You're happily watching your plasma TV. Suddenly a screech-filled, static-laced, can't-take-your-eyes-off-it transmission interrupts your regularly scheduled program. In a flash, every bit of mass-media information available -- all the sex, violence and ads -- is uploaded into your brain. You've been "signalized." And you want to bash-in someone's skull.
That's the high concept explored, with considerable lo-fi verve, in The Signal, a made-in-Atlanta indie film that opens Friday on 50 screens around the country. Though it travels familiar zombie/sci-fi/horror terrain, The Signal's cautionary, you-are-what-you-watch subtext and its audacious sense of style make it both entertaining and provocative.
The story unfolds on New Year's Eve in the haunted-looking city of Terminus, where Mya plans to escape from her hotheaded husband and rendezvous with her boyfriend. But to find him, she soon discovers, she'll have to duck a population of signalized citizens swinging baseball bats, tire irons, shovels, whatever, at each other's skulls. It's road rage to the nth degree, an amplified version of the real-life, random anger that can creep into modern existence.
"I'll be standing in line at the grocery store and the person in front of me is taking too long to pay," said David Bruckner, one of the film's three directors. "I just want to kill them. That's what it means to be 'signalized.'"
The film suggests that media we gobble is to blame. The characters whose information consumption is out of control are more prone to turn into killers, according to Jacob Gentry, another of the film's directors.
Violence in The Signal is fueled by mass-media consumption.
Video courtesy Magnolia Pictures"Our media-driven society, like capitalism, doesn't have an agenda," Gentry said. "It doesn't have a personality. It's not good or bad. It just exists, a manifestation of what is inside all of us. The positive and negative ramifications are in how we react to it."
Created by Atlanta-based collective Popfilms, The Signal features three different segments, or "transmissions," one directed by each of the film's directors. Once they settled on the film's basic outline -- infectious gadgets yield rampaging homicidal maniacs -- each director designed his own film within the film.
Bruckner's claustrophobic Transmission 1 shows us the chaos through Mya's eyes. In Transmission 2, Dan Bush fills his more cartoonish exposition of the carnage with bloody bodies, smackdowns and paybacks. Gentry's climactic wrap-up, in Transmission 3, is quieter and creepier.
The movie as a whole wears its digital video origins proudly. The effects, used in small doses, give the story needed jolts at the right time.
"We obviously couldn't afford all of the effects we wanted to do -- probably Steven Spielberg says the same thing -- but our imaginations are limitless," said Gentry. "We knew there were effects we had to put a lot of time and money into, so we had to prioritize. 'Which ones were important for the structure of the story?'"
The filmmakers also spent far more time than usual for the average horror film working with their no-name actors.
"The stronger connection you have to the characters, the more intense the scares," Gentry said. "We wanted to earn our horrific and scary moments."
