• the217
• Movies + TV
• The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

Related Media

Is ambiguity in a film a good thing? Well, in Mark Pellington’s creepy 2002 thriller, The Mothman Prophecies, the answer is a resounding yes. John Klein (Richard Gere) and his wife Mary (Debra Messing) are driving home one dark night when she sees “something.” She crashes the car, goes to the hospital and quickly dies from a rare brain tumor. Flash forward a few years, and John is mysteriously drawn to the quaint West Virginia town of Point Pleasant. With no idea how he has happened upon the town, John soon learns that the town’s residents are seeing the same moth-like creature that his wife saw before she died. Enter the town sheriff (Laura Linney) and a man who keeps having strange visions (Will Patton), and soon horrible things start happening in Point Pleasant.

Is the mothman real, or is he a figment of everyone’s imagination? Who keeps calling John in the middle of the night? How could an eight-foot creature with glowing red eyes possibly avoid detection so successfully? These questions are never answered, and the film is all the more chilling as a result. Pellington leaves solving the mystery to the viewer, and the film really gets in your head. Every time I watch the movie, I see new things and get new visions of just how terrifying the mothman really is. For a film with no clear villain and very little blood, The Mothman Prophecies will make you want to sleep with the light on. Oh, and it’s based on true events.