Can we talk about how dirty the ad campaign for Split did the actual movie?
Like, I know horror sells tickets, and I know that Shyamalan couldn’t reveal that it was actually a superhero/supervillain movie until the very end, BUT. All in all, the marketing materials were infinitely more ableist than the film itself.
I’m not saying that you still have to entertain the idea of watching Split if you’re offended. People can choose the art they consume, and as much as Split is my favorite movie, I am still a highly critical viewer. I especially and completely understand how the plot of a teenage abduction triggers a TON of people.
However, in Split, I found a story about rising above trauma. I may not have the scars of the two lead characters, but the message of turning your negative experiences into tools of defense and how our brains learn to defend themselves over time was an extremely powerful one for me.
In the ads, though? That message doesn’t get across. If you like Blumhouse movies, you do you, but the commercials make it look like a shitty B-horror about how dissociative systems are dangerous and lack any of the emotional depth that made the fandom fall in love with these characters.
I would say the film, while still inaccurate, was made from a place of wonder rather than malice. Shyamalan himself has stated in interviews that his intention was to explore just how far the separation between alters could be taken and just how far human capacity for physical change could be stretched. While I don’t condone how the alter undergoing this supernatural change, the Beast, is a villain, or how his Horde is tasked with kidnapping teenage girls, this sense of extension beyond the bounds of human power is supposed to emphasize how this shouldn’t be treated as a documentary but as a series of what-ifs.
It saddens me that viewers who were lured in by the horror trailers have taken the latter as the former. But I don’t care if it was Universal’s fault, Blumhouse’s fault, Blinding Edge’s fault (which would be the true tragedy of this production); thematically, attaching a detrimental film to two empowering ones makes no sense, and I encourage other viewers to read between the lines in the movie. The belief in the extraordinary power of the human mind is there.
Unfortunately, it has been clouded by a message of hate brewed by producers with a penchant for shooting themselves in the foot.
