the movie as well, so let's take a look at some of it, shall we?

1 - There's parental negligence, and then there's just bad writing.

As mentioned the last time around, the film opens with its ending, as the main character is murdered by her parents. On first viewing this sequence works as a heavy-handed message about the lack of interpersonal connection in all these people's lives. The unknown victim's parents are so out of touch with their child's life that they can watch a news story about murdered teens and not even see a connection to their own daughter.

When taken in its proper context, however, this scene makes absolutely no sense.

These are not the parents of some random teenager in town. Over the past week every single one of their daughter's friends has been brutally murdered by a madman, and all signs point to her being the next on the killer's list. At this point in the movie they shouldn't be headed to work in their sports cars, they should be putting their daughter on a plane to the farthest location they can afford to send her. Which, given their house and cars, might well be the moon.

Hell, they don't even check in with her before leaving for work. Because that's plausible in this situation.

How to Ruin Your Own Movie: Chain Letter Edition

As the film Chain Letter opens, a young woman is caught in a terrifying death-trap, each of her legs attached to the rear frame of one of her parents' cars. After a close call in which she's almost saved, the inevitable happens, and she's torn into two pieces. Totally acceptable opening for a slasher film, but unfortunately a few elements of the scene go out of their way to let the audience know that they're not watching the first scene of the movie.

They're watching the last one. How can we tell this?

Note the ridiculous amount of duct tape covering the victim's head. A single piece of tape wrapped around the character's mouth would be sufficient to keep her from alerting her parents to her plight, but the killer has covered her up for no reason other than to cloud her identity from the viewer.

According to Vardulon's first rule of horror filmmaking you don't put a mask on someone unless taking it off will be of some significance to the viewer - but since this is the first film we have no idea who any of the characters are. If this is simply the teaser kill, there's no percentage in hiding her identity, so why are they doing it?