I watched BuzzFeed's terrible new horror movie so you don't have to

Also: That time BuzzFeed "fired" me

Hey there, stranger! Welcome to my Substack. If you sign up to receive it in your email inbox, I’ll send you e-copies of both my published books for free, and enter you in a drawing to win a signed paperback copy of each. You can scroll to the bottom of this post for more info, or else just enter your email address here:

---

I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to mistake the following piece for anything other than the obvious schadenfreude it is: I once got recruited, and then ghosted, by BuzzFeed.

This was eight years ago, when BuzzFeed was the hugest thing on the internet, and I know this will sound like a fever dream now, but I swear it’s all true: Ben Smith, then the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, showed up in my email inbox, saying that he loved the stuff I’d written for Cracked and he wanted me to write something similar for BuzzFeed because they were looking to increase readership among “evangelicals”—mind you, this was at the tail-end of the Bush/Obama years, when it was still sort-of-okay to be an evangelical. I’d always been indifferent-at-best toward the label myself, but I wasn’t about to say no to one of the most-read sites in the universe, so I sent them some pitches. They responded enthusiastically, so I wrote up a couple full pieces and turned them in.

At the time, it felt like my career was finally coming together: Not only had I just signed with a small press to publish my weirdo lit-horror novel, BuzzFeed had come calling! How could I not be on the cusp of international superstardom???

Obviously, uh, things didn’t work out that way.

I never figured out what I did wrong, but they published just one of my pieces (the images are broken now, but you can still read the text here) before never responding to my emails again. To this day, I still wonder if I crossed a line with one of my jokes or something,¹ but it’s a solid bet that the viewership numbers on my first piece just weren’t good enough. The only language BuzzFeed ever really spoke was clicks.

That clicks-are-king approach, by the way, is why you probably haven’t heard from BuzzFeed in a while. Originally started as a research project to measure and track virality of online content, BuzzFeed eventually became the most-read site on the internet mainly by churning out articles designed to highjack Facebook’s algorithms—but of course, if you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm. Facebook’s constant, capricious changes to its system hollowed out BuzzFeed a while ago—as of this year, BuzzFeed has shuttered its hard news division, and even its clickbait department is casting an eye towards AI-generated content.

And maybe this is the post hoc rationalization talking, but it’s probably for the best that I didn’t get sucked into their world. While I was eager to take advantage of BuzzFeed’s reach, I have to admit I never particularly respected them. Some of their journalism was pretty good (I mean, they have more Pulitzers than I do), but it was subsidized by mountains and mountains of bottom-of-the-barrel stuff about Disney Princesses and What Your McDonald’s Order Says about You. None of it meant anything; it was all just Content™️ designed to win the war for your ever-shortening attention span.

In that sense, we just might have BuzzFeed to blame for the current state of the internet as a vast wasteland. If success on the internet is about nothing more than grabbing clicks and eyeballs, there really is no functional bottom to the aforementioned barrel. Everything’s on the table: not just clickbait, but sensationalism, out-and-out lies, conspiracy theories, hatred. It’s the same reason “trolling” and “dunking” are the only reliable way to up your follower count on Twitter, and it’s no coincidence that BuzzFeed has an entire section dedicated to online “clapback”: it grabs attention. It also eats your soul from the inside out.

Which—put a pin in that one. We’ll come back to it in a sec.

It was probably inevitable that at some point we’d all wake up from gorging ourselves on Facebook’s and BuzzFeed’s firehose of Content™️ to the hangover of a global pandemic, riots in the streets, and a world at war—and suddenly the vacuity of BuzzFeed’s Obama-shooting-hoops vibez would be laid bare. But before most of that happened, Adam Ellis—one of BuzzFeed’s staff cartoonists at the time—introduced us to a ghost named “Dear David.”

“So, my apartment,” Ellis first tweeted in 2017, “is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he’s trying to kill me.” Ellis continued to mete out the details of this haunting over the course of the next year-and-a-half or so, wending his way through the standard ghostly tropes of sleep paralysis, spooked housecats, deadly curses, strange artifacts in attics, and malfunctioning Polaroid cameras (you can read every tweet here if you want). It was a compelling enough story that it netted Ellis thousands of new followers, and he even turned it into a BuzzFeed post. Was it true? Who cares? As with all Content™️, the point was the attention, not the veracity.

The Dear David saga petered out in early 2018, without reaching any sort of big, cinematic climax, which suggests that perhaps Ellis wasn’t just making it all up; he also sold the movie rights for a bunch of money around the same time, which suggests he was. But anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that earlier this month—yes, this month, in the year of our Lord 2023—Dear David: The Haunting of Adam Ellis has finally been released to theaters and streaming platforms.

Is it any good? I mean, obviously it’s not. It’s a low-budget horror movie based on a Twitter thread; how could it be anything other than hot garbage? But I’m not really interested in the movie itself, which is perfectly fine if you love borderline-unwatchable horror movies²—I’m just fascinated that it managed to get made at all.

When New Line Cinema first bought the rights back in 2018, it struck me as both inevitable and stupid—inevitable because the Dear David story was extremely viral Content™️; stupid because it really wasn’t that much of a story. It was mostly just a parade of tropes, but by slowly releasing details on Twitter, Ellis had made it all feel brand-new. It felt like anything could happen—that at any moment, Ellis could pop up in your timeline with definitive proof ghosts were real. How do you turn that sort of Content™️ into a traditional, three-act movie? I have no idea, and apparently neither did New Line, seeing as they eventually re-sold the rights—back to BuzzFeed.

So, yes, since “firing” me, BuzzFeed has apparently become a movie studio. In 2020, having failed to make either serious journalism or low-effort clickbait profitable (in the long term, at least), they announced a new partnership with Lionsgate to produce “socially relevant and high-concept feature films for global millennial and Gen Z audiences,”³ which just might qualify as the biggest, most belated, and most desperate “pivot to video” of all time. A year and a half later, the partnership announced Dear David as its third film, which might lead you to believe they’d finally cracked the nut on how to turn it into a movie. They had not.

I’m sure you’re wondering how they attempted, though, so here’s the gist: Dear David tries to solve the problems I’ve laid out above by turning the story into a paranormal techno-thriller reminiscent of The Ring, and also forcing a heavy-handed (and a bit confused) moral into the proceedings. In Ellis’s original tweets, Dear David was a pretty normal ghost of a kid who died in a retail accident; here, he’s a spirit who lives in the internet and latches onto netizens who spend too much time trolling the haters—which Ellis (portrayed by Augustus Prew) tends to do, in this film as in life. Soon the film version of Ellis finds himself rushing to solve the mystery of who Dear David is before David comes for his soul.

To once again state the obvious, none of it works. The truths that Ellis digs up about David (played by Cameron Nicoll) don’t make a lot of sense and don’t shed any real light on why David is tormenting him. The workplace scenes set at the BuzzFeed HQ of 2017 should have been played for laughs, but they function more like cringey hagiography, thanks no doubt to BuzzFeed’s involvement in the production. And most importantly, the “don’t troll the haters” moral rings incredibly hollow, given how much mileage BuzzFeed and Ellis himself have gotten out of toxic internet “clapback” culture. Trolling, like all other Content™️, is unlikely to summon ghosts or otherwise harm you in this life—on the contrary, it rakes in those clicks and follows. The only downside, as we’ve said, is that it eats your soul (something that Dear David at least tries to get right, despite its source). We’re twenty years into widespread internet adoption by now, though, so I’m guessing that those of us who haven’t learned this likely never will.

As I was writing this, my curiosity got the better of me, and I checked the real-life Ellis’s Twitter feed, just to see if he’d had anything to say about the movie. He hadn’t said much about it (other than to point out that he wasn’t involved in its production and hadn’t watched it yet), but while I was there I noticed he’s still gleefully trolling all the haterz, quote-tweeting and clapbacking for those likez and retweetz like it’s still 2015. And that probably doesn’t mean anything at all, but I admit I did have a moment where I thought to myself This could have been me. I could have fallen down that BuzzFeed hole and never escaped that toxic internet Content™️ culture. And for a moment, I was feeling good about the way things turned out for me.

Then I noticed that Ellis has a new horror book out, which will no doubt sell very well, thanks to his BuzzFeed-granted fame. And for a moment, I thought—

But y’know what? Never mind. I’ll keep my soul. And my unhaunted house. 🕹🌙🧸

---

(Looking for Stuff I’ve Been Enjoying Lately, Two Years Ago, etc? You’ll find it here.)

---

Did someone say “free books”? No? Huh. Weird. Coulda sworn I heard something

Hey, thanks for reading! If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s how it works: everyone who signs up to receive it in their email inbox gets free e-book copies of both my published books, plus you get entered in a monthly drawing for a free signed paperback copy of each! Why? Because I like you.

So, just for signing up, you’ll get:

• Ophelia, Alive: A Ghost Story, my debut novel about ghosts, zombies, Hamlet, and higher-ed angst. Won a few minor awards, might be good.

• Murder-Bears, Moonshine, and Mayhem: Strange Stories from the Bible to Leave You Amused, Bemused, and (Hopefully) Informed, an irreverent tour of the weirdest bits of the Christian and Jewish Scriptures. Also won a few minor awards, also might be good.

…plus:

• a monthly update on my ✨glamorous life as an author✨ (i.e., mostly stories about me lying around the house, playing videogames, petting my dogs, etc.)

• my monthly thoughts on horror, the publishing industry, and why social media is just the worst.

Just enter your email address below, and you’ll receive a biweekly reminder that I still exist:

Congrats to last month’s winners, marykathleen12pa and deely88! I’ll run the next drawing Nov. 1! 🕹🌙🧸

1. Okay, confession time. I’ve never told anyone this, so if you actually read my footnotes, feel special, because I’m about to let you in on a secret: The second, unpublished piece I sent them did have a gay joke in it, which seems like the sort of thing mid-2010s BuzzFeed editors might lose their minds over. The joke was about evangelical youth group kids watching WWE and “try[ing] to ignore the homoerotic subtext” (it was funnier in context, I promise), and I can see how someone could be offended by that, but come on:

1. They specifically said they wanted pieces like the stuff I wrote for Cracked. Back in 2015, the Cracked editors would have eaten frat boy humor like that up.

2. The joke isn’t really at the expense of gay people. It’s at the expense of youth group kids and (especially) that no-talent hack Sigmund Freud.

3. It was part of a listicle! If it bothered them, they could have easily cut that one entry and told me not to do it again! They didn’t have to unceremoniously dump me over it!

But I’m just speculating here. No one ever told me why they ghosted me, so who knows if this even had anything to do with it.

2. Weirdly, though, it was directed by John McPhail, who also made one of my favorite movies of all time, Anna and the Apocalypse. Sorry to trash your new movie, John. I still love you.

3. Can we talk about the fact that we all arbitrarily agreed to rename “Gen Y” “millennials”—but then just kept calling the next generation “Gen Z” as if we hadn’t done that? Also, why is “Gen Z” capitalized and “millennials” not? Is it so the world can screw my generation over in yet another way?