Featured Essays Science Fiction I Tracked Down the Film that Traumatized Me as a Kid, and Found a Forgotten Gem Weird, ambitious art — the kind that sticks with you for decades — is always worth searching for. By Asa West | Published on December 1, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share “Do you know what makes a good movie?” Rosalind Russell reportedly once said to fellow actor Cliff Robertson. “Moments. A couple of moments that people remember, that they can take with them, is what makes a good movie.” If you’re lucky, those moments are meaningful and complex, a single action pregnant with meaning or a line breathtakingly delivered. If you’re me, they scare the pants off you when you’re eight. It was the ’80s, and my mom was watching TV. It had to have been a weekend, because she had a movie on instead of Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy. We only had one TV back then (and it wasn’t even flat!), so when my mom was watching something, I couldn’t put on cartoons. The logical thing to do would have been to go play, but instead, I hovered around the living room and bugged her. In my memory, the movie looked for all the world like yet another plodding grown-up film, in which nothing interesting happens and all the characters do is talk. A group of medieval monks were gathered in some kind of cloister or forest, having a deep conversation. Yawn. Would I be able to sneak in a Disney video before bedtime? I stared, glazed, at the screen, and nothing prepared me for what happened next. While the monks talked, one of them suddenly looked up, and a fucking skeleton flew across the sky. Speaking of memorable film moments, do you know that scene in Mulholland Drive? Where the guy goes out to the dumpster, and the terror of what he encounters there physically knocks him over? That’s how I remember feeling when I saw that thing. Few jump scares have gotten me that good since. Fast forward ten or fifteen years. I’d grown up with this bizarre memory rattling around the back of my brain, and it finally occurred to me to track down the movie it was from. I started by asking my mom, but when I described what I’d seen—monks in a dark place, a flying skeleton—she had no idea what I was talking about. I tried to sift through my memory for specifics. The skeleton was a vulture, maybe. Like a vulture-skeleton thing. I remembered asking my mom what it was at the time, my heart still pounding from the jump scare, and her replying that it was a bad omen for the monks. Did any of that ring a bell? She shook her head, mystified. From there, I turned to the internet for answers. Google existed by then, and it didn’t suck yet, and my search queries grew more and more creative. “Medieval monks skeleton movie.” “Medieval monks flying skeleton.” Or maybe they weren’t monks, but peasants? With all the robes and cowls people wore back then, it was hard to tell. Okay, then: “Flying skeleton vulture medieval peasants movie.” Each search came up empty. I repeated it once or twice a decade, whenever I had a free minute and remembered that I still hadn’t tracked down that weird old movie that had scared me as a kid, but the result never came up. Whatever that film was, it seemed to have faded hopelessly into obscurity. Or maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that my Google search finally hit pay dirt. It’s long been the case that the least interesting art often finds the largest audiences. At the library where I work, the latest batch of ghostwritten crime novels inevitably has months-long waiting lists, while the small press and indie titles gather dust on their displays. There have been times when I’ve practically begged patrons to take home an obscure book I love—Just try it! Read the first ten pages!—only to later find it discreetly abandoned on a table. But from a reader or moviegoer’s perspective, those kinds of guardrails make sense. Even aside from the fact that there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a crime novel, books and movies are expensive these days. A hardcover might set you back $35! A night at the movies can run you a good $150 if you have to get a babysitter! When time and money are scarce, you tend to seek out a safe bet. You might even make the calculation with library books, since it’s frustrating to sink an hour into a book before admitting to yourself that you’re not into it. Entertainment that’s been vetted by a hundred critics or a colossal studio budget can feel like it’s going to be more worth your time. But oh, the pleasures of indie media! Especially messy indie media! A book with an ugly cover and the strangest writing you’ve ever encountered! A movie that hasn’t been ground into a pap of digestible tropes and clichés! Finding a piece of art that’s too weird for the mainstream feels like finding an old wedding ring sticking out of your garden soil. It’s beautifully surreal, almost too good to be true. I’ve found that there’s a special pleasure in indie speculative art, especially film. We all know that franchises like the MCU or Avatar have endless funds to pour into visual effects, and we’ve all seen movies that have suffered because of it. But when filmmakers are forced to get creative in how they portray fantastical elements, you get some really intriguing art. Two of my favorite projects in recent years are Falling Stars, a folk horror movie set in the California desert, and the sci-fi series Scavengers Reign. Falling Stars uses nothing but physical props and camera cuts to create the illusion of people being snapped up by flying witches, and Scavengers Reign relies on gorgeous cel animation to depict a planet teeming with strange and terrible creatures. I’ll take weird visuals like these over a computer-generated monster any day. Indie projects aren’t perfect, but neither are big-budget ones. Both Falling Stars and Scavengers Reign drag at times, when a bit of dialogue is so poetic that it’s hard to follow, or the story gets swallowed up in its own vibes. But even the flaws in a smaller film are often more interesting than those in a major one. You can tell when a misstep comes from an artist’s vision instead of a boardroom of executives trying to wring more profit out of a film. The question of why a scene doesn’t work, or why a line of dialogue falls flat, is much more fun to mull over when the answer isn’t just that the studio wanted more money. The phrase I typed might have been “flying skeleton medieval peasants.” Or maybe “middle ages movie flying skeleton.” Whatever alchemy I used, the result this time was instantaneous: a grainy old trailer someone had posted to YouTube. The movie? A 1988 fantasy from Australia and New Zealand called The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey. I immediately recognized it. This was the one. I had never heard of this movie in my life. I asked around, and no one else had, either. The plot, which I learned from the trailer and Wikipedia, centers on a village of Cumbrian copper miners in the Middle Ages. At least I got the medieval part right! Bubonic plague is sweeping across the country, but a psychic boy named Griffin receives a vision of a way to protect the village. Under his direction, the miners dig a tunnel through the earth, and end up in modern day New Zealand. God bless Tubi: the movie was streaming. I waited until a night when the kids were asleep and my husband was out with friends, and I put it on. The movie is directed by Vincent Ward, who would go on to direct What Dreams May Come (1998, adapted from the Richard Matheson novel). Ward is a surrealist, and The Navigator starts with a long, phantasmagoric sequence of Griffin’s visions. We see snippets and images that don’t make any sense: a torch falling into an abyss, a floating coffin, a figure climbing a church tower. The story properly kicks off when Griffin’s idol Connor returns from traveling across Britain. Connor brings dire news, telling everyone that the plague is drawing closer to their village. In fact, it’s right on the other side of the lake separating the miners from the closest neighboring settlement. As night falls, Connor says it’ll reach the village by morning. But wait! Griffin sifts through his confusing visions and comes up with a plan. They’ll go to a deep cavern by the mines and tunnel through the bottom of it, taking some of their copper ore with them. They’ll dig all the way to the other side of the world, where they’ll find the biggest church in all of Christendom. Once there, they’ll melt their ore into a spire, which they’ll place on top of the church. If they can get it done by the time the full moon sets, then their village will be spared. So they begin. They dig deeper and deeper, as the moon rises higher and the plague draws closer. The tone of the film takes on a frantic quality as the miners struggle to make headway. Sitting on my couch in my dark living room, I grinned with anxious excitement. I started to recognize the setting, the gathered men in cowls and robes, the dark and moody cavern around them. The skeleton was coming. When it arrived, it was nothing like my old memory of it. I remembered monotonous dialogue punctuated by an inexplicable jump scare; instead, the moment is taut with dread. Griffin and the men yell at each other to go faster. The moon is high in the sky! Their families are all in danger! Griffin is seized by a sudden urge to look up out of the cave, and there, through a gap in the rock surrounding them, he sees the worst vision of all. The Angel of Death is heading for their village. It’s a genuinely terrifying moment. The figure isn’t a vulture after all, but a human skeleton carrying a trumpet and wearing a shroud. Its arrival is announced by a scream and the shrill blast of its trumpet. The skeleton is rendered in stop motion animation, which makes it look especially uncanny compared to the live action miners. It looks straight at the camera as it flies by, as if taking note of Griffin looking up at it from the cave. God, no wonder this moment scared me so much as a kid. Then the miners break through the rock into a strange tunnel with smooth walls. It’s a modern-day sewer system, and it’s under the city of Auckland. At this point, I was glad I’d finally re-watched the skeleton scene, but I was also invested in the story. I had to know what was going to happen to these miners. There’s so much to love about this movie. There’s the audacity of the time travel logic, for one thing. There are standard-issue time travel movies, and then there are mind-bending time travel movies. Back to the Future? Fantastic, and standard issue: a guy invents a time machine and uses it. Primer has the same basic premise, but the tangle of causality that ensues as its heroes shred their own timelines makes it mind-bending. The Navigator falls into mind-bending territory because its time travel is so elegantly simple. The desperate miners dig a tunnel so deep that it leads to the future. In the world of The Navigator, the future is a physical place you can visit if you find the right fissure. The premise is an echo of the mysticism that informs the characters’ medieval worldview: the Angel of Death is real, psychic visions can be trusted, prayers and offerings work, and reality is malleable and porous. There’s no explanation for how or why Griffin’s vision drives a bunch of English miners to dig their way to 1980s New Zealand, because it doesn’t matter. It happens because the miners live in a world where this kind of thing can happen. After the film came out, Ward told the New Zealander magazine Onfilm that the idea for the movie came from two sources: his heart-pounding attempt to cross a busy highway on foot, and a story he’d heard about a group of Indigenous men from Papua New Guinea visiting a major city. We see the first influence right away. After the miners emerge from the sewer, they set about trying to find the tallest church in the city. First they have to cross a busy highway, but since they have no idea what they’re looking at, they see it as a terrible kind of river filled with large, fast beasts. They don’t know about things like crosswalks (although one would presume they know about bridges?). All they know is that they have to get across. From here, the film could have just been a series of fish-out-of-water gags. In fact, Ward told The New Zealand Herald that the first draft of the script was a comedy. Instead, the film really is a strange sort of odyssey, as the miners set off across a landscape as unfathomable as Homer’s wine-dark sea. We quickly realize that the miners don’t know they’ve traveled to the future. How could they? They have no point of reference for what the future might look like, no sci fi novels to paint a picture for them, no rapidly evolving technology to give them a hint. From their point of view, this is the “Celestial City,” the holiest place in the Christian world, and they’ve been sent here to place their spire. If the place is incomprehensible, well, that’s just more proof of its holiness. But the supposedly holy city quickly becomes a nightmare. The hapless miners are terrorized by construction equipment, trains, and even a nuclear submarine in Auckland’s harbor. The most horrific thing about the city is that there’s almost no human being in sight. The sidewalks are deserted, and all the machines seem to operate themselves. No one shows up to help the miners as they struggle, even when Connor is caught, screaming, on the front of a train. The miners don’t know what to make of this place, which seems to be populated only by monsters. If it’s the holiest place in all Christendom, why is it so hellish? They do find one bit of human connection, though—and here’s where the story gets really mystical. After a near hit-and-run, a group of men approach to see if they’re okay. The miners explain their mission to place the spire, and ask where they can find some blacksmiths and a foundry to melt down the ore. Turns out the group of men are blacksmiths. They all happen to be standing right outside of the foundry, which happens to have a spire-shaped mold all ready to go from a church order that was canceled. From the miner’s perspective, all is going according to divine plan. The blacksmiths, meanwhile, think the miners are funnily-dressed representatives from the church that ordered the new spire. The two groups work together to melt the ore, falling into an easy camaraderie across the gulf of history. This place is where the miners were supposed to come. Everything is happening as it was meant to. The story would be diminished if it was just about a bunch of ignorant medieval guys being educated by savvy modern folk. Instead, the miners seem to enrich the present as much as they hope to be saved by it. The blacksmiths, bitter about their fading livelihood, feel heartened about their work. A crowd gathers to cheer the miners on as they finally try to place the spire in a church that’s conveniently lacking one (perhaps the same church that canceled its order with the blacksmiths). One can see a divine hand in the encounter, not just guiding the miners to save their village through a ridiculously complicated offering, but bringing the past and future together to touch and change each other. Neither the miners nor the blacksmiths ever guess that time travel has taken place. No one really knows what’s going on, but they all accept it with as much grace as they can muster. When The Navigator first came out in 1988, it only made back about a fourth of its 4.3 million Australian dollar budget. I imagine that any cutthroat film exec would see that return on investment as an abysmal failure. However, the movie earned critical acclaim. It received a standing ovation at Cannes and won a slew of awards in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Not only that, but the film offers commentary on 1980s issues that are startlingly relevant today. It’s not hard to see the specter of AIDS lurking behind the miners’ frantic efforts to ward off plague, and it felt almost eerie to watch the movie during the Covid era. Ward was also concerned with issues like nuclear weapons, which of course are still a threat, with climate change as an equally terrifying backdrop. The things that scared our medieval ancestors—war, sickness, death—never go away. They only change forms. All this is proof of what plenty of artists already know: that the real investment we make in art is cultural, not monetary. Ambitious and weird art re-enchants the world, making it a little more mystical, a little looser around the edges. I’d rather live in the miners’ world of flying skeletons and magical caves than the blacksmiths’ anonymous, industrialized hellscape. There’s one more moment in The Navigator that’s going to stick with me. This one is a major spoiler, so feel free to skip this next paragraph if you need to… At the end of the film, when the miners’ mission is complete, we suddenly cut back to the cave and find out that the whole trip has been a story that Griffin is telling the other miners at the mouth of their tunnel. Wait, what? Did they travel to the so-called Celestial City, or did they just sit down in the cave for storytime? Does the church in 1989 Auckland have a new spire on it, or doesn’t it? Did any of that stuff happen!? It seems like Griffin’s story is the offering the miners were supposed to make, or maybe they were supposed to make their offering as characters in his story. Whatever the situation is, the story was the point, and once it’s done, they head home to the village. The scene adds yet one more layer of surrealism onto the narrative, one more question to chew on. Watching that stop-motion skeleton appear on the screen, I felt two eras of my own life touching each other across time. I was my 8-year-old self again, holding my breath at the supernatural. I was my current self, braced and ready and grinning at the thrill. I’d carried that moment with me for decades, and now, as past and present met, it was deepened and transformed. And with that, I have a new moment to carry with me going forward, until the next time my past and future meet.[end-mark] The post I Tracked Down the Film that Traumatized Me as a Kid, and Found a Forgotten Gem appeared first on Reactor.