Aug 18-24 indie comix week: When I was a kid, I used to read Mad Magazine and Cracked, so when I got a little older, it didn’t take much convincing to pick up Eightball and Hate. I’m an OG in the “complaining about superheroes” game, and my scars were anointed on the Comics Journal message board!

The first of three horror movies by Phillip Ridley — followed by The Passion of Darkly Noon and Heartless — The Reflecting Skin starts with three friends — Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper), Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee) and Kim (Evan Hall) — doing what bored kids stuck in Idaho do. That would be inflating frogs and blowing them up all over a widow named Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan).

Seth lives in a gas station, where he works when cars pull up, as his parents, Ruth (Sheila Moore) and Lewis (Duncan Fraser), exist in a state of ennui toward one another. At one point, a car full of men in dark suits pulls up and one of them promises that they will see Seth soon. Seth has been talking to his dad about vampires, so when he is sent to apologize to Dolphin, she mentions that she feels 200 years old. He starts to think that she is one of the dead.

Eben soon goes missing, and Seth’s father is sure they will be arrested for it, as everyone in town knows that he is gay. Instead of facing the police, he sets himself on fire. Cameron (Viggo Mortensen) comes back from the Army to help raise Seth and soon falls in love with Dolphin. At the same time, Seth finds an ossified fetus and believes that it is Eben, whom he turns to, convinced that his brother’s radiation poisoning is being fed on by Dolphin.

Ridley said of this movie, “I created a fabulous child-eyed view of what I imagined America to be like – it’s a kind of mythical once upon a time never-world, where guys look like Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, and everything is set in a Wheatfield and it all looks very American gothic.”

Cinematographer Dick Pope captured the magic hour here, orange fields of grain set against the black car filled with evil. Everything heads to a dark end, as the actual monsters of the world aren’t the monsters in a child’s mind, but the very simple killers that roam the highways around the small town.

Coil, which had Stephen Thrower as a member, used samples from The Reflecting Skin on Stolen & Contaminated Songs.

“It’s all so horrible, you know, the nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse. One day, you’ll wake up, and you’ll be past it. Your beautiful skin will wrinkle and shrivel up, you’ll lose your hair, your sight, your memory. Your blood will thicken, and your teeth will turn yellow and loose. You will start to stink and fart, and all your friends will be dead. You’ll succumb to arthritis, angina, senile dementia, you’ll piss yourself, shit yourself, drool at the mouth. Just pray that when this happens you’ve got someone to love you, because if you’re loved you’ll still be young.”

You can watch this on Tubi.