Starry Eyes: Hollywood as Satanic Bargain

Every few years someone makes a film about how Hollywood destroys young women, and almost all of them are cowards. They arrive with sympathy pre-installed, position the industry as the villain and the actress as the victim, and let the audience off with a shudder of agreement. Starry Eyes, made by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, part-funded on Kickstarter and premiered at SXSW in 2014, is the one that refuses the deal. Its argument is that the industry offers a genuine transaction, that the transaction is honoured in full, and that its protagonist wants it. That is a much harder film to sit through, and it is why this one is still being argued about a decade on.

Sarah Walker, played by Alex Essoe, is an aspiring actress in Los Angeles. She works at a potato-themed fast-food restaurant with a leering boss, played by Pat Healy — an actor the desk last met at a front desk in The Innkeepers, and casting him again as a man whose entire personality is unearned authority over a younger woman is a joke with teeth in it. Sarah’s friends are also aspiring something: an actress, a film-maker with a script nobody wants, a circle of people in their twenties who meet for barbecues and quietly audit each other’s failure. She auditions for a picture called The Silver Scream, for a production company called Astraeus Pictures, and the audition does not go the way auditions go.

The audition is the film

Kölsch and Widmyer’s best decision is to shoot the casting process as ritual, without ever winking at it. A bare room. Two people behind a table who do not react. A young woman performing an emotion on command for strangers who have not told her what they want and will not tell her afterwards. Maria Olsen plays the casting director with a stillness that is genuinely disturbing precisely because it is a completely accurate depiction of the job — she is not doing anything a real casting director does not do. The horror is documentary.

Then the film makes its move. Sarah has a compulsion: when an audition goes badly, she locks herself in a bathroom and tears out her own hair. It is presented flatly, without diagnosis, as something she does. And the casting director, having watched her leave, has heard it through the door — and calls her back, because that is what they were auditioning for. The industry is not asking her to act. It is asking to see what she will do to herself, and the moment it sees, she is hired.

The second audition compounds it. Sarah is brought back and asked to repeat the thing she did privately, on demand, in front of the table — and the request is delivered in the flat administrative tone of someone asking for a second read. The film understands that the cruelty of the casting room is procedural. There is no villain in the room, only a process with a vacancy in it, and the process has correctly identified that Sarah will fill any shape offered. Kölsch and Widmyer hold the camera on Essoe’s face while she decides, and the decision takes about two seconds, which is the most frightening edit in the picture.

That is the whole film in one hinge, and it is a superb piece of horror writing. Every subsequent escalation follows the same logic: she is asked for a little more, she gives it, and the asking is always polite. Nobody threatens Sarah. Nobody has to.

Essoe does something rare

Alex Essoe was largely unknown, and the performance is the film’s engine. What she gets right is the ambition. Sarah is not a naif being tricked; she is hungry in a way that is faintly embarrassing to watch, and Essoe plays the hunger as physical — a woman who is always slightly leaning forward, always calibrating her face for whoever has entered the room. In her scenes with her friends she is visibly measuring herself against them and finding the result unbearable. Essoe makes you like her and makes you understand that liking her is beside the point.

The second act asks her to play deterioration, and she does it without vanity in a way that a more established actress would likely have negotiated down. The transformation, when it starts, is rendered mostly practically — hair, skin, fluids, teeth — and the effects work is deliberately unglamorous. There is no gothic beauty to it. It looks like illness, filmed the way illness looks, and the film’s refusal to make the suffering photogenic is a direct rebuke to the tradition it belongs to.

Jonathan Snipes’s score is the other half. It is a thick analogue-synth pulse, closer to Goblin or early Carpenter than to any 2014 fashion, and it does something clever with its placement: the synth surges hardest in scenes of professional success. When Sarah is being praised, the soundtrack sounds like a monster arriving. The film scores ambition as a supernatural threat and desire as a possession, which tells you where its sympathies actually sit — with Sarah, and against what she wants.

The money matters here, because the film’s poverty is legible and useful. This was made for a figure in the low hundreds of thousands, topped up by a Kickstarter campaign, and the budget shows in exactly the right places: the LA of Starry Eyes is all rented flats, car parks, chain restaurants and someone’s back garden, which is what the city actually looks like to a person auditioning in it. The Astraeus offices and the producer’s house are the only spaces in the film with any grandeur, and the contrast does the entire class argument without a line of dialogue. A studio version of this script would have made Sarah’s world look like a lifestyle advert and lost the point.

The real ancestor

The obvious grandparent is Rosemary’s Baby: the Los Angeles apartment complex, the older people with excellent manners, the young woman handed a career in exchange for the use of her body, and Polanski’s central insight that a coven is mostly an HR process. Starry Eyes is that film relocated from the Bramford to a bungalow with a swimming pool, and it is honest enough to admit that Sarah signs where Rosemary was tricked.

The film also descends from the studio nightmare, and the desk has been down that road in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls — the Hollywood picture as a fever dream where the industry is a physical appetite rather than a metaphor. And the transformation belongs to Possession, from which Kölsch and Widmyer take their most important lesson: that a woman’s body coming apart on screen is only horror if the actress commits past the point of dignity, and that the camera should hold rather than cut away.

The Satanic machinery, meanwhile, is pure 1970s occult paranoia of the Sentinel school — the sense that certain buildings in certain cities are administrative offices for something older, staffed by professionals.

The case against

The friends are thin. The film needs a peer group to make Sarah’s isolation legible, and it assembles one out of recognisable LA types who never quite become people, which weakens the back half considerably — the film’s later violence depends on us caring, and the currency is not really there. Noah Segan and Amanda Fuller do what they can with characters written primarily as context.

The bigger charge is that the metaphor is unsubtle. Hollywood as a Satanic cult is close to a cliché before you start, and Starry Eyes does not complicate it so much as commit to it at full volume. If you want ambiguity, the film has none: the devil is real, the deal is real, and the film means it literally. Some viewers find that bracing and some find it adolescent, and both readings are available in the text.

I am in the first camp, because the literalism is what makes the ending possible, and the ending is one of the few in modern horror that has the courage of its thesis. Two years later, The Neon Demon covered adjacent ground with more money and better lighting and considerably less nerve, which is a useful comparison for anyone who thinks this film is the crude one. Kölsch and Widmyer went on to direct Pet Sematary for a studio in 2019, and the drop in temperature between that and this is instructive about what a hundred people with notes can do to a film.

It streams and has had good disc releases. It is a genuinely nasty watch and it is short about mercy. Watch next: Possession for the physical commitment, Rosemary’s Baby for the paperwork.

Spoilers below

The offer is explicit. Astraeus is a cult, the producer is its priest, and the deal is a straightforward exchange — the studio will make Sarah a star, and in return she gives herself to the thing they serve. The scene in which the producer lays it out is played as a business meeting, and the film’s most alarming choice is that his pitch is reasonable. He does not lie to her about a single term.

She accepts, and the transformation begins: the hair goes, the teeth go, she vomits, she rots, and she does it alone in a flat while the film watches. Kölsch and Widmyer stage this stretch as an illness rather than a metamorphosis, with the camera locked off and patient, and the effect is to make the audience wait with her exactly as she has waited for every callback in her life.

What she becomes then does the industry’s actual work. Sarah murders her friends, and the film stages the killings as a series of dreadful, clumsy, close-quarters acts rather than as a monster’s rampage — a hand weapon, a struggle, effort. There is nothing operatic in it. She is dismantling the only people who knew her before, because the deal requires the old Sarah to be gone and the old Sarah lives in their memories.

The last movement is the reason the film matters. She emerges. She is beautiful, calm, transformed, and she goes to set — and the film ends on Sarah, remade, ready to perform, having received in full precisely what she was promised. There is no punishment. There is no irony. The devil kept his word, the cult was honest, the industry delivered, and she is a star. The horror is that the transaction is fair. Every other Hollywood-destroys-women film ends by pitying its heroine; this one ends by giving her exactly what she asked for and letting you watch her be glad.