Written by Shanice Barnes, Staff Writer

If you haven’t heard about the Johnsons, consider yourself lucky. They’re not your average happy-go-lucky family. There’s something quite strange about them.

In 2011, young filmmaker Ari Aster showed what made the Johnsons so strange when he released a very controversial short film entitled, “The Strange Thing about the Johnsons,” touching on incest and molestation. The film has now resurfaced, and the public is talking about the Johnsons once more.

The short film starts with a father bursting in to his son’s room at the wrong time. The young son, Isaiah, was masturbating to a picture. Sidney, the father, saw how embarrassed his son was and explained that what Isaiah was doing was completely normal. Gaining his father’s approval, Isaiah felt a sense of ease, but what Sidney didn’t know was that the picture his son was holding was a picture of him. The son became obsessed with his father, not in a role model way, but in a romantic way.

Years go by and the obsession progresses. Isaiah rapes his father on a regular basis; Isaiah even molested Sidney during his own wedding. This film raises a lot of eyebrows, and the questions that seemed to be on everyone’s mind was why the father didn’t put an end to this infatuation. Was he really so afraid of his son that he couldn’t teach him wrong from right?

Many people found this film really disturbing and hard to watch, but individuals have still made memes of the film mocking the abuse. For some people, this was just plain disgusting, while for others it was their reality. There are instances where incest and molestation occur within someone’s household.

However, most films touch on the complete opposite of what occurred in this film, which is the parent raping the child and not the other way around; that is what made the film harder to digest.

The film left me speechless because as much as I wanted to blame the father for allowing this to happen to him, I also had to put myself in his shoes and try to see things from his point of view. The abuse could have made him crazy or could have caused post-traumatic stress disorder.

One part of the film that seems to have audiences in a frenzy is when the wife, Joan, witnesses her son raping her husband at Isaiah’s own wedding, and she pretends not to know anything about it. How can you watch your son molest his father and not do anything about it?

The writer failed to provide viewers with the reason why the Johnson’s were so afraid of their son. It jumps from Isaiah’s adolescence to adulthood, and as I watched the short film, I couldn’t help but wonder how a grown man could be afraid of his son and allow him to do such vile things. Was the father just as much to blame?

Sidney, unaware that his wife knows about his encounters with their son, tries to inform her through a book entitled “Cocoon Man,” which details what Isaiah did to him. Isaiah eventually finds the copy and burns it. After the family’s new year’s party, Isaiah decides not to go home with his wife but stay at his parents’ home instead. There he found his father in the bath tub and molested him. Sidney’s screams echoed through the hall. The audience sees Joan in the other room, as she turns up the volume of her TV and does nothing to help.

Sidney eventually dies after trying to release “Cocoon Man,” to the world. Running away from his son, Sidney gets hit by a car. The movie ends with Joan finally confronting her son, in a very indirect way I might add. After she confronts him, he attacks her, and they scuffle for a while until she stabs him to death.

By then, the damage was already done. She shouldn’t have just allowed it to happen. She was just as bad as her son for witnessing the abuse and not taking a stand.