I don't think I would call this horror, although there is some horrible stuff here, it is more along the lines of a dark sci-fi, quasi dystopian thriller. It is a seriously flawed modern sideways take on "Videodrome", and reminds me a bit of the absurdly stupid "Await Further Instructions", it is better than that hackneyed piece of junk, though there are several similarities with that film. It certainly shares a lot of the flaws of "Videodrome", and unfortunately it has even more flaws. While the acting is very good in "Peripheral", the story is threadbare, and that is fine except we learn very little about this book that sparked youth riots, and I really feel that was an important thing to explore more. Take out the 5 minutes of useless sex scenes and go a bit into the history of that book, the most we get is that it was drug fueled and that she wrote it on an old typewriter, this just isn't enough to explain the fanatical response of one of her fans(whose response the Bobbi's book is pretty over the top). I really feel we needed to know what in her book made her feel this way? Even in "Videodrome", it's clear inspiration, we see what is causing the protagonist and his girlfriend to spiral into madness and more.
This is not a spoiler. Bobbi seems to be the by-product of a bad book deal, I think this is inferred in the subtext, she was a junky as well, so she very well may have squandered her money on drugs, I don't how see some people didn't get this from the film? Again, there were things here that do not merit more explanation. How many people have been the victims of bad contracts or wasted their earnings on partying and drugs? A LOT. This is absolutely inferred without a shadow of doubt throughout the dialog in the film, it just isn't explicitly said.
"Peripheral" has a very dark vision of the media and how it manipulates both the creators and the consumers. There is a lot of unexplained stuff here, though I don't actually think explaining a lot of those things would have benefit the film other than what was prior mentioned. What also would have benefit the film was cutting down the overly long sex scenes, seriously, there are two and they drag on into infinitum. There was genuinely no need for this, they went on for several minutes both and I found myself skipping them because they really had no need to be this long(I always skip sex scenes anyway if they are more than a few seconds and explicit at all). One of these is what is essentially a quasi technological date rape scene. I get the metaphor here, and that is fine, but it just dragged on and on, I kept skipping 10 seconds to see when it would end, and it seemed endless.
In the end, I thought it was an interesting movie though highly flawed movie. It is a bit obtuse, it doesn't explain much explicitly, by the end you really don't understand most of what is real and what wasn't, there are a ton of metaphors here, maybe too many. Though I suppose that was the point, and given the metaphors and surrealistic aspects, it would have been beneficial if the surreal aspects were pushed more to the forefront, and again, if we had more of an explanation of why her initial book was so influential. It is pretty explicitly stated why they want her to write more books by the end, and this again is an obvious commentary on how media manipulates and hurts people, and it shows this in quite explicit, yet metaphorical terms. This movie is actually better thought out than people are giving it credit for, but if you don't like strange movies and thinking a little and piecing things together, you will hate it.
