When a creator invents a fairly consistent set of rules, images, and characters in his or her fiction, often they get referred to collectively as a "mythos" (like the Cthulhu Mythos) or a "verse" (like the Whedonverse). Kelly has said explicitly that there are interconnected ideas underpinning his cult hit Donnie Darko, weirdo political epic Southland Tales, and forthcoming movie The Box (opening tomorrow). Kelly's movies are deliberately crafted to remain open to many interpretations. But there are a few consistent themes that form the shadowy pillars of what I've come to think of as the Darko Mythos.

time travel

In Donnie Darko, the half-mad protagonist Donnie is given a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel by one of his teachers. Reading it, he realizes that he's accidentally entered a "tangent universe" created by a rift or portal in space-time. Tangent universes diverge from reality very dramatically, are extremely unstable, and eventually come to an abrupt end. It appears that Donnie may have entered the tangent universe when a jet engine crashes into his bedroom while he's out sleepwalking with shady figure in a bunny suit named Frank (who turns out to be a figure from Donnie's future). Donnie lives in the tangent universe for a month, then travels back in time to the moment when the jet engine crashes into his room - only this time, he's in the bed. His death allows several other characters to live, and it's possible that they remember the tangent universe in dreams.

Critics have suggested that Southland Tales may also be set in a tangent universe, because the graphic novels accompanying the film describe several of the characters traveling through space-time rifts. The movie begins with two characters, Roland and Boxer, driving through a rift and traveling back in time for an hour. Southland Tales also tells the story of an alternate United States which has been attacked with nukes and hit by an energy crisis nearly as dire as peak oil. It's possible this entire vision of the United States is a tangent universe, which is destroyed at the end of the movie when the twins Ronald and Roland Tavener rise above Los Angeles in a floating ice cream truck and touch their hands together.

Time travel, in the Darko Mythos, is associated with relatively short-lived, parallel worlds headed for an apocalypse.

water flows through everyone and everything

As Kelly told us earlier today, he includes a lot of water imagery in his work because he thinks it represents a force that connects humans with each other and the water-logged Earth itself. In Donnie Darko, many of the characters (including Donnie) sprout long, watery tentacles that emerge from their chests. These watery appendages are connected with the way people move through time, and they are sometimes depicted as tunnels. You could call them souls, or simply a representation of the water that every human - no matter how despised or despicable - carries within them.

Water plays a role in Southland Tales as well. A crazed inventor at the Treer Corporation has created something called "fluid karma" that uses quantum particles to generate energy. It's touted as a replacement for oil, but also seems to be causing rifts in space-time.

Look out for water symbolism in The Box, too. A very strong theme in the Darko Mythos is that all human beings are connected. Every death leads to someone else's survival, and every crime is counterbalanced by an act of (sometimes bizarre) justice. People transform each other's lives across time and vast distances without realizing it.

mirror worlds

One of the iconic moments in Donnie Darko is when Donnie looks into the mirror and sees Frank in his bunny suit. There are several scenes where we look out of the mirror into Donnie's face, and watch him pounding against the mirror with his fists or a knife as the surface of the mirror ripples like water. In Southland Tales, the mirroring is even more bizarre. Two of the main characters are twins (or possibly just alternate versions of the same guy) named Ronald and Roland Tavener. Meanwhile, a character named Boxer (played by Dwayne "Rock" Johnson) has traveled back in time via a tangent universe, but his original self has died (which you see in this image of him looking at his own dead body).

In a world riddled with alternate universes, where everybody is connected, it's no surprise that doubling is a major aspect of the Darko Mythos. The mirror represents another version of the self, or perhaps just an imperfect way of looking at yourself. Either way, mirrors in the Darko Mythos remind us that we can never truly know ourselves. Even when we stare right into our faces, we see something mysterious.

apocalypse and redemption

The Darko Mythos possesses what you might call an agnostic form of Christianity. The trajectory of tangent universes seems to be an apocalypse that also inspires redemption: One of the notable aspects of Donnie Darko is that nearly every character is redeemed in some way, partly as a result of Donnie's actions. Even the seemingly-evil bunny Frank finds redemption in the end, when we discover that he's just a regular kid whose death in the tangent universe has turned him into one of the "manipulated dead."

Southland Tales is in some ways a retelling of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament, so it's packed with Christian imagery. But it's also full of psychic porn stars and sympathetic neo-Marxists, who seem to have claims to truth that are equal to the claims of the Bible. I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd venture to say that Kelly's view of redemption is a surreal blend of Christian spiritual love, carnal connection, and Marxist social justice. There is never any specific "God" in Kelly's work, but characters find something akin to godliness when they see and acknowledge their primal connection to other people.

Holiness and redemption in the Darko Mythos often involve a character or characters sacrificing themselves to save other people or to make the world a better place. These are not sacrifices to appease a Christian God, but rather to affirm the connectedness of all humanity. These are sacrifices even a neo-Marxist could get behind, because they aren't about going to heaven, but instead preserving the physical, carnal, human world.

military industrial entertainment complex

Southland Tales is about what happens to the United States when Republicans expand the USA-Patriot Act massively in the wake of nuclear attacks, and then institute a special surveillance agency called USIDent. It's also about how Hollywood movies and reality shows on the internet have intermingled to create a giant war of propaganda and counter-propaganda fought entirely on screen. At the same time, there are hints of government experiments with space-time that may have led to the surreal world of the movie itself, where neo-Marxists and internet porn stars are trying to subvert the surveillance state.

In Donnie Darko, the fate of the tangent universe hinges on a massive airplane engine that travels through time and eventually crushes Donnie. Even though his characters wade through mirrors and erupt with time-traveling spiritual essences, Kelly's Darko Mythos is packed with images drawn from the world of industrial technology.

You can expect to see more of this in The Box, whose main characters are part of the NASA Langley Research Center community. (In fact, The Box has a Space Age era origin in a Richard Matheson short story called "Button, Button" published in 1970.)

The Darko Mythos is also saturated with entertainment technology, from movies to the Web. During one of the pivotal moments in Donnie Darko, Frank opens a portal in a movie screen where Evil Dead is playing, and we see time/water swirling around in the center of an image from Sam Raimi's classic horror movie. One of the main characters in Southland Tales, internet porn reality star Krysta has developed precognition and written about the future of the world in a weird screenplay called "The Power," which is about a porn star trying to save the world (this subplot is mostly in the graphic novels associated with Southland Tales, not in the movie).

Ultimately the Darko Mythos is exploring mysticism in a world ruled by industry and the pseudo-rationalism of high tech propaganda. His characters, through excursions into madness and horror, always discover that beneath the trappings of modern life there lurks a primal spirit that connects all of us - across time and between mirror universes. It's a spirit that flows like water through everyone, from pornographers and NASA engineers to Christians and snotty teenage girls in the Sparkle Motion dance troupe. It's even in you.

Salon's summary of Southland Tales helped me immeasurably in writing this.

At the premiere for The Box we stole a few minutes with director Richard Kelly and finally got to the bottom of a lot of questions that have been plaguing us for years, like his constant use of water imagery, what it's like coming back after Southland Tales and what he really thinks about the Darko sequel made without him.

Why are you drawn to science fiction?

I think that science fiction is something that can capture the imagination of any human being, in the way that it lets us speculate and analyze the mysteries of the world. We live in a world that's filled with a lot of mystery. Fundamentally it gets to the heart of why we pay fourteen bucks to sit in a movie theater for two hours with a bunch of strangers. It's to discover new mysteries. And you know, with something like Avatar coming out, it sort of helps me reclaim the childhood sense of discovery I got from Jim Cameron when I saw Alien or when I saw Terminator for the first time, seeing the trailer for that film brings back all of those memories and makes me realize why I got into this business so… I think science fiction is where some of the most exciting stories are told.

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden are seen getting water dumped all over them in this movie, you've used water before as a supernatural element, can you tell us what that's all about?

Well I think sometimes the concept of saltwater coming from the ocean and the ocean being the driving force of the planet and our bodies being made of saltwater almost entirely… there's something fascinating about embracing that, the essence of it as a higher intelligence, a higher technology of some sort and it allows you to portray a higher intelligence in a visual way that provokes a lot of discussion and interpretation for audiences. So that's sort of been the reason behind my thought process. People may not understand that when they first see it but it plants a seed in your mind. It's something that we actually did with Donnie Darko and a little bit in Southland Tales so hopefully people are kind of connecting the dots.

What was it like directing this movie after doing Southland Tales?

It was a pleasure for me to have a simple concept to embrace, where I could still design an elaborate mystery behind it all and to try to design an elababorate roller coaster ride. And also to work with intimate characters and… really it's a three-character melodrama, it's the husband and the wife and the stranger who knocks on their door. And there's something wonderful about that simplicity and also being able to work within the studio system… is such a relief for me. To know that my film is going to get released and here we are, red carpet, and there's people here! So I'm very grateful for that.

One last question, have you seen S. Darko [the sequel to Donnie Darko]?

I have not seen it.

Are you planning to?

No. I kind of... it's not… I didn't have anything to do with it and I just.. kind of want the movie to exist in my heart the way I made it and I just I won't… I don't have any plans to see it.

The Box is theaters November 6th.

We saw a ton of gorgeous footage, which sort of spelled out the movie's storyline: a man missing half his face comes to visit Norma (Cameron Diaz) in 1976, and offers her a million dollars. All she has to do, to earn it, is press a button on a wooden box in the next 24 hours — and someone she's never met will die. Her husband Arthur (James Marsden) is a scientist, and he's skeptical about the box, which appears to be just a plain wooden box with a glass dome and a button inside. And eventually, she winds up pressing the button, and then regrets it. Norma and Arthur track down the family of the person who died as a result of their button-pressing, and try to give them the money, to no avail. The movie is based on a short story by Richard Matheson, but Darko takes the original concept and runs with it.

More importantly, the footage we saw was like Donnie Darko, only more grown up and suburban. There was lots of trippy imagery, including people moving weirdly in unison, and the images look color-enhanced and creepy. There are some of those liquidy surreal globs that you'll recognize from Darko, and clearly Diaz and Marsden fall into a weird, scary world as a result of their decision to press the button. The film is scored by Arcade Fire.

In the press conference after the panel, Kelly told us that the movie puts Arthur and Norma through a more extreme test in the film's second and third acts, which push them to the outer limits (so to speak) of their very being. And the movie's ending is incredibly intense and emotional, as they're tested to the brink.

So who's behind this weird moral test, of pressing a deadly button for money? The biggest clues came from Diaz. (And this is a huge spoiler, so beware.) In the press conference, she talked about a higher power that's overseeing humans and trying to decide whether we deserve to go on living, as a species. But she got even more specific in the actual panel, referring to Martians who are pulling the strings. There's an existential question: "Are we alone, or is there somebody else out there pushing the button as well?" says Diaz. Also, Kelly says the movie ties in with specific events at NASA in 1976, where Arthur works.

Kelly adds that the movie is his most personal, and the film's main characters are based on his parents. He set it in the 1970s, because you couldn't have a film about "somebody you don't know" dying set today, with all the social networks and search engines. "I didn't want to write the scene where [the main characters] google arlington steward and then tweet it," says Kelly.

The film is intended to be a Hitchcockian suspense drama of the sort Kelly's parents would like, with no swearing in it whatsoever.

Adds Kelly:

I'd love to do bigger films, to play with big toys like motion capture and 3D within the studio system. But this is still the most personal film I've ever made and it's within my sensibility. I'd like to make a movie that makes more than $1 million.

He added in the press conference afterwards that it's "a real relief to know that I'm making a film that's going to be on a big screen and in a lot of theaters." He was able to navigate the studio system in a way that allowed him to make exactly the movie he wanted to make.

So we were curious about the symbolism of this random button, with its power to kill and enrich — since the movie is set during the Cold War, and that's when the source material comes from, we asked Kelly if the button is sort of linked back to the fear of nuclear war. And he responded:

The button can be a symbol of many things. It's a very pronounced metaphor. What Matheson designed, with his short story, feels like it's from myth. It feels like an old myth... and that was waht was so fascinating about it for me. It's just a wooden contraption, with a glass dome and a red button on it, and it's not something fancy. It doesn't have elaborate technology. But there's something about its simplicity, that makes your head kind of explode with the possibilities of what it could mean, and I think you can draw parallels to all sorts of things, [like] the red button that our president has that will launch nuclear missiles, or pressing a button to vote for a politician or launch a bomb.

Adds Marsden: "Or end a friendship via email. Hit send." (He makes a sort of "boom" noise.) And Diaz compares it to the "easy button," which you can get at office supply stores. "How easy is it, really?" asks Diaz.

But when you come right down to it, Kelly says it's foolish to blame a piece of technology for our own violent acts — technology makes it easier to kill another person without looking him or her in the eye, unlike the more personal, visceral feeling of stabbing someone.

Additional reporting by Annalee Newitz.

S. Darko is directed by Chris Fisher, whose main claim to fame is directing one episode of Chuck. It's nowhere near as spooky and cool as the first film, and in many ways is a bad retelling of Donnie Darko except with a female protagonist on a road trip whose evil bunny (yes the evil bunny comes back) is a Gulf War veteran. She's also menaced by some churchy types, and there are a few clumsy efforts to show us that Christianity is bad - or maybe just a few Christians are bad, or maybe they're just weird.

Hard to say, when the plot is mostly focused on showing us Samantha looking hot in teeny shorts or dresses. There's time travel, of course, and those blobby Abyss-looking things pop out of people's chests just like in the first movie. But it all feels very rote until this scene, which you can see here, when the world starts to end and Samantha happens to be on a really awful date. There's a fun originality to this scene, where her date's flailing efforts at making out are nearly as scary (if not scarier) than the "tesseract" and a mysterious bombardment from space.

If you loved the original Darko flick, I hesitate to recommend this sequel. Check it out for completism, but don't expect it to take you to strange new places the way the first movie did.

S. Darko via IMDB

After the critical and commercial misstep that was Southland Tales, writer-director Kelly is looking for a comeback - and when your cinematic strengths are in science fiction and horror, it's hard to think of a firmer foundation than adapting from Richard Matheson, whose 1970 short story "Button, Button" provides the basis for the The Box.

The film follows Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a couple in 1976 struggling with marital and financial issues. A mysterious stranger (Frank Langella) gives them a box and a simple proposition: push the button on the box and they get a million dollars… but someone they don't know will die. This is the second major adaptation of Matheson's story, following a 1986 episode of The New Twilight Zone.

According to a post on Kelly's Myspace, the film was shot last March and completed post-production at the end of 2008. The extensive, eight-month post-production period was due to the 300 visual effects shots the film required, which is triple what Kelly used in Southland Tales. Warner Brothers, the film's distributor, considered releasing the film this March, but all parties involved quickly agreed it made much more sense to put the film out during Halloween season, hence the release date of October 30, 2009.

Kelly writes that this is his most personal film yet, which, considering how weird and uncompromising his first two movies were, must really be saying something. Fans of sweeping baroque pop indie-rock (guilty as charged) will be interested to know that Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, and their frequent collaborator Owen Pallett provided over eighty minutes of score for the film. There will also be music from the Grateful Dead, Derek and the Dominos, Wilson Pickett, The Marshall Tucker Band, and Scott Walker. The film clocks in at an hour and fifty-five minutes, including the end credits.

So how about it? I've got to admit that Donnie Darko left me cold when I watched it a few years ago, and I've yet to summon up the raw courage necessary to work through Southland Tales. Still, there is a delightful strangeness to Kelly's films, and this does sound rather promising. Is this the sort of commercially viable film with a recognizable cast that can finally introduce the public at large to the insanity of a Richard Kelly movie?

[Richard Kelly's Myspace]

In all fairness, it does seem like the main character is the original actress, Daveigh Chase, who played the sparkle-motion sis to Donnie (and, also a little sidenotey, was that creepy girl that crawled out of the well in The Ring), while the other two CW actors just act smarmy and "homeless crazy" around her.

S. Darko will be released onto DVD April 28th and follows the little sis and her friend Bebop Brownhair or something (I'm not bothering to look it up) on their merry way to the big city to get "discovered." On their scantily-clad road trip the two encounter visions, Ed Westwick's crotch on a bike, and space meteor problems, which detour said journey. Oh and one of them dresses up like a mermaid and another mis-uses the wormhole FX.

Ever since they canceled the panel at NYCC, we've been hellbent on getting to the bottom of this strange DVD release. S. Darko (starring Jackson Rathbone, Ed Westwick Briana Evingan and the original little sister form Daveigh Chase from Donnie) looks like it takes place in the middle of the desert. Perhaps some cigarette-in-sleeve-rolling bad boy wrecks a pretty red car into some sort of bone covered wagon (What the hell are those things all over the car anyways)? Anyway, the main story follows Samantha Darko and her bestie Corey on the road to LA to "make it big" but on the way a meteorite crashes down and the two start to have terrible visions.

S. Darko will be released onto DVD April 28th.

[Briana Evigan Online, Jackson Rathbone Online and Ed Westwick]

The new art shows more of the all-growed-up Samantha Darko, who wants to "make it big" in Hollywood, or somewhere. Sam and her bestie head out of town, following their inner souls, until a meteorite and the Darko issues start to plague little miss S. We'll be bringing you all the deets from the movie's NYCC panel.

The direct-to-DVD sequel, now called S. Darko will be coming out on April 28th from MGM's home entertainment.

The summary, according to the IMDB page is as follows:

S. Darko takes place in the summer of 1995, seven years after the original film. It follows Donnie Darko's younger sister, Samantha (Daveigh Chase), who, in the wake of his death, has found herself at age 17 with a broken family, mired in feelings of insignificance. She and her best friend Corey (Evigan) set off on a road trip to Hollywood in a bid to 'make it big', but their journey is cut short when their car breaks down unexpectedly, leaving them stranded in a small desert town. When a meteorite happens to crash-land nearby, Samantha is plagued by bizarre visions telling of the universe's end and it appears that their breakdown was part of some grander plan. When she finds out she was actually adopted by the Darkos, and that she is in no way related to Donnie, she must face her own demons and, in doing so, save the world and herself.

Bloody Disgusting has the first still from the DVD and shows a disheveled mer-teen all angsted out, from what I can only assume are an overdose of visions and time warps. Click on the picture for a better look.

The trailer will be premiering at this years New York Comic Con and we'll be there front and center to tell you if it heralds the return of Frank. But for now, amuse your self with the teaser.

The main problem is that this movie has been a lame duck in the movie pond, trying to paddle for shore ever since the Cannes Film Festival. Kelly rushed the film into competition there, even though it "wasn't finished," and it got savaged by the critics as a result. Most people who saw it had no idea what was happening with the story, and even The Rock had trouble following along. You know your film is in trouble when braniac former pro-wrestlers lose the plot. Kelly vowed to finish (and fix) the film, adding over 100 visual effects, trimming scenes and having J.T. re-record his voiceover track. Did any of this work help?

L Magazine's film critic Michael Joshua Rowin had a real soft spot for it, saying "Here it is, at last: the worst film of the year." Even New York Times film critic Mahnola Dargis, who seems to be one of the few loners who enjoyed the film to some degree, calls it "messy" Granted, Donnie Darko was called messy and confusing in plenty of reviews when it came out, but it didn't have the albatross of bad Cannes reviews hanging around its neck when it was released. Southland Tales does have that albatross, and these reviews are pulling it under like an anchor. The film is playing in limited release right now, which means if you're near New York or Los Angeles you might have a chance of seeing it, but if you live elsewhere you'll have to pray for a DVD release. With reviews like this, you won't have to wait long.

Review: Southland Tales spins nonsense [AP]
More on Southland Tales [GreenCine Daily]

We say he's been hard at work, because this film premiered at Cannes amidst some pretty dismal reviews. In fact, some of the reviews were so bad that they make the two word review Spinal Tap got for Shark Sandwich look eloquent in comparison.

He's added over 100 visual effects shots to a film that "wasn't ready" for Cannes in an effort to clarify the story. Does that mean that George Lucas was saying that the Star Wars flicks weren't ready when he put them out with all new effects?

We'll let you know if it worked when we're sitting front and center for its November 14th premiere. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plus Sarah Michelle Gellar plus Seann William "Stifler" Scott plus 100 new visual effects shots = we have to see what comes out of this mix. That's not even mentioning the musical number from Justin Timberlake.

Southland has new shots [Sci-Fi Wire]