The Stygiad, or Finding James Wan's "Stygian" (2000)
My quest to find the lost James Wan film that got way out of hand.
Phase #0: ~470 BC
Here’s a riddle: Is Socrates a real person?
Well, of course, we have extensive records of what the man supposedly thought, where he was born, who his parents were, who he married, pretty much every mundanity that comes with a life fully lived.
But only supposedly. The great catch that came to be known as the Socratic problem is that everything we know of him comes from sources that are contemporaries, yes, but not Socrates. And those contemporaries not infrequently disagreed with each other regarding Socrates himself. The most entertaining contradiction to me are the writings of Plato - being Socrates’s pupil and seemingly biggest stan, Plato used his figure in his dialogues, setting them in stone and gifting us the Socratic method and the beginning of Western philosophy as we know it. Even despite the tiny inconvenience that Socrates considered written knowledge a pale imitation of its oral counterpart.
Besides the conspiracy that Socrates is just a convenient plot made up centuries ago by Xenophon and Plato because they magically predicted inventing some guy would change history forever, this is just baby’s first introduction to the concept that an author, or even a work, is never truly knowable. Plato’s Socrates, Xenophon’s Socrates, and my Socrates are concepts that have little to do with the actual man who, despite my framing, most probably lived and died in Athens. It’s immensely frustrating, but it is just a blown-out case of everyday instances of dealing with second-hand knowledge and mere representation, depending on how deep into the poststructural nightmare you want to delve.
You probably want to know what any of this has to do with the James Wan movie besides that I wanted to make the title sound faux Ancient Greek. Aren’t you smart? Can’t a guy just want a cool title for his Substack essay? Now sit back down, school is in session.
Phase #1: 2021-2022
As I mentioned numerous times before I was very normal about Saw and all its tributary and adjacent projects during roughly 2021-2022. And am now, frankly. A part of this healthy and non-concerning interest has been obsessively consuming every movie James Wan and/or Leigh Whannell have ever been involved in, or at least every one I found at least a tiny shred interesting. (No amount of hyperfixation will get me to watch a DC property, no offense Aquaman.) Naturally, this led me to repeatedly come back to their profiles on film aggregate sites like IMDB and Letterboxd to find my next fix. And each time Stygian’s little icon there called to me like a siren.
Stygian is a horror film directed by James Wan and Shannon Young, first shown in 1998 at the Melbourne Fringe Festival (MFF)1 and then, getting a glossy new revamp for the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF), re-released in 2000. Among other notable production members is Leigh Whannell, who would go on to write and star in Saw and is famously a dude I have nothing to say about; He had a minor acting role in the film. The film won an award for Best Use of the Guerilla Aesthetic at MUFF. It would even go abroad, screening at the Scottish Dead by Dawn festival in 2001.
Stygian is also completely, absolutely, irrevocably lost. So lost that it received its very own entry on the Lost Media Wiki last year, a fact I’m mentioning just because.
It’s an old movie barely teetering on the explosion of the internet era and at the very beginning of Wan’s, Whannell’s, and Young’s cinematic careers, in fact multiple sources define it as a student film. It was understandable to me why it was lost from the get-go. These things happen, many films that are still in circulation aren’t available on the internet, let alone forgotten decades-old amateur tapes. But it kept bothering me. As you can see, there is just enough information about the film for it to have a presence on these aggregate websites, a full list of the production team, and even a perfunctory plot summary that was enough to get you hooked. Here it is as it appears on Letterboxd:
A young man who looks like a teenage Billy Zane is being pursued by three trench coated killers, during a shoot out they are transferred to an ‘alternative universe’ with killer clowns, mad scientists, gory zombies and mayhem galore. A mini-classic local exploitation pic.
And with Leigh Whannell featuring in the credits as “Clown / Punk kid”, you just know I absolutely had to know more.
What followed was a months-long research crusade that most well-adjusted people would consider creepy, but all of it was about a commercial property sourced from publicly accessible sources. So if you take nothing else from this essay: Take your internet safety seriously. I’m for real. You wouldn’t like to know how deep even a snot-nosed amateur like me can go armed with only a search engine. And I wasn’t even willing to cross some lines and spend too much money on this endeavor.
In lieu of a tidy collection of discoveries, I’m going to present this… thing as a personal narrative. Keep in mind my initial dive into this mess took place nearly three years ago and I did it in brief spurts while balancing a full-time job. I encourage you to click and explore links and footnotes as they come up, some jumps from topic to topic and references will seem nonsensical otherwise, but I did my best to make the story flow as well as it is possible.
I recall exhausting every option on every search engine typing in “Stygian (2000)” and the most fruitful results were a report in Senses of Cinema on MUFF 2000 featuring a brief look at the film and Shannon Young’s entry on the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers (MIF) database. The MIF writeup seemed especially promising as it featured previous coverage Young’s films, including Stygian, have received. What particularly excited me was a mention of a Fangoria #192 article; A magazine with such a cult following has nearly all of its issues documented somewhere, somehow. I even tracked down the issue it reportedly appeared in, only to be disappointed about having to download some shady file format reader and left to satisfy myself with some scans of American Psycho and Buffy the Vampire Slayer articles. It soured my hopes about the credibility of the already very sparse sources but surely someone just made a mistake here, a possibility I’m raising just because.
In my exasperation, I started to truly put the cart before the horse. I was watching some sort of YouTube video about lost media also from either the late 90s or early 00s and the creator mentioned he went looking for clues on the Usenet archives - a sort of precursor to internet forums before the internet as we know it - and thought, hey, that couldn’t hurt. But it did! As it turned out, Stygian is also the name of a board game and like five indie metal bands, as far as I could gather. I had to wade through hundreds of pages of posts manually since there was no way to refine my search or preview the contents of posts. I started thinking all hope was lost when - bingo! Some guy calling himself gore boy (lol) was searching for it in 1999 saying it was filmed last year. It’s not much, but it felt like an adrenaline hit rivaling a parachute jump.
It’s an important piece of the puzzle to me because dates can and do get confused, especially for niche releases and after all this time: Most sources to this day claim Stygian was released in 2000. Multiple, like the aforementioned Senses of Cinema and MFF, say 1998 and MIF for some reason say 1999. If we unilaterally agree we are looking for the 2000 MUFF release, then the 1998 MFF one is extra hella mega lost, since it was stated on the MUFF website that the film was re-edited and had its soundtrack completely changed for its second debut.
This was pretty much the extent of what I could dig up at the time, but by then my passion was sufficiently fueled and my frustration was mounting. Everywhere I looked were brick walls - ancient websites that expected their reader to be an Australian in 2000 who could catch the film at the festival and thus didn’t see fit to give anything away past an appetizing taste of the plot. So, in the most polite way possible, I crossed one of the lines I don’t like to cross in media research: I contacted the creator.
And this is where the Lost Media Wiki comes into play. I only discovered this by accident, having remembered this whole Stygian shebang in conversation with friends recently, but the Wiki now claims one of the biggest milestones for any aspiring academic.
My first citation2. Number six, thank you very much. It’s a Reddit post I wrote including everything I dug up and later edited for posterity to include the fact that I spoke to Shannon Young. What is funny to me is that they didn’t even source the later, better post I made as my last Hail Mary at the time. But hey, they didn’t even take the time to make the 1998 vs 2000 distinction. Amateurs.
For whatever reason I don’t have access to that Reddit account anymore so even if I wanted to respond to any queries there, I can’t. So consider this me speaking directly to the Lost Media Wiki contributor who wrote the entry on Stygian: I am not alleging anything. At the risk of sounding like a dickhead who’s full of themself, I am simply reporting on the conversation I had with Shannon Young.
Two things remain true: First is that I got a legal disclaimer at the bottom of his response warning me not to share what he wrote. As a person who is absolutely not well-versed in law and just a nice guy in general I am going to honor that. And second is that Stygian is not getting released to the masses again, at least as far as Young is concerned, but that much can be gathered from his public statements. Even if he didn’t provide me with a smoking gun of what the fuck exactly Stygian is about so I can quit this whole nonsense, he was still very nice and I consider him a cool filmmaker. Razor Eaters (2003) is a doozy that could warrant an entire deep dive of its own and his new film Stricken releases this year, so if you’re an Aussie make sure to catch it while I’m left to hope it’ll get some international release. I will also state in no uncertain terms that as polite and non-pushy as I was, I was still crossing a line - don’t bother Shannon Young or anyone else who was involved with the film for that matter.
In any case, the sheer absurdity of being featured on the Lost Media Wiki launched me right back into the depths of existential hell that is Stygian, if only because it reminded me I was once so nauseatingly close to it as to exchange emails with its actual writer/producer/director.
Phase #2: 2023-2024
At this point, I had some experience playing this game, so I restarted my investigation at the beginning instead of instantly jumping into ancient archives and frantically searching for magazine scans.
Firstly, the captures of the MUFF website to this day remain the best source on everything Stygian-related.
It’s a shame that the pictures are now broken, but most everything else is a goldmine: plot description, specs, production anecdotes, a list of previous coverage, and leads on further distribution. Two images also survived the old web apocalypse alongside their descriptions, a look at a set piece and an actor in costume and prosthetics. Crunchy, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Secondly, I managed to dig up the MFF 1998 pamphlet, which is a great find for anybody interested in niche Australian culture or graphic design from the 90s - it is gorgeous. Anyway, here’s the star of this show:
I can’t explicitly confirm the image is from the film, but from context clues and what I know of the plot this seems like one of them biker mutants that haunt the world of Stygian’s Exile. Perhaps Bombhead, the character Shannon Young dressed as for the MFF march?
Thirdly, there’s this:
It’s a screenshot from Leigh Whannell’s old blog, all of the links on it are broken now so this post can’t be viewed beyond the blurb. I can’t even be sure it’s Stygian he’s talking about, although the chances of it being anything else are slim. Here at Unsafe Pin there is no room for dishonesty: I’m only including it to feel a brief moment of camaraderie with this weird guy and so you can see Stygian described as ‘epic’ in Comic Sans.
Here I hit another wall, but not before spending literal hours on ABC TV Recovery’s delightfully Y2K website. Nothing else was digitally archived anywhere I could access it and what was left was physical media. I’m not delusional enough to believe that tapes of nearly thirty-year-old Australian TV and radio shows would fall into my hands, but the magazines still presented a faint glimmer of hope. The problem here is that I still have some standards - I’m not waiting for an overpriced overseas rag where a tiny mention of Stygian may or may not appear (After the Fangoria incident I developed trust issues) and that I don’t find interesting at all besides.
But, as is often the case for gambling addicts, just as I was getting tired and started considering quitting, my luck suddenly began to turn. After that Screen Rant article from Footnote 2, I began wondering what else I missed because I just assumed there was nothing new to find on the very surface of the web. Lo and behold, an Instagram post from 31 July 2023 quoting Fangoria #203.
Huh? What of my trust issues then? Well, the MIF mistyped, mixing up the May 2000 issue (#192) with the May 2001 one, and nobody noticed for eighteen years. I was beating myself over the head even as I was jumping with glee, because of course! 2001 was the year they were shopping around for overseas releases after all, it makes absolute sense this is when Stygian would surface in American media. It felt like seeing Holy Mary’s face in a bowl of cereal.
This is no short blurb or passing shoutout either, I was graced with a full-page interview with James Wan and Shannon Young. It honestly sent chills down my spine reading Young in 2001 say “Look at New Zealand: They’re a small country, and they managed to produce Peter Jackson. What are we doing? We’re hoping we might be Australia’s Peter Jacksons. Who knows?” Well, congratulations to one of you!
Here’s a longer excerpt to archive some interesting details where they can be accessed more easily:
“Describing Stygian as “a road movie that veers into violent fantasy,” Young enthusiastically reveals that “we kill off all our lead characters halfway through the film - two of whom are innocent good guys and three are bad guys. The five then cross to this alternate world, and the story changes completely.” <…>
Essentially, two characters unwittingly take possession of an object that is being sought by a triple-threat team of serial killers who will stop at nothing to regain it. The chase is then unexpectedly transposed into another dimension that parallels our own. “This otherwordly maze is a cityscape called Exile,” Young explains. “It’s like Purgatory, where the world’s scumbags find themselves when they die. They’re still physical - they can kill and be killed - the idea being that when they land there, they could be there for centuries.”
Stygian also works in the monstrous concept of the three killers facing their fears and becoming physically transformed by the experience. Amidst a slew of zombified extras, the film presents three unique examples of feisty malevolence: an ax-wielding killer clown; a biker with a burst face whose helmet is attached to his head with barbed wire; and a black-caped vision of death with mechanical syringes for fingers.”
There are few more complicated paths in this quest that do not neatly fit anywhere but perhaps here. The first is Fatal Visions. My faith reignited by the discovery of the Fangoria article, I once again zeroed in on the magazine titles covered in MUFF and one caught my eye. Fatal Visions was a Melbourne hardcore horror and trash cinema fanzine active in the 80s and 90s and is locally considered somewhat of a tastemaker in the genre. Stygian’s name featured so prominently on its 1998 cover, it’s as if it was calling my name and the whole magazine explicitly appeals to my interest in weird horror and oddities from the past. The cost of the volume covering the issues from 1990 to 1998 was also frankly peanuts. The stars aligned in just the right way for this movie to finally get to my wallet and I ordered Fatal Visions: The Golden Age 1990-1998.
But don’t hold your breath, Stygian’s not there. Still a very worthy purchase though, I might have to do a little history of Fatal Visions one day. I got in touch with the lead editor Michael Helms, but if you haven’t noticed the publishing date of this leviathan, the majority of this new research and my attempt to reach out took place over the hectic holiday season. Nobody wants to deal with pesky amateurs begging for three-decades-old articles during Christmas shopping. So no dice.
Looking on the bright side, Fatal Visions is a discovery on its own: It’s one of these things I would’ve just not known about at all if it wasn’t for this project, and isn’t that sort of charming? Now I’m deeply invested in a subculture from a continent I’d never been to and that fully developed before I was born. And Michael Helms is a great guy, for his effort you can bless him and the legacy of Fatal Visions with a purchase of the zine anthology or a movie from their sister video label. There is an alternate present I can imagine very clearly where Fatal Visions has faded into obscurity and was relegated to dusty boxes in childhood bedrooms of now middle-aged horror fanatics, but it hasn’t. And that is a massive cause for celebration of people who not only work to keep it alive but continue to build new projects upon its foundation.
The second is the existence of Siren Visual Entertainment. Stygian’s profile on the MUFF website claimed the film was slated to be distributed by that company, but from a quick glance at all of the captures of their DVD catalog that didn’t seem to materialize for whatever reason. In any case, Siren seems to be quite a beloved Australian anime distribution company. They were also bought out and shut down about five years ago. Now, obviously, I’m no big part of the Aussie anime scene so I could be wrong, but again it seems like I stumbled onto a case of a precious yet forgotten piece of history. Siren was a mix of video nasties and anime, gleefully corrupting impressionable youths with titles like Cannibal Holocaust and Tomie, and yet it’s an absolute piece of nothing today. It was cherished and even somewhat revered, but I had to dig real hard to even find out it existed. It’s like the visage of Stygian is staring back at me wherever I look.
Phase #3: Past
You may notice that at this point Stygian is not so much a movie as it is a couple of images and a mish-mash arrangement of dates, descriptions, and interviews. Not unlike how Socrates, as looming as he is over the entirety of Western philosophy, is just a collection of writing by people who are not him. See! I got us back on this track, joke’s on you. And Stygian does loom over quite a few people.
It’s James Wan’s directorial debut, someone who is an unshakeable staple in horror cinema today, earning a place for his name among Wes Craven, Clive Barker, and Sam Raimi. It’s also Leigh Whannell’s actorial debut and he would go on to be just as prolific as a multi-hyphenate, you don’t need me to sing his praises again. It’s no coincidence that the only buzz the film generates now is because of its relation to the two (The Lost Media Wiki article has ‘lost James Wan film’ in its title, for god’s sake). I’m a bigger fan of Whannell than Wan, but the outcome’s all the same. This act of underlining a particular name in a project signals to me not only why Stygian is lost, but a variety of complicated feelings I have about it.
Here’s one - it’s only natural as a creator to want to keep your amateur cringe dead and buried. I have no doubt that Stygian being lost and forgotten helps Wan and Whannell sleep soundly at night, the powerhouses with reputations to protect that they are. There is plenty of their early cringe out and available right now. To atone for my crimes of being a rose-tinted-glasses fan in my writing before, here’s a short and incomplete chronological writeup of Top Leigh Whannell and James Wan L Moments You Can Watch Now: Dead Silence (2007) was fairly described by Whannell as “The Hellish Experience of Making a Bad Horror Film”, Death Sentence (2007) is borderline unwatchable, Doggie Heaven (2008) sucks in every imaginable way beyond it having a tasteless sexual assault joke, and Crush (2013) is a humiliation to have your name be in the credits for. They don’t need another mess clouding their professional presence. So I get it, okay? I don’t want my half-baked novels or Voltron fanart from 2015 broadcasted to millions of people and I don’t even feel good about my horrid essays from three years ago being available to a few dozen either.
But this air of embarrassment around Stygian from its creators (Wan’s only alleged comment about it that I could dig up being “it shouldn’t be seen by anyone :)”) is frankly incongruent with both the fact that the film is award-winning and that us Y2K grime fetishists will watch any piece of garbage and love it. Frankly, at their level of notoriety what I would do is release this piece of shit on some nicely designed limited edition DVDs and hold an exclusive viewing in the Paris catacombs. It feels like a free pile of money sitting right in front of them, but they’re standing with their back turned to it. It’s not exactly an active effort to sanitize history, no one is going out of their way to hide anything here, but it leaves the same tangy taste in my mouth.
I expected this paragraph here to be a discussion of the material cost of film production and my discomfort around basing this whole search around the fact Stygian is a “James Wan film” (or, to me, a “Leigh Whannell film”) because that means other people who worked on it are not getting credit, especially with the movie being so utterly buried. If I’m being pedantic, it’s not even correct from a director-centered perspective, as then it would be a “James Wan and Shannon Young film”. But after looking into the Stygian IMDB discussion board archive a little more it appears like a moot point: There’s a nearly equal number of people looking to watch Stygian and of those who claim to have seen/worked on it calling it utter garbage. What made me scrap this section entirely is a comment saying Stygian is so bad one person kept it off their CV. What is the point of earnestly discussing the labor ethics of small vs big filmmakers and losing vs preserving films when even the people who allegedly made the damn thing wouldn’t see it as a worthy pastime? It’s frankly depressing. I’m depressed. Not only that people as far back as 2005 were looking for this thing and got dust, but that the rare animals who have seen it unanimously rule it’s not only awful, but commits the cardinal sin of being boring.
The question one might have while reading this is “Why?” Why work this hard for some student film from Australia that everybody finds not worth the hassle? I’ve gotten this politely worded to me on Reddit in the form of people saying that the creators clearly don’t want it available, so maybe I should tone it down a notch. So I’ll restate what I said on Reddit and many places else already: Paradoxically, I don’t want to see the film that bad. If the creators decide to release it someday I’ll be elated beyond words, but I understand the circumstances of its loss and the reasons for its continuous obscurity very intimately at this point. All I want is somebody who has seen it to tell me, finally, after literal years, their closest recollection of it. My personal Socrates as written by Plato - if we can’t have the man, let’s at least preserve the next best thing.
According to the Library of Congress, seventy-five percent of silent-era American films are lost. It’s a fact that seems obvious when you think about it - reels are fragile and movies were seen as largely disposable - but nonetheless instills a sense of existential dread. Especially in the age of the internet, I was raised with a promise that nothing will be lost ever again. And yet it does, and not even in the way where it’s out of sight, shells of lost things haunt the web taunting anybody who dares go looking with broken links and ‘no results’ pop-ups. This is why we have wikis with thousands of dedicated searchers, I imagine. There is even less rhyme or reason to what survives in the theater of the web than there was in literal cinemas during the silent era, a movie by wildly popular filmmakers perishes while somebody’s forgotten home video of family Christmas stays very well alive on some server collecting dust and pittance from some bank account. Being so lost that nobody remembers your name seems like a kinder alternative in this light.
So I guess what I’m looking for in Stygian is an alleviation of this existential nightmare - that history is not a tireless archival project preserving every grain of sand in the Sahara but a devastating force bulldozing everything in its way that doesn’t have its roots gripping hard enough. The irony isn’t lost on me that every time I got obsessed with being the hero who would eventually excavate this unholy grail, it was a very tumultuous period in my life. The first time around I was utterly aimless, preparing to apply to university a whole year later than all of my peers to god knows what program. My entire sense of self was pretty devastated by my very-bad-completely-no-good pandemic senior year. Now I’m halfway through my bachelor's degree and again completely at a loss of what to do afterward. It’s particularly upsetting because unlike James Wan and Leigh Whannell, some of us will only be remembered by the things that, eventually, are so bad they shouldn’t be seen by anyone ( :) ). I don’t think I can pull my bootstraps up high enough to suddenly explode into a franchise and become a household-name millionaire. My claim to fame right now is a Lost Media Wiki citation. And, well, this Substack.
Phase #4: Future
I could’ve written a clean and short profile of what Stygian is without narrativizing every stage of my process into a 5000-word monstrosity. But that would’ve been emotionally equivalent to lying. I would be amputating the beating heart of my work. We can’t choose what we care about, because if we did I would’ve learned C++ or written an actual novel by now. Instead, despite its age, jank, and utter lack of utility, I care about Stygian.
In any case, I believe it’s important to point out here where it will stick out that despite all the shots I took at the quality of Stygian and many other properties, preservation should not depend on any sort of “value”, be it emotional, artistic, educational, whatever. As soon as you start splitting hairs about what makes a piece of art “worthy” of preservation, you are already on a slippery slope. There’s plenty of space for everything, from Guillaume Geefs’s Lucifer to Lucifer Valentine.
This was a long journey for me. Emotionally draining, as you can observe. For a long time, I expected to close on a bittersweet note, seeing that I didn’t find much of anything except bits and scraps despite spending weeks parsing through every available lead. But good things come to those who wait and, as it turns out, I left the real kicker for last.
When I ordered the Fatal Visions anthology I figured that since I’m already in this deep I might as well pick up something else. It’s based on an intriguing message that taunted me for a while left by Shannon Young on that Stygian IMDB discussion forum:
Rationally, I understood this is most probably bogus. If footage from this lost movie people were already searching for eighteen years ago just sat undisturbed on a widely available DVD, someone would’ve already gotten it and spread the word around. However, throughout this journey I developed a bit of a completionist streak, so I said ‘fuck it’ and ordered Razor Eaters, if only to signal it as a dead end for other seekers to come. Then I missed its arrival in the Netherlands while I was on Christmas break back home, then I realized I can’t get the DVD player I have here working, had to order an external DVD player, and then its arrival got delayed. And here we are now.
Since you’re already no doubt shivering in anticipation (and tired of my endless yapping) I’ll cut to the chase: I’m probably the only person right now in knowing possession of footage from Stygian, outside of its creators.
Forty seconds of glory3. Mr. Young, I doubted the veracity of your claims from the moment that I read that comment last year until literally an hour ago but I am on my hands and knees saying mea culpa. And I will also take the opportunity to gloat: It was just sitting there and no one else but me bothered to check? I’m going out and buying myself a bottle of champagne tonight.
As elated as I am to leave you on this triumphant note, there’s still work to be done. We have to work to preserve the things we love. In spite of Socrates’s idea that a spoken word is better than a written one, we have to write things down. We have to keep building our own Socrates here, folks. Here is a compilation document of every Stygian-related item both found and lost, feel free to poke around the links, see if you can find something yourself. And find your own lost little weird thing to be obsessed with for years on end! This is not a suggestion, it’s a command.
Happy hunting!
There are going to be multiple acronyms including the words ‘Melbourne’ and ‘Film’ thus looking like the same damn acronym. I’m genuinely sorry in advance.
This is actually (probably) not true! My buddy Rozan pointed out the existence of this Screen Rant article that I completely missed. It was published on December 28 2022 and quotes that same Reddit post, while the LMW article was last edited in October 2023 and all the citations were retrieved around the same time. This is not a smoking gun because I don’t have and don’t wanna make an account (lol) so I can’t see the history of the edits. Thus, I’m still giving LMW the honor because I like their work and they don’t try to pass off my paraphrasing of Young as a direct quote from him like Screen Rant does. Yay independent media archival projects, boo bad citing practices from supposed professionals. And thanks Rozan!
First: Forgive my patchy editing. Second: I, unlike the Australian government, highly endorse Razor Eaters and demand you go purchase your own copy of the DVD. It’s a good watch and the entire making-of documentary is fascinating. Go hike up those prices!
Fantastic, thank you!