You're Pretty Set on Getting Into Harvard

Dead Man’s Curve (1998) Dir. Dan Rosen

Discovering a college policy that bestows automatic 4.0 GPAs to students whose roommate has committed suicide, two students hatch a plan to murder their roommate. 

“To whom it may concern. I, being of sound mind but broken spirit have decided to take my own life. There is no one to blame but a society that has pushed its youth too hard and too fast without ever giving them a parachute if they fail.” - Tim

As a teenager in the nineties, I spent a lot of time at the cinema watching the Teen Horror Cycle of that decade. An era that, at the time, was much maligned as being too brightly lit, overly meta, and filled with overly articulate TV teen heartthrobs who couldn’t act. These days, a lot of the people for whom these films were formative are now critics themselves and so these films are getting rightfully reconsidered.

But some have still fallen through the gaps. 

I first saw Dead Man’s Curve (The Curve in the US, to avoid confusion with Dead Man on Campus) on a VHS I rented with some friends. It didn’t do well in the US and so went straight to video in the UK. I remember liking it at the time but I’ve never seen anyone talk about it since, and it seemed impossible to find anywhere. I almost worried I’d made it up by combining memories of two or three different thrillers.

Luckily, it’s now fairly easy to rent and so I watched it recently, braced to discover it had not aged well.

It has and it hasn’t. Dead Man’s Curve is definitely a product of the nineties, but I think a lot of the film’s satire holds up well and it deserves to be part of the conversation when we talk about this era of horror cinema.

My instinct is the film didn’t have a huge soundtrack budget for the sort of needle drops one would expect from a film of this period, but they expertly make use of Bela Lugosi’s Dead as a repeated refrain. While it’s not as referential as something like Scream, it still delights in a dark, ever-so-knowing Gen X irony and pop-cultural snark.

“Suzanne Vega, The Smiths, The Cure… You guys know we have a sale on Joy Division?” - Clerk

Every character is clearly a sociopath and their goals are consistently restated: to get to Harvard Business School. That’s it. They are not interested in learning, or doing anything remotely useful after this. They want to succeed in the ways that America and the education system have told them you succeed. They are perfect products of a system that is more interested in appearing to work than actually working.

The fact that Harvard Business School is their desired destination makes so much sense. These are the people who will go on to recklessly and callously bring about the 2008 crash. They are not to be rooted for, or likeable, and they are representative of a fundamentally flawed system that is not broken but working exactly the way it was intended.

It’s also a film about performance. As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that every scene has a character performing for someone else in the room. Not a single interaction is authentic.

Nowhere is this made more apparent than a scene in which Matthew Lillard’s Tim regales his friends with a story about their late friend when he was at high school. As he gleefully holds court, and the story gets darker, the lighting and ambient sound dim until his monologue’s theatricality is made literal. It’s very nineties. I love it.

Spotlights like that are important to the film. The majority of big, climatic and revealing scenes take place in front of the town’s lighthouse, where the spotlight literally moves from character to character as agency is passed like a torch between the main players.

Talking of performances, this film is clearly owned by Matthew Lillard. Lillard was someone who, at the time, I couldn’t stand. As a teenager who was shy and uncomfortable in my own skin, Lillard seemed brash, obnoxious and the type of person who would have bullied me at school. But with the distance of time, I’ve come to really enjoy and appreciate his unhinged, physical performances - and Dead Man’s Curve is one of his best. If you want to see more of Stu Macher, Tim could easily be what happened if Stu lived and got away with it. 

My own timidity made it difficult to see the vulnerability in Lillard’s characters. I never noticed how every hysterical laugh feels on the verge of tears. But ultimately, it’s just a delight to watch him chew the scenery. I’m really enjoying how much people seem to be rediscovering Lillard at the moment. He deserves it. 

The script is lean and efficient. Beginning in medias res with the plan already in action, and swiftly explaining its premise with a comedian’s stand-up routine about the Dead Man’s Curve policy playing over the credits.

Unfortunately Keri Russell and Tamara Marie Watson don’t get a huge amount to do, and there are various artefacts of The Objectionable Nineties. But if you’re able to overlook these, I think Dead Man’s Curve is worth rescuing from VHS obscurity.

Where can I watch it in the UK?

You can rent it for £2.49 or buy it for £8.99 on amazon.

Pairs well with

The temptation is to pair this with 1988’s Heathers as another film interrogating the culture of American schools with murders that are disguised as suicides.

But I think the better comparison is Battle Royale (2000, Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, available to stream on BFI, Shudder and Now). A film that critiques the Japanese education system and the way that it pits child against child rather than prioritising the act of learning. 

Further Reading

• If you’re interested in this period of horror cinema, Alexandra West’s book The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle is an excellent read.
• Skip Intro’s video about Abbott Elementary and the American schooling system feels like a fitting watch.

Other Recommendations

• One of the reasons I wanted to do this newsletter - as opposed to a Twitter thread or blog - was to help me slightly move away from social media. I’ve started deleting the apps from my phone and made an effort to retrain my brain out of bad habits. As such, I’ve noticed the algorithms don’t like me as much anymore. So having this substack is hopefully a nice way to stay in touch with the people who want to read/look at my work - without having to dance to the algorithm’s whims. That all being said, one of my favourite social media apps is now Letterboxd because it’s just logging the films you’ve watched. Come find me on there!
• I’ve made a list on Letterboxd that includes all the double bills I recommend in Grave Offerings, in case that’s helpful for any readers.