How many times have we read the warning that reminds us that the film or series we are about to see is the result of fantasy and that any reference to real facts and people is completely random? Very many. For this many were amazed reading at the beginning of the series Swarm a sentence that completely overturns its meaning: “This is NOT a work of fantasy. Any resemblance to real people, dead or alive, or to real events is intentional.” The new series available on Prime Video immediately claims an affinity with reality which is then made explicit in the sixth episode where – without spoilers – the narration suddenly becomes a real mockumentary (or mock documentary) which transports the fictionalized story that has been presented to us up to that point into the real world. But how are the facts really?
Swarm tells of Dre, a young woman so obsessed with a famous pop star, Ni ‘ Jah, to kill anyone who criticizes her on social media. Is there really a serial killer who kills driven by a sort of musical fanaticism? Fortunately no. Andrea “Dre” Greene, presented as real in the sixth episode, he is in every way a fictional character and the entire mockumentary only serves to instill doubt in the viewer, forcing him to wonder if the obsession with some stars, treated as real divinities, can somehow be superimposed on the religious fanaticism that stained ancient history with blood and modern. The fact that fictional pop star Ni’ Jah is openly comparable to Beyoncé it only adds to this sense of creepy and alienating realism.
“We researched for months to find events over a 2 1/2 year period to put our main character into. – declared Al Los Angeles Times the author Janine Narbes – So it’s not entirely a work of fiction. We collected real internet rumors, real murders and combined them with the narration of our main character, Dre. It’s not entirely imaginary.”
It’s not the first time that authors decide to carry on this sort of deception that plays on the ambiguity of the concept of “true story” that is typically served up in Hollywood. The choice made by the Coen brothers for their award-winning 1996 film became iconic Fargo to insert the following caption at the beginning of the film: “What you will see is a true story – The events shown in the film took place in 1987 in Minnesota. At the request of the survivors, fictitious names were used. To respect the victims everything else has been faithfully reported.
Thus, the viewer is immediately called to look at the grotesque characters and the bizarre events that are told to him with a different eye, especially when he is faced with a sudden and crazy explosion of violence. Needless to say, even in this case, Fargo it’s not a true story, except for the fact that it is vaguely inspired by crimes that actually happened. “If the public believes that something is based on a real event, – admitted Joel Coen – this gives you permission to do things that otherwise people could not accept”. The naivety of some characters, the stupidity of certain choices and the very avoidable bloodshed that is shown in the film thus appear to us as the fruit of incest between human fallibility and the cruelty of chaos. However, what’s crazier than reality?
The same narrative device will then be proposed again within the four seasons (the fifth will be released in the coming months) of theanthology series of the same name. In this case, the caption at the beginning of each episode is a tribute to the Coens’ cult film, which underlines the gap between what we believe is real and what really is.
But there is a genre that most of all loves to throw the hook of the “true story”: the horror. There are many horror films that like to propose, right from the promotional campaign, the effective claim “inspired by a true story”. Wording that formally does not mean anything concrete, as is evident when we see it juxtaposed with stories that tell of supernatural creatures that have decidedly little to do with the “real”. The term “inspired” (instead of “trait”), in fact, means that the author more or less freely modified the real factsthus allowing him to insert as many horrific elements as he wishes, however unrealistic they may be.
One of the most popular horror sagas that exploits this narrative trick is the one born in 2013 with the film The Conjuring – The evocation, followed by 9 other films including direct sequels and spin-offs. Started as a dramatization of the events that happened to the royal couple of demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warrenthe series has increasingly distanced itself from it over the years.
A different matter is the one concerning the independent cult of 1999 The Blair Witch Projectwhich became the highest-grossing low-budget film ever ($248.6 million for a production cost of $60,000) thanks in part to a marketing campaign that focused on the presumed realism of the facts narrated. In this case, the story was totally made up, but the film was shot and promoted as if the tragic adventure of its protagonists (the actors not by chance played themselves) had really happened. The film definitively launched the genre of found footage and, above all, that of mockumentary. Narrative technique that, closing the circle of what we initially told, we will find again in the series Swarm.