Richard Gere wears a Fossil

Something is wrong in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Residents report seeing a large winged figure with red eyes. The phone rings, and the voice on the other end knows things it has no way of knowing. Then the Silver Bridge collapses. Mark Pellington's The Mothman Prophecies (2002), loosely based on John Keel's 1975 book about real incidents from the late 1960s, takes that material and builds a horror film out of dread rather than shocks. Richard Gere plays John Klein, a Washington Post reporter who finds himself in Point Pleasant under circumstances he cannot explain, grieving a wife he has recently lost.

The watch on Klein's wrist gets several extreme close-ups, and it earns them, because at one point it becomes a piece of evidence in its own right. Klein hides the watch to test the entity calling him, to find out whether a voice on a telephone can really know the location of a physical object. The camera lingers on the dial in the film's cold blue-grey grade, and what it shows is a small round dress watch with a cream guilloche-textured dial, applied Arabic numerals at twelve, three, six, and nine, slim leaf hands, a tiny running-seconds sub-dial at six o'clock, and an onion crown. Printed in cursive at twelve, with the little triangular logo beneath it, is the answer to a question fans argued about for years. It says Fossil.

That is worth pausing on. The watch looks pedigreed enough that it is easy to expect a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso or a Cartier, the kind of dress watch a movie star is supposed to wear. The dial says otherwise. Fossil is an American company, founded in 1984 in Richardson, Texas, that built its name on affordable, retro-styled quartz watches sold in tin boxes, the 1950s-Americana look reproduced at a department-store price. The Mothman watch is exactly that aesthetic, a heritage three-hander made to look like an heirloom it is not. And that is precisely why it fits. A grieving newspaper reporter does not wear a watch because he collects them. He wears one because he needs to know the time. On Klein, the Fossil is one more quiet detail marking him as an ordinary man who is not equipped, psychologically or professionally, for what is coming for him.