1In June 2009, Mark Region’s After Last Season debuted in four North American cinemas. This limited theatrical run, and the modest DVD release of the film that eventually followed, were more muted and necessarily less well-populated than the online reception of the film’s trailer, which appeared a few months earlier. In March 2009, an Apple page featuring movie previews had included a strange trailer for an independent film directed by an unknown filmmaker named Mark Region (a pseudonym that will be used throughout this article out of respect for the filmmaker’s wishes). One piece of press coverage from the period that illustrates how the trailer made a bigger impression than the film itself is an article from Entertainment Weekly, which effectively described the content of the trailer (and the film):
The footage features a star-free cast flatly reciting dull, disconnected dialogue in spartanly-decorated rooms. One part of the trailer consists of a man announcing down the phone, “They’ve got, uh, printers in the basement you can use.” The footage also boasts some extremely basic special effects and an MRI scanner that appears to be covered in paper. It also fails to indicate whether the movie is a comedy, a drama, or a horror film. (Collis)
2Much of the Entertainment Weekly article involved a theory that circulated online at the time, that After Last Season could not possibly be a real theatrical release and was instead merely a trailer made for the viral marketing of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, scheduled to open in the fall of that year. When the film did release in full, that theory was disproved - a few bewildered people saw After Last Season, and soon the popular interest created by the trailer died down. The digital traces of After Last Season, concretizing the film as a failed movie, have been sporadically visible, even as the film is no longer available through any official channel.
3This overview of the film’s first encounter with audiences illustrates many dimensions of failure, including–but not limited to–a failure to be taken seriously or regarded without skepticism, perceived artistic failures relating to expectations about how film dialogue should engage with the audience and how elements of set design and special effects should tell a screen story visually, and commercial failure involving not only the modest theatrical release but also the negligible box office take in light of the film’s reported budget of five million dollars (Macaulay). This financial detail, often cited in press and commentaries about the film, feeds into or highlights the other dimensions of failure. In other words, how could a film with a budget of five million dollars include such a bad script, poor direction, and cheap production values?
4However, this line of thinking, which involves reacting to the strange assembly of scenes in the trailer and speculating about where the money went, ignores the combination of film forms and subjects After Last Season manages to achieve. It is a film about small issues like the minutiae of schedules and room assignments for medical students, and simultaneously about big health issues like schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. The plot involves a serial killer, a ghost story, and a dream sequence so long that its events feel more consequential than the events the film’s characters experience while awake. In short, a lot is happening in After Last Season. Though the film’s failures seem obvious on the surface, it is possible that some viewers’ and critics’ failure to be more imaginative about what a single film text could or should contain creates the impression of a worse film than Region’s work deserves to be called. Thus, the goal of this article is to position After Last Season as a film whose status as a failure should be contested in certain respects.
5There is no denying the commercial inviability of Region’s movie. However, the film’s aesthetic values and its position as a cult film artifact are remarkably distinctive when compared with other notoriously bad films of the period, such as Tommy Wiseau’s The Room from 2003 or James Nguyen’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror from 2010, both of which have also been more successful in the repertory screening circuit and home video releases. This repositioning of the unique After Last Season will begin by reviewing some past scholarship about the film. Then, I will utilize long-standing evaluative criteria relating to good and bad cinema to consider the film as a failure to commit to convention, but a success at innovating in unexpected ways, especially in how the film promotes reflection on the processes of visualization and image-making. I will explore how certain features of the film, such as its indexicality, contribute to a profound and paradoxical effect of absorption or alienation (depending on one’s view of the film’s artistic value). This cinematic distinction and its properties differ from films that merely approximate familiar narrative and audiovisual conventions to unconvincing or underwhelming effect. The article concludes by showing how the cult and influence of After Last Season continue to occupy a space within discussions of failed films, especially in ways that involve those aspects of the film that are innovative within the context of post-classical cinema.
6After Last Season has received very little scholarly analysis, with discussion of the film being confined to popular culture websites, blogs, and fora. Thus, an introduction to After Last Season as an object of academic study includes a couple of forays into establishing the film as such. In 2015, I shared a paper at the Film-Philosophy Conference in Oxford, in which I discussed After Last Season as belonging to a tradition of films that invite an especially deep engagement with the viewer; an invitation to substitute their own reading of the substance of the film in place of the apparent large (or total) gaps of information left by the author. A contrasting film that functions in such a way, though more skillfully and to greater commercial success, is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which teases the viewer with a range of possibilities that guarantee theorizing about what Kubrick’s adaptation was really trying to express, or, more conspiratorially, what the filmmaker was trying to confess to.
7Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237 illustrates how far some viewers will go to declare the meaning of The Shining. My argument in the 2015 paper was that Mark Region created a film that achieved the freedom from convention longed for in film texts and manifestos dating back to cinema in its first generation. That is, he treats cinema as if it has no obligation to previous forms such as the stage play and the mechanics of dramatic storytelling. Whether this was an intentional rejection of tradition or simple ignorance about how movies should operate is for each individual viewer to determine.
8I also wrote an article coinciding with the film’s tenth anniversary “10 Years After Last Season: Film Art and a Frozen Aura” (Britt), published by Media Commons in an issue examining “Where can we locate Walter Benjamin’s legacy in the digital to post-digital landscape?” (Ball). I considered After Last Season’s complex status as an unavailable film and how that provoked thinking about the film’s unity and sublimity. The argument then was to see the film as an object in its veil, concluding that After Last Season existed within the rare sphere of the beautiful because of various boundaries that prevented viewers from getting too close to the object. That the film continues to be unavailable on streaming outlets and is long out-of-print on DVD heightens its status as hidden and inaccessible, only available to those audiences interested and savvy enough to find it through unofficial channels.
9In the present article, my interest is more in the form of After Last Season than the philosophy or psychology that informs its plot and perceptions thereof. Whereas many failed films, when taken seriously as art objects, are regarded with evaluative standards relating only to their badness, it is also worthwhile to apply formal evaluative standards that might be called normative. One important distinction to make when dealing with these categories of evaluation is that failed movies such as After Last Season do have value beyond the way they alert us to what movies are supposed to do. Becky Bartlett, a scholar of bad films, observed that “because bad films are incompetent, they allow us to recognise disparities between the attempts to achieve a certain outcome and the actual results, and thus draw attention to elements of production and formal construction that are ordinarily concealed in ‘good’ films” (163). While that statement is true, something more needs to be explored beyond the irony of the attempt to make a good film and the seamlessness with which so-called good films operate. Specifically, if taking failed films seriously, we should not treat every element of a bad film as though its incompetence or oddness prevented those elements from functioning within systems of formal evaluation, even if the elements themselves resist the seamlessness to which good films aspire. This more liberal critical approach also extends to the authorial identity of the filmmakers behind so-called bad films. After all, resistance to the norm might be the artistic intention, social aim, or natural inclination of such filmmakers.
10Bordwell and Thompson’s formal criteria as systematized in the classic text Film Art: An Introduction are useful for examining After Last Season as a film whose failures are stark, but exist alongside other qualities that might succeed according to the measures if not the conventions or results that critics normally associate with those measures. For example, one of Bordwell and Thompson’s formal evaluative criteria is coherence (66). The initial reaction to the trailer for Region’s film, followed by the informed assessments of those who watched the work in full at the cinema or on DVD, reflect a majority opinion that After Last Season is incoherent. Evidence supporting this conclusion includes the seemingly disconnected groups of characters, the apparent mismatch between the locations where it was shot in and the settings they are supposed to represent within the fiction, and the dialogue that seems to be heavier on inconsequential small talk than plot. If one way of referring to failed coherence is to call the product of that failure illogical, and After Last Season gained a reputation for being illogical, then each of the apparent departures from conventional screen story logic becomes another instance of failure and ignores or seems to weaken any logical throughline the filmmaker created.
11One of the earliest and most even-handed reviews of After Last Season was written by accomplished filmmaker David Lowery, then at the beginning of his feature film directing career. His astute analysis of the film’s failings stops short of crediting Region with a logical system that brings all of the elements into a harmonious relationship: “To watch the film is to take in the vision of someone with a severe case of disconnection: what is most consistently striking about the film is that the gap between conception and realization is irreparably wide” (Lowery 2009). He then ends his review by speculating about Region’s intentions and failure to speak up for his vision.
12However, in a rare interview Mark Region gave to promote or discuss his film in the same year it was released, he explicitly defined and defended the film’s logic as well as his intentions. This response began when the interviewer, Scott Macaulay, who had only seen the trailer but not the full film, asked Region about his interest in schizophrenia as a subject matter.
13Region: I had this idea about the play between science and science fiction, and then I did this research and I found schizophrenia. I did more research and found a play here between patients who suffer from schizophrenia and the boundaries of the science… between what’s real and what’s not real and where science can go in the future. Maybe that’s the plot. But if you put that in [the interview] then that is the plot.
14Filmmaker: It’s interesting you say it that way, that you’re worried that your story can become too defined. Do you want the film to be confusing, or difficult to pin down? I haven’t seen it, so I can’t speak to the clarity of its story…
15Region: After you’ve seen it, you know the whole plot. It’s all in there. It’s very logical. I wanted to make the movie as realistic and logical as possible, it’s just in the way it’s presented. The way it’s presented it will produce some kind of thrilling or disturbing reaction. But it’s very logical and it’s all in there.
16The few times individuals from After Last Season have spoken publicly (or privately with enthusiasts) about the film, they have been consistent that Mark Region was not hiding his intentions and firmly believed that the film’s logic was sound. The filmmaker's disappearance from public view after the film failed is itself a sincere reaction to having his film received as a failure. Therefore, it is even more valuable to have his words directly stating his intentions before the film’s reputation as a failure solidified.
17If we take Region at his word that the film’s logic was one of his concerns, along with the thrilling or disturbing effect of the presentation of that logical story, all relating to the blurred line between reality and fiction, then many of those aspects of the film regarded as failures become evidence of success and competence, relative to his goals. For example, a scene that takes place in the first act of the film features a doctor talking with two medical students about a colleague whose patient “heard voices inside her head” and who was successfully treated with a dopamine receptor-blocking medicine, after which she no longer heard the voices. The doctor presents his medical students with MRI results from this patient, as well as those of another one who was prescribed a different medication. When one of the medical students questions the doctor about the nature of the voices the different patients have heard, the doctor says the patient given the medicine to block dopamine receptors said she heard the voice of a dead man. He then offers a corresponding visual: a side-by-side comparison of this patient’s MRI scan compared with an image of a normal brain. He spotlights the differences between the so-called normal brain and the schizophrenic brain.
18This scene, which lasts just more than a minute, showcases many of the off-putting aspects of production design, performance, and cinematography that are often listed among the film’s shortcomings. There are ill-timed reaction shots, cuts to another location and character whose geographical and narrative relationship to the action of the present scene are unclear, and a barely concealed home/domestic setting that stands in, unsuccessfully, as an MRI wing of a hospital. It would be fair to say that these features are the result of Region’s rudimentary approach to picture editing and framing as well as the lack of funds directed to arranging profilmic elements that align with their supposed function in the fictional story. However, there are also a number of visual and narrative features that support Region’s stated logic and set up later events in the film and reactions to those events (both by the characters and the audience). The doctor’s references to the former patient claiming to hear voices of a dead man introduces that possibility into the story world and serves as foreshadowing. When the voice of a dead man arrives, quite late in the film, it confirms the film’s status as a ghost story. Both of the medical students that appear in this early scene with the doctor, Matthew and Sarah, hear the voice of one of the serial killer’s victims later in the film.
19The MRI results that the doctor displays for the students also introduce a visual motif that Region employs in a fascinating way throughout the film. In the scene previously outlined, the doctor compares an image of the brain of a schizophrenic person with an image of what he calls a normal brain. Later in the movie, as both the killer plot and the ghost plot take shape, Region’s camera devotes significant screen time to arrows that point in different directions within building interiors. These arrows usually appear in isolation but, as the film nears its climax, the camera focuses on both at once. There is no accompanying text to indicate what the arrows are guiding us to within the building. This leitmotif reinforces the either/or dichotomy that the doctor sets up in the opening minutes: normal brain versus schizophrenic brain, to which Region adds reality versus dream, and then corporeal reality versus the activity of ghosts.
20The second act of the film is dominated by a long sequence involving an experiment, during which long scenes of animation are punctuated by live action. This animation is the object of much ridicule among viewers, however it clearly demonstrates the difficulties of referents and representations on multiple levels, including the subjectivity of thinking about objects and then turning those objects into pictures that might be shared by a creator and an audience. During this sequence, Matthew gives Sarah a prompt about seven cubes in an empty room and asks how she would arrange them. Region then cuts from a live action wide shot of the two characters engaged in the thought projection/visualization experiment to the blank digital screen that is the backdrop for the animated objects. This blank screen occupies the entire frame for six seconds before animated representations of seven blue cubes enter from the bottom of the frame and eventually settle into the shape of a question mark.
21The question mark is a visual sign of the open-ended mystery and investigation the characters are engaging in. The overall action of arranging cubes in an empty room prefigures the crates and bins that move around the floor during the more overtly paranormal section of the film that follows. After Last Season’s plot is explicitly concerned with such unifications, approximations, and occasional failures of fidelity between the image one conceives of in the brain and the representation created for that referent. These comparisons bring together virtual and real objects filtered through the psychologies of the characters, further motivating and validating the visual and verbal attention to brains throughout the narrative.
22Because of this interrelation of different aspects of the production, After Last Season also meets another of Bordwell and Thompson’s evaluative criteria of complexity, which they define as “[engaging] our interest on many levels, [creating] a multiplicity of relations among many separate formal elements, and [tending] to create intriguing patterns of feelings and meanings” (66).
23Before moving on from normative standards to defenses for bad or failed films, it is worthwhile considering David Thomson’s words from the book How to Watch a Movie, in which he acknowledges that the thrill of moving images has worn off in the post-classical era:
This is the dilemma of the Internet--of so much to see that attention wavers or loses faith in itself. There has been a similarly jaded response to filmed stories. How often a picture begins and in just a few moments we are saying, Oh yes, I know this one…Instead of rapt spectators of the lifelike, we have become like screenwriters or editors. (71-72)
24It is no coincidence that one of After Last Season’s most vociferous early detractors is himself now a highly successful screenwriter, C. Robert Cargill. Cargill, writing under an pseudonym, is less charitable towards Region and blunter in his assessment of the film than fellow filmmaker Lowery. He sees the movie as a failure because it does not adhere to the narrative structure and level of production design he expects from commercially released theatrical feature films. Rather than being, in Thomson’s words, a “rapt spectator of the lifelike,” his perception of the movie's failures prevents him from seeing the life that Region puts on screen. Cargill is emblematic of a viewer perspective not likely to be satisfied with a formulaic film but also not extending a sufficiently flexible taste to appreciate the art of a film this far outside of the prescribed boundaries.
25So much of the negative reception of After Last Season regards the film’s supposed failure in its fictional narrative, the execution of which involves the odd direction, editing, performances, and other technical elements. One way of seeing beyond that failure is to treat the objects on screen as primary, rather than secondarily holding them to the standards or functions the viewer has been conditioned to expect from more conventional screen stories. Indeed, part of what makes After Last Season so fascinating is the mere presence of the people, places, and things Region assembled to make his movie. Again, it bears repeating that around half of the film’s running time is about the mysteries and limitations of making images, a process that is shown to be subjective and, therefore, as transcending imposed evaluative systems.
26David Davies’ description of indexicality in cinema is useful when considering Region’s achievements in After Last Season: “in fictional cinema, indexicality relates the screened image to actors and film sets, rather than to the characters and events within the fiction” (53). In a film so consumed with the play of the mind, it seems appropriate that the set decoration for every room the actors are sitting in is conspicuously unfinished. In some cases, Region’s post-production effects have addressed this unfinished state, but in a way that contributes to the strangeness of the location shooting style. That is, After Last Season is shot on location, but the locations in most cases do not match their corresponding settings in the fictional narrative.
27Region’s production design, enhanced in some places by digital extensions of the physical space, results in a waystation between rehearsal space and set, much as the animated sequence resembles a previsualization rather than final product. Most scenes include white letter-size paper, white tiles, or other constructed white monolith-like structures somewhere within the frame, which are like placeholders for more information that the fictional story chooses to withhold. This technique is unconventional, indeed, but it is part of the film’s formal system that focuses the eyes and mind on the forming of images.
28In this reading, After Last Season becomes a crucial film text for understanding the relationship between indexicality and the means through which a viewer normally gets drawn into fiction. A comparable film that is not necessarily conventional but was commercially and critically successful is Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), written by Charlie Kaufman. In that film, two formerly romantically involved people have their memories erased to get rid of their attachment to one another. One of the key settings in the characters’ memories (and thus in the film’s narrative) is a Barnes & Noble bookstore. The shooting location was a bookstore at Columbia University, a fact that relates in a different way to the supposed reality of on-screen fiction.
29During one such scene in which the two former lovers reunite while one of their memories is being erased, what begins as a shot-on-location scene featuring hundreds of books as props transforms into an eerie wasteland of books with no titles or cover art (an effect created digitally in a film relatively light on digital effects). Over the course of the scene, the location that, just seconds before, was full of intellectual and artistic detail and possibility is drained of all that information, paralleling the emptying out of the character’s memory and the objects within the fiction.
30In this example, the concept of indexicality focuses one’s attention on the real books that are the initial substance of the scene. These objects in the shots help to deliver the fictional narrative about memories being erased and lovers becoming estranged through technological means. The viewer does not get alienated from the screen story when these central objects begin to disappear, because the logic of the film leads us to expect such removals and absences. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an imaginative film with an Academy Award-winning screenplay, and its form assures the viewer at each turn that odd developments involving onscreen objects are the effects of the events in the narrative and not mistakes or incompetency on the part of the film technicians bringing that story to the screen.
31After Last Season is not about memory erasure, but the film shares with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a positioning of the cinema screen as a space that can go blank or become corrupted or haunted in conjunction with a character’s psychology. The much-discussed animated sequence about image-making includes a line from Matthew that the information flow moves in one direction only, and that you (the other character in the experiment) won’t see any of his thoughts. He is talking to Sarah and asking her to come up with the pictures, because otherwise, there will not be any pictures at all. This dialogue heightens the viewer's identification with Sarah as an image-maker. Like Sarah, the viewer also encounters empty white spaces that the camera records.
32Further, Region’s camera is often like that of an observational documentary filmmaker, outside of the action he is documenting but possessing the urge to capture the mundane details unfolding before him. This perspective is also alienating for viewers accustomed to watching fictional screen stories in which the authorial perspective is one of godlike control and elimination of contingency rather than wonder and possibility. Wes Anderson’s meticulously designed and executed movies are the direct opposite of After Last Season: what happens on screen is always being presented and never being discovered.
33After Last Season’s significance as a cult object has grown through its preservation on the Internet Archive and other locations online, where blogs and web articles occasionally surface to revisit and reframe Region’s work, often echoing the same bewilderment and criticisms the film has received since its trailer emerged. Though most commentaries about the film regard its supposed badness, they simultaneously reflect some of the key reasons why bad films resist being ignored, even this film whose own creator abandoned the finished work and disappeared. Phil Christman, a scholar speaking up for the value and function of bad films, varies the competence theory advanced by Bartlett and others. Christman writes, “Incompetent movies…can increase our appreciation of competence, while relieving our boredom with it” (84). This is the more generous and productive position towards works like After Last Season. Bad movie scholar Uku Tooming goes an additional step further and declares that bad movies (what Tooming calls good bad movies) “merit genuine aesthetic appreciation [as] movies because they realize…artistic possibility, which cannot be realized otherwise” (40).
34The artistic possibilities realized by After Last Season do live on, even if the majority of online discourse about the film is about its failures, and despite the fact that the filmmaker abandoned filmmaking entirely. There are social media groups devoted to the film: a YouTuber uploaded a recut (that fittingly, disappeared), and, most visibly, Red Letter Media finally created a long-teased After Last Season spotlight episode of its show Best of the Worst, receiving millions of views (2023). A 2024 Red Letter Media spotlight episode of Neil Breen’s bad movie Cade the Tortured Crossing featured a reference to the charms of Mark Region’s set design, noting that while the home doubling as a hospital was wholly unconvincing, at least the actors were standing in a real place and not against a stock photo backdrop like in Breen’s film.
35Beyond these direct references and intersections with Region’s work are other occurrences, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and a temporary shift to shooting movies in the home or other unusual controlled settings. While this approach to production did not revolutionize or democratize cinema, both no-budget filmmakers and highly acclaimed ones, including Jonathan Glazer (who made Strasbourg 1518 (2020) in this manner), demonstrated one’s home or room was a suitable location for production. The sparsely decorated domestic environment is sometimes an ideal a setting to occupy what Mark Rappaport has called the empty screen, a space that is both watched and watching. After Last Season remains one of a kind, and ahead of its time for giving the audience so much freedom to define its blank white spaces, including the freedom to fail in their imagination.
36In this article, I have recounted the surrounding circumstances and artistic/aesthetic substance of Mark Region’s After Last Season, still a relatively little-known film, abandoned by its creator, whose legacy of supposed badness paradoxically sustains its minor position in popular culture. To its critics, After Last Season is a work so bad or apparently incompetent that it seems like a joke or invites speculation about how such a film could be born of earnest intention. While these areas of competence and intention are central to scholarship about failed or bad movies, After Last Season escapes exclusively dismissive readings and has merit when judged according to the evaluative standards of film art because the film is genuinely innovative on several formal levels. I have argued that this innovation is particularly evident with respect to cinematic indexicality and the way the film’s formal system is unified by attention to the mental activity of turning conceived images into physical events and objects. This type of narrative focus, logic, and coherence encourages viewers who do find themselves absorbed by After Last Season to reflect on the mysteries and mechanisms at the very heart of film as a visual art.
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