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I talk about a couple
of movies and there are some spoilers. So, you know, look out.
Anyone who hasn't been
in a coma for the last five years or so has noticed the massive
influx of “found footage” horror films both in theaters and
straight-to-video. The feeling I get, just from cruising around the
web, is that a lot of people bemoan the growing prevalence of this
subgenre, saying that it's driven chiefly by the desire of producers
to make and market films with next to no budget and with even less
creativity. They can get away with shooting on video, using
locations instead of sets, and hiring unknown actors. The Paranormal
Activity series is probably the worst offender, recycling the
same story from movie to movie and seldom even bothering to change up
the formula: for the first half, doors creak slowly on their hinges,
curtains are rustled, and objects are knocked on the floor when no
one's around. Later, pots and pans get dropped from the ceiling and
loud noises freak everyone out. Finally, someone—usually a
woman—is grabbed by an invisible force and dragged along the floor.
I've only seen the first three (aren't they up to five now?) and
they all follow that same basic pattern. In between scares, we see
lots of footage of bedrooms and kitchens where nothing is going on.
The whole series feels a little bit like a joke on the audience, and
a mean one at that.
Still, there's nothing
about the genre in and of itself that makes it awful, save for the
lackluster efforts of some of its practitioners. I have to admit I'm
kind of a sucker for this sort of movie. I loved The Blair Witch
Project when it came out, probably because I've been out in the
woods at night enough times (minus the witch) to relate to the
situation the characters find themselves in. The scares build
steadily and effectively, and the ending is flat-out unforgettable.
While many people apparently thought Apollo 18 sucked, I was
actually impressed by the premise, and thought the film did a decent
job of capitalizing on the idea of two astronauts trapped on the moon
with a mysterious, malevolent presence and no way out. The fact that
they were under attack by rock monsters was lame, but up 'til then
they had me hooked. Cloverfield is terrific, one of the
better monster movies I've seen. And I enjoyed the first Paranormal
Activity, a movie best watched alone and at night. Once you've
seen one, though, you've seen 'em all.
I find the animosity
toward these movies kind of perplexing, mainly because they're not
much different in kind from the crop of slasher movies that came out
all through the '80's. Genre movies are all about trends, and this
happens to be one that dominates the area of horror at the present
moment. Just as older horror fans look back on Freddy, Jason, and
Micheal Myers with nostalgic fondness, fans in their teens and
twenties will remember The Last Exorcism and The Devil
Inside the same way. They won't be wrong to do so; everyone has
a soft spot in their heart for the popular culture of their youth,
and there's some good in there that sets itself apart from the dreck.
I watched a couple of
movies recently that, for me, represent both ends of the spectrum of
found footage horror. While tooling around on Hulu looking for
something to watch, I happened across a Spanish language film called
Atrocious. The title gives ample fuel to anyone looking to
make an easy joke about the movie's quality, which, after sitting
through the whole thing, I feel might be perfectly justified. Not
that it's a terrible movie, but it stands as a good example of why
some people hate the found footage genre. The story involves a trio
of siblings who stay with their parents in an old ancestral home
somewhere in rural Spain, located next to a shrubbery labyrinth
similar to the one in The Shining. The eldest is a young man
who wants to shoot a documentary about a local urban legend.
Against their parents wishes, the boy and his sister tromp around in
the labyrinth looking for cool stuff to film. They see a mysterious
woman, with her back to them, through a gap in the shrubbery, and
later the family dog turns up dead at the bottom of a well inside the
labyrinth. Not knowing the dog is dead, the youngest of the three
disappears into the maze to look for it, freaking out their mom and
sending the whole family on a search to find him. Naturally, all of
the action is seen through the night vision of the two video cameras
the brother and sister keep with them at all times.
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Up to this point, the
movie has a lot of build-up without very much happening. Once the
characters are in the maze, they spend what feels like twenty minutes
running around and yelling. It's pretty boring until the young man
is grabbed from behind by an unseen assailant and dragged for several
feet. Recovering from the attack, he picks up his camera to go find
his sister, who he finds tied up at the gazebo at the maze's center.
They make it back to the house, where copious amounts of blood have
been spilled. They barricade themselves in the upstairs room,
listening for the unknown person moving about in the house. The
movie goes to news reports of a family in rural Spain that has been
murdered, clearly talking about the people we've just been watching,
then backs up and shows us the rest of what happened. The young man
goes downstairs, then down into the basement, where a videotape is
playing showing a woman with his mother's name in a psychiatric
hospital. The narrator on the tape describes her as a deeply
disturbed patient who has already murdered two of her children. At
this moment, the young man's mother creeps up behind him, wielding an
axe, and kills him.
Points go the the
film's writers for not doing the obvious and ripping off Blair
Witch Project. The urban legend mentioned earlier refers to a
local ghost said to guide lost travelers out of the woods. Rather
than telling a ghost story, which we have every reason to expect, the
filmmakers go for a variation on the “someone you least suspect is
really a psycho killer” formula. Overall, it's not very effective,
because that kind of twist is, by now, pretty used up. Now that I
think of it, it's a stripped-down version of the end to Scream.
And like I said before, not a lot happens up until the end. A long
way to go without much of a payoff. I wouldn't blame anyone who sees
this and thinks, “Man, this found footage stuff is bullshit.”
In it's defense, it doesn't feel as cynical and lazy as the
Paranormal Activity series.
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Before Atrocious,
I watched V/H/S, a movie from a couple of years ago. Unlike
every other found footage horror film I've seen, this one takes the
audacious step of being an anthology. There are, in total, five
different stories in this one, hung on the the framing story of a
bunch of young lowlifes breaking into an abandoned house with the
intention of stealing a VHS tape. What they find are a pile of
videotapes and a dead body. The presence of a corpse in no way
deters them from looking for the tape they want, and one member of
the gang is given the task of sifting through the stack to find the
right one. As he does so, he watches a group of guys pick up girls
at a bar, one of whom turns out to be a vampire demon; a man get
murdered by his girlfriend's lover while they're on vacation at the
Grand Canyon; a group of hikers slain by a killer who can't be
filmed with a video camera for some unexplained reason; and the
female half of a Skyping couple being an unwitting participant in an
extraterrestrial breeding program. Once that story wraps up, the
corpse comes to life and kills all the creeps. Weirdly, there's one
more tale after that, though there's no one left alive to see it.
Not a perfect movie,
but the anthology structure prevents it from getting dull, and all
the stories move along at a good pace. It has genuinely scary
moments, and there's some smart use of the found footage format.
Whereas in just about everything from Blair Witch onward,
characters are required to run around with a camera glued to their
face in a way that seems totally unnatural, seeing as they're being
chased by ghosts and monsters and whatnot, the makers of V/H/S
opted for the most part to be logical: the guy in the first story
films the action through a pair of glasses with a built-in mini
camera, so it makes sense he doesn't stop shooting as he's running
for his life. The couple at the Grand Canyon don't use their camera
any more than you'd expect, and the Skying couple likewise don't use
their laptops and tablets in any way out of the ordinary. V/H/S
comes off much smarter than most entries in the genre, and it'll
probably wind up with a cult following in later years, if it hasn't
already. It gives me hope that this kind of movie can be done well
when in the right hands. The concept provides the sort of immediacy
the horror genre thrives on, and fans ought to rejoice that new
territory has been staked out that can be explored in innovative,
unsettling ways by talented filmmakers.
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