Possibly in Michigan: The Cannibal-Musical Short Cult

In 2020 a piece of American video art from 1983 started appearing on teenagers’ phones. It is about twelve minutes long. It was made by an artist called Cecelia Condit, on analogue video, with a cast of friends, for the gallery-and-festival circuit that existed in the early 1980s for exactly this sort of thing. Its total budget would not have covered a day of catering on a real film.

Possibly in Michigan now has an audience measured in the millions, arriving four decades late, none of whom have any idea they are watching video art. That accident is the most interesting thing to happen to the American avant-garde in twenty years, and the reasons it happened are worth taking seriously, because they are formal reasons rather than algorithmic ones.

The short is genuinely good. It is also genuinely alien in a way that no amount of context softens, and that is precisely the property that made it travel.

What it is

Two young women, Sharon and Janice, are trying perfume in a shopping mall. A man in a rubber animal mask is following them. He sniffs. He follows Sharon home. What happens at the house is the second half of the film, and the film’s structure is a fairy tale — which is to say, a hunt with a reversal in it.

The whole thing is narrated in song. Narrated, in the literal sense: the soundtrack is a chanted, sung, nursery-rhyme-adjacent recitation, composed with Karen Skladany, that delivers plot the way a playground rhyme delivers a plague. The words are simple and repetitive and they land like a threat. The images are flat consumer-video images of an ordinary American mall and an ordinary American house.

That collision — a child’s singing voice reporting a stalking, over footage that looks like somebody’s holiday tape — is the entire engine of the piece.

The mechanics: why the cheapness is the special effect

There is a lesson here for anyone who thinks budget determines dread.

Condit shot on early-1980s video, and the format’s failures are all present: smeared colour, blown highlights, that slightly seasick motion, sound recorded in rooms with no acoustic treatment. Every one of these defects reads today as documentary. Film stock announces itself as a made thing. Analogue video announces itself as a recording of something that occurred, because our whole visual culture files that texture under news, surveillance, home movies and evidence.

So a fairy tale about a cannibal, shot on the exact medium in which real crimes and real family Christmases were preserved, arrives with an authenticity that a beautifully lit 35mm version would have to spend an hour earning. The mall in this film is a real mall with real shoppers in it. The house is a real house. The masks are real rubber masks from a real shop. Nothing has been designed, and the absence of design is the effect.

This is the same discovery that the found-footage boom monetised fifteen years later, and Possibly in Michigan precedes the entire cycle. I have argued the general case in the video shop aesthetic and why it won’t quit: degraded video functions as a claim about provenance, and audiences read the claim before they read the content.

The second mechanic is the tonal refusal. Condit never signals. There is no moment where the film tells you it is a comedy, and no moment where it tells you it is a horror film, and no moment where it tells you it is a satire of consumer culture — which it also is, given that the predation begins at a fragrance counter, where women are being sold the smell that attracts him. Every viewer arrives at the end holding a different genre, and the film declines to arbitrate. That tonal vacuum is why it works on a phone with no context. There is nothing to be spoiled and nothing to be explained, so the algorithm’s audience is in exactly the same position as the 1983 festival audience: no idea what this is, unable to stop.

The song does the violence

The best formal decision in the film is that the song carries the horror while the pictures carry the banality.

Watch what happens in the second half. The images stay domestic — rooms, furniture, a kitchen, ordinary bodies moving at ordinary speed. The soundtrack, meanwhile, sings its way through material that would be unwatchable if staged. Condit’s mode is report, delivered in rhyme, and the gap between the sweetness of the delivery and the content of the report is where all the pressure accumulates.

Anyone who has watched a small child sing something appalling they heard at school knows the exact physical sensation this produces. The refrain about what Sharon did to her guest has become the film’s viral payload precisely because it is chanted rather than screamed. A scream is an appropriate response to horror and therefore reassuring. A rhyme is not, and therefore is not.

Condit is also doing something structural with the masks. The man wears animal faces, and they change. He is a wolf at the door in the literal folkloric sense, and the women’s response is folkloric too — the folk tale in which a girl is eaten has an older sibling in which the girl eats. Condit is working the Grimm seam without a single castle or forest, using a shopping centre in the American Midwest as the dark wood, which is roughly what a shopping centre is.

The real ancestor

Nobody watching this on a phone thinks it has ancestors, so here they are.

The immediate parent is the American video-art scene of the 1970s and early 1980s — artists who got their hands on portable video the moment it became affordable and used it for the things film crews would never fund. Condit belongs beside the video-art generation more than beside any horror director, and the short’s institutional home was galleries and museums.

Its cinematic cousins are the films that turn appetite into a domestic joke. Parents does the same trick with 1950s suburbia and a father’s barbecue; We Are What We Are does it with a family’s grief and a household rota. Both are features with crews and budgets, and both are trying to achieve the sense of ordinariness that Condit got for free by pointing a camcorder at a real shopping centre and a real house.

And the folkloric ancestor, honestly, is Little Red Riding Hood with the ending rewritten by the girl. The short’s fairy-tale logic — a stranger’s attention, a house, a meal, a reversal — is a thousand years old. The only thing 1983 supplied was the mall.

There is one more thing the reversal does, and it is the reason the short outlives its cleverness. Almost every stalking narrative ever filmed spends its running time asking the audience to fear for a woman. Condit spends four minutes doing that, efficiently, with a mask and a corridor — and then reallocates the remaining eight to a woman’s afternoon. The camera’s attention, which the first half has trained you to experience as the predator’s attention, simply changes owner. By the last shot you are watching the house from the same distance the man watched it, and the film has quietly handed you his position without ever letting you enjoy it. That transfer is done with editing and duration alone, no dialogue and no signposting, and it is a more sophisticated manoeuvre than most feature-length thrillers attempt.

The honest case against

The film is twelve minutes long and it is slight. Its admirers, myself included, have a tendency to load it with more argument than it can carry: a piece this short with no dialogue scenes and no character work is a mood and a reversal, and the readings we hang on it — consumer culture, the male gaze, the folk tale reclaimed — are readings the film permits rather than proposes.

The performances are also non-performances. Condit’s cast are friends doing what they are told in front of a camcorder, and the flatness that reads as eerie for eight minutes reads as amateur for the other four. The song, likewise, is an acquired thing; a substantial fraction of viewers find it grating within ninety seconds and are simply correct about their own reaction.

And there is something uncomfortable about the way the short’s viral second life has flattened it into a meme — a refrain, a mask, a joke — which is exactly the fate Condit’s original audience of forty people at a video festival would have found ridiculous.

The verdict, though, holds. This is the most successful piece of American video art ever made, by an enormous margin, and it earned that on merit rather than luck. Condit found a tonal register that nothing else occupies, built it out of the cheapest possible materials, and made a twelve-minute thing that a viewer in 2023 with no frame of reference cannot dismiss. Forty years of horror cinema, working with money, has not produced many objects that stubborn.

Where to find it: Condit’s work has been made available online by the artist herself, and Possibly in Michigan streams free in decent quality. Watch it twice. The second pass is where the shopping-centre material stops being background.

Spoilers below

The reversal is the film, so let us take it seriously.

The masked man gets into the house. The two women deal with him. And the dealing-with is filmed with a total absence of catharsis — no triumph, no scored release, no shot that invites a cheer. The song reports the meal. The dog is fed. The remains are put out for collection with the rest of the week’s rubbish, in bin bags, on a suburban kerb, which is the film’s best and coldest image: municipal waste collection as the end of a fairy tale.

What that ending argues is more interesting than “the victims fight back”. Sharon and Janice respond to a predator with a domestic procedure — a guest is dealt with, dinner happens, the bins go out — as though this were the fifth time. The horror is the competence. The ordinariness of the house and the housework rhythm of the whole business point at a world where being eaten is one of the things that occurs, and where the women have arrangements in place.

Condit’s title has been the joke all along. Possibly in Michigan. Possibly anywhere with a mall and a kerb.