Twixt Ending

Twixt (2011) is a funny creature - a small horror comedy, by one of the biggest names in cinema, Francis Ford Coppola.

It stars Val Kilmer as a minor horror writer on a book tour. He’s booked into a tiny town that doesn’t even have a bookstore - just a few bookshelves in the corner of the hardware store. He meets Sheriff Bruce Dern, who could tell him a few stories, by gum. He takes Kilmer to see a fresh body that he claims was murdered by a serial killer. Kilmer is intrigued and agrees to take Dern on as a writing partner.

Later, he discovers that Edgar Allen Poe stayed at the hotel in town and decides to stay awhile. He meets Elle Fanning, a quiet, outcast girl who won’t come into the hotel with him. She also points out that all of the clocks on the seven-sided clock tower in town show different times. Then Fanning bites the hotel proprietress and is chased off by a priest, and Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) comes along. And Kilmer wakes up.

He is now inspired to stay on, and discover the truth behind these dreams. The sheriff tells him that there’s an encampment of kids across the river, probably satan cultists, possibly vampires. Their leader is a sensitive biker called Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich). Dern has even developed an automatic vampire staking machine to execute them, if need be.

But all this doesn’t help him get his book written. His editor wants a draft soon, and the ending has to be bulletproof. So he gets the sheriff to buy him all the sleeping aids he can find, and settles down to finish the dream.

I won’t go into it too much (or spoil the ending), but it is fun to see how Coppola blends dream and reality. I guess this is a popular horror trope, where a scene starts normal, then gets weirder and weirder, and then the character wakes up (but not always!). There are also a lot of eerie, beautiful images - Fanning’s character, the clocks, Flamingo gang of freaks, runaways and fire jugglers. But it kind of doesn’t come together - too much dream logic, not enough story. And the real story, which I will spoil, is not really presented fully: While Kilmer is dreaming up a horror fantasy, Dern is probably the actual serial killer, murdering children as “vampires”. I get that the joke is that he doesn’t care about something so serious, while chasing the trivial. I just don’t think Coppola pulled it off.

Also - and I say this as someone who loves him - Kilmer has a weirdly tiny face in a big, puffy head.

I guess Coppola had a good time making this - he filmed from his home in Napa. And he deserves it, after all he’s given to cinema. It’s just not that great - twixt bad and good?