Two Nights Back
Spoiler alert -- I'll summarize.
Premise: a little girl gets lost in the woods, briefly, but while lost, sees a little boy.
Flash forward many years.
A group of activist teens head into the woods, including that girl.
Several times, while they're asleep, an unseen figure hoovers over them, just watching them.
One camper, played by BK's sister breaks camp. As she's leaving, she gets spooked, runs, trips, breaks her glasses. She escapes.
Those glasses reappear in camp, outside her tent.
One by one, campers are murdered, strangled, chests are carved with a design that is actually initials.
A camper is missing, they find him in a ravine, but can't get to him. The murderer emerges, offers to help them. They mostly decline his help and manage to get to the fallen camper, he's dead, murdered, carved.
Down to three campers, two young men and the girl who was once lost as a little girl.
One of the boys gets his leg caught in a bear trap near a cabin, the girl goes inside to look for, I guess, a bandage. Inside she discovers drawings of a little boy and his mom.... and on another wall, a framed article about herself, about when she was lost, but she doesn't find that until later.
Murderer shows back up, she first leans into him, thinking he's a source of protection... but of course he's not. Oh, did I mention, he's kept his dead mother in the cabin... and later the girl wakes up, alone in the cabin, in his mother's dress?
That's my loose recap. It has elements of every psychological thriller ever made, including requisite steals from Psycho, the only thing missing is a shower scene, but the big knife is front and center, that's for sure.
Comparing it to the real life horror at 1122, some things jump out at me.
Sleeping campers and the watching
The big knife
The carving
The murderer showing up "to help"
The glasses reappearing
Multiple murders but one obsession
Even before I ever watched this film, I long thought BK practiced stealth in his own home, feeling powerful watching family members sleep. How much awareness of it they'd have, I don't know. But now I wonder if he didn't purposefully try to spook his sister, the one who played a part in the movie. Taking her things. Putting them back. Messing with her. Because he could.
If he is the person who broke into his colleague's apartment and rearranged her things, I doubt he just suddenly got that idea.
I don't even know that it would have been his first and only time doing it in her apartment. Maybe it was just the first time she noticed.
You tell me. What would be more unnerving -- to be burglarized OR, having been burglarized, to discover those items back where you left them?
Holy creepy to find things arranged in a way you know you didn't leave them, or, like the key, right back where it was missing from.
In the movie, the murderer watches the campers sleep, his knife, sheathed, prominent by day at his belt. Such an invasion, a violation, yet the campers are entirely unaware.
Was 11/13 the first time BK entered 1122?
Or had he been inside before, undetected? Watching people sleep? Taking personal items? Returning them? Rearranging things?
Is it likely? Probably not. But possible? Maybe. 23 visits, some without his phone. Plus there's precedence. Or, I should say, there might be precedence, since we don't know for sure.
I think it's safe to say -- and scary as hell -- that, while life seemed safe and secure for MM, KG, EC and XK, this crime didn't happen out of nowhere. BK was planning and plotting and surveilling for months. It was building. From the time of his Amazon purchase, from the time he moved to Pullman, from the time he first drove near 1122 King Road, they were never safe.
He was already lurking in the shadows.
JMO