Why Found Footage Horror Can Work

Hey guys! Let's go buy a video camera so we can film everything!

Awesome. Make sure to film awkward interactions with your family and friends. After all, anyone who gets a video camera is suddenly overcome with a childish, two-year-old-style desire to play with it 24/7 and film every little fucking thing.

We might run into some bad, scary stuff later, but it's okay. That comes with the territory of owning a video camera these days. When you're running away from whatever Eldritch demon you somehow conjured up with your own tomfoolery, you won't drop the camera at all. You won't miss a goddamn thing. And even if you die during your chase, your camera will be found by magical film-fairies who will edit the footage together in a convincing manner AND slap a "Based on a True Story" title card before it all, as if anticipating a major theatrical release. That makes it super real. So real, you guys.

I laid on the sarcasm pretty thick there, but you get what I mean – those are the worst things about found footage films. I've seen a lot of dumb movies that do this shit. I used to be really dead set against this whole style, and it made me miss out on the most interesting things about movies like Paranormal Activity. Recently I've had a kind of change of heart on these kinds of movies – there are still things wrong with them, yeah, but also plenty of ways to do it right.

I've said in the past that these found footage shaky cam movies are a product of who we are as a people right now, and it's true. We are millennials, as much as I personally hate that term after reading one too many think pieces about how we're all lazy fucks, and one thing we do differently than other generations is recording ourselves.

Whether it's Facebook, Twitter or Tinder, we love using the Internet to show off what we find unique about ourselves or how we're feeling. We put ourselves at center stage at all times. These horror films take that and put a morbid twist on it, putting characters at center stage, filming themselves, even as they're dying or coming face to face with horror. That's fine because everyone is like that deep down – we all sorta view ourselves as the main characters of our own films. I don't think that's specific to just millennials.

The point is, this is a trick that can be done well. There are a lot of films like The Devil Inside, Apartment 143, The Taking of Deborah Logan, the last two V/H/S films and plenty of others that do it wrong – they're just shitty scripts and shitty movies, with little creativity or nuance. The camera gimmick is stretched thin in all of them and there isn't enough quality there otherwise to make a difference.

But every once in a while … you get a really good one. People, I'm talking about The Houses October Built.

Director: Bobby Roe

Starring: Brandy Shaefer, Zack Andrews, Bobby Roe, Mikey Roe, Jeff Larson

IMDb

I guess it's a good thing found footage has kinda been fading out of style recently in favor of artier flicks like Starry Eyes and It Follows, because now we can distinguish The Houses October Built as the kick ass movie that it is. This is a pretty stripped down story about a bunch of friends going on a road trip to do a bunch of haunted houses. As a self-professed lover of haunted houses myself, I was all over this shit.

It's just a well done movie. The dialogue feels realistic and you get to like the characters, who really just act like regular people you'd see at your job or at a local band's show or whatever else. That takes some talent to do.

The scares come slow and creepy. You really get a sense for the atmosphere at these haunted houses, which I understand were all real places the cast members went and filmed interviews at. It's playful ambiance, and transitions almost seamlessly into the scary bits through little, eerie moments here and there. The pacing is very good in this. When the scary shit does start happening like a landslide, it feels natural and you do actually feel as claustrophobic as these characters, trapped in horrible places.

Since the topic of this article is the found footage, well, the handheld camera perspective actually works for the movie. You get a sense of being right there with these people. The interviews with haunted house cast members are also cool and add a spice to it that a lot of these movies miss – very individual.

I guess some of the scenes on their RV feel a bit silly when they constantly have the camera on, like even at breakfast. Maybe a better idea would be having those parts as a normal movie without the camera, but I guess for that 'realistic' effect, it's not too bad - still better than the ways some movies do it, mostly due to the realism of the dialogue and how much you end up liking these people.

That's really a minor thing though, and overall there are comparatively few moments that feel really forced or silly with the camera – certainly no Paranormal Activity moments where they grab the fucking camera before going to see if someone needs help. And there are actually a few times later on when they do turn the camera off when they're asked to for secret haunted house business. That's really something more of these movies should try – it leaves the imagination wanting more and it's actually realistic. Most of the time, people in real life aren't gonna want you filming everything.

The really scary moments at the end feel extra seedy, dank and creepy as fuck with the low-res camera lens and the realistic audio, so points for that.

People will have mixed reactions to this, and if you don't like American haunted houses and that kind of shit, you might not get it. But I think it's one of the better movies of its style out there. It's on Netflix, so you can go watch it right now. You know, unless you don't have Netflix or something like that. In that case, I guess you're fucked. Sorry.

Found footage horror isn't dying out yet, and I actually think they're getting better now than they were in the mid-to-late 2000s. This one is my favorite I've seen recently, but other ones like Grave Encounters and The Den, despite having problems, are certainly worth a cursory view if nothing else. So don't write off the style yet even if you hated all of these movies I've mentioned. It might come out with something that interests you eventually; you never know.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

The Worst Movies of 2014

Welcome, readers, to the annual thing I do at the beginning of the year where I talk about the best and worst films of the previous year. Like every year, let's start with the worst first and work our way back up to the top.

There weren't a lot of bad movies that I went to see last year, because I frankly didn't need to spend a shitload of money going to see Ouija, Annabelle, the TMNT reboot, whatever Transformers garbage came out last year, or any of the numerous other shitpiles that likely ended up on every other 'worst movies' list from the year. But unfortunately, some sewage did slip through the cracks. That's why we're all here today.

Disappointments of 2014

The Equalizer

I liked parts of this rather well and I hate to keep bashing on Denzel movies – he seems like a pretty cool guy and obviously a lot of people dig him. But this just isn't all that great. After a fairly good opening where he gets involved with this Russian mafia prostitution plot, the film just gets bigger and bigger as he keeps killing more people with zero consequence. I'm just tired of Hollywood movies portraying revenge as this cool, glamorous thing you can do wearing shades at night and then not suffer any consequences, physical or mental, from it afterward. Why don't we see any of the repercussions to him killing all these scores of people? If your only answer is 'turn off your brain, it's a dumb action movie,' then I don't think you understood what I was saying here. Revenge isn't cool and it isn't glamorous. It's a choice you make at the end of your rope – let's see more human, in-depth stories about it, and less dumbass Hollywood action flicks.

Worst Movies of 2014

5. Jersey Boys

Clint Eastwood needs to retire. There's no shame in that, as the guy has been doing movies longer than most of our parents have been alive. He needs to just hang it up now while he's still got the memories of good films in our fairly recent past – because this shit is seriously just awful. It's a biopic about a bunch of 50s doo-wop singers in their prime, and for those nostalgic for that sort of music, it'll probably work fine.

For the rest of us, not so much – this is a very safe, boring, bland experience, with no weight to anything that happens and no drama. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it really isn't. This is an extremely candified, watered down movie that comes off something like Martin Scorsese on happy pills. It's going for that kind of Scorsese-esque scope and dramatic presence, but with none of the emotional impact. This was such a numbing, blasé experience that you will need to go home and watch car crash videos on Youtube to actually return feeling to your senses afterward.

But eh, the acting was pretty good, so I won't put it too low (or too high?) on this 'worst movies' list.

4. The Taking of Deborah Logan

I covered this one last week, so no need to go on forever about it, but come the fuck on. Totally half-assed material that actually doesn't even feel finished as a movie. Plots that go nowhere, barely explained story tropes even through the morass of painful exposition, dumb ideas, dumb characters – just a fucking dumb movie.

3. Dracula Untold

A very droll fantasy tale with none of the glamor or prestige needed to make it feel as big as it wants to be. This whole tale of Dracula's origins doesn't even feel like it cares much about its own story, as it's a very short, rushed mess of a movie that doesn't inspire much grandeur or horror. The writing treads shallow waters, and this is just another dumb fantasy movie with all the colors washed out to blue and grey, all the characters speaking in forced-dramatic British accents to make up for there being no real drama, and lots and lots of cinematic music to make you think you're watching something cool. Wake me up at the end credits.

We don't need an origin story for every single iconic character we've come to love or fear over the years. Contrary to what Hollywood studios seem to think, movie viewers do still have imaginations. We don't need every little thing told or explained to us through the lens of millions of dollars spent making an unnecessary movie.

2. Dumb and Dumber To

I never thought the original was great, but at least it was something. This is a mind-numbing two-hour insanity fest that just made me feel old and tired. Parts of this are just agonizingly bad, while other parts will make you hate cinema as a whole. It's hard to really go into detail about what was so bad about this, because the movie itself was just bad to the core. Bad writing, bad story, bad jokes – just bad, bad, bad all around, with really not even the smallest morsel of quality to glom onto by the woeful ending. You will be praying for the end credits.

And the absolute WORST film of 2014 was...probably exactly what you'd expect after reading my blog, if you have been.

1. The Purge: Anarchy

Already went on quite a rant about this too, but why not some more? It's a lazy hack script for a lazy modern horror movie and there's nothing good or redeemable about it. I thought the idea of the first movie had potential as it was just confined to one house – so I figured maybe, just maybe, setting the second one in a bigger and more open environment would make for a better film. Nope. What we got was awful one-dimensional storytelling and strawmanning for the movie's main shitty point – all people are bad, and would kill each other if they had the chance.

Not to mention some of the worst social “satire” I've ever seen. I really don't even get what they were trying to imply – so the government would legalize crime one day a year and that somehow gets rid of crime the rest of the time? Or is it just a thinly veiled “rich versus poor” thing?

Either way, it sucks. Unfortunately it's already been renewed for a third sequel in 2016, though, which I probably won't waste any more time watching.

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

Well, it's the first review of a new year! Time to do another bland possession exorcism movie again!

Director: Adam Robitel

Starring: Jill Larson, Anne Ramsay

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

You know, I genuinely feel sorry for the people making these piece of shit movies in a way. Well, not too much. But I know that, deep down somewhere, there was some kind of glimmer of artistic intention in a movie like this. Some poor sap going 'hey, I have a really original and good idea for a horror movie. I'll do it found-footage style, so it feels like you're right there in the action. Nobody has done that before. Then I'll carefully craft a story about a possession, but I'll tie in a story about a disease like Alzheimer's to make it more grounded in reality! Yeah!'

How depressingly optimistic. I almost don't even want to be mean to it...oh who am I kidding, yes I do.

We start this off with some lame text on a black screen announcing that the movie we're about to see is composed of outtakes, security camera footage and all kinds of other bullshit that has the unique distinction of being everything but a fucking movie. Seriously, who gives a shit? Show us a goddamn movie.

We get a sort of half-told story, paradoxically forced and hamstrung to felt realistic through “whispered” lines “secretly” filmed. It kind of, sort of establishes that this woman needs money to help her Alzheimer's-ailing mother, Deborah Logan, so she lets some film crew make a documentary about Alzheimer's featuring her mother.

I don't know why the film crew is doing this, though; couldn't you just go to a hospital ward and film normal Alzheimer's patients instead of crazy old ladies living out in houses in the woods? Wouldn't that be more economically sound, easier to shoot and just plain better in every way? Oh, I forgot, a house in the woods isolated from society is just more convenient for stock horror storytelling tropes...my bad.

Anyway, we get some fairly middling scenes of Deb stumbling around and doing Alzheimer-y things that could have been interesting in a movie that cared about depicting the disease accurately. But then you realize you're just watching another dime-a-dozen ghost horror possession movie, and then you go 'oh, right,' and promptly smoke a bowl. My favorite scene is when they actually, no joke, throw in a little 'informative' bit about what Alzheimer's is, complete with totally random CGI graphics.

"This is the part of your brain that dies when watching The Taking of Deborah Logan."

No, your Netflix didn't just glitch up and jettison you over to a kids' science class instructional video – you just saw that.

So to demonstrate exactly their knowledge of how Alzheimer's works, the movie then shows us the true meaning of the disease – when you have it, you sometimes stand in dark rooms and stare ominously at nothing, like you're in a shitty horror movie:

I guess every character in one of these kinds of movies has Alzheimer's then!

And when that doesn't sound appealing, well, there's always the old 'tear off your own neck skin' trick. A classic Alzheimer's staple.

Man, I'm going to hell for this review.

After she gets released from the hospital, I'll be fair and admit that even the movie starts to admit that Deb's condition isn't actually Alzheimer's. Really? What tipped you off about that? Was it the scene where they find her naked in the attic intoning in French about snakes and burying people in the river and all kinds of other nonsense? I guess that one was a close call. I mean, it's easy to see how you'd fucking mistake that shit for Alzheimer's. I guess you needed to consult with all the top doctors and get second opinions.

One of those priceless family moments...

And because the writers of this thing apparently grew up in a vacuum and were never aware that this is a trope in horror movies older than time itself, we get a bunch of scenes after this where they go online and research why she was saying all that shit. Nothing that can't be solved by showing characters clicking around on a computer, right? Because they couldn't figure out a clever way to shoehorn the plot in without a big stinky info-dump...that's exactly what we get next. A big stinky info-dump, clogging up the movie and stopping everything in its tracks.

"Just photoshop whatever you need to on that computer screen, it's easier than writing compelling scenes!"

So, if you care, the story is that there's some serial killer from the past who used to take kids and drown them, or something like that. He mysteriously disappeared years ago, and now apparently is possessing Deb and making her do all this crazy stuff, as she spoke to him once before years ago at her job as a telephone operator. I don't know. It's all pretty obviously made up on the spot, as there was no clues to this storyline before these last few scenes, and we're halfway through the movie.

Really all we need now is the reveal that the demon is actually Toby, the demon from the Paranormal Activity series. Piggybacking off an established franchise would at least bring in some of that money the family needs to pay their bills and stuff. So there would be that advantage!

So with the reveal that this is definitely not Alzheimer's, you'd think the camera crew would move on. After all, their job was to make a movie about Alzheimer's, and clearly what we have here is a demonic possession. So they're done, right? Right?! No...actually they keep on filming shit anyway, just for the hell of it I guess. Or maybe their producers just thought it was a better story than 'hey, let's exploit an old lady with Alzheimer's!' That seems more likely.

"Isn't this a little too personal and sensitive to stand there filming? Doesn't it kind of make us complete assholes?"

So we get an astounding little text blurb under some scenes listing the number of days the project has been going on – first we see 41 days and then over 60 the next time. Jesus, what is their time frame on this? When do they plan on stopping? It seems like they're really just winging it and hanging out to film whatever at this point, as there's no clear narrative being formed and they're really just reacting to things now. They're at the mercy of the elements. There's no story or plan here anymore. Might as well just admit you have no clue what you're doing, guys.

There's a baffling scene where this old guy from next door comes over to their property shooting a gun like a madman. He hits the camera crew's car a few times and is then arrested. It's never exactly explained why he was shooting – maybe he has Alzheimer's too. See? I can be insensitive too.

Then the next day, one of their guys quits because of all the crazy shit going on like the old lady's bizarre possessed actions and the bullets that destroyed his windows last night. I guess we're supposed to feel really bad and scared for the others, but all I feel is relief for the guy who left. I mean, he's clearly the only one with any sense of career goals, anyway.

He's got plenty of other hack found footage horror scenarios do appear in.

I really wanted, later on in the movie, to have a sidebar chronicling his normal and healthy career path juxtaposed with the other main characters' continued descent into idiocy – just to drive the whole ridiculous thing home.

What's going on with the titular character Deborah Logan, you might ask? Ha ha, just kidding; nobody is asking that. But I'll tell you anyway. Apparently after doing silly things like throwing up worms, she was admitted to the hospital.

Not this month's approved dieting fad, but we all need to get worms out of our system at some point.

My favorite scene in this sequence is when one of the doctors offers up the brain-shattering conclusion his years of schooling have brought him to: she threw up the worms because she might have eaten worms when out digging in the garden in her dementia state. Yes. You read that right. Isn't this man the genius we've all been waiting for? I think he is.

Seriously, though, dude – answering complete indescribable insanity like throwing up worms with retarded levels of unrealistic “isn't it so simple?” acceptance probably isn't your best course of action here.

Apparently he isn't the hospital's only problem, though, as we see their security is so lax that even a skinny old woman like Deborah Logan can break out...somehow. It isn't really explained how, and somehow she also even kidnaps some little girl out of a cancer ward. I'm guessing the reason the movie doesn't show us the scenes of them escaping is because even the writers had no idea how it happened.

The story here, supposedly, is that the serial killer possessing Deborah wants to kill cancer girl. Why? Because he's crazy and a serial killer, so no other motivations are needed. He's just kooky.

I guess we then get a long, long, annoyingly, painfully long action sequence where the cops team up with the camera crew and Deborah's daughter to go find the girl. Somewhere in the blitzkrieg of nonsense before this, it was established that the sheriff and the daughter are old friends, so I guess that means it's okay to take her and a random camera crew of people you don't know on a hunt for a kidnapper. Cops of the century, ohhhhhhh yeah!

"You go ahead of me. It's just for safety."

Seriously. This is established police protocol? Just invite the cancer girl's entire 3rd Grade class along too. Why the fuck not? Invite the goddamn Nambian church choir jazz ensemble, too. Maybe throw your AA buddies in, too. Surely someone will be able to find that girl!

Turns out it's the camera crew who ends up finding the girl. Convenience to the point of contrivance? What big words!

But yeah. Just take a look at this:

You can insert your own caption this time. I'm sure you'll come up with brilliant ones.

Because you know, cancer patients make the best food for serial killers. Which is a sentence I never thought I'd say.

They shoot Deborah Logan and save the girl, and it's all a happy ending except for the fact that somehow the serial killer guy body-jumped into the little girl now.

Presumably she is incarcerated for life into a mental asylum when she starts talking about drowning people in the river.

How did he do that? I'm sure there was some unfinished line of dialogue in this half-assed mess of a movie that explained it, but fuck it if I'm going to waste my time with finding it. I'm just going to assume the moral of this movie is that Alzheimer's means demonic possession and cancer patients are good nutrients for serial killers. Happy New Years.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.