Starring: Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Doug JonesDirected By: Stacey TitleWritten By: Johnathan PennerRelease Date: January 13, 2017Rating: FMy Thoughts:If you're like me, when you walked out of The Bye Bye Man, you were probably thinking something along the lines of: 'What the hell did I just pay 12 dollars to see?' And this is just based off of the nonsensical plot of the film. However, one thing that caught my attention in the credits was the fact that this movie is an adaptation of a short story called, The Bridge to Body Island by Robert Damon Schneck.
In the book, the story is about a some college students who decide
to play a Ouija board which brings them in contact with spirit of The Bye Bye Man, who was once deranged serial killer. The board also informs them that the more they think or talk about The Bye Bye Man,the quicker he gets to you. The Bye Bye Man in the film looks just how he's described in the novel with the hood and the pale skin, but apparently The Bye Bye Man was an albino orphan that got sick of being teased and turned to murder. He ran away from his group home and began train hopping, murdering tons of people along the way. Trains are a huge motif in the filmand though their constant presence is never explained in the film, it'simportant to note that trains typically symbolize adventure and newbeginnings, but here they given a completely different representation since TheBye Bye Man is literally murdering people as they board the train, so they never even get to begin their journey. The same things goes for the film because hearing a train whistle symbolizes that The Bye Bye Man is near. And the closer he is, the closer you are to having your journey cut short.The most interesting factor about the film is the idea that The Bye Bye Man can manifest himself and find you the more you think about him. It's also quite interesting that he can also manipulate the people who know about him into doing unspeakable things. If you don't know his name, he cannot affect you. The ideology behind that can be applied to myths and fear in general.Fear is mental construct. We only begin to fear things in general because our brain makes up believe whatever we're thinking about will cause usharm. If we've never seen or heard about this frightening concept, it's as if it doesn't exist. The Bye Bye Man doesn't exist if you don't know abouthim, but as soon as you hear his name, regardless if you attempt to forget about him, his name is still embedded in your subconscious no matter how far back you attempt to push it. It can come back into the forefront of yourbrain at any time. This is why The Bye Bye Man does these mind tricks on his victims while they attempt to not think about him. Even if you block it from the conscious part of your brain, the name is still there. The only way to protect yourself is to be completely ignorant of the fact it exists. You need to not even find out about the myth. If you never find out about The Bye Bye Ma, you're safe A lot of information like The Bye Bye Man's background is cut from the film even though most of this information probably would've saved this movie from being the mess it was. If The Bye Bye Man had followed Schneck's story a bit closer, it may havebeen a better film than it was, but a lot of people have problems withadaptations. When it comes to adaptations, most people are upset that thefilm and the novel aren't completely the same. However, you've got to think about the differences between a book and a film. A book is told through words, so what you'rereading is visualized in your head as if your thoughts were a film which is why people tend to get so upset when some movie adaptations change things because now the vision they've had for the book is now completely skewed. Books are inhibitors for expanding ourimaginations by reading into someone else's world and exploring the way they live in our heads. These imaginings are far more personal than the ones we see on a movie screen simply because they're coming from our perspectiveas if it is us going through these situations ourselves. "Your mind makes it real," (Matrix).
On the oppositeside of the spectrum, when it comes to film, you've got to look at how a script/novel is read and adapted to the screen. When youreading something, you're getting a direct link to the character's thoughtsand emotions. You're getting information pulled from the very brain of the character, which is something that is harder to do in film simplybecause these things have to be told visually. A lot of people feel that because of this, film adaptations ruin the film form because when you're limited to creating only what's on a sheet of paper, you're stunting a director's creative abilities. This is why director's tend to stray from their source material. They want to keep the author's vision alive, as well astheir own. In order to craft this vision, everything is conformed to visualization.Themes, motifs and certain literary aspects are much harder to put to screen as visuals than just having them listed on a page. This is why I was so interested about the fact that The Bye Bye Man wasbased on a book. The concept of this as a story is interesting, but why they chose to leave out so much perplexes me. Adaptations sell. That's a simple fact and it's the reason why people keep making them, but no one would realize thisfilm was an adaptation if they hadn't caught that line in the credits like I did andI'm glad I did because the story was way more information and chilling thanthe movie. Like I stated before, while you already get more information from a book simply because it's a book and you can infer more fromwords on a page rather than a moving pictures, but if you have something towork off of, it should make things a bit easier, right?
