The “lost media” trope, a centrally important one in online horror fiction, seems to have had its old-media coming-out party this year, with lost episodes and unfinished films turning up in everything from Boots Riley’s Amazon Prime series I’m a Virgo to Graham Hughes’s new film Hostile Dimensions (also showing at FrightFest 2023). Now it’s the turn of Michael Hurst to take it to a new extreme with Transmission.
There’s an unfinished film at the heart of Transmission, and anyone familiar with this kind of horror narrative will be unsurprised to learn that it was unfinished for reasons darker and stranger than simply running out of money. In order to get to it though, you’ll have to wade through tense news reports about horrible crimes, black-and-white sitcoms, an Elvira-a-like horror host, and an old man sitting in a darkened room obsessively changing the channels. Transmission is a channel-hopper’s apocalypse – one where the end of the world comes not with a bang, but with the sudden static burst of an analogue TV switching over.
Transmission is a channel-hopper’s apocalypse – one where the end of the world comes not with a bang, but with the sudden static burst of an analogue TV switching over.
One of the slyest conceits Transmission has up its sleeve is that it’s essentially a screen-life horror film, just for an older kind of screen than the likes of Unfriended or Host, and like those films, it can be a challenging watch for those who like to nitpick the logic of mock-documentary fiction. There’s a nice running gag involving a children’s show where two puppets try to figure out how to make a jigsaw, their efforts neatly paralleling Hurst’s own narrative being pieced together. It’s hard to imagine these puppets being in the same situation for the whole of Transmission‘s 73 minutes though, and the film has that common problem that tends to appear in movies about fictional artworks – the better the art is supposed to be, the harder it is to believe it. For example, Transmission contains a pastiche of 1980s teen sex comedies which is almost as gleefully awful as an actual Porky‘s sequel, but it’s less convincing when it switches to the work of a fictional horror director hailed as a lost genius.
In the end, it doesn’t matter so much. A more po-faced version of Transmission would live and die by its verisimilitude, but Hurst’s film is gleefully trashy from the opening scene’s flicking between a ranting televangelist and a pay-per-view porn channel. There’s also something surprisingly heavy at its heart – a take on the cosmic horror of the infinite that suggests the influence of Thomas Ligotti. Despite this, it’s a brisk, entertaining ride, and one that easily overcomes its limitations with plenty of audacity.
