The Signal is a 2007 American horror film written and directed by independent filmmakers David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry. It is told in three parts, in which all telecommunication and audiovisual devices transmit only a mysterious signal turning people mad and activating murderous behaviour in many of those affected.
The film is divided into three interconnected chapters, referred to as "transmissions", which are presented chronologically from different characters' perspectives. Each chapter was written and directed by one of the film's three directors and differs in tone, moving from splatter horror to black comedy and a post-apocalyptic love story. The Signal received mixed but generally positive reviews from critics.
Contents
Plot
Mya is cheating on her husband, Lewis, with Ben. Ben asks Mya to leave the city with him, but she remains noncommittal. As Mya exits, Ben turns the television on and watches a bizarre psychedelic sequence of images. Mya listens to a compact disc given to her by Ben, but she is menaced by men who are acting strangely in a parking garage. When she reaches her apartment building, she finds more people behaving strangely. Unknown to Mya, a static-like interference coming through communications media has amplified people's negative emotional traits, causing them to act irrationally and, in most cases, violently.
Transmission 1: Crazy in Love
Written and directed by David Bruckner.
Once inside her apartment, Lewis and two friends, Jerry and Rod, attempt to fix the TV, but Lewis beats Jerry to death over a minor argument. Mya flees in panic, leaving Rod and Lewis in a struggle, but finds the whole building in chaos. Mya hides in a nearby apartment until morning. When she re-enters her home, she finds Lewis unconscious and bound to a chair. He awakens to see her leave while listening to Ben's compact disc. Mya encounters Rod, who drags her into a janitor's closet and tells her of his struggle to survive. It becomes evident that the signal affects each person differently, and Rod may also be crazy, though he seems to largely have control of his judgment. Together, they escape and attempt to drive to safety. But after being shot by a policewoman and almost left behind by Mya, Rod becomes more violent and attacks Mya, who crashes the car. Rod is incapacitated and trapped in the vehicle, while Mya flees, telling a stranger named Clark that she is going to the train station.
Transmission 2: The Jealousy Monster
Written and directed by Jacob Gentry.
Ben finds Lewis duct-taped and loosens his bonds. Lewis knocks Ben unconscious and puts him in the back of a pest control van. At a nearby apartment, a woman named Anna has killed her husband in self-defense but has continued planning for a party as if nothing has happened. Clark, Anna's neighbor and a conspiracy theorist, soon arrives. The two attempt to understand what is happening, and Clark admits that he decapitated Rod after Rod violently attacked him. Eventually Lewis arrives at the apartment after seeing Mya's crashed car. At first, Lewis befriends Anna and Clark, and they convince themselves that none of them have been affected by the signal. Lewis' violent and paranoid tendencies cause him to kill Anna's niece, Laura, who arrives seeking help. He dismisses the act as defending Anna, but Clark convinces him not to attack the next arrival, Jim, who is apparently oblivious of the situation. While Anna hallucinates that Clark is her husband, Lewis hallucinates that Jim is Ben, taunting him. He beats Jim to death, pins Clark to a chair using kitchen knives, and blinds Anna with insecticide. Convinced she knows nothing about Mya, Lewis forces Anna to ingest the poison. He exposes Clark to the signal and interrogates him. Ben, having woken up and freed himself from Lewis's van, enters the apartment and knocks out Lewis.
Transmission 3: Escape from Terminus
Written and directed by Dan Bush.
Lewis wakes up and follows Ben and Clark. He attempts to kill them in a tool shed, but they fight him off and escape. Ben convinces Clark the signal is a lie, breaking its effect on him, and Clark informs Ben where Mya was headed. Ben and Clark run through the now mostly-dead city and arrive at the train station. There, they find Mya tied to a chair, being forced to watch the signal by Lewis. Lewis attacks them and strangles Clark to unconsciousness. Ben uses Lewis's own paranoia against him, tricking Lewis into believing that their roles are reversed. Lewis punches a signal-broadcasting TV in a frustrated rage, electrocuting himself.
The story ends ambiguously. Ben, Mya, and Clark stock up on supplies, then Clark leaves. However, the next scene reveals Mya still tied to the chair, seemingly catatonic. Ben places Mya's headphones on her, and she closes her eyes, a tear rolling down her cheek.
Cast
Anessa Ramsey as Mya Denton
Justin Welborn as Ben Capstone
A. J. Bowen as Lewis Denton
Scott Poythress as Clark
Sahr Ngaujah (as Sahr) as Rod
Cheri Christian as Anna
Chad McKnight (as Chadrian McKnight) as Jim Parsons
Matthew Stanton (as Matt Stanton) as Jerry
Suehyla El-Attar as Janice
Christopher Thomas as Ken
Lindsey Garrett as Laura
Production and release
The Signal was developed by Bruckner, Bush and Gentry, who had met while working with the Dailies Project, an experimental filmmaking workshop in Atlanta. The concept grew out of an earlier collaborative project called Exquisite Corpse, in which filmmakers successively continued a story begun by another filmmaker. Each filmmaker wrote and directed one of the film's three segments. The film was shot in Atlanta over 13 days on a budget of $50,000.
The film premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival on January 22, 2007, where it was acquired for distribution by Magnolia Pictures.
An earlier version of the film screened at Sundance featured a cover of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day". The song was subsequently replaced for music-rights reasons by Ola Podrida's cover of Joy Division's "Atmosphere".
The film was theatrically released in the United States on February 22, 2008.
On February 24, 2008, two moviegoers were stabbed by a stranger during a screening of The Signal at an AMC theater in Fullerton, California. The attacker was later convicted of attempted murder and other charges.
The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on June 10, 2008. The home-media editions include an audio commentary by the directors, deleted scenes, making-of material, the short film The Hap Hapgood Story, and three additional "transmissions": Transmission 14: Technical Difficulties, Transmission 23: The Return, and Transmission 37: Crosstown Traffic.
Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, 59% of 71 critics' reviews are positive; the website's consensus reads, "The Signal is gruesome, funny, and has big thoughts about society, but those disparate elements fail to come together convincingly." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle gave the film three and a half out of five stars, praising its low-budget depiction of societal collapse and its mixture of horror and black comedy, while criticizing some of the performances as overly histrionic. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a C+, finding its gross-out humor inventive but arguing that it ultimately relied too heavily on scenes of violent confrontation.
In a 2013 retrospective, Karen Kemmerle of Tribeca praised the film's raw, grainy visual style and its blend of horror, science fiction, comedy and relationship drama, describing the second segment, The Jealousy Monster, as perhaps the film's strongest. Aaron Gillot of Filmmaker praised the film's three-director structure and its treatment of paranoia and distorted perception, calling it "creative" and "intelligent".
In 2012, Joshua Winning included The Signal in a list of 50 notable independent horror films, writing that a larger budget would have given the filmmakers more room to explore the film's ideas.