He Never Dies, A Four Film Cycle

Abstract

He Never Dies is a film cycle consisting of four works: The Taking of Jordan (All American Boy) (2022), The Boy Was Found Unharmed (2024), Victim of Circumstance (2024), and My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting (2025). In this essay, I will trace my artistic growth as a young filmmaker obsessed with cult and outsider cinema, how that obsession evolved into contemporary interests in pornography as queer history, and the eventual culmination of these years of cinematic growth into my thesis project He Never Dies. Through readings of Lacan, interspersed with Žižekian interpretations, and engagements with Derrida’s theory of hauntology, I examine the ways in which desire is mapped, embodied, and reproduced, and the ethical complications inherent within such forms of cinematic representation, particularly when working in the mode of found footage. Through this essay and the films of the He Never Dies cycle, I posit cinema as a contemplative space for preserving lost histories, critiquing power structures, and challenging dominant representations.