A Double Feature of the Forgotten and the Fragmented: *Scared to Death* (1980) & *Syngenor* (1990)**

Greetings, ghouls and post-structuralists! Step right up, step right in—if you dare! Tonight’s transmission from the interdimensional abyss brings you a double-dose of delirium, a two-for-one special in the darkly-lit, zigzagging corridors of B-movie oblivion. That’s right, fiends and fiendettes, we’re dusting off the VHS vaults to unearth *Scared to Death* (1980) and *Syngenor* (1990), two slices of schlocky celluloid that will have you questioning not just the nature of fear, but the very linguistic constructs that allow us to define it!  

### *Scared to Death* (1980) – A Creature in Search of Its Own Meaning  

Imagine, if you will, a Los Angeles drained of color and hope, haunted not by ghosts but by something altogether slimier. The *Syngenor*—the Synthetic Genetic Organism—is a stalker of alleys, a lurker in the neon-noir ruins of a city that has long since lost its grip on reality. Directed by William Malone (who would later give us the *House on Haunted Hill* remake), this flick is a marvel of micro-budget ambition, delivering a reptilian terror that slithers somewhere between *Alien* and a late-night cable-access fever dream.  

Yet here’s the twist, boils and ghouls—the creature isn’t the only one lost in translation! The film itself stumbles through the syntax of horror, unable to fully articulate its own monstrosity. Our ex-cop-turned-novelist hero, played with all the charisma of a mannequin in a trench coat, embodies the Derridean différance—never quite present, never quite absent, eternally deferring his own meaning while the film chomps away at the fringes of genre expectation. Oh, what delicious decay!  

### *Syngenor* (1990) – A Corporate Horror of Simulacra and Schlock  

Fast forward a decade, and what do we have? A sequel-in-spirit that devours its own tail like an ouroboros built from rubber suits and corporate satire. *Syngenor* ups the ante, giving us a shadowy megacorporation, Norton Cyberdyne, that has perfected the ultimate soldier—except, of course, it’s a neon-green nightmare that sweats ectoplasm and mangles unsuspecting victims with the glee of a late-stage capitalist nightmare.  

But let’s be honest, boils and ghouls—this isn’t just horror, it’s horror simulacrum! *Syngenor* doesn’t just reference *Scared to Death*, it erases it in an act of cinematic différance, rewriting its monster mythology while pretending it’s still the same beast. The horror isn’t just the monster—it’s the realization that the monster itself is a copy of a copy, endlessly reproduced in the petri dish of direct-to-video culture. And much like the doomed characters in this corporate wasteland, we too are trapped in the cycle, consuming the repetition, delighting in the decay.  

### Final Invocation  

So what have we learned, my midnight movie maniacs? That the *Scared to Death*/*Syngenor* duology is more than just a rubber-suited fright-fest—it is a haunted text, a flickering specter of genre, a monster movie that devours its own meaning before our very eyes. Watch them with a stiff drink in one hand and a well-worn copy of *Of Grammatology* in the other, and you just might survive the night.  

Until next time, my graveyard philosophers—stay scared, stay skeptical, and always read the fine print before agreeing to human experimentation!