In November 1966, two young couples outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, claimed they were chased by something with wings and glowing red eyes. More sightings followed. Over the next year, the strange figure became wrapped up with other unexplained events and eventually with a real tragedy that permanently changed the town. Writer John A. Keel gathered the stories, sightings and coincidences into his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies. Decades later, screenwriter Richard Hatem turned that unsettling stew into something even stranger.

Washington Post reporter John Klein (Richard Gere, Pretty Woman) is still reeling from the death of his wife Mary (Debra Messing, Searching) when an ordinary nighttime drive somehow leaves him hundreds of miles from where he thought he was going. He winds up in Point Pleasant and knocks on the door of Gordon Smallwood (Will Patton, Copycat), who greets him with a gun and insists John has been there before. That would be enough reason to leave town. Instead, John starts hearing about sightings, voices, visions, and strange telephone calls from local police officer Connie Mills (Laura Linney, The Miracle Club) and others around Point Pleasant. The further he goes, the less the mystery behaves like one that wants to be solved.

That’s what I still love about the movie. Director Mark Pellington, coming off Arlington Road, never gives the audience a comfortable look at some rubber-suited creature flapping around West Virginia. Shapes appear where they shouldn’t. Reflections seem wrong. Sounds arrive from nowhere. The movie keeps suggesting that something is present without doing us the favor of defining what that something is.

Gere is especially good because John is already vulnerable before anything supernatural enters his life. He wants the inexplicable events to mean something because senseless loss is much harder to live with. Patton is even more unnerving as Gordon, whose growing terror makes the phenomenon seem contagious. In one of his last roles before his death a year later, Alan Bates plays Alexander Leek, a researcher based loosely on Keel, with the character’s surname providing a little backwards nod to the author.

Pellington’s music-video background is all over the movie, sometimes for better and occasionally for worse. Images smear, sounds overlap and editing rhythms turn ordinary rooms and highways into spaces you suddenly don’t trust. There are moments when all that technique threatens to overwhelm the story, but at its best the style makes The Mothman Prophecies feel like something you half-remember from a nightmare.

That refusal to provide easy rules frustrated plenty of people in 2002. Some viewers wanted a creature feature and got an existential mystery instead. The movie’s reputation has steadily grown since, and it fits beautifully alongside Stir of Echoes and The Ring in that turn-of-the-century stretch when Hollywood was making unusually adult supernatural thrillers. More than 20 years later, not knowing exactly what is out there remains the scariest thing about it.