Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Why 'The Fourth Kind' Needs to Suckle at the Teat of Malcolm Gladwell

Collectively, we think alien abduction is dumb. I mean really dumb. Like, if I came home one day and said, "Hey, I was abducted by aliens," somehow that would launch me deeper into Fucking Nutcase Territory than "Hey, I was possessed by a demon who's been stalking me since childhood," or "Hey, I was screwed six ways from Sunday by a modern Dracula who looks like Fabio after a brief stay at Auschwitz," or even, "Hey, I turned an entire investment bank into a giant vampire squid." But really, why is alien abduction so much nuttier than demon possession or vampire sex or Matt Taibbi's anti-Goldman rage? It's simply a matter of agreement—we all agree that it's crazier, so it is. It's the same reason why, say, Scientology is grounds for unbridled derision, while Catholicism is a "legitimate" religion. At least Xenu lets you wear a condom.

Given this tide of mainstream scorn, it's hard to get anyone to take a horror movie about alien abduction seriously. Even before you start shooting, there's general agreement that your premise is crap. And let's face it: this general agreement is right. Sure, people claim to have been snatched and probed in all sorts of unpleasant ways by aliens. People claim to have seen all sorts of things—ghosts in the shower, demons in the bedroom, Mary Magdalene's face in a week-old Denny's Grand Slam. These visions are a result of neurochemical cocktails sloshing around in our brains, killing our ability to distinguish between the mind's creation and what exists in the physical universe. (Yeah, okay, you could claim my definition of "existence" here is narrow, and assert that the mind has the ability to create reality, but I'm far too hungover to get all quantum physics right now. Go debate this with someone smarter.)

So once you've made your silly alien film, how do you get moviegoers to buy it? Answer: you release it in a time/place where alien abduction has already garnered mass acceptance, or at least some societal relevance. People need to be eased into strange and unfamiliar concepts—black presidents, gay Marines, soy milk. Alien sightings aren't considered legit until significant social reinforcement or a cultural movement says they are (AKA, Mulder and Scully). Remember that whole Tipping Point chapter on contagious teen suicide in Micronesia or wherever? (Yes, you read it. So did I. Though I stole a friend's copy, I swear.) It said that suicide was anathema until one popular kid did it, then gradually it became a social norm. When Gladwell isn't garroting contextual logic or jerking off on a pile of royalty checks or sprinkling pixie dust on his cauldron of marketable anecdotes, he stumbles on the occasional good point—humans implant ideas in each other's heads, creating viral permission-chains. So when one burly trucker (or Southern governor, perhaps?) starts proclaiming on TV that little green men gave him an anal probe, others will pick up the notion and run with it, and on and on, until pretty soon your crappy horror film is evidence of a full-blown "sticky" trend.

And here we have the crux of The Fourth Kind's problem: it knows that no one gives a shit, because no one cares about aliens right now—we're all too busy with things like wars and foreclosures and healthcare for people who don't have platinum cards. It knows that it should have been made eight years ago, when The X Files was still programmed into everyone's VCR. It knows all this, and so it begs, no PLEADS with you to take it seriously. This stuff is real!! We swear!! Look at all the SUPER REAL footage that we have to prove it!! Though you don't have to look at it too much, since we wouldn't want to assault your retinas with anything that isn't Milla Jovovich!

Of course it fails. Miserably. The whole "faux-reality horror" thing works if it's demons in a tract house or a witch in the woods, but don't try our patience. There is no alien Happy Hour going on in Alaska, there are no owl-eyed spacemen sneaking through our bedroom doors and beaming us up to their human experimentation labs. Viral marketing or no, we are simply not going to buy this crap. Not without balloon-boy levels of cable news coverage on UFOs, or a decade of David Duchovny telling us it's real. Maybe the execs at Universal should read The Tipping Point before they greenlight any more of these movies. Just tell them to buy it used.

Previously: 'Antichrist' Might Give You a Penis-Ache but that Doesn't Make it Misognyistic

Melissa Lafsky really likes horror movies.