The Empty Man, a supernatural horror thriller film set in 2020, is a unique take on the horror genre. The philosophical way is an odd one for horror, yet The Empty Man takes it. David Prior wrote, directed, and edited the film, which was based on a comic novel by Cullen Bunn and Vanesa R. Del Rey of the same name.
If you are familiar with the Law of Attraction and manifestations, you will enjoy the premise of this film. You may manifest your life by rewiring your subconscious ideas, according to the Law of Attraction. It does not function quite like that in the movie, but it is still cool, and you will have to keep watching to find out more.
The film is a mix of philosophy and mystery. While hiking in Bhutan with his buddies, Paul has a horrible encounter with a spirit and becomes comatose. His girlfriend assassinates the rest of the group before killing herself. The film then jumps to the next scene, when ex-detective James is investigating the disappearance of his friend Nora’s daughter. He then discovers a hidden sect that worships The Empty Man, and an intriguing plot twist explains James’ peculiar heritage.
James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland, Sasha Frolova, Samantha Logan, and Aaron Poole star as James, Nora, Amanda, Davara, and Paul, respectively.
Plot: Summary
The movie introduces the Ura Valley in Bhutan. It’s the year 1995 and four friends – Greg, Ruthie, Paul, and Fiona are hiking in the mountains. Paul hears an unusual whistle and falls into a crevice.
When Greg finds him, he sees that Paul appears to be frightened. He is shaking and crying while staring at a big, inhuman skeleton that was embedded into the wall of the cave. He drags Paul out of the cave to the others. They carry him to an empty house for refuge as there is a snowstorm.
The next day, a strange figure chases Ruthie. It is the spirit of the creature from the cave where Paul had fallen into. That night, Paul whispers something into Ruthie’s ear and the next day, he goes missing. The group does end up finding him in the snow near a bridge. Things get wilder from here as Ruthie appears dazed. She stabs Greg and slits Fiona’s throat. She throws their bodies over the cliff and then, herself. Best hike ever!
The scene cuts to 2018 to former detective James Lasombra grieving the death of his son Henry and his wife Allison as it was their one-year death anniversary. He then meets up with Amanda, the daughter of his friend Nora. Her dad had passed away on the same day a year ago. She gets all philosophical with him while talking about her grief. She explains how the world isn’t real and everything humans experience, they manifest it with their thoughts. James finds it a bit silly really. Then, she seemingly runs away from the town.
They investigate the situation and enter her bathroom. There, they find the message ‘The Empty Man made me do it’ written in the bathroom mirror with blood. The police get involved. James finds a leaflet from the Pontifex Institute in her room. The word Tulpa was written on its backside. He then uses his detective skills to track down Devara, Amanda’s friend from school. She sees the figure of a man for a split second.
Then, she tells him that a couple of nights ago, Devara, Amanda, and their friends, Lisa, Brandon, Meyer, Julianne, and Duncan tried to summon the Empty Man at the bridge, a local legend, after Amanda encouraged them. She told them that if anyone found an empty bottle on an empty bridge and blew on it, they would see the Empty Man. They had completed the ritual and at the mall, Devara saw Amanda whisper something into Brandon’s ear. This takes us back to Bhutan where Paul had done the same with Ruthie.
He tries to track down the rest of Amanda’s friends but fails because they were all missing. He goes to the bridge to investigate and blows into an empty bottle. Nothing happens at first but then he hears sounds coming from a manhole. He ventures below and finds the hanging bodies of all the kids except Amanda. And there was the same message. ‘The Empty Man made me do it.
The police retrieve their bodies. That night, the spirit of the creature from the cave attacks Devara. It possesses her and kills her with a pair of scissors, making it look like a suicide. Once again, James finds the same ‘The Empty Man made me do it’ message.
He researches the Pontifex Institute and Tulpa and finds out some pretty disturbing stuff. It was a cult from places like Bhutan that believed that people could meditate and manifest a human, who was called a tulpa and it was a lot stronger than a regular person.
James begins to have nightmares and feels like there was someone in his apartment but finds nothing. He goes to the Pontifex Institute the next day and meets cult leader Arthur Parsons. He is alarmed when Parsons refers to The Empty Man as an entity to give their followers what they want if they do his bidding.
He tries to find Amanda and some guy gives him the intel regarding a top-secret VIP location where the most devout followers went. He finds a cabin, follows the location with the cult members, and gets his hands on files on Amanda, her friends, Paul from the Bhutan hike, and also, himself. He finds videos where weird experiments are being conducted. At night, he sees the cult performing a ritual around the fire. They spot him sneaking and try to pursue him but he manages to escape.
James tells the police about it but he has no evidence to support his claims. He also thinks that Amanda is in the cult and takes Nora to a hotel to the hideout. Turns out, Nora and James were having an affair during the time both of their spouses died.
James’ hallucinations become increasingly intense. He gets worried and ambushes a guy from the cult asking him about it. The guy, Garrett, tells him about a man in the hospital who was The Empty Man’s vessel and transmitted his messages to the cult.
James goes to the hospital and finds Paul to be the vessel. He was in a coma. The cult members used to visit him regularly to interact with the spirit. He also finds Amanda there and she tells him Paul was dying because of the physical strain of being The Empty Man and how they needed a new vessel. Turns out, James is their new ‘tulpa’ aka vessel for the being and Amanda and her cult had manifested all of his memories and relationships to use his pain and loss to ensure a connection with the spirit. She tells him that James has existed only for a few days.
James finds himself in disbelief and calls up Nora but she doesn’t recognize him. He has a massive breakdown as he thinks about his family’s death and his affair with Nora. He then finds himself in a dimension where the spirit appears and takes over his body.
In the hospital, James kills Paul and leaves the room. Several members of the hospital staff surround James and bow to him. The movie ends.
Even though the critics didn’t quite enjoy the movie, The Empty Man did go on to become a cult classic. The box office collections were disappointing as well but if you’re looking to add a dash of philosophy to your horror collection, or enjoy the Law of Attraction and similar concepts, add this movie to your wish list.
The biggest reason why critics and studios have shown skepticism towards the film is because of its philosophical side. Ironically, the reason why it did end up reaching cult classic status despite being a fairly fresh movie is also because of its philosophical side.
Unusual concepts often tend to attract a niche audience and The Empty Man does exactly that. Sometimes, you don’t need to break into the mainstream to make an impact. Think about those musicians who are not in the mainstream and yet, have an extremely dedicated fanbase. The Empty Man has been able to conjure something quite similar for itself.
One would think that how does a bunch of mystery elements with reference to detective work tie up to manifestations and other philosophical, spiritual concepts. But it does. The plot twist in the end of the movie is unique and works as a great plot point to tie up all those loose ends which feel disconnected at first.
However, despite all the offbeat, exciting things about this movie, it has a surprisingly daunting runtime that crosses the two-hour mark, which is quite unusual for an American horror movie. But well, everything about The Empty Man is unusual.
Thoughts That Come To Life – Tulpa: Explained
First, let’s talk about how regular manifestations work. Your subconscious brain is exponentially more powerful than your conscious brain. According to the Law of Attraction, you can wire your subconscious brain via meditations and affirmations and create your own reality. Let’s say, you want a car. You meditate over it. Visualize the exact car you want and imagine yourself living in a reality where it has already happened. Then, once you’re done, you let go of your desire for wanting the car because to manifest, you have to believe that it has already happened.
Now, it might sound mystical and impossible, but it works for many people. Several people swear by it. Constant occurrences make one believe that it is in fact, real. But how is this connected to the Tulpa?
A Tulpa is an entity that is manifested. It is similar to having an imaginary friend, but also, slightly different. It is an entity you can create in your mind and it functions as a separate consciousness from your own. It’s not someone you pretend to be and it is not an alter-ego. It’s separate. But, it exists alongside your own consciousness. They have their own thoughts and feelings and that does not have to be connected to yours.
Fully developed tulpas are almost like real people but it’s not similar to schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder. Schizophrenia causes hallucinations while DID splits your brain into several other personalities and you cannot control when one switches to another. Also, people often tend to create other sides of themselves to deal with trauma. It is a form of escapism. However, tulpas aren’t created for that purpose.
One has to meditate to manifest this consciousness. It can be anything. You can create a whole new person or you can create something based on a fictional character of your choice. You and your tulpa can coexist together. It cannot escape the confines and boundaries you set for it.
You can have full control over its creation or allow it to choose its own appearance once it has a well-defined personality and thoughts of its own. You can also have more than one tulpa. Some people have around ten. However, it can get quite daunting to keep track of so many tulpas. Through rigorous meditation, you can achieve this feat and it is in fact, a common point of study in Eastern spirituality.
In certain situations, tulpas can take over the consciousness of its host if the host meditates enough and allows its tulpa to do so. Other than that, some interact with them in the form of hallucinations while others create mindscapes similar to simulations where they get to interact with them personally. Lucid dreaming and hypnagogic are great ways to do that.
But this still doesn’t connect to the Law of Attraction, at least not yet. And that’s why, it is essential to dive into the movie, The Empty Man, to understand how the two concepts are working together.
In the movie, Amanda and her friends meditate to create a tulpa. The members of the cult who followed The Empty Man needed a new vessel for the spirit to communicate to them as the one they had, Paul’s body, could not sustain its powers.
In the movie, Amanda tells James during the earlier scenes that nothing is real and everything can be manifested with your thoughts alone. According to the Law of Attraction, your life is what you have manifested with your thoughts. If you think about it, people who are inherently more positive tend to have better lives than those who are negative. It’s not like the happier people in life have lives similar to those who have undergone much worse circumstances. They don’t. And that’s the point.
Amanda and the rest of the cult members have manifested James’ existence. Because they needed a stronger body to act as a proper vessel for The Empty Man, they manifested the perfect vessel. All of James’ memories and life experiences were not real and in fact, situations that had been manifested for him, in his mind. In fact, he was only three days old. This is why, when he contacts Nora after finding out about his ‘origin’, she is unable to recognize him.
“Thought + Concentration + Time = Flesh”. This is an equation the members of the cult-followed during their meditations and manifestations. Here, the Tulpa is not a separate entity within a person rather, it is another human being with flesh and bones altogether. As you can manifest anything for the tulpa, it is the ideal way for the cult members to create a human body strong enough to sustain The Empty Man’s spirit. And the strength here is not physical but is the emotional state of someone who has gone through substantial loss and grief.
The movie opens with James lamenting the death of his wife and son. He also feels guilty for it due to which, the phrase ‘Where Were You?’ haunts him. He was with Nora, the woman he had an affair with. James believed that if he wasn’t with Nora at that time, his family would’ve survived. This emotional pain makes him strong enough to be the perfect vessel. But once again, these life experiences aren’t real.
The Empty Man may denote this concept of Tulpa as per its name. Because the man that has been manifested is not a man at all, his memories are fake. His connections are fake. His entire life in his head is fake. He is nothing but an empty vessel for the spirit to take over.
What Is The Pontifex Society?
During the scene where James goes to a cabin in the woods, he finds documents with the names and details of several people such as Amanda, all of her friends, and of course, his own. He also finds VFX tapes and views them. The content of the tape was undecipherable for any regular person. It opens with the logo of The Pontifex Society and the catchphrase: We transmit, You receive.
Transmission here can refer to The Empty Man transmitting his message through the tulpa while the cult members receive it. Or, it can be the manifestations of the cult being transmitted while the tulpa receives it in the form of flesh and memories.
To James, it looked like experiments were being conducted on someone. But that someone did not look like a ‘real’ person but a very stripped down version of what could be considered ‘human’. With every scene, the thing begins to act more and more human. At first, it is seated and acts in an unusual way. Then, it uses its fingers on something, it’s still unusual but it shows behaviors humans would exhibit, and the last scene is that of the thing creating the logo of The Pontifex Society with what can possibly be blood. This means that the thing is developing, which is true because the members of the cult are using their manifestations to do so.
As we have already established, the movie is heavily philosophical. And no, it’s not just undertones. Throughout the course of the movie, David Prior makes it very apparent that this is the direction he intended to take.
He designed the film to make the audience question themselves, their beliefs, their reality. Are you a real person or are you a concept? Do you truly exist or are you a social construct? If you think about it, everything around us is a social construct. We feel what we feel because we have been conditioned to do so. We believe what we believe because we have been conditioned to do so.
For example, Western music follows the pattern of 12 tone equal temperament, also known as 12-TET. This denotes that to create a melody, you have to play within 12 notes. This has become so normal in society that anything beyond the 12-TET seems like there’s no melody. But that is not true. The ‘pitch’ at which people speak can also be translated into music but for the longest time, instruments weren’t tuned to be able to produce those not-so-melodic sounds and the human voice did not experiment with it as much.
And this not-so-melodic effect comes from the fact that this is what we have experienced as listeners of music for centuries. So going out of what the norm is will be a completely different experience for us.
Similarly, one can argue that humans cannot be monogamous but, it is not unnatural for people to want monogamy and feel jealousy or even feel like they can’t feel for others if they’re already in love. And this is valid even if humans are not inherently supposed to be monogamous because society has pushed monogamy for centuries. Naturally, the feelings of most people have adjusted themselves to fit into that mound.
These are just some instances of how everything we believe and experience is a social construct and in fact, the ground, hard, truth. For all you know, that ‘truth’ might not exist. Everything is arbitrary.
Prior introduces the film with scenes in Bhutan, a place that is home to the Tiger Nest’s Buddhist temple. The high school Amanda attended was called the Jacques Derrida High School, which pays homage to the Algerian-born French philosopher. He was renowned for his concept of deconstruction which was a form of semiotic analysis i.e looking beyond the surface of the message to find corresponding effects depending on visual, verbal, auditory, or other signs.
Derrida was influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, a philosopher who believed that words had meaning only within their repeated context. This means that the inherent meaning of a word is how it is used repeatedly but its meaning can change over time. Slurs that were once considered extremely offensive are now a part of our daily vocabulary. And most of the time, it’s not used to insult people but just as an exclamatory effect. This shows how repetition can change and enforce the meaning of certain words.
The speaker at Pontifex Society aka Arthur Parsons seems to reinstate this as he constantly asserts that repetition is the death of meaning. A very real-life example of this would be the usage of the word love. If you use it for everyone and everything, its gravity decreases until it becomes gibberish in your vocabulary,
Parsons also refers to Friedrich Nietzsche aka the philosopher who is every existentialist’s inspiration. He questions James with the line, “If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”. According to the philosophy of the Pontifex Society, the abyss isn’t what’s pivotal to the situation but the act of calling for something to look back and conjuring the abyss in the process is what is the real MVP of this philosophy.
According to Nietzsche, people should embrace their own thoughts conjured from self-reflection and denounce external influences such as religion. He was known for his nihilism which he had conjured following the deaths of friends and family members in his formative years. The Pontifex Society and its members followed his teachings as Amanda echoed Parsons’ words about the abyss later in the hospital. The abyss can also refer to emptiness and the entire movie deals with The Empty Man.
Society believes life beyond The Empty Man is meaningless and absolute chaos. The reference to Bhutan also brings us to the Buddhists and their philosophy of being passive nihilists due to their belief of existence being a salve for suffering. Even though Nietzsche denounces religious concepts such as Christianity, Adam and Eve were sent to Earth from the Garden of Eden as punishment for their sins, which denote that the Earth is a place for suffering.
It’s interesting because Paul encounters the spirit during his hike in Bhutan and the Tiger’s Nest is a very important Buddhist monastery. The spirit in itself is not The Empty Man but the vessel is. The cult members are literally following an empty vessel. And they have the nihilistic belief that life and the universe, in general, mean nothing. Humans are just a speck in the universe.
However, The Pontifex Society does stray from this a bit in the sense that the cult members find meaning via The Empty Man.
The name of the Society in itself comes from the Latin word ‘pons’ which means bridge while fex means maker. Society wants to bridge the gap between thought and form. The way to summon The Empty Man is by blowing into an empty bottle on an empty bridge.
Even being an empty vessel requires nihilism. There is no nihilism without pain and loss. James is made to go through pain and loss through the death of his family and his guilt so that he can become the ‘nihilistic’ empty vessel that the Pontifex Society needs him to be.
This brings up the question about James’ existence beyond being a manifestation. You could argue that Amanda is playing a mind game with him and brainwashing James to fit into her narrative. However, when James called Nora after realizing his origin, or the lack thereof, she is unable to recognize him. She doesn’t know he exists. It is because he is The Pontifex Society’s manifestation and only three days old.
He keeps telling people he is from San Francisco and the repetition makes it real to him. If you lie about something enough, people think it’s the truth. This also ties itself to the concept, ‘Fake it till you make it’.
He does not exist because The Pontifex had all the receipts regarding his life, because they were creating him. In the scene where he uses an old birthday gift card to pay for his lunch even though it wasn’t his birthday is the biggest giveaway because it was his birthday. He had existed for three days as a Tulpa and the first few scenes were his first day on Earth.
When he becomes The Empty Man after killing Paul, he gives up his free will. If you look at the scene, James takes the shot where the angle is what can be his third eye. The blood splatter that is formed following the shot is the same as the artwork created by the thing in the VFX tape of The Pontifex Society.
This brings us back to Parsons talking about the abyss. James is the abyss who was created by the cult to use as a vessel because they looked for meaning in their life by following The Empty Man.
Will There Be ‘The Empty Man 2’?
The movie fared pretty poorly at the box office, despite it gaining an appeal in the realm of cult classics, making a movie that makes no dent in the box office is a financial loss. So, a sequel does not seem like something a production company would want to risk.
Prior did pitch the idea for a sequel while The Empty Man was in production but he only had an opening sequence of 20 to 30 minutes that took place in the Arabian Peninsula. There was, of course, a cave, symbolic of maybe the abyss or an empty vessel and the era was 500 AD. However, there was no concrete plan for the plot.
If there does happen to be a sequel, it will happen for sure, likely to be philosophical in nature. It is highly likely to go deeper into the history of the Pontifex Society and its experience with Tulpas. It might also dive into the consciousness theory of the tulpas, the one where it is a separate consciousness within one person. There might not be any cat vs mouse chase, as seen in horrors and thrillers in general unless Prior decides to re-use mystery as a concept where someone finds out about the Society.