He was not a malicious sorcerer, but an innocent hoping to distance himself from a world of hostility and confusion. While Sean had hoped for material gain and personal freedom, he had no intention of using his new powers for evil. Soon he’s staggering around the woods threatening to meet his demonic tormentor in hand-to-hand combat. Bloody horns begin to protrude from his face, and his fingernails grow into feral claws. While his cousin haunts him, hurling taunts in a demonic growl, Sean grows more erratic and animalistic. As his rituals grow more and more depraved, he and Cortez both transform into demonic figures. That’s just the beginning of the monstrous changes his body experiences throughout The Alchemist Cookbook’s final third. Sean doesn’t stop at giving Baliel his teeth. It’s all the more affecting given what comes next. It’s an uncommonly tender moment from a filmmaker who’s otherwise focused mostly on making viewers squirm. No one would even know we were here.” He nearly mists up at the thought of enjoying “Doritos sandwiches,” a “giant fridge” filled with Gatorade and “so many fucking Capri-Suns” alongside his pet. “I was gonna be all rich,” he says, “buy us a big mansion out in the woods. In a late-film lament, he describes everything he had hoped his rituals would achieve. His goals aren’t Marty’s nebulous “bigger things,” but a supremely specific fantasy. He’s even willing to put his own body in jeopardy for the opportunity, inhaling fumes and promising time and again to “give his teeth.”īesides Trevor, Sean is the Potrykus character with the most coherent idea of what it is he’s striving toward. Though he shuns human company, he’s hungry to welcome Baliel into his life. That book of spells, Sean hopes, will provide the means for summoning a demon named Baliel. This amateur scientist would rather spend time with his book of spells, his punk records and his cat. It’s clear Sean resents the film’s one other character. His only contact with the outside world comes courtesy of Cortez (Amari Cheatom), a cousin who brings occasional deliveries. Sean listens to some of the same aggressive music as Marty and Trevor, but he’s also shown to enjoy a warbly, nostalgic rendition of “Jingle Bells.” The song accompanies an improvised Christmas morning ritual that reveals the child behind the Black Flag t-shirt and gas mask. He’s also more unambiguously childish and sentimental than Potrykus’ previous monsters. Instead of the Rust Belt streets of Grand Rapids and Detroit, he occupies a trailer somewhere in the Michigan wilderness. Sean (Ty Hickson), in particular, takes pains to keep away from the public. In pursuit of riches and retribution, they isolate themselves to even more extreme degrees than their predecessors. Their efforts don’t come at anyone else’s expense and their attempts to get back at society are only ever self-destructive. His leads, however, aren’t nearly as alienating. The horror becomes far more literal in Potrykus’ latter two films. 1 of Joel Potrykus’ Midwestern Monsters: Ape And Buzzard here Chaotic Neutral: The Alchemist Cookbook and Relaxer Their creator has matured with each new film, but they’ve made no such change. They instead resemble scared children, hiding rather than angrily locking themselves away. While Ape and Buzzard ’s not-quite anti-heroes resemble scorned adolescents, The Alchemist Cookbook and Relaxer ’s monsters are both more isolated and more pathetic. Their obsessive pursuits and disgusting fates are the same, but their attitudes have changed.
Despite growing more and more physically monstrous, his characters have only become more sympathetic. Through four features, Joel Potrykus has carved out his own unique niche in American independent cinema and created his own unique, instantly recognizable kind of monster. In the finale of a two-part series, Bennett Glace dissects the Chaotic Neutral in Joel Potrykus’ The Alchemist Cookbook and Relaxer