Alien Beasts is a film that shows the destruction of art; it suggests that art in and of itself is dead. Upon seeing it, I literally developed a fever and needed to shut down and nap to process it. It didn’t feel like a film; it felt like watching an unmarked VHS tape, an artifact that one would stumble upon and be cursed to die in 7 days after viewing. However, its very notion of being the antithesis of art shows that it creates an essential experience in seeing outsider art. Outsider art is art at its most sincere and imaginative, for better or worse. The director, Carl J. Sukenick, is a member of New York City’s Community Access Art Collective. This collective helps promote mentally ill artists such as Carl, which confirms any speculations of his mental health, and contextualizes his contributions as an outsider artist. As someone who experiences mental health issues, I have found that there are properties through its use of plot and structure that are consistent with that experience. Beyond being a film that breaks every rule of cinema, it is one of the utmost sincerity, and falls into the disjointed logic of a psychotic episode.

The Agent, the Aliens, and the Disjointed Logic of Paranoia

The narrative, theoretically, is quite simple. An agent is sent on a mission to get rid of humans that have transformed into beasts due to a radiation storm caused by extra-dimensional alien beings. At the same time, there are rogue CIA agents that attack the main CIA base. However, it has the strange, disjointed thought process of someone suffering from bipolar and/or schizophrenia. There is a voiceover that explains every step of the way. The problem is that he jumps back and forth between topics, making you lost in the process. What doesn’t help is that he struggles to read his lines, causing him to repeat them, and has no proper flow which causes him to run out of breath with huge pauses in between. It falls into the logical rabbitholes that many of the mentally ill will fall victim to. 

The aliens, instead of being extra-terrestrial, are extra-dimensional yet with no indication of how they accomplish such a task. No matter what happens within the plot, there is someone watching the security footage with the same facial expression, giving the thoughts of heavy paranoia. You’re being watched no matter where you are or what you’re doing. The only major speaking role that speaks to the other agents rambles like one with severe issues. He is completely incomprehensible, screams incoherently, including yelling at the other actors to see if they understand him. Most plot devices, such as the monster using an energy blast, are either ignored, or consist of technical effects that still have no effect towards the characters that were hit by the blast.

Disjointed Editing and the Pacing of Madness

The film’s technical aspect is what gives that sense of uneasiness. Simply put, it was one of the most effective uses of the atmosphere that horror films try to accomplish. There is never a middle ground in terms of pacing and editing. Sometimes still images are used for long periods of time alongside his narration. The most apparent example of this is a scene that consists of a few slides of on-screen text. He says the words on the screen twice, and the slide stays on-screen, in silence, for a long period of time before transferring to the next slide. The dialogue scenes are one-shot, with one notably including the woman agent staring off at the distance, trying to avoid the gaze of the camera, and at times failing. It is a film full of action scenes that might fall into the action genre, but it is one at its most reductive. Long shots in the distance of poorly done fight scenes, extended to what can only be described as the true sense of monotony. On the other end of the spectrum, regardless of whether they consist of the still images of other content, it jumps back and forth at an almost frame-by-frame rate. It uses this sense of chaos with the intensity of the overwhelming thoughts that the mentally ill suffer from. It can have a combination of the monster moving around, cuts to a dead body, a house, and a fight scene.

However, the uncertainty is caused by the overall sound design of this film. It feels as if the clips were made on their own in post-production, with their own soundtrack in each scene. This means that when the clip jumps to another one, the different soundtrack is used. During the use of a hodgepodge of clips as mentioned above, the sounds turn into a combination of nonsensical chaos. It is this aspect that turns this film into a constant feeling of unease.

The soundtrack is simply at its most effective. It consists of a sort of playful and catchy funky track you may find in an MS-DOS game from the early ‘90s, to the sort of electronic music the avant-garde composer Stockhausen would create. It is when this is combined through scattered and disjointed layers. Even with the more tolerable and happier beat placed below, the synths that sound like dissonant strings are a sound that will never leave your mind; in fact, it is when these two sounds are combined, giving one of the most severe uses of contrast in art. No matter what is going on in this film, when those sounds were played, it terrified me, and I felt feverish. Even a scene of erotica would include this combination of sounds. It is the conclusion that creates the most disjointed nature of this. It goes out of left field in terms of the filming style, with the closing credits coming in before getting interrupted by the film, then coming back into the credits. During this constant feeling of madness, the same cursed sound combination remains consistent.

Horrifying Sincerity: The Lasting Impact of Outsider Art

Alien Beasts is not a good film in the sense of a conventional manner. It is an exhausting film that needs to be processed after viewing it physically rather than mentally engaging with it. Through its method of breaking all the rules of filmmaking, it gives that sense of the “cursed VHS tape” that would spread online as a rumoured story, as opposed to a film.Thanks to its complete incoherence and the constant sense of unease, it accomplishes a horrifying atmosphere in spades. However, it is art at its most sincere. It falls into the typical symptoms of someone suffering from mental illness and comes across as his form of not only expression, but therapy. He is an artist that tries to replicate avant-garde art as well. He is said to have been inspired by not only genre films, but by legendary avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. It is with this combination that makes this one of the memorable pieces of art one may come across – if they can handle it.