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.

REVIEW: Paranormal Activity (2007)

Of all the movies in the horror genre these last ten or fifteen years, nothing has changed the landscape more than the Blair Witch Project. Something about the concept of attractive young people with cameras filming themselves as they wander around in the woods just really caught on. I guess it’s like I said in my “Why do modern horror movies suck?” post a few weeks ago – we’re the Do It Yourself generation. We just love filming, documenting and recording every aspect of our lives as if we are important. And thus, one of our newfound fears is extremely close personal eye-level accounts of horror – we want to see up close what’s killing us.

And though Blair Witch laid the foundations for all of that, Paranormal Activity really took the idea to a new level and brought the fear into peoples’ own homes and everyday lives. It was also the series that showed us how cool everything looked in that dark blue lighting. Since the DVD box proclaims it “a scary at-home viewing experience,” who am I to contest the Confucianistic wisdom of DVD box covers? Let’s review Paranormal Activity.

Director: Oren Peli

Starring: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

IMDb

We start right off with a guy named Micah who I think has some kind of new sexual disorder – he loves cameras almost as much as his girlfriend.

"Don't worry, Camera! I was just pretending to still be in denial!"

Seriously, this guy is obsessed with cameras. He carries it around everywhere just to talk to her while she’s brushing her teeth or reading on the couch. Like he couldn’t just do that without carrying the camera everywhere.

Seriously though, here’s the basic plot of this thing, if you haven’t been living under a rock the last four years: he wants to use the camera because his girlfriend Katie has been experiencing paranormal activity (TITLE DROP!) since she was a little girl and hasn’t been able to stop it. She tells a story about how when she was a little girl, she used to see a dark hooded figure standing at the foot of her bed which wouldn’t go away. Then her house lit on fire. Uh, I don’t think that’s a demonic spirit. I think that’s a drunk member of the KKK who got the wrong house.

But the movie maintains that it was a demonic spirit. For some reason it’s getting worse just as the movie is starting. Katie wants to go to an exorcist, but because Micah saw The Exorcism of Emily Rose, he decided cameras were the better way to go.

"Allow me to make sure you never have a private moment to yourself ever again..."

The first twenty minutes or so are pretty basic set-up type stuff, which mostly consists of Katie telling Micah to turn the camera off. Which is one of the main things about this movie that imitators ended up copying! Isn’t that awesome? Most of the dialogue in this is actually well done, and feels realistic. But one of the main problems with this movie is just how many excuses they have to make to have the camera in every scene, because, you know – otherwise we wouldn’t have anything at all. So we get tons of scenes that would otherwise be entirely natural and effective, broken up because the actors have to shoehorn in a line about the camera being there – it gets kind of old after the first three or four times.

Seriously, what guy really loves shooting home movies this much? I mean, I get it – sometimes he’s just horsing around and experimenting with the camera, but what about the other scenes, like the talking in the bathroom ones, or just the random bits where she’s sitting on the couch or hanging out with her friend? Did he need to have a camera for all of those moments?

"You could've just come and told us without the camera, you kn---"
"SHUT UP!"

It makes me think the film would have been generally more effective if they’d just reigned in the camera stuff to the really effective scenes at night when stuff really happens. It’s more original the way they did it, but there are only so many ways to say “get that camera out of my face!”

Then we get the bedroom scenes, which are the ones the movie is often remembered for. If you like dark blue lights and scenes of nothing going on while the timer fast-forwards to show us that time is passing, you’ll be in heaven with these. Look out for the special unrated version where they don’t fast forward through these scenes. The movie is 28 hours long! You can also see snippets of the cameraman flashing the audience if you look close at the scene transitions. Buy it at your local Walmart today.

But then everything gets super serious the next morning when Katie finds that – gasp! – her keys have been moved a couple inches off the counter and wound up on the floor! The horror!

And not only that, but when they look at the tapes later, they see that the ghost also added moving a door a few inches to its resume of blood-curdling terror! Nooooooooo!

So yeah, this is your scares for the first act of the movie: doors moving a few inches, and keys on the floor. Can you just feel the horror? I guess it’s serious enough to warrant some exorcist doctor guy coming over though. He talks about some stuff that the movie needs for the trailer: “it’s not human,” “you can’t run from this,” etc, etc, etc…it’s all pretty bland, and the guy is a fairly inconsequential character otherwise. I mean, do we really need a guy sitting on the couch to tell us the thing haunting us isn’t human? Seems pretty self-explanatory to me. What, do they think it’s Dennis the Menace? Is that suddenly a convincing alternative?

We also get some scenes of Micah researching demons and whatnot – it’s not too long of a scene, and I don’t mind it, but it does point out a chief difference between this and the old movies of the 70s and 80s. It’s just too serious and orthodox. The film takes its religious demon science as just that – a science, and endows it all with a sort of dogmatic fervor that doesn’t really lend itself to the kind of cool, bizarre and spontaneous feel that I liked so much in movies like The Beyond, Suspiria or Evil Dead – those movies didn’t need to explain so much what the evil things haunting us are.

Which is scarier - this, or...

...this, with just the bare minimum of explanation?

Now, I am not trying to compare Paranormal Activity to those films as some kind of a basis to slag on PA. They’re very different movies and they have different ways of expressing themselves. But there’s one fundamental flaw in the methodology of a film like this: research is not scary. It’s just not. Having Micah flipping through a book and giving us exposition on the demons sheds light on what should be shrouded in shadows, waiting to scare us. While I won’t try and claim the film after this is bereft of scares, it would have been even more chilling if the movie didn’t feel the need to explain itself and bring in all this super-serious, dogmatic stuff. Horror is scarier when you have no clue what it is you’re dealing with. As this is all obviously fictional and made-up, you don’t have to really go into detail on the science and history behind demons – sometimes it may be beneficial, but most of the time it’s better just to go for the throat and scare us, rather than wasting our time with exposition and explanation of what everything is.

But I digress; you know what’s TRULY scary? A bug in the bathroom! AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!

The true manifestation of evil...really....

Yup, another of this movie’s invaluable contributions to the world of horror – Katie screams for Micah about a spider in the bathroom, because you know; a girl who’s been haunted by demonic hooded figures standing at the foot of her bed would really be afraid of fucking insects. And I also love how Micah goes and grabs his stupid camera before going to help his screaming girlfriend – just imagine if she’d really been in danger. He’d be a real dick in that case! Ha ha ha! What a card.

Then we get some more scenes of sleeping with blue lights. There are some loud noises and Micah shouts at the demon like a deprived pro wrestler laid off for too much contact with the opponents’ genitals. Then they go back to sleep and Katie decides it’s time to go for a little possessed walk down the stairs!

You know, I’m having some trouble seeing into the logic of this demonic creature stalking them. I mean, what has it really done so far? Moved some keys, moved a door a few times, and now made a girl walk outside and sit down. It doesn’t try to harm her, or kill her or anything – it just makes her walk down some stairs and sit outside. Pretty weak there! I bet this demon is the laughingstock at the annual demon convention…the Evil Dead demons and the guys from Poltergeist laugh him out of the hall.

There’s a quite effective scene where Micah sets up some powder on the floor to try and track the demon’s footprints. It leaves the footprints but then leads them to the attic, where Micah finds a picture of Katie as a little girl at her old house which burned down. This is a good, effective horror scene because it’s so inexplicable and chilling – why would that picture be there? It’s very nature is threatening. For that this scene is very well done.

So the demon is that creepy guy from down the street who used to sit outside your house in a white van because "there was no parking by his house."

Then we get the scene where, even though Micah promised he wouldn’t buy a Ouija board, he does it anyway. His reasoning is that he didn’t buy it, he borrowed it! Ha ha ha! What a card, yet again. Somebody get this guy a spot on Comedy Central. Or maybe a seat in Congress.

"What do you mean I'm a lying jackass?"

So we get some pretty good scenes of them arguing and what not; the scenes where you can see how worn out these two are, and the strain it’s putting on their relationship, are quite effective. They try to call back that exorcist doctor guy, who just tells them he can’t help and leaves. He never shows up again even though he says he wants to try to help – so I guess that’s the culmination of that subplot…that guy was a fuckin’ fraud the whole time.

Then because the movie doesn’t seem to know how to explain things aside from turning to the Internet, we get some more backstory awkwardly shoehorned in: apparently some girl named Diane in the 60s had the exact same thing happen to her that Katie has now. What does this tell us? Let’s play a guessing game:

If you selected Answer C, “Nothing,” well, you win a million bucks and the chance to keep watching the movie! (The million dollars is taken back through taxes to pay for the movie.)

If the past few scenes have seemed entirely pointless to you, well, let’s just cut to the chase…we then get the final scenes where they’re planning to just leave, after everything that’s happened. Katie is despondent and weak, and at the end she decides she doesn’t even want to leave anymore, the demon perhaps finally having control over her mind. So they stay for one final night until Katie gets pulled out of bed by the demon:

Then you get perhaps the greatest horror movie scream in the last twenty years from Katie – I’m serious; it is fucking chilling how good this scream is. It’s completely blood-curdling and insane, and most importantly: we never see anything. For once the camera gimmick pays off, because we never see what’s happening to Katie to make her scream like that – we just use our imagination, and that is scarier than anything they could have put on screen. I think they should have just ended the movie right here. Just fade out and give us the credits right now, you bastards!

Unfortunately…

Yup, we get an ending with Micah getting thrown at the camera like a drunk game of college football and then Katie comes up and bites his neck like a vampire who’s watched The Grudge too many times. It’s a hundred times scarier than anything that shitty ass movie series could do, but it’s still pretty weak. I remember seeing this ending in theaters and the whole theater burst out laughing at this bit. I mean how lame can you get?

Fortunately for those among you who, like me, thought this ending was horrible, we get an alternate ending. In this one, she wakes up, goes downstairs and screams just like the theater ending. The movie unfortunately still does not end right there. Instead, she comes back up with blood on her and a knife in her hand, because I guess we really needed to see that or else we’d just assume Micah used his super powers to beat the devil out of her. Really, this scene isn’t a horror movie ending – it’s a promo for the next episode of hit internet TV sensation Hot Girls with Knives!

Unfortunately her time in the spotlight is cut short:

So that’s Paranormal Activity. Was it good? Well…yes. Yes it was.

When this first came out, I thought this movie was a joke. I walked out of the theater disappointed. And for a long time, while I acknowledged the impact it had on the horror world, I just scoffed at people who said it was really anything all that scary. But watching it again, all these years later, I do think it’s good. It’s got some pretty silly and lame parts to it, but overall it’s more good than bad. I see why it scares people. The idea of having no control over your body and surrendering to this demon over such a long period of time is pretty scary. And the movie, despite a few lame bits, has some very good scares as well.

Maybe it’s watching this at home that did it – it really seems to work better in that context, surprisingly enough. Very few movies do. While Paranormal Activity has its share of limitations and flaws, it’s a well done flick and has its merits, too. It influenced a whole new generation of direct-to-video “found footage” films and helped to make that style more prominent in the mainstream. With all the garbage in this subgenre right now, it can be hard to find good shit, but I hope people keep doing it. I hope we get some good movies out of this gimmick, because I really think the potential is there.

Hmm, well, I’ve reviewed all the influential modern horror films I can think of. Hostel isn’t worth my time, and I’ve done the main two. I’ll be damned before I review any of the sequels to either this or Saw. So what’s left for my final October review this year?

Of course! The actual most influential modern horror movie of all time! Why didn’t I think of it before?

Images copyright of their original owners.

REVIEW: Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

Director: Tod Williams

Starring: Molly Ephraim, Brian Boland, Sprague Grayden

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1536044/

The first Paranormal Activity was an admirably underground and low-budget flick that I sadly just didn’t find too well done otherwise. It just didn’t have a whole lot going for it, between the numerous scenes that just sort of dragged on and the ludicrously silly ending. It was a film with potential that just hadn’t been realized yet. Now we have the second one, and while it’s still got problems, I did find it more enjoyable and compelling than its predecessor. The main reason is just that there were more characters and things going on in this one. The first movie just had the 2 characters and nobody else, and they weren’t exactly the most interesting ones, either. A lot of time was spent on very clichéd ‘research horror stuff’ scenes that just went nowhere and failed to interest the audience once the actual scares started. This one has several characters, an entire family, and they’re much more interesting to me. They actually did stuff and had interactions that drew you in. Even the silly scenes at the beginning with them in the pool and doing lighthearted stuff worked alright, as it did get the audience into them and their situation. The main girl was really good, and the dad worked pretty well too.

Now, the problem with this movie is perhaps even more pronounced than the last one – maybe just because I’m actually interested. The problem is that not a lot happens in the first half hour or so. This is a very slow moving film, and I’m all for that, but this was just too slow sometimes, with all these scenes of the cameras ‘watching’ the house and nothing really going on. I appreciate the subtlety and realistic nature of these scenes, but please, next time just cut them down and focus more on the conversations between the characters and the actual paranormal activity, please. Once the film got going and started showing us the real scares, it was quite entertaining, and I found myself liking it fairly well. This still isn’t a great film, but maybe the third movie will reach that plateau. Until then, this is OK, and I could watch it again and not regret doing so.

REVIEW: Insidious (2011)

Director: James Wan

Starring: Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Ty Simpkins

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591095/

"It's not the house that's haunted. It's your son."

Yeow! That’s some red-hot horror-flavored cheese going on here – like, so cheesy that it almost defies the laws of cinema how this isn’t totally terrible. Insidious is a new movie by the makers of the original SAW movie, James Wan and Leigh Whannel, and Oren Peli, who produced Paranormal Activity. That isn’t exactly a pedigree to be proud of. I know what you’re thinking – didn’t the SAW guys create that horrible movie Dead Silence a few years back? Didn’t they both have a hand in several of the mediocre and underwhelming sequels? Didn’t Paranormal Activity pretty much suck? This movie had a lot of stuff going against it. But something about Insidious made me want to see it – maybe my thirst every now and again for modern horror movies about rich suburban white people. Or maybe the ties to H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos, however vague, were what incensed my interest. I don’t know. But this is one hell of a kick-ass horror movie from a bunch of guys I never suspected to put out a good one.

The story, about a rich white suburban family with few other problems, gets scary when their little boy Dalton falls into a ‘coma’ that he can’t wake up from. That’s distressing enough, but when the film adds in a bunch of supernatural poltergeists, parasites and hell creatures tormenting the family, things get real. Fast. Now I know what you’re thinking (again) – that sounds totally generic and dull. How on earth is he praising this movie?! Well I’ll tell you.

For starters, it doesn’t take itself that seriously. This is one of those movies that doesn’t mind throwing in a little comedy into the mix. Everything about this film is overblown, ridiculous and colorful, and I love it. It really sets this one apart from the crowd and makes the scary parts that much scarier. We’ve all seen other horror movies where all the colors are dark and seedy, and that’s cool too, but it’s just so expected. To have a film throwing all these weird colors at us is really out of left field and offers a nice treat for the eyes. And the sounds are off the wall too, with this weird opera music popping up at various points to accentuate even more how strange and alien the goings-on of the plot are. Top notch atmospheric device. It makes everything feel that much more off-balance and uneasy.

Second, the story is better than the norm for these kinds of films. Movies like The Haunting in Connecticut had it decently done enough, but Insidious goes the extra mile and spices up the usual formula. Yes, the boy is being haunted by spirits, but this time they’re all from a spiritual hell-zone called ‘the Further.’ And the film goes into detail about the connection with this and people astral projecting in their sleep – which the boy can do quite adeptly, although he does not know it. And you actually do get to see ‘the Further’, endowed masterfully with excellent special effects and delicious horror imagery to make it look cooler than any 3D film you’ll see this year. Awesome stuff. All of these things add up to a more detailed plot that makes the movie more believable (even in its most excessive, silly moments) and more interesting.

Third, the scenery and aesthetics? Just awesome, beyond belief. This is horror incarnate; of a kind I haven’t seen done so well since the cheesiest days of the 80s. I like horror because of its over the top excesses and silly imagery: flaming torches down long dark hallways, red lighting and chains and monsters that get right up in your face and scare you. Shadow-men with horns and claws standing in the corner by your comatose son’s bed. Scary little girls with grins of death frozen forever on their faces. This movie operates on a very campy and un-subtle notion much like Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights – or, for non-Floridians, the biggest, most over the top haunted house attraction you can think of in your own state. Everything is big and loud, so that it will reach even the people furthest away. Horror – good horror – is about the theatrical and the surreal, both of them combined to warp the minds of the audience.

The film pays gleeful tribute to the horror of the past all throughout its duration. The musical cues and those frozen grins popping up on the ghosts remind me of old 1920s silent horror. The Gothic black and white look of the shots of the house in the credits sets a very classic feel as well. The hellish colors and warped, stylish dramatic flair recall Lovecraft. The whole haunted house motif, the jump scares and the manic energy the film has are all like things time-capsuled out of an 80s horror movie. This whole thing should be a mess of jumbled influences and nonsensical parts, but it comes out to something hugely entertaining.

Hell, even the jump scares are awesome. These are actually really well done and make the experience that much more fun! How did they do that? Most movies I see these days just put them in there as excuses to not write any actual suspense or terror into the script (laziness kills), but Insidious uses them forcefully and powerfully, proving that anything can truly be done well if you try hard enough.

I think that’s the best word to describe this movie in the end – energy. Everything here feels vital, urgent and honest. Everything here is so in your face and so excitedly done that you have no choice but to sit up, pay attention and let the movie bowl you over like a tank. This movie was made out of love for the horror genre, and with powerful strokes it has become one of the most enjoyable American horror films in recent years. Sure, it’s not perfect. The characters could be a little better, a little less generic, but even then, they’re no worse than any other horror film, and the movie itself is strong enough so that you won’t notice unless you’re really looking to pick it apart. Insidious is a ton of fun and I will definitely watch it again more in the future. Highly recommended.