SPEAKER: Hello.
Welcome back to the Channel.
Something I have not filmed on before and like a month or so and I've
completely forgotten how I could do anything in front of a camera.
But we're coming back with another episode
of Film Fridays where I talk about movies
that have a disability, something related to them,
and talk about representation and what have you.
Sometimes cats are involved.
Hello.
Today we're going to be talking about horror
movies which I absolutely love.
If you know me, horror is my favorite genre.
And today we're going to be talking about The Unholy,
which released last year.
It stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan from The Walking Dead and Cricket Brown.
Those two are our main leads.
And the movie's not good.
To me it's not very good.
Not just on a horrible take on deaf
rep and what have you, but granted,
I don't think that really matters, bear with me.
But also, I just don't think the movie is good.
Regardless.
Here's a paragraph about the plot.
A girl who is deaf, by the way,
inexplicably regains the power to heal the sick after
a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary.
As word spreads and people flock to witness her miracles,
a disgraced journalist visits the small New England town to investigate.
However, when strange events start to occur,
he soon wonders if these phenomena are
the result of something more sinister.
In descriptions, it will say a hearing-impaired girl
and other descriptions it says the deaf-mute girl.
I don't know why it doesn't say that in description I just read.
But yeah, that's the thing.
So let's just get the whole deaf (UNKNOWN)
part out of the way, shall we?
Cricket Brown is straight up a hearing person.
In fact, she's local, or at least she
graduated locally in North Carolina.
And I don't know if, I mean, on one hand,
you could get a normal deaf woman,
deaf girl to play the role just fine, honestly, those exist.
But the character Alice is only deaf for
like 2 seconds in the entire film.
So like because of how boring the movie is anyways, I was just like,
does it really even matter if Cricket is deaf or not?
Like, this one thing that annoys me more on Amazon,
you can watch it on Amazon,
you can also watch it on Hulu for premium subscriptions.
This is more on Amazon than in the release of the actual movie itself,
but the captioning format is so weird.
I don't know what's happening when you have two actions or two
different pieces of dialogue from two different characters,
everything side by side instead of stacking it up.
It's just side by side and it's very annoying to look at.
Does Alice know ASL?
That's a very good question.
Yes, but it's not done very well.
I'm guessing that Alice is supposed to have been deaf her entire life,
that's what they pretty much insinuate.
Also, not only is the signing itself very awkward to watch,
but you don't really see much of it because
the camera guy is filming her backside,
back of her head, her back, so you can't see it.
And then she's signing to the doctor and
the doctor understands what she's saying,
but then she's speaking back to her and her uncle doesn't sign at all.
It seems he's just talking like your average,
ordinary hearing person would,
and then the doctor is still just talking out loud,
but you don't see her actually interpreting anything.
So I'm sitting here thinking the doctor doesn't know how to sign it.
And this girl, Alice, is just another magical,
you know, unicorn lip reader.
But later on in the movie, and I'll tell you why she does this later,
but she does start signing.
So I don't really understand what the thought process was,
having the doctor not sign back,
not even sim coming in the beginning of the movie.
But holy crap, people, when there's signing involved,
you need to put it in a frame.
If you're not only pulling in the frame but also show it on the camera.
Why are you filming it from behind?
The movie, of course, falls into your traditional stereotypes
where I don't even know his character's name.
Honestly, not very important.
Where Jeffrey Dean Morgan is walking with the doctor
and he's like so confused as to how Alice can start talking.
Because in the very, very beginning of the movie,
she's being possessed by the Virgin Mary or whatever
and she says a sentence and then she passes out.
Once they're walking together, Jeffrey, Dean,
Morgan and the doctor who just goes, but she was talking.
Deaf people talk too.
Not all of us do.
I do.
I didn't make that obvious enough.
But deaf people talk, right.
And then doctor is responding saying that impossible as she has,
whatever this is right here,
I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce it.
So she's never been able to talk for her entire life,
which again, is also a thing.
You know, all of us talk.
Like I said, not all of us can talk,
but it's just this flat out "But she talks!"
Like deaf people don't talk and then, of course, again,
there's a stereotype where if deaf people suddenly start talking,
that means we're not actually deaf.
That's a whole tangent for another day.
But I'm just saying the writers of the Unholy, deaf people can talk.
Lots of us do, lots of us don't.
Lots of us do.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a journalist and who's trying to find that
next big story because he's apparently the bad journalist
that makes up stories that aren't true and so nobody's really
a big fan of him and trying to turn that around, I guess.
So he can get a big break again,
get a nice job again and his old job, even I think.
He thinks, what better way to really start
my big break by making a story,
writing a story about how the deaf girl is talking.
Naturally, this movie has become an inspiration for one type of movie,
but with the horror behind it,
instead of some, you know, fluffy, sad, romcom,
whatever, like Me Before You or anything else.
And that's when you get to the tree that Alice was at the beginning of
the movie and all of a sudden she goes from being completely deaf,
completely nonverbal to all of a sudden being able to hear,
to speak like your average,
everyday normal hearing person and everybody loses their mind.
Nobody really believes it.
People are in shock.
Insert a montage of hearing test galore and there you go.
She's magically hearing and nobody knows why.
Well, I was not glad because she keeps talking about Mary and how Mary
if you give all of your faith to Mary, she will be good to you.
And now Alice has basically become this Virgin Mary type person,
and now she can magically heal everyone.
And that's exactly where this movie starts to go.
And there was the big thing, I posted this on TikTok.
If you don't follow me on TikTok consider following
me on TikTok it's just chaos, I post whatever.
And they have this little boy that is in
a wheelchair and they want him to be healed.
So Alice is going to start walking over.
She does a little hocus pocus whatever,
and he starts to struggle to get up
and then all of a sudden he's walking
and the entire crowd- it's like watching Midsummer but with
less creepy screaming, thank goodness, at least.
And they just start crying and they're falling down to the ground
and they're just sobbing and it's so awkward to watch.
Well, I said I'm team do whatever you want in terms of religion.
I mean, believe him, whatever you want.
OK.
But it's not uncommon for people to completely lose their minds
and want disabled people to be healed, want to be able to be healed.
And then they do that little hands on the head
thing and it's extremely uncomfortable.
So watching this entire scene just made me extremely uncomfortable
and it started making my TikTok viewers uncomfortable as well.
One quote that annoyed the absolute hell out of
me is we're all grateful that she's recovered.
What the hell does this girl need to be recovered of deafness?
We're not dying from being deaf.
I don't know.
It's just the wording in there, so bad.
Like the script in itself.
The script as a whole, anyway, was boring, it wasn't enticing.
I found myself doing other things on my phone.
That really rubbed me the wrong way.
Little disabled wheelchair-using boy is
walking again and he makes the news.
Everyone starts crying.
Brand new inspiration porn story.
Alert the media, breaking news at 11.
Somewhere in the middle of the movie,
you see the doctor starts signing to Alice
and then Alice stopped her because remember,
Alice is a hearing person now.
That was just weird to see when in the beginning she wasn't signed at.
I already know, and maybe she was signing to Alice,
but you just couldn't see it at all because again,
the framing of everything was practically, essentially nonexistent.
I'm going to give credit where credit is due for this movie, though,
because they say the one thing that I thought
all the time and I think is very,
very important and then did this part so well,
it's a very tiny part, but they did it very well.
The doctor says there are various degrees of deafness.
Thank you.
Deaf one big umbrella.
Little things underneath that.
Deafness is not one size fits all and it does not
just mean you can't hear anything at all.
(UNKNOWN).
So I can appreciate and I do appreciate that they mentioned that in
the movie because people don't seem to understand that, you know.
Falling back into deaf stereotypes once again.
And this is kind of both right and not
that at one point, Alice was saying,
you know the worst part about being deaf,
you can't listen to music but you can feel it.
Incorrect and also correct.
Incorrect is the point that she's making
where you can't listen to music.
Obviously, that is false if you are not completely,
profoundly deaf to the point where you
cannot actually hear anything at all.
Yeah, you can't really listen to music in
a traditional sense but you can feel
it which then we call that listening to music anyways because whatever.
But if you have some residual hearing left like I do,
it's very minimal now in comparison to years ago.
You try it up loud enough, you have hearing aids on,
your cochlear implant, you know, things like that.
You listen to different types of music,
like maybe something that is more bass-heavy,
which is what I tend to listen to mostly.
And you can...
there are deaf people that listen to music.
And again, we have great musicians, you know, deaf rappers,
singers, those who play instruments like, you can.
We do listen to music.
But when she talks about feeling it, she's not wrong in that
regard because there are some that will just you know,
you have to be very strong vibrations and that which you go off of.
So that's not wrong.
So it's like that part of the movie was just very confusing.
This is partially a blur, but I think it was Alice.
It makes sense that it would be Alice where she says
that now she can give a voice to the voiceless.
I hate hearing a phrase about marginalized
people where everybody's like,
"we're giving a voice to the voiceless."
You know, my hearing so,
my abled self is giving a voice to the voiceless,
for the poor deaf people, for the poor disabled people,
for the poor blind people.
You know, we have voices.
Some of it is an actual voice coming out of our mouth.
Some of it is with using our hands.
Blind people have voices.
Wheelchair users have voices.
The voices had been there.
We had been voicing our concerns, our opinions for forever.
Nobody needs to be giving a voice to the voiceless.
The voices have been out there.
We just need them to be heard.
So please, can we do away with that quote?
Like entirely, like yesterday or last year when this movie came out?
Please. Thank you.
Oh, but did you think they forgot about
a little singing musical part of this?
This might sound contradictory because I was just
talking about how we have deaf musicians.
Why is it every time with movies like this, horror or not,
music has to get involved and now the girl is cured
and now she could sing and everybody is like,
Oh, my God, this is such a sad, happy moment.
Come on.
And now we're getting into the third act of this movie, right.
They find out what this whole possession is.
They're trying to figure out how to get
Alice to come back to reality and,
you know, stop being evil.
And they're like, just whole, almost like sort of carey moment,
you're going on, right.
And they can't figure out how to get her back to reality.
I think Jeffrey Dean Morgan is trying to talk it out or wherever
he is explaining that the whole thing was fake.
It wasn't really, but they were trying to get
people to believe that it was fake because
the more that you gave faith to Mary,
the stronger that she was going to become.
So you had to take that away from her.
And so that's when Jeffrey Dean Morgan is
trying to be like, hey, this wasn't real.
You know, I'm the same old crappy fake journalist I always was.
But Alice/Mary isn't really...
you know, Mary is pissed.
OK.
I understand.
She's pissed, she wants power and now she is not getting the power
anymore because people are starting to take their faith back.
Alice is, you know, having a little bit of a struggle because she's
being possessed by Mary and we need her to come back, right.
But how the heck can we get that done?
And I actually thought this part was kind of cool.
OK.
The doctor starts saying to Alice and then
that kind of just snaps her back.
So it's like bringing death Alice, the original Alice.
Original death Alice back.
Like there's there was something about ASL that just like,
quick and she's like, Oh my God, I remember who I am now.
That she started coming back to reality,
Mary getting all pissed off and, OK.
Alice is again.
Alice sacrificed herself at the end of the day.
She came back alive because Jeffrey Dean Morgan
is suddenly a Christian or whatever again.
And, you know, God is like, OK, alright.
She's resurrected, I guess and she is deaf again.
The way they had Virgin Mary be a demon was actually kind of cool.
On one hand, it was kind of weird.
On the other hand was kind of cool.
And one thing I want to talk about before I get
to my general thoughts on the film overall,
I need to know if there was a...
no there wasn't ASL master for this.
I was looking in the credits trying to find ASL master
because at least The Silence had an ASL master.
But my friend Catherine was part of that cast for that crew.
The Unholy didn't have one.
And you can tell.
What did they do?
I learned it for the role.
A few Zoom sessions with an ASL coach and also a lot of YouTube,
a lot of Internet searching of people in the deaf community
and people that speak with ASL, just watching them.
I don't know if I was part of that internet search,
but so there was an ASL coach, we don't know who the ASL coach is,
but if you only did a few Zoom sessions with an ASL
coach and then you just watched people on YouTube,
which we don't even know who on YouTube she watched.
Were you watching actual deaf people like Bill Vickers, Ersan Knock,
Sound with Hart or were you just finding random videos where there's
a lot of hearing people that just, you know, sign songs or hearing people
that are trying to teach ASL and it's done incorrectly.
And that's kind of how that looks here.
You can't just go off of a few Zoom sessions because the ASL
master needs to be there to make sure everything's right.
You know, you get that ASL master in there to, you know,
make sure everything looks good when you're signing it.
So they're just kind of really going based off of memory
or they're pulling up an ASL dictionary real quick,
like right before they start rolling a camera and be like,
well, OK, that works, I guess.
And then so for someone who I'm guessing is supposed to be fluent
because I'm guessing she was deaf since birth, I don't know.
It looks very, very strange to me.
Overall, I just didn't care for the movie.
I actually, I'm not one very much for like the religion type or anyways,
but you know why if somebody made a movie
of a deaf person being a demon,
Deaf Demon Bob- hi, running joke.
If someone made that movie or made a movie
with that type of character and,
you know, planned world deaf domination, I'd totally watch it.
I'd also totally want to be in it.
Suddenly I want to write a fiction short about it and post
it on Patreon because that's gonna sound really fun.
So I kind of like the idea of the movie, you know,
I would have preferred that movie to just (INAUDIBLE)
and made everyone deaf and is dead.
But it just wasn't really done very well.
It was kind of boring.
Yeah, you can find better movies out there
with actual deaf characters and if actors.
Even in a horror genre, there's a couple.
A couple of people on TikTok already
told me their thoughts about the movie.
But now if you've seen it,
let me know what you think down below in the comments below.
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