The Moth Diaries of a Mad White Teenager

Literary analysts say that every great romantic vampire story revolves around three things: blood, sex, and thinly veiled Sapphic homoeroticism. Wait, no… that’s not right. Blood, sex and an attempt at passing off Scott Speedman as a viable non-creepy romantic interest for a possibly mentally ill 16 year old. Crap, that’s not right either. Maybe it’s blood, sex and a disappointing return to horror for acclaimed director Mary Harron of American Psycho renown. Never mind, my co-author Google has just informed me that the three elements of traditional vampire romance are actually blood, sex and death. Regardless, 2011’s The Moth Diaries, based on the book of the same name, does contain all of the aforementioned ingredients in hefty proportions.

Rebecca is a student at a prestigious all-girls boarding school (gayer…) whose roommate and best friend Lucy (gayer…) helped her heal in the wake of her poet father’s suicide two years prior. But this year, tall and mysterious new student Ernessa is taking up all of Lucy’s attention, making Rebecca crazy jealous (PERFECT.) and throwing a huge wrench in their “friendship”. But there’s something off about Ernessa, and soon Lucy falls mysteriously ill. Is Rebecca imagining things? Or is Lucy’s new friend really the cause of her declining health?

I want to like this movie so much more. On its face, it has all the romance and mystery of The Virgin Suicides. It’s billed as a gothic thriller boasting the direction of the woman responsible for one of my favorite slasher dramas of all time, and it’s gayer than Tracy Chapman singing Come To My Window to Ellen DeGeneres from the back of a San Francisco U-Haul. Unfortunately, however, many of the technical aspects as well as the overall storytelling are deeply flawed. It’s monotonous, meandering and occasionally downright dull. While Lily Cole is fabulous as Ernessa, Sarah Bolger’s Rebecca is wooden and kind of unsympathetic. We’re never really sure if Ernessa is a vampire or a bizarre succubus-ghost hybrid, and much of the vampire mythos of this film flies in the face of the usual cannon without being properly explained. The only character whose fate the audience (me, in this case) even cares about is black sheep lesbian Charley, played flawlessly by Valerie Tian of Juno fame. This film is pretty to look at, but its characters lack substance while the storyline itself fails to be scary or even borderline compelling.

There is no doubt this film and it’s literary predecessor set out to say something about women, specifically adolescents in the process of changing from girls into women. Professor Scott Speedman has a monologue that serves as the thesis of the film, that all vampire narratives contain anxiety about women gaining agency and sexual liberation. Rather than focusing on Stoker’s Dracula in his romantic literature class, he instead chooses Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novella Carmilla, which focuses on a female vampire manipulating and preying upon the young female narrator of the story. Like most stories that take place at boarding schools, The Moth Diaries is also without doubt a coming of age story, featuring characters who at the age of 16 are torn between the fun and carefree existence of girls and the desires of women.

So if this film is about the anxiety involved in adolescent girls becoming adult women and all the agency and sexuality that ensue, what exactly does it have to say? Ultimately, it’s that we’re all going to be just fucking fine… Maybe. It depends on whether or not you find Rebecca to be a reliable narrator. She lives the nightmare of becoming isolated from everyone she loves, as Ernessa picks off her friends one by one, be it through expulsion, parental concern, or literal murder. Eventually Rebecca is left all alone to face her enemy, having lost the girl she loved most, at first figuratively as Ernessa turns them against each other, then literally when Lucy’s mysterious sickness finally takes her life. In the anti-climactic climax, after accidentally unlocking a previously suppressed memory of discovering her father’s body in a bathtub, Rebecca breaks into the school’s basement and discovers Ernessa’s trunk where she’s been sleeping, because vampires, douses her in lighter fluid and sets the trunk ablaze.

Now, there’s a popular fan theory regarding both the film and the novel, in which Ernessa doesn’t really exist at all but is simply the narrator’s projections of anxiety and fears of growing up, losing her friend, and unresolved trauma surrounding the loss of her father. While this might check out in the novel, which is told from a single person perspective in the form of diary entries, it’s a little hard to comprehend in film form, as Ernessa is seen interacting with other characters including students, staff and faculty. For the purposes of this analysis, let us disregard that theory. It is, however, that Rebecca occasionally hallucinates her interactions with Ernessa, as is depicted in the library blood rain scene. Ernessa most certainly exists, at least in the film telling of this story, but it is possible that Rebecca has conflated reality with imagination, projecting aspects of the novella from her romantic literature class onto Lucy and Ernessa’s relationship and concluding that Ernessa is the cause of Lucy’s illness and death. So, best case scenario, Ernessa is a vampire and Rebecca has destroyed her, in which case the authorities will “find no body” as Rebecca explains. Middling outcome is that Rebecca is just a teensy bit hallucinatey, imagined the interaction, and mostly just set a trunk in the basement on fire and will be expelled for mild-to-moderate arson. Worst case scenario, Ernessa was for real in the basement but totally not supernatural and Rebecca set an innocent girl on fire in a violent schizophrenic episode. So, there’s that.

The film talks a fair amount about sex, as coming of age tales tend to do. It comes to a kind of cool conclusion that sex just isn’t that big of a deal… I think. In the beginning of the film, the girls are all talking about which of them have had sex yet, we find out that one of the girls is seeing a boy from a nearby school, and then later in the film they get together and do it in a field with two of the other girls (Rebecca included) keeping watch so they don’t get caught. Rebecca dreams that she sees them have sex and her friend whose name I can’t remember is screaming in agonizing pain. However, when the girls are talking about it, the friend says it was just okay, she doesn’t feel any different, and that she didn’t love it, but that she didn’t hate it either. So… yeah, what? This might mean that Rebecca has an internalized fear of sex, or maybe just that she’s not into having sex with dudes. Rebecca later has a Freudian makes out session with father figure stand-in, Professor Speedman, and then pretty much runs away. Maybe sex is fine, but also maybe it’s the worst.

That conclusion pretty much puts its finger on the pulse of why this movie isn’t very good. It sets out to have a message, but it all gets pretty bungled in the process and we’re essentially left with a narrator clinging to the fringes of sanity who loses everyone she cares about and is maybe fine or maybe deeply disturbed. It’s fine for a film not to hand its meaning to its audience on a silver platter, but this film handles it in such a way that it’s not thought provoking as much as it is frustratingly confusing.