“The Bye Bye Man” is one of those movies that takes on a completely different meaning when you know its backstory. Like actors John Cazale in “The Deer Hunter” and Chadwick Boseman in “Black Panther,” a major creative force in shaping “The Bye Bye Man” struggled with a terrible illness at the time of filmmaking.
There are some key differences. Cazale and Boseman were actors who knew while making their most famous films that they were dying of cancer. “The Bye Bye Man” was helmed by a director, Stacy Title, who was afflicted with the early stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease and apparently didn’t know it at the time. Thankfully Title is still alive today, but tragically has not directed anything else since “The Bye Bye Man.” She has said in interviews that she wants to do so, and certainly the cinema world would be better off with another Stacy Title movie… but this seems to be the last one.
Yet “The Bye Bye Man” isn’t interesting simply because it was the final film created by someone with a promising career. (Her other notable films include “The Last Supper” and “Hood of Horror.”) Written by her husband, Jonathan Penner, it tells the story of a “reaper” who marks victims for death if they think or say his name, Bye Bye Man. Sometimes it will murder you directly, but other times it will use your own anxieties to trick you into hurting yourself or someone else.
That is because, as Title and Penner seems to understand, there is a special type of mental torture in forcing yourself to not think about or say something. It’s like the old aphorism that trying to not to dwell on a toothache will only make it go worse. Inevitably the act of trying to force a thought from your mind, by its very nature, forces you to do the very thing you must avoid. The end result are acts of forced self-repression that are terrifying and agonizing all at once.
In “The Bye Bye Man” those psychological muscles must be flexed to avoid thinking or saying the words that would summon a demon, but these skills are also required in the real world. Our fears of being betrayed, of getting sick, of encountering things we find repulsive or objectionable, of failing, of being insane, of wasting the most precious years of our lives and (of course) of dying are always in the back of our minds. If we didn’t find ways to keep them in that pocket of our subconscious, they would consume us.
“The Bye Bye Man” works as a great allegory for this dilemma by upping the stakes while addressing all of the issues mentioned above.
Of course, being a horror movie, this is manifested more literally. What if the mere act of thinking or saying something upsetting and scary, instead of simply triggering anxiety, literally leads to your death? Persistent thoughts are like a psychic itch that we feel compelled to scratch, even though the consequences for doing so can be dire. The Bye Bye Man simply takes that fact to an extreme through its allegorical reaper character.
The scares in “The Bye Bye Man” — or, at least, the best ones — play off of this theme. The film juxtaposes moments when characters suspect that their worst day-to-day fears are coming true (those fears have varying degrees of validity) and must avoid dwelling on those concerns, with the deliberate thought suppression that is required in order to avoid an encounter with the Bye Bye Man. The Bye Bye Man exploits the characters’ anxieties and paranoias for its own purposes, of course, but one senses that it’s only adding fuel to the fires that already burn within each of us.
In short, this is a psychological horror film more than the slasher or monster flick it may have initially appeared to be. It taps into a torture with which every human being can identify… that of being unable to control your own mind.
I have spent this entire review avoiding any details about the plot of “The Bye Bye Man” because this is one of those movies where I feel even the most minor spoilers detract from the moviegoing experience. That said, I will draw special attention to the opening scene. A journalist panicked at the revelation of what The Bye Bye Man does goes on a rampage through an idyllic American suburb in 1969. It remains the most gripping part of the movie, and well worth seeing on its own.
The same can be said of “The Bye Bye Man” as a whole, which absolutely did not deserve the critical shellacking it received. Stacy Title made a great horror movie, one with added layers of depth because of her personal story. If there is any justice in the world, “The Bye Bye Man” will one day be regarded as a cult classic.
Pre-Halloween Update (10/30/20): I just watched a negative review of “The Bye Bye Man” by YouTube personality Phelous. He has a very meta and absurd sense of humor, which he uses to analyze pop culture artifacts like obscure horror movies. He is also extremely well informed, so I learned a lot from him about the mythology behind the Bye Bye Man character as it was developed by Robert Damon Schneck in the 2005 chapter “The Bridge to Body Island” from the book “The President’s Vampire.” While I was casually aware of the fact that this story existed, I walked into the movie — and reviewed it — as its own entity. I readily profess ignorance of the source material.
Then again, I do not believe it should be necessary to do homework before being able to assess the quality of a movie. When viewed as an allegory for a certain severe type of obsessive anxiety, it is a very effective psychological horror movie, It was creatively wise to shed all but a few superficial elements of Schneck’s lore, since that allowed the film to draw more attention to the unsettling ideas. As for the titular character itself, The Bye Bye Man is made more menacing by its mysteriousness, by the mere hints of hits origins, like a low rent version of Michael Myers from the original Halloween (1978).