The World Premiere of BT Meza’s debut feature Affection (2025) served as the opening night film for this year’s edition of Screamfest, covering several bases of the horror genre. It begins as an unsettling psychological study of family trauma, loss, and grief, adds elements of body horror, and gradually morphs into a sci-fi narrative that proposes large ideas that I’m sure had at least a few people scratching their heads as they tried to wrap their mind around what those ideas implied. What better way to launch the largest and longest running horror festival in the United States?
Timeloop narratives have become dirigeur in genre circles, but Affection expands that narrative device into what I can only call a replication loop and it does so with admirable economy, using only three actors to make its rounds. Ellie (Jessica Rothe) wakes up in bed beside a man she does not recognize, wanders through a home that is unfamiliar, and discovers that the man Bruce (Joseph Cross) professes to be her husband and that they have a daughter Alice (Julianna Layne), even though she angrily insists otherwise; that she has a different husband and a son, not a daughter. Bruce attributes her disorientation to an accident that has affected her memory and which causes epileptic seizures. He explains to her that cryptomnesiatic references are shaping false memories in her brain and causing her confusion.
But why can’t she remember any of that? Or, more importantly, why doesn’t she believe him?
It’s difficult to write about Affection without undermining its reveals, which I don’t want to do, so I will limit my write-up to what I believe is the moral and philosophical spine of this challenging sci-fi narrative. At 72 years of age, I have lost more than 30 friends, family and significant others, such that over the years I feel that wherever I go I am accompanied by a host of ghosts and—though equally over the years I have learned how sacred the altar of memory is to keeping my loved ones “alive”—there are nights shredded by dread when I ache for the affectionate touch of those I have lost, which reveals—as I have often said—that memory is an unreliable narrator who tells me a story I want to hear, a story that is often more beautiful than true, a story that in its own way tries to keep me in touch with those who have gone to that place where in some way they still exist, but which is undeniably a place where they are not physically present. Memory, therefore, is a narrative construction to guard the heart from despair and to compensate for irreparable absence. To what extent would I go to have back the physical affection of my mother’s caress, the hugs of friends, or the erotic touch of lovers? How far would I search for that physical affection? What available technologies would I use to recover it?
In his press notes for Affection, BT Meza concurs that—although the past remains unalterable, and as much as he would wish to restore a past identity and, thereby, bridge the psychic disjuncture of physical loss—memory and/or creativity are the only tools at hand to suffice. Affection has given him the opportunity to create a story that fuses his emotions and childhood memories into a sci-fi horror narrative, where imagined technologies can create desired results, which is to say that genre at its best, and ideas at their largest, communicate essentially at their human core.
