Dear David (2023) - The Wrong Medium

Dear David (2023) was a film that I don't think anyone thought would actually become real. In fact, the rumours of a film deal only added to the creepy last note of the original twitter thread the film is based on. However, it did finally get a (limited) release. Unfortunately, the movie did not live up to the five year wait.

Dear David follows comic artist Adam Ellis (played by Augustus Prew) as he documents the activity of a child ghost haunting his apartment. As the haunting gets worse, Adam's life begins to fall apart.

It's a simple, by the numbers horror. But here's the twist: the movie is based on a series of tweets the real Adam Ellis (also a comic artist) made back in 2017. These tweets went viral; accumulating a lot of speculation and had thousands following along. It's since been preserved in a Wakelet story.

The general consensus is that the thread is a very well-crafted ARG. (Alternate Reality Game; a form of storytelling where you, the viewer, is invited to treat the story as something real and interact with it.) Though Ellis has never outright acknowledged this to be the case. (Troubling implications, if you know the ending!)

I remember seeing the very first tweet thread of Dear David, and being unsettled after. It's an effective, short, scary story reminiscent of Bloody Mary; Adam's initial sketch sells the creepiness of the character. I caught up with the thread much later, when it was popular enough for Youtubers to start covering it. I would almost venture to call Dear David The Ghost Story for a digital age. We're voyeurs to this haunting. It combines text, photos and videos to create a multimedia view of paranormal events and, for most of its run, treads the line of believability well. For a while, most people couldn't tell if this was true or not; the evidence was unusual and unexplained. It was particularly effective as Ellis, then working for Buzzfeed, was known only as a 'relatable' comic artist, not for anything horror related.

Of course, the twitter thread made the fatal mistake of all spooky stories, in that it went too far. Suddenly, we have photographic evidence of ghosts. Generally, it was acknowledged to be a viral horror story.

But a very well done viral horror story! Even when David himself starts manifesting, the effects are done well. They're spine-tingling and creepy. And, at the end of the day, it hits the right thread a scary story should, and that's being able to imagine it happening to you. It's being reminded of the thread when you walk past an abandoned building, or when your cat is acting strange. It haunts you, so to speak.

But that's the Twitter thread. Let's talk about the movie. Straight away, it claims to be based on true events, which - kind of. Even from the trailer, it's clear the actual story has been changed pretty significantly. Obviously, this is true for all 'true stories', but it does feel particularly poignant when the story is still so fresh; and when the changes feel arbitrary. Instead of a ghost that appeared randomly in a dream, Dear David is now a digital entity, coming to attack those who cyberbully.

True to life, our Adam Ellis in this film works at Buzzfeed creating comics, and has a problem with internet trolls. When he makes the fatal mistake of feeding said trolls, it awakens the wrath of this digital Dear David. From there, the film includes nods to the original thread, such as moving apartments, a sleep sound app and spying something through the peephole, but has no other real similarities to the original thread.

Instead, we get a convoluted and over-thought backstory of how David became Dear David. (Though they don't explain the Dear David thing, at all - in fact, they don't stop to explain much.) Almost everything we know is changed, but in a way that feels its to pad out the runtime, as opposed to tell a coherent story. More is added to the story, but none of it for the better.

This is probably due to the contrast between what's interesting for a horror film and what's interesting for a twitter thread. On twitter, it was interesting to see a polaroid not developing correctly because the audience couldn't say it was definitively fake, and because they had to wait for further updates. It was a drip-fed, slow moving story. A horror film has the uphill work of the audience knowing they're watching a staged movie and expecting scares.

Scares, which are just as half-baked as the added plotlines. There's little creativity to them, relying on leaping creatures for jump scares, and demonic voice changes. (The demonic voice change always comes off as slightly comedic.) In fact, the climax of the movie became so absurd in its execution that I wondered if they were aiming for a black comedy after all.

The effects weren't actually bad - they were competent and effective, but nowhere near as chilling as the original images of Dear David.

The most enjoyable parts of the movie were actually the Buzzfeed sections. It captured a delightful and nostalgic cringe of Buzzfeed as a company. Justin Long and Tricia Black were particularly great in being the right amount of well-meaning, unaware cringe. In fact, Prew did a strong job of portraying Adam, and it was clear everyone was giving it their all.

If the movie had tried to swing closer to the vibe of the original thread; of more of an investigation in and around an apparent haunting, it would have been a lot stronger. Unfortunately, it got bogged down in becoming too much of a run-of-the-mill horror.

If you're after a good scare, I recommend reading the Dear David thread for yourself, or listening to someone else read it through on Youtube.

And after you're done, swing by Ellis' Instagram for more truly terrifying comics. He really is skilled at crafting a story that sticks in your mind long after reading it. He even has a collection of his spookiest comics coming out in May that I've pre-ordered, and suggest you do too.

That's why I'm so critical of the movie: because this story deserved a much better retelling than the one it got. A movie was not the right medium for the story of Dear David.