Is Return to Babylon a haunted movie... or a case of failed viral marketing? YOU DECIDE

So apparently there’s this movie and the film itself is haunted and oooo scary yeah right.

In a nutshell: independent filmmaker Alex Monty Canawati finds some unused 16mm black and white film on the pavement of Hollywood Boulevard(!). He thinks it would be fun to use it to make a movie set in the 1920s and, using a vintage hand-cranked camera, makes Return To Babylon, a film about the scandals involving some of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the time.

And then the weirdness starts.

Cast and crew claim they sensed something was off during filming. Actresses Jennifer Tilly, Maria Conchita Alonso and Debi Mazar said the set had an otherworldly feel and that they felt unseen hands grab them during filming (and no, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t involved in the production). 

As the film was being edited, Canawati says he and his editor began seeing things that really, really shouldn’t have been there. Things like actors’ features morphing into hideous demonic visages and their fingers changing into claws and shadowy figures appearing where they shouldn’t be.

Sounds intriguing, right? Well to me, yes, otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this when I really should be walking Cadbury.

So off to the Google I go. And that’s when I fall down the rabbit hole.

For starters there’s the movie’s IMDB page. There’s a distinct lack of any mention of demons and monsters. Also, note the release year of 2013.

Then we get to a site called returntobabylon.wordpress.com. Yes, a Wordpress blog. With — unless I’ve forgotten how to use the Archives links on a Wordpress site, which I doubt seeing as I had one for the best part of 10 years — literally four entries... all dating from 2008. A full five years before the movie was released. I’m pretty sure that “faking” the publication dates of Wordpress posts can’t be done apparently it can be done. Interesting. Another thing I find interesting is that the only social media share button is for Reddit. No Facebook or Twitter, even though they’d begun polluting the internet a few years before. There’s also no copyright date at the bottom of the blog, which I seem to remember was automatically generated by Wordpress.

The July 2008 post is a transcript of a long interview with Canawati (the others are a teaser trailer and some screenshots). The first part of the interview is a general discussion of the movie’s beginnings, and starts with the sentence: “I recently conducted a telephone interview with filmmaker Alex Monty Canawati to talk about his most resent [sic] feature film, Return To Babylon.” Wait, resent recent? According to IMDB, it hasn’t even been released yet, and won’t be for another five years.

The second part of the interview, subtitled “The fantastic, the incredible, the unexplained…”, deals with the so-called paranormal issues surrounding Return To Babylon. Canawati says:

I’ve had the film studied by many film people and we have all concluded that there is paranormal activity going on; that is most certain.  When you study the film frame-by-frame you can see “morphing” taking place with the actors; morphing does not happen spontaneously … its very costly and time consuming.

 [...] 

Basically, Jonathan, I have a strong amount of paranormal activity; numerous film professionals cannot explain a lot of the images on the film, and countless psychics and mediums in the field of the paranormal have concluded the presence of spirits and ghosts.  There is a strong similarity to famous silent movie icons, such as the original vampire “nosferatu” and the “phantom of the opera.”  You literally see the actors and actresses morph into these images in careful frame-by-frame study.

[...]

I happened to be with a cinematography/photography instructor from BROOKS INSTITUTE OF PHOTOGRAPHY who kept asking me whether I had done any special effects in the viewing of the dailies.

OK... I’ve worked in newspapers for 22 years and although I’ve only ever worked in design with a side order of editing, I know enough about reporting that if one of our reporters turned in a story containing a tenth of the unattributed stuff as these quotes do, they’d be in for a bollocking. 

Newsflash: Simply saying the film’s been studied by numerous film professionals and countless psychics isn’t good enough. Name them, especially the guy from the Brooks Institute (ironically, said institute — actually a photography college — closed in 2016. I guess the countless psychics didn’t see that one coming). It’s called attribution; without it, your statements are worthless as fact. It’s the internet equivalent of “a bloke down the pub told me”. Shit like this is responsible for 90% of Facebook and 100% of Brexit. 

  
Deep breath, think of puppies, keep writing...

This 2008 article in the Worcester, Massachussetts, Telegram talks about how Return To Babylon was to have its public premiere at Cinema Salem in Salem, home of the witch trials, on Halloween of that year. Five years before the official release date on IMDB. And a psychic pops up again, only this time he’s actually named:

The idea for the screening came from Jeffrey Justice, a psychic based in Salem who heard about “Return to Babylon,” contacted Canawati (an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles), and subsequently saw a cut of the movie. “After I had seen Monty’s picture, I knew that working with him in order to introduce ‘Return to Babylon’ to the paranormal community was something I had to accomplish,” Justice wrote in a blog.

I’m gutted to report that I can’t find Justice’s blog, but here’s a blurb about him. And there’s no follow-up story on the Telegram as to how the screening went.

Now we’re off to the Paranormal Corner of NJ.com. In this article from 2015, it describes the film as “a 2011 movie that claims to have captured demonic activity on film while creating the picture”. Wait... 2011? And the defunct Brooks Institute pops up again: “A photographer teacher from the Brooks Institute of Photography said the film ‘breaks all rules of cinema logic’.” Shockingly, he isn’t named. And “photographer teacher”? What? 

Anyway, if you’re still awake keeping count, we now have three years for the movie’s release: 2008, 2011 and 2013.

Also in 2015, weekinweird.com published an article headlined “Deciphering Hollywood’s Scariest Movie: Return to Babylon’s Terrifying Ghosts Caught on Film”.  Leaving aside the claim that Return To Babylon is “Hollywood’s scariest film” on the grounds that otherwise we’d be here all week, the post says that the movie was released in... 2012.  So, 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013. If you’re not thoroughly confused by now, I’m not doing my job.

And now to LA Weekly. Back in the days before it was bought up and gutted by a bunch of Orange County millionaires with next to zero experience in newspapers, it mentioned Return To Babylon in its “Party Pick of the Week” section for August 9, 2013:

Return to Babylon, a contemporary take on pre-talkie flicks that’s set in Old Hollywood, is close to becoming the stuff of Hollywood legend itself. Starring Jennifer Tilly, Maria Conchita Alonso, Tippi Hedren, Debi Mazar, Ione Skye and many more L.A.-based stars and scenesters as silent-film stars, the movie has been on a shelf somewhere for a few years now. It got some traction when it was featured on Biography channel’s My Ghost Story (it was filmed in old L.A. locales rumored to be haunted, and paranormal activity apparently was caught on tape), but most have never seen the completed film. Now filmmaker Alex Monty Canawati is unveiling a new edit for all to see, and to celebrate.

Ah... “the movie has been on a shelf somewhere for a few years now”. From my limited knowledge of Hollywood, I think this is code for “this movie is so crap no one wanted to spend money to distribute it”. So is this where the IMDB release year of 2013 comes from? At this point — frankly, my eyes are killing me right now — I’m happy to go with it.

But a quick callback to the story about finding vintage film on Hollywood Boulevard. According to a comment on unexplained-mysteries.com (from 2010, just to add another year to the mix):

The backstory of this film sends up some red flags for me. The claim of finding a bag of 16mm black & white film on Hollywood Boulevard that just happens to be the type used in a vintage movie camera when the director was thinking about doing a silent film seems a bit too convenient. What a wonderful story to add to the mystique of ‘Return to Babylon’! What are the chances of finding a bag of unopened film of the street? Then figure the odds of it being 16mm b&w? Also, the brand of the film was Ilford. Ilford is a British company that specializes in black & white (excellent film, btw). While not uncommon in the U.S., Kodak is really the first brand one would expect to see.

And one last thing before I publish this to almost universal laughter acclaim. The movie now has an official website that doesn’t involve free blogging software. Here’s the blurb:

Photographed with a hand-cranked camera and scored with music of the Roaring Twenties, this saucy silent film strings together the lives of scandalous Clara Bow (Jennifer Tilly), fiery Mexican film star Lupe Velez (Maria Conchita Alonso) and husband Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Weissmuller, ill-fated Virginia Rappe (Ione Skye) and Fatty Arbuckle, Douglas Fairbanks (Maxwell DeMille), Gloria Swanson (Debi Mazar), Ramon Navarro (Phillip Bloch), Josephine Baker (Rolonda Watts), Rudolph Valentino (Alex Monty Canawati) and a host of others.

No mention of demons? Anyway, scroll to the bottom of the single page(!) and we see:

“Return to Babylon” is not currently available on DVD or BLU-RAY.
The producers plan to have a special screening in 2018 in the Los Angeles area.
Watch this website for news and updates!

So... 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2018. It looks like the movie was shelved for the best part of a decade and Canawati’s now trying to get the funding up for a 2018 release/re-release and is marketing it as a “saucy silent film”. At least he isn’t using Wordpress any more.

And here’s the trailer on YouTube:

Needless to say, comments are disabled. 

So after all that, what’s my take on the parnormal events surrounding Return To Babylon? I have an ever-so-slight feeling that the whole “mysterious demon possession” attempt at viral marketing didn’t work out the way Canawati hoped. The story about “finding” the film, the creepy events on set, the “morphing” of actors’ faces and hands all smack of attempts to generate buzz about and/or money for the movie... none of which appear to have worked. The trouble is, by 2008 we’d all become used to viral marketing tactics. And it does help if the movie is good. So the film was shelved and now he’s taking a different approach to getting it released.

I guess the bigger mystery is why I spent so much time and so many words on this, but it was kind of fun to research and write.