SNATCHERS is Super Weird and Here's Why

You don't frequently encounter a movie where it's difficult to say what year it came out, but nothing about Snatchers is simple.

The easiest place to start is the plot. Snatchers is about a high-school girl who has unprotected sex for the first time and gets pregnant. Not normal pregnant, though. She has morning sickness almost immediately, and she appears to be several months pregnant by sunset of the next day. Things get worse from there, especially when it becomes clear that the baby isn't human.

The movie depends on the performances from Mary Nepi as the pregnant Sara and Gabrielle Elyse as Hayley. Checking out their IMDb pages, you start to see evidence of the weirdness:

So did Mary Nepi play Sara Steinberg in Snatchers in 2015, in a short? Or in a TV series in 2017 and 2018? Or a 2019 movie?

Why not all of them?

To understand the story of Snatchers, we have to dial the clock back to 2017, when plenty of companies seemed to believe that streaming services were a free license to print money. Verizon was trying to get into the game with go90, a company that would be defunct by mid-2018, and one of the projects they put forward was a weird episodic sci-fi horror show called Snatchers.

In a fiasco that would later be echoed by the brilliant disaster that was Quibi, the idea behind go90 was a streaming services targeting cell-phones with short, snappy episodes. Episodes of Snatchers were shown at Sundance's Midnight Episodic Showcase, but go90 fell apart before the show's intended second and third season could materialise.

Oh well, it's hardly the first show in history to be cancelled before the story had run its course.

This is where things get weird. Rather than just abandon the project, they got the gang together and filmed an ending to the story and then re-edited the current episodes of the show together into a movie-length project.

You could be forgiven for assuming that a production like that would lead to something incoherent, but Snatchers is actually surprisingly effective. Although, if you know about the production's struggles going into it, you can't help but notice some of the weirdness.

For one thing, the movie wastes no time getting started. After all, the first episode of the show was only about 8 minutes long, so the version of the story that they'd already filmed needed a fast start. Then there's some weirdness to the pacing. Considering the level of violence at parts of the movie, it really seems like you're reaching the end when you're barely halfway through the film. Why? Well, that was probably the climax to season 1 of the go90 show.

Then there are weird beats throughout the movie where little emotional threads don't seem to flow together correctly. Characters aren't exactly consistent, and it seems like some of that might have felt more natural if particular scenes took place in separate episodes rather than back to back.

And yet, that probably makes it sound more scattered and wild than it feels to watch. After all, lots of campy horror movies kind of flail wildly in the second and third acts. Sometimes watching movies like these feels like watching someone struggling to stay on a bucking horse. Only in this case we know why. Three seasons of a show with eight-minute episodes were edited into a single movie, so we know that the production wasn't exactly smooth.

However, when you're watching people's heads get blown off by an alien lobster, you accept that it's going to be a bit of a rocky ride.

As a movie, Snatchers is wild, bloody nonsense. At times it is funny, and at times it is cringey. The movie was written by three men, and yet the most important relationship in the movie is between two teenage girls. And the slang that the movie goes for? It would have sounded strange in 2017, just as it does now in 2021.

With that said, it's also sometimes funny. Sometimes its charming. The performances from the two leads hold the movie together, and the end result works way better than a movie with a production this messy should have.

However, knowing all of this, I can't help but think about Elle Griffin's recent Vocal post about fiction and serialization:

Be sure to check out Elle's post if you haven't already. She goes into much deeper detail about the state of serialized fiction than I will here, and she has a lot of really interesting thoughts to share.

As long as I can remember, people have been looking at the state of the internet and heralding a return to serialized fiction. Of course, there have been success stories, but the vast majority of serialized fiction is still struggling. As Elle writes in her post, "maybe we don’t have the right platforms yet."

I agree with her analysis of the situation, but watching Snatchers I was struck by another thought: serialization is always going to lead to some textural difference in the final product.

Considering the circumstances, Snatchers feels like a best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that a serialized project (like a serialized novel or a TV show that's squashed into a movie) will feel badly paced or mechanical. There's something very strange about the fact that the best, most exciting action sequence in Snatchers comes midway through the movie, after all, in what was likely the climax of the first season.

And again, that's a best case scenario.

When we watch a movie or read a book, we expect the tension to rise throughout the story and then fall with relief towards the end. Of course, there will be moments of heightened tension and relaxation scattered throughout, but a pattern emerges. That's the sort of big-picture pacing we expect from a full-length story.

In a TV show or a serial, though, what matters is that the pacing feels correct in each individual chunk. Every episode has to be a winner because you don't want to lose the audience between episodes. These mediums demand different tools.

So where does that leave us?

For me, it raises a couple of thoughts. When YouTube launched, the people who succeeded on YouTube were the people who managed to realize that YouTube was something new. It wouldn't just be the destination for indie movies or new TV shows. It created new genres, particularly the vlog. Succeeding on YouTube meant understanding that this new medium would bring something different.

I expect that the same thing will end up happening with written entertainment as well.

Obviously, we've already seen some of that with the rise (and fall) of the blog. Blogging was a format that was really unthinkable before the rise of the internet, and then it was everywhere for over a decade before falling out of fashion.

But what about for fiction? Will we just end up seeing a return to serialization? Maybe, but maybe not. My guess is that we will see something new that is specific to the tools that we now have access to, and that the people who succeed in that market will be the people who understand that we are making something new.

If something like Vocal ends up succeeding in the long run, it will be because Vocal manages to generate something new and exciting. It's not enough just to echo the past. At least, that's my guess. I know that people are trying to use Vocal to write serial novels, and maybe some of those will succeed, but I expect that the real winners will be whoever learns what is the new thing that Vocal is capable of.

What is that new thing? I don't know. But I'll be keeping my eyes open.

Watching Snatchers reminded me that when you try to transform one medium into another (a bite-sized streaming show into a full-length movie), the results are always going to be awkward. The best results are achieved by understanding what the implications of the medium are before you even use it.

So yeah. Snatchers is weird, but it has a surprising amount to teach us. Probably not in the realm of sex-ed, though. For a movie ostensibly about a pregnancy, it's not exactly a documentary about the wonders of child-birth.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider checking out some of my other writing. If you like what you see, I'd appreciate it if you left a like and subscribed.