Inspired by the obscure anti-fashion fashion trend of wearing ordinary clothes, stalled in a quagmire of studio collapses and rotating directors, and then released straight-to-streaming ten years too late for what little cultural relevance it had to start with, Jeffrey Bell’s horror thriller NormCore has its share of problems. In a twist worthy of its genre, over-competence turns out to be the biggest one.
Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, this movie is as average as the dearest hopes of its namesake. We find young Norman Corey- yes, I know; I’ll give you a moment- struggling with all the pitfalls of adolescence. He’s awkward. He’s misunderstood. He’s chock-full of untapped potential and, oh, by the way, he wants to kill people. But that will have to wait. As the film’s tagline tells us, every wolf needs his sheep’s clothing. Norman has undertaken a budding serial killer’s most essential work in his penultimate year as a high school student: he is perfecting his performance of normalcy.
Where better to start than with a humble button-down tucked into the stunningly high waist of your stone-washed jeans? Norman builds a wardrobe he perceives to be the pinnacle of ordinary. We have a term for this. It’s called aggressive mimicry, where a predator develops characteristics either benign or attractive to its prey. Think anglerfish, the deepsea nightmare of teeth and lies that tempts unsuspecting sea life closer with its bioluminescent lure.
What Norman fails to foresee is that his classmates are whipped into a frenzy by his casual aesthetic. Suddenly socks and sandals populate the hallways. Overalls reign supreme. Even his teachers begin to dress like him. And it doesn’t stop there. Soon, Norman’s peers take on more than just his windbreakers and tennis shoes; they begin to adopt his mannerisms.
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We don’t have a term for this. Shrimp don’t sprout their own lures to dangle in front of the anglerfish. Here is where things start to get interesting and, if you’ve been keeping up with the news, familiar.
Most of you will have come to NormCore via the media’s breathless coverage of numerous homicides taken straight from the film’s original ending. Fully submerged in their Norman personas, his classmates enact his own fantasies on him in a grotesque climax that is one part murder, two parts orgy, and fifteen parts Jeffrey Bell’s therapist’s worst nightmares. Call it mesmerism or call it tasteless gorilla marketing- upwards of five copycat murders have been reported, and you can no longer see that ending.
It’s a real loss for cinema. Atonal as it was, the closing scene turned NormCore from a bad joke into a downright wonder. At first, you think the film has turned the concept of normal on its head in a bid for cheap irony; then you realize, as teenage teeth gnash the gristle of our would-be antihero, that this is simply the purpose of normal laid out honestly. Humankind is both predator and prey to itself. We invented the very concept of normalcy for exactly this: as a lure, as a weapon, as the obfuscation of and justification for our worst instincts.
To describe the edited version streaming now as a massacre in its own right would be pretty disrespectful to the dead. I’ll hold my tongue. And who knows? As one of the few to have watched the unedited version, I may soon be holding yours.