V/H/S/2, Occult, and Special Effects in Found Footage Movies

One of the things that I love about the horror genre is its unique relationship with low-budget filmmaking. Cheaply-made terror trashfests have been a dime a dozen for decades, but on the other hand I cannot imagine where horror films would be today without low-budget classics such as Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thus, it makes sense that the subgenre of found footage films, films that deliberately look rough and amateurish, has made its home in horror. There are exceptions to the rule (such as Cloverfield, which relied on high-quality CGI effects and green screen composite shots), but the found footage subgenre has largely been populated by filmmakers of limited resources.

With that in mind, what happens when a filmmaker decides to make a found footage film due to budgetary limitations but also wants to include special effects? This post will look at that question through the approaches taken by two found footage titles, V/H/S/2 (2013) and Occult (2009). Both incorporated special effects outside of the usual blood-and-guts stuff, each with varying levels of success. Read on for my analysis, with minor spoilers for both films.

Like the original V/H/S film, V/H/S/2 is a combination of found footage and anthology storytelling; also like its predecessor, it demonstrates that found footage and anthologies don’t really mix. None of the stories presented in V/H/S/2 are enhanced by the found footage visual style, and they might have been scarier had they not been found footage films at all. (This especially applies the story titled "Phase I Clinical Trials", where the protagonist receives an ocular implant that records his everyday life. Because the protagonist has no choice to record everything he sees, this story should have worked as a found footage short. It doesn't.) Even the best story of the bunch, an unexpectedly poignant zombie tale called “A Ride in the Park”, doesn't feel like it had to be shot in a found footage style in order to be effective.

The eco-friendly, mountain biking zombies from "A Ride in the Park" in V/H/S/2.

For as gory as it is--and believe me, it is very gory in some areas--V/H/S/2 features two stories that attempt to include monsters as part of the narratives. "Safe Haven" involves a goat-headed demon, while "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" involves a group of gray-skinned space invaders; unfortunately, both types of monsters look like actors in monster suits. Furthermore, the directors of both stories felt compelled to shoot their parts in a gonzo, over-the-top style, as if the visual overload will compensate for the unconvincing monsters.

"Safe Haven" layers on as much violence and gore as possible and even though the demon has a single line a dialog that ends the story on a morbid, twisted note, the demon’s bouncing goat head on top of a human-proportioned body emphasizes just how hokey the whole story actually is. In contrast, "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" tries to compensate for its low-budget monsters by becoming much shakier than most found footage films. If the idea of shaking a camera as hard as possible to compensate for low-budget creature effects sounds like a bad idea to you, then you know what to expect in "Slumber Party Alien Abduction".

The uninvited guests from "Slumber Party Alien Abduction" in V/H/S/2.

Then again, V/H/S/2 doesn't completely fail when it comes to special effects. The zombie effects in "A Ride in the Park" are convincing, and there’s an eerie creature that appears towards the end of "Tape 49", the main story that ties all the other stories together. The creature skitters along the floor by doing a contorted form of spider walk, and it's one of the most convincing and chilling effect shots in the film. Of course, it also helps that the footage of the creature are fleeting, unfocused and poorly lit--enough to engage the imagination, but not enough to see through the effect.

In contrast to V/H/S/2, Occult (a.k.a. Okaruto) is a single-story found footage film that begins with a documentary team’s investigation of a sudden killing spree at a tourist resort a few years earlier. Their research takes them to one of the attack’s survivors, a homeless drifter who wanders from temp job to temp job. The crew’s interaction with the drifter becomes plagued by a series of increasingly strange events, and the drifter slowly reveals his belief that the attack was a sign from a supernatural force that he has been chosen to perform a special "ceremony" that will allow him to ascend to another dimension.

The director of Occult, Koji Shiraishi, is known for other found footage horror films, including the excellent Noroi (2005). In Occult, Shiraishi incorporates special effects into several of the scenes, including strange, nebulous shapes that appear in the sky whenever the drifter is present and a final shot that shows the fate of the drifter. Unfortunately, none of these effects are convincing, so why Shiraishi used them both during the film and in the film's final frames seems like a serious misstep on his part. After all, he did use special effects in Noroi but those were simple effects that succeeded in conveying an eerie, ghostly mood, so I don’t understand his difference in approach for Occult. Yet in spite of weak special effects, Occult works because of the strength of the story, its convincing characters, and its mood of dread that gradually increases throughout the movie.

Occult: Sky worms from another dimension?

It may sound like a cliché that good acting, direction and writing can save a film with weak special effects, but Occult shows that this rule also applies to found footage films. This also explains why an anthology format doesn't work for found footage: With so little time to build a narrative, characters and mood, it’s no wonder that most of the stories in V/H/S/2 went straight for explicit visual shocks even though the low-budget effects used to provide the shocks fail to deliver. Ultimately, found footage works best with stories that emphasize mystery, suspense, and the unknown, while visual effects are better left to filmmakers with bigger budgets.

V/H/S (2012) Movie Review

With V/H/S/2 set for national release this weekend, I figured that I should finally see the first movie in this fledgling found footage anthology franchise. I enjoy the horror subgenre of found footage, but anthology movies never appealed to me so I wasn't particularly interested in seeing V/H/S in spite of the buzz that it has generated in the horror fan community.

Regardless, I'll give V/H/S credit: It's the first film that attempted to combine the visual style of found footage with the anthology approach to horror. While the end result isn't a success, it has enough interesting ideas to whet the appetite of found footage fans for what a better film could do with the same approach. Read on for my complete review.

Anthology movies are usually hit-and-miss in terms of quality (some more "miss" than others), and V/H/S is no exception. V/H/S is divided into six stories:

* "Tape 56", directed by Adam Wingard. A group of criminals that record their crimes and sell the footage online take a job that requires them to break into a house to find and retrieve a particular video tape. When they arrive at the house, they find a corpse sitting in front of a stack of TV sets and VHS players. "Tape 56" is the framing narrative for the rest of V/H/S, with the other stories being represented by tapes the criminals watch during their search.

* "Amateur Night", directed by David Bruckner. Three friends set up a motel room and a hidden camera with the intent of making amateur porn video with the women they plan to pick up during a night of bar-hopping. Their plan goes horribly awry when one of their intended sex partners reveals that she isn't what she appears to be.

* "Second Honeymoon", directed by Ti West. A married couple's second honeymoon is disrupted by a series of increasingly strange events.

* "Tuesday the 17th", directed by Glenn McQuaid. Four friends go on a camping trip to an isolated location that was the site of several brutal murders the year before.

* "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger", directed by Joe Swanberg. A girlfriend tells her boyfriend via video chat about odd noises she hears in her apartment during the night. She uses her laptop's built-in camera to show her boyfriend what happens when she decides to investigate the noises, and in doing so she learns that she's not alone.

* "10/31/98", directed by Radio Silence. A group of college students get together to go to a Halloween party, but wind up somewhere that is farthest thing from a party.

As with other entries in the found footage subgenre, the crucial detail is whether the movie benefits from using the found footage aesthetic. If you're going to shoot a movie as found footage, then the movie has to integrate that detail as a primary part of its narrative; otherwise, the movie might as well be shot as fiction films usually are and not as found footage. Unfortunately, the found footage style does not add much to the stories in V/H/S. Each of the protagonists use consumer-grade video cameras to document key moments of their lives in some way, but the cameras and the act of using cameras do not feel integral to the telling of the stories.

Further hindering the quality of V/H/S are the stories themselves, which are neither original nor engaging. I’m particularly disappointed that the film did not take advantage of one of its own recurring plot points--the idea of a collector who amasses a sizable inventory of footage of people in final days, hours and minutes of their lives.

Even though V/H/S won't bring any new fans to the found footage subgenre, it does have a few noteworthy moments:

* There's a chilling scene in "Second Honeymoon" involving video footage shot in a hotel room in the middle of the night. While this doesn't sound exceptional on the surface, director West sets it up to be the most memorable sequence in the movie.

* "Tuesday the 17th" is like an abbreviated slasher movie, but with two unique details: its "final girl" has a very disturbing idea about how to stop the killer, and it uses static and digital distortions in the footage to indicate the direct presence of a malevolent force. The distortion effect is unnerving to see--it's sort of like the Predator's cloaking device, only much more surreal--and it's a shame that the story didn't make better usage of it.

* "Tape 56" and "Amateur Night" play with the idea of sleazy digital voyeurism, although both use it as a plot device to set up the protagonists for their grisly yet predictable fates. Yet when I watched these characters plan and execute abusive, violent and exploitative activities for the sake of recording them for profit, I couldn't help but to think of recent all-too-real controversies surrounding high schools in Steubenville, OH and Saratoga, CA, where teenage rapists used digital media to document and brag about their crimes. With that in mind, I'm guessing that a found footage variation on I Spit on Your Grave is only a matter of time.

From what I've heard so far, V/H/S/2 is a better movie than its predecessor. In contrast, V/H/S is an intriguing but unsuccessful experiment with the found footage subgenre, and it thus would only be of interest of the subgenre's most devoted fans.

Human Sacrifice, Spirit Photography and a Cursed Village Haunt Nintendo Wii's Project Zero II: Crimson Butterfly

Two people who are lost in the woods find themselves in a strange village that vanished a long time ago under mysterious circumstances. No, it's not Brigadoon--it's the Nintendo Wii edition of Tecmo's Project Zero 2: Crimson Butterfly (a.k.a. Fatal Frame 2).

Project Zero 2 was one of the last major releases for the Wii, but it was only sold in Europe and Japan in June 2012. I was able to purchase a copy of the European version at a reasonable price through eBay, and then I played it on my Wii console through the region-free Gecko OS application that I downloaded for free from the Homebrew Channel. This might sound like a lot of effort just to play a video game, but I'm glad I did it. Even though it arrived late in the Wii's release schedule, Project Zero 2 is one of the best horror games available for that console. Read on for my complete review.

The Wii edition of Project Zero 2 is a remake of Fatal Frame 2, which was originally released for the PlayStation 2 in 2003 and the Xbox in 2004. While the game has been changed to fit Wii's motion control system, its plot remains the same: Twins Mio and Mayu Amakura are hiking through the woods of Japan to return to a place they liked to visit in their childhood. Mio follows Mayu into a detour that takes them much deeper into the forest, where they find an ancient village that appears to be abandoned. As they explore the village, they learn that a human sacrifice ritual involving twins that was regularly performed by the villagers had gone horribly wrong, which then opened a portal to the underworld that plunged the village into a state of murky limbo. Yet many angry ghosts still walk the streets of the village, and they are determined to use Mio and Mayu to perform the ritual correctly to end the curse that imprisoned them in everlasting darkness.

Project Zero 2 is one of the creepiest horror games I've played on the Wii. Between its detailed environments, gruesome story and impressive selection of ghastly spirits, this game will make your skin crawl for hours on end. Players will encounter ghosts of previous sacrifice victims, as well as those of visitors who found the village and became trapped by its curse. Two of the most disturbing spooks among the cast of phantoms are the woman with the broken neck (she walks around with her lifeless head eerily flopping from side to side) and the woman who committed suicide by throwing herself down a stairwell (watching how this ghost moves herself along the floor will make you squirm). As the game progresses, players learn more about the specifics of the sacrifice ritual, the people who lived in the village, and what went wrong that caused the village to vanish.

The game utilizes the Wiimote and nunchuk controllers to enhance players' immersion into its gloomy world. Players use the Wiimote to aim either a flashlight or the Camera Obscura, the only weapon Mio and Mayu have to fight against the ghosts. Defeating ghosts gives players points, which can then be used to buy upgrades for the Camera Obscura. I've never played any of the Project Zero/Fatal Frame games before this one but I found the Wii-specific controls to be very intuitive and responsive, so much so that I’m astonished that Nintendo didn't adapt the entire series for the Wii console. (Actually, Nintendo did release Project Zero 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse for the Wii back in 2008, but that release was exclusive to Japan and it currently costs around $80 or more to buy on eBay. Dammit.)

Unique to the Wii's version of Project Zero 2 is a Haunted House mode, where players tour different haunted locations. This is a fun addition to the game that "measures" your fear by how much you shake the Wiimote during your haunted visit; this mode also allows a second player to participate by triggering random scares to surprise the other player. The selection of haunted environments and two-player game play format is very similar to another Wii title, the Ju-On: The Grudge Haunted House Simulator. However, Project Zero 2 is the better purchase simply because it's better made and has so much more to offer than the Ju-On game.

Project Zero 2 does have its shortcomings, but not enough to ruin the overall gaming experience. Most of the missions involve looking through old village buildings to find various objects; this becomes repetitive and a somewhat annoying from time to time. Furthermore, because of the game's strong focus on narrative, players will often have to find a certain object or perform a particular task in order for the game to progress. If players cannot figure out what the object or task is--and sometimes it is not as obvious as it should be--then the game essentially comes to a halt. For example, I was in a level that required me to look through a hole in a wall in order for a necessary cut scene to play. Yet because this kind of action wasn't required anywhere else in the game to make it continue, it didn't occur to me to do it until I watched a Project Zero 2 walkthrough video on YouTube.

If you enjoyed other Wii horror games such as Calling, Cursed Mountain and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, then you will want to add Project Zero 2 to your library. It may be hard to get for some Wii gamers, but the effort is worth it.

Old Super 8 Home Movies Make the Final Cut in Sinister (2012)

For as much as horror movies are associated with scary monsters that are made possible through complex special effects, some of the most noteworthy movies are the ones that take something that is so ordinary and harmless and turn it into the source of unimaginable terror. Such is the case with the Super 8 movies that form the center of Sinister, a 2012 film that was directed and co-written by Scott Derrickson.

Sinister tells the story of Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a true crime novelist who moves his wife and kids to a small town in Pennsylvania where a family was massacred by an unknown killer. Oswalt hopes that his research into the murders will provide him with a new bestseller that will rejuvenate his stalled career. While his family moves into their new home, he finds a box of Super 8 home movies in attic that were shot of different families at different locations, from the 1960s to the present. Strange and eerie things begin to happen as Oswalt researches the films to understand their link to the murders he is investigating, things that push him and his family deeper into a mystery that isn't meant to be solved.

Sinister feels like a hodgepodge of ideas from other films that feature found footage, ghosts and slashers, but the end result of this combination is a creepy, compelling film that boasts a strong performance by Hawke and haunting direction by Derrickson. Even though seasoned horror fans will figure out the film's final twist before the characters do, Sinister is so well produced that it will keep you watching until the final twisted frame.

Even though Sinister is not a "found footage" movie like Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, the Super 8 home movies that Oswalt finds become an intimidating force during the course of the story, thus turning an obsolete media format into a vehicle for hallucinatory nightmares. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Derrickson revealed that he shot the Super 8 movies before shooting the rest of the film. "I think that creating the Super 8 imagery before shooting the body of the film – along with finding the music that I found – had a lot to do with the overall impact of the whole film," said Derrickson. "Those elements set a tone in my mind that represented what the movie was going to feel like. I bought 9 music tracks ahead of time and shot the Super 8 films to those tracks. ... In some ways I think buying that music early on was the wisest move I made when making the film. I can’t imagine what the movie would be without them." In that observation, Derrickson is absolutely correct. Imagining Sinister without its Super 8 movies is like imaging Alien without the artwork contributed by H.R. Giger.

When considering the creative influences in Sinister, the most obvious would be The Shining, Ringu, and H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House" story. Yet with its depiction of the insanity that erupts when voyeurism collides with obsession, Sinister's most interesting themes are similar to those in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Derrickson's film is not nearly as bizarre as Cronenberg's, but Hawke's intense portrayal of a man falling under the hypnotic thrall of disturbing moving images is reminiscent of Videodrome's doomed protagonist Max Renn (James Woods).

Invisible Demonic Terror Returns to Suburbia Again in Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

Among modern horror film franchises, Paranormal Activity is the only one that has been able to consistently use the "found footage" style of storytelling throughout each of its films. Other franchises that began in the horror subgenre of found footage all jettisoned that style at one point or another. Some did as soon as the first sequel (Blair Witch Project, The Last Exorcism), while others did so later (REC). Yet upon my viewing of Paranormal Activity 4, this franchise's accomplishment is looking rather dubious. After all, why stay within the style of found footage if it begins to hamper a franchise's storytelling possibilities?

For as competently made as it is, PA4 serves as a reminder that its franchise needs to make some major changes very soon to keep its central story engaging and avid fans interested in more PA movies. Read on for my complete and spoiler-free review of Paranormal Activity 4.

Paranormal Activity 4 takes place in 2011, when a family in a suburban neighborhood takes in their neighbor's child Robbie (Brady Allen) after his mom is suddenly rushed to the hospital. During his stay, Robbie begins to bond with the family's youngest member Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp)--a bond that sparks suspicion in older sister Alex (Kathryn Newton) when strange, inexplicable things begin to happen in their house.

I wasn't completely dissatisfied with PA4, because there are plenty of scary ideas embedded within the story. It provides some more ideas about how the cult that was introduced in PA3 operates, and how children play a key role in the cult's grander scheme. Such a scheme explains a crucial plot twist that happens during the middle of the film, a twist that honestly surprised me but was logically consistent with the PA movies that came before it. PA4 also makes use of the Xbox 360's Kinect feature in a very creative, creepy way.

Because of the low-budget nature of found footage movies, PA4 has to rely on a lot of strategically placed obscurity to keep the special effects budget at a minimum. In doing so, this sequel mostly relies on same bag of tricks used in the previous films: characters reacting in horror to something just outside of the camera's view, supernatural entities appearing as powerful, fast-moving blurs, etc. These tricks worked well enough in the previous films, but they're begging to show their age in PA4.

Just as the camera angles are set up in PA films to hide certain visual details, the films are also structured in a way that conceals key plot points until near the end (or at the very end) of the film. As such, PA4 recycles plot details from the previous two sequels--the protective sister figure from PA2, the children who have strange imaginary friends from PA3--as a way to keep things going until the final reveal. Further dulling the sequel's creative spark is that its setting and characters look almost identical to settings and characters from the previous films: upper middle class people living in upper middle class households. To go by the situational logic of the PA franchise, supernatural entities are only interested in terrorizing people who prefer suburban living and fall within a particular income bracket.

Watching PA4 was like watching one of the later seasons of The X-Files. You sit through a lot of stuff--some familiar, some different, some scary, some boring--for the sake of learning a bit more about the grand conspiracy that ties everything together, only to be left with only a few more small details to ponder at the end. PA4 is shorter than a season of The X-Files, so it at least has that going for it. Yet if this franchise is going to have a future, it has to do something different to keep the story fresh and scary. Otherwise, future PA sequels will be the kind of footage that no one wants to find.

A Superhero Origin Story Goes Back to the Basics in Chronicle (2012)

During the summer of 2012, I spent many hours reviewing online discussions among fans who compared The Avengers to Dark Knight Rises, the two big superhero blockbusters of that season. Some argued that The Avengers and Dark Knight Rises are polar opposites of each other in terms of style and mood. On the basis of what I have just watched, I would argue otherwise: The polar opposite of both The Avengers and Dark Knight Rises is Chronicle, the 2012 low-budget film that was directed by Josh Trank and scripted by Max Landis.

I make my comparison based on one major criterion: Avengers and Dark Knight Rises are based on preexisting characters with devoted fan bases, while Chronicle creates a new set of characters that have no fan bases and thus do not have to conform to any preexisting fan expectations or narrative arcs. As a result, Chronicle feels like a fresh and emotionally honest take on a story that has been told many, many times before--the story of what happens when ordinary human beings are granted superhuman abilities. Read on for my complete review.

As I mentioned in my review of Iron Man 2, the most compelling superhero stories are the ones that act as morality plays about the nature of power--its use and abuse, who has it and who doesn't, when it should be exercised and when it shouldn't, and so on. In the case of Chronicle, a power is given to three teenage boys--the reclusive Andrew (Dane DeHaan), the philosophical Matt (Alex Russell), and the outgoing Steve (Michael B. Jordan)--discover a glowing, crystalline object buried in a pit in the woods. The power is a kind of telekinesis that grows in strength and flexibility with its continued usage. After the boys first receive the power, they spend many days together to understand it and frequently use it to do things that most teenagers are inclined to do--play pranks and perform simple tricks to impress each other. However, when a series of circumstances and events place one of the boys in a state of emotional meltdown, the power's full destructive force is unleashed upon the streets of Seattle.

Chronicle doesn't completely escape the narrative conventions that are common in superhero origin stories or horror/sci-fi stories about tormented teenagers who use supernatural or technological forces to seek revenge on those who wronged them. Thus, this film invites comparisons to both the superhero origin movies such as Superman (1978), X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) and horror/sci-fi movies such as Carrie (1976), Akira (1988) and The Craft (1996). Some of the characters' pranks will also momentarily remind viewers of certain teenage sex comedies from the 80s, comedies such as Zapped! (1982) and Weird Science (1985).

Where Chronicles succeeds on its own terms is in the strengths of its script, direction, and performances by the lead cast, as well as the usage of the "found footage" format to tell the story. Some may find it odd to see a found footage superhero origin story, particularly since the footage in question is never actually "found". Instead, the found footage approach in Chronicles is similar to that used in Skew (2011)--it invites the audience to see through the characters' eyes as events happen, such as when they first discover their power and awkwardly experiment with its usage and limitations. In particular, we get to see when the boys first learn how to fly, and watching this experience unfold through their point of view provides for an exhilarating sequence among the clouds. When the narrative crosses into the territory of horror during its final act, the found footage approach emulates that of Cloverfield (2008) in that it enhances the fear that emanates from the enormous acts of destruction enabled by the boys' seemingly inexhaustible power. The kind of raw brutality and emotional shock that takes place at the end of Chronicle will never be seen in films featuring a popular superhero characters, lest they offend certain fan sensibilities or limit toy merchandising opportunities. Indeed, the final confrontation in Chronicle makes the final confrontation in Superman II (1980) look like a minor misunderstanding between urbane and cultured gentlefolk.

Nevertheless, Chronicle would have fallen apart if the three main characters and their respective backgrounds didn't feel sincere. Andrew, Matt and Steve could have been pigeonholed into stereotypical teenage character types, but the script and the lead actors don't let them. The boys' bonding over their shared power allows us to see how they differ from each other and how they are alike, and this bond ably facilitates the movie's transition from superheroic fantasy to bone-crushing horror. In fact, it is an honest gesture of friendship that one of the boys does for another that sets in motion the tragic events that lead up to the film's disastrous and heartbreaking end. If there's a moral lesson in Chronicle, it is that even the most well-meaning and innocuous usage of power--say, to impress peers at a high school talent show--can have extremely severe consequences under certain circumstances. From this perspective, the boys in Chronicle have more in common with the tragic heroes of ancient Greek myth than with the superheroes of modern pop culture.

As a horror fan, I was impressed at how well Chronicle connected the symbolic and thematic commonalities between the superhero and horror genres. Even though capes-and-tights stories are usually played for action-packed thrills or tongue-in-cheek camp, the idea of a supremely powerful human being is actually an extremely terrifying idea. This is one of the reasons why I still appreciate the two recent live-action Hulk films, since they are among the few superhero films of late that are willing to tread so close to the fine line that separates superheroic melodrama from uninhibited terror.

Chronicle is a kick to the gut of the superhero genre, stripping away the colorful facade of the typical superpowered do-gooder to reveal the vulnerable and volatile emotional landscape that lies underneath. I highly recommend this film.

Follow a Terrifying Investigation of the Supernatural in Noroi (2005)

For some, the horror subgenre of found footage has become the bane of good horror filmmaking. Much like the slasher and zombie subgenres in previous decades, found footage has become the subgenre of choice for aspiring horror filmmakers who have very small production budgets at their disposal. Of course, the talents of such filmmakers vary and while some of them have produced found footage films of high entertainment value, many more have made films that are simply average, below average, or so below average that they are unwatchable.

Even though some found footage narrative conventions have become clichéd due to their recent overuse, I still think that this subgenre has the potential to tell stories that other subgenres can't. As the name suggests, "found footage" is just that--footage that was shot by one person or group and found by another. With so many forms of video technology available these days, the footage could come from anywhere: home video, security cameras, news footage, live Internet video feed, and so on. In other words, wherever a video camera can be found, a found footage horror movie has the potential to be made.

In the case of Noroi, the found footage in question is a documentary that was completed by a journalist two days before he went missing. Unlike most found footage films, Noroi is shot like a documentary with very few "shaky cam" shots. What also sets this film apart from others in its subgenre is the span of time it covers: most found footage films cover events that occur within a few hours or a few days, but Noroi examines events that occur over the course of several months. Such differences result in a different kind of horror movie, the kind that foregoes jump shocks and excessive gore in exchange for an eerie, creeping mood that stays with you long after the film ends. Read on for my complete review.

Noroi is about the last documentary made by Masafumi Kobayashi (Jin Muraki), a paranormal investigator, and the events that led up to his disappearance. Kobayashi's documentary tracked a handful of what initially appear to be separate incidents of supernatural activity (EVP recordings, psychic visions, spirit photography, etc.) but they all have connections to the sinister occult practices of Shimokage, an abandoned village located in Japan's Nagano Prefecture. The footage in the documentary includes interview footage shot by Kobayashi and his crew, along with footage from other Japanese TV shows about the paranormal and archival footage from 1977.

Noroi is a complex movie with a large number of characters and subplots. For the complete story to make sense, the viewer has to pay close attention to the video clips that are shown to identify clues--both spoken and unspoken--that tie each of the narrative threads together into a complete story. Furthermore, because most of the film's footage is shot like a documentary, it feels like you are watching a horror movie from the outside and looking inward. Almost all of the deaths that happen in the movie occur off the screen, so you'll never see a single scene where a victim is being stalked and attacked by some mysterious threat.

This is not to say that Noroi isn't scary at all; far from it. Director Kôji Shiraishi knows how to build a fragmented narrative that slowly converges into a whole and rewards viewers who are willing to put the pieces together in their minds as the film progresses to its conclusion. Noroi is not an example of cinematic shock, but a layered supernatural mystery that will make your skin crawl if you let it. That said, just because it doesn't feature much explicit violence or gore doesn't mean that Noroi is neither brutal nor gruesome.

Horror fans who love films that are loaded with high-intensity frights and bloodshed will be disappointed in Noroi because it is not that kind of film. However, horror fans who love a good mystery should see this movie, particularly the version that includes the alternate ending. That's the version I saw and I think that calling it an "alternate" is a misnomer; it's actually an extended ending that it delivers a chilling conclusion to Noroi's engrossing, intricate mystery.

Skew (2011) Movie Review: When Video Cameras See Dead People

I missed last weekend's premiere release of Paranormal Activity 4, but I did have the time to watch another kind of "found footage" movie called Skew, which was written and directed by Sevé Schelenz and has won a few awards on the indie film circuit. Read on for my complete review.

Skew is about three friends--Simon (Rob Scattergood), Rich (Richard Olak) and Eva (Amber Lewis)--who go on a cross-country road trip to a friend's wedding. Simon brings along a video camera to record the trip and their numerous stops at gaudy tourist attractions. As the journey progresses, the camera starts to exhibit peculiar quirks: distorting sounds, skipping video frames, turning on by itself, blurring people's faces, and seeing things that aren't really there. Is the camera acting as a window into the supernatural, or is it providing clues to the characters about their ultimate fates?

Even though it has the look and feel of a found footage film, Skew isn't actually a found footage film because the footage you see is never "found". Instead, the film is shot in such a way that requires you see the story strictly through the camera's lens, both when Simon is using the camera and whenever the camera turns itself on. (Hint: Rich and Eva don't see the exact same things that Simon does when they look through the camera's viewfinder.)

Another significant difference is how and when the footage is shot. In many found footage movies, much of the footage is out of focus or shot in the dark in order to establish and maintain the moods of mystery and suspense; on the other hand, Skew is shot mostly during the day with ample amounts of sunlight. Such brightness provides its own sort of unease, particularly when it calls attention to the camera's odd behavior and the strange events it allows Simon to witnesses. Whenever the camera turns itself on, it is usually facing something other than the characters but you can eavesdrop on what the characters are saying; these scenes of disjointed voyeurism add to film's prevailing atmosphere of confusion and dread.

Skew is essentially a ghost story, although it is not the kind like The Haunting (1963) and Poltergeist (1982) where ghosts are the central point that moves the plot forward. The movie is more like The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Head Trauma (2006), movies where supernatural beings and paranormal occurrences coexist alongside the living as a sort of warped reflection of reality. To be more specific, Skew tells the story of what happens when a supernatural phenomenon enters the life of someone whose sanity is already beginning to unravel.

An anonymous specter ... or a familiar face?

With its unique approach to the found footage genre and its clever use of the supernatural as a backdrop for a character-driven drama, I found myself thinking about Skew long after the final credits rolled. Even though it was clear from Skew's style that its ending would be a grim one, I could not guess how the story of Simon, Rich and Eva was going to end as I was watching it. There are some points in the movie where the dialog feels scripted, but it's not enough to detract from the overall narrative.

Skew may frustrate viewers because it deliberately obscures some of its key plot points. There's a connection between the blurred faces and the ghosts that appear through the camera, as there is a significance to when a person is viewed for the first time through the camera's lens and when a person's face becomes blurred. Unfortunately, these narrative rules are not applied clearly or consistently, resulting in two off-screen deaths--and possibly a third--that are heavily inferred but never explicitly confirmed, as well as a final image before the end credits that's more baffling than it is revealing. There's also an awkward subplot involving a police officer; even though the subplot provides a tense interrogation scene that reveals important information, it leads up to a character death that's far too contrived and improbable to be shocking.

If you already despise the found footage subgenre of horror cinema, Skew isn't going to change your mind. Yet if you're willing to try something that takes a fresh (and somewhat flawed) approach to the subjective horrors that can be witnessed through a home video camera, Skew is worth your time. Skew is currently unavailable on DVD or Blu-ray, but you can probably watch it on demand on various video sites around the Internet.

Evidence (2011) Movie Review: The Truth is Not Out There

For as much of a novelty as they seem to be, "found footage" horror movies require the usage of certain storytelling and filmmaking devices to make them effective. In that sense, they're like any other movie: They must manipulate the audience in order to elicit certain emotional responses without the audience actively noticing that the manipulation is taking place. Well-made found footage movies are works of quality cinema in their own right, because it takes a lot of talent to make footage that looks rough and unscripted on its surface be so compelling.

In the case of Evidence (2011), there's enough talent on display to keep you watching but it never assembles its plot threads into a coherent enough whole to make it satisfying or memorable. Read on for my complete review, which contains minor spoilers.

Evidence is about four young adults who take a weekend camping trip in the woods. One of the adults, Ryan (Ryan McCoy) is using the trip as an opportunity to collect footage for a documentary about his friend Brett (Brett Rosenberg) and his first experience with camping. As the trip continues, the four campers soon realize that they are not alone and what starts out as a weekend getaway quickly escalates into a fatal nightmare.

As found footage films go, Evidence keeps your attention by having talented enough actors play the main characters and by making sure that the video footage is unprofessional enough to qualify as "found footage" but not unbearable to watch. (If you've sat through a few poorly shot home videos, you'll know how unwatchable amateur footage can be.) For what special effects there are, they are effective and convey the illusion that they are part of the found footage. Where Evidence fails is in its inability to create and sustain a mood of intrigue and dread.

Well-made horror films require fans to use their imagination when providing scares, because imagination is necessary to make the artificially-induced fears palpable. Because of its stylistic limitations (no background music, limited or no special effects, etc.), found footage horror films must engage the audiences' imaginations in ways that other horror films don't. This is often done be providing background details about the subject of horror before the horror itself is directly encountered by the protagonists. The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity had their characters discuss related supernatural accounts and details early in the narrative so that viewers can use their imaginations to envision what is responsible for the strange events that happen later and are caught on the grainy, somewhat unfocused footage (e.g., what is making the strange noises during the night, what is causing objects to move by themselves, etc.).

Further prompting the viewers' imaginations are the characters themselves. The curiosity of the protagonists encourages the viewers' own curiosity, even if it's obvious that such curiosity will lead to the characters' own vague demises. Other horror films can get away with disinterested characters (they make for great monster chow), but disinterested characters in a found footage movie can evoke a similar disinterest among viewers.

Evidence hinders its narrative momentum from the beginning by making Ryan's efforts to make a documentary about Brett's first camping experience as self-centered and unfocused as possible. The footage in the early, pre-horror parts of film suggests that Ryan isn’t very serious in his effort to make a documentary, nor does it indicate that he has any genuine interest in his documentary's subject. Naturally, the other characters--Brett, Abi (Abigail Richie) and Ashley (Ashley Bracken)--quickly become irritated with Ryan, which leaves viewers with characters who aren't very engaging and a contrived situation that serves no other reason than to 1) put the characters in danger and 2) have a camera present at all times to cover said danger. It also doesn't help that when the scares finally begin to happen, they having nothing to do with Brett's experience with camping or lack thereof, which further calls into question the film's narrative approach.

(On the other hand, if Evidence revealed that Brett actually had ample amounts of camping experience and he was just using Ryan's vanity to lure his friends into a deadly game of backwoods cat-and-mouse--that would've made for an interesting and unique found footage movie.)

The movie picks up a bit when the scary stuff begins, but that too remains ill-defined--in a bad way. The scares seem to originate from a gorilla-like creature that makes eerie howling noises and attacks in a direct, brutal fashion. These scenes suggested to me that the monster is some kind of "Skunk Ape", which gave Evidence a Blair Witch-meets-Bigfoot vibe. Yet as the final act of the movie shows, the actual source of the horror is more complex than that, although its exact connection to the ape monster remains unexplained. (Hint: If you've seen The Crazies, 28 Days Later or Quarantine, you'll know what to expect in the film's later half.) The final scenes of Evidence explode with all kinds of disturbing imagery and jump scares, but there's no anticipation building up to it. The end credits provide some additional footage, but none of it will help you better understand what you just saw.

I think the true source of the horror in Evidence has plenty of frightening possibilities (some of which are seen fleetingly), but the filmmakers do nothing to build the suspense leading up to its reveal or to prompt us into connecting the film's clues together in our imaginations into a comprehensible whole. It almost seems as if the ape monster attacks were thrown into the movie both as a misdirection and to compensate for the film's lack of suspense, not to add any kind of plot insight.

When seeing a found footage horror movie, one important question needs to be asked to determine its overall quality: Was it effective as a found footage movie, or would it have been better had it been shot as a standard horror movie? The problem with Evidence is that its makers didn't know how to construct a plot that uses the found footage approach to build tension, so they resorted to jump scares instead. The end result is a movie that's mediocre, regardless of its style. Still, if barrages of jump scares are a requirement in your found footage film viewings, then you might want to give Evidence a look.

Paranormal Activity 3 Review: A Tale of Two Doomed Sisters

It's rare for a horror film franchise to produce sequels that remain devoted to a group of characters with a consistent chronology. It's even rarer that the same franchise can tell its ongoing story in reverse chronological order, and that the franchise keeps the budget and production values of each of its films consistently small. Upon viewing Paranormal Activity 3, I can confirm that this "found footage" franchise, which began back in 2007, meets all of those attributes, which makes it a valuable rarity unto itself.

Click below to read my full review for PA3, which contains some mild spoilers. I really enjoyed this sequel, largely because it provides some great scares and it adds a great deal of new background information to Katie (Katie Featherston) and Kristi (Sprague Grayden), the sisters from the first two movies. If you prefer to stop reading to avoid spoilers of any kind, then I can only recommend this: If you're of the mindset that prequels are completely unnecessary and anti-climactic because the fates of the key characters have already been established, then PA3 is not for you. However, if you are genuinely interested in how it all began for Katie and Kristi, then this prequel is worth your time.

PA3 starts shortly before the events of PA2, when Katie drops off a large box of home videos for Kristi as she and her husband Dan (Brian Boland) are preparing a nursery for their soon-to-arrive son. The rest of the movie consists of edited footage from those VHS tapes, which show what happened during the month of September in 1988 when the sisters were children and living with their mom (Lauren Bittner) and her boyfriend Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith). Dennis earns his living by producing wedding videos and when odd things begin to happen in their home, he sets up cameras around the house to capture on tape what's behind the occurrences.

PA3 remains faithful to the standard set by its two predecessors. The special effects and shot compositions are simple, as is the story itself. The scares start small, and then build throughout the course of the story until its grim, vicious ending. To prop up the film's running time, the movie features a few scenes and plot devices that are reminiscent of other haunted house movies. There are some segments in PA3 that will have horror fans recalling other horror films such as Poltergeist, and the common horror plot device of a child who has an invisible, imaginary friend who isn't imaginary at all plays a major role in the story. These observations may make PA3 sound like a tired rehash of what has come before in both the PA series and in the horror movie genre in general, but this sequel is anything but. There's a lot of talent in this film both in front of and behind the camera, and it shows.

Katie and Kristi as adults ...

... And as children, played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown.

As I was watching PA3, I would occasionally wonder how the same scenes would look if they were shot like a non-found footage horror movie. There would be a more stylized use of lighting, different camera angles, and background music to build tension before certain events happen. The fact that PA3 is still a scary film in the absence of these filmmaking techniques shows how well the movie's production crew of understood both the strengths and weaknesses of the "found footage" subgenre of horror. Even in the absence of fast-moving "shaky cam" found footage, PA3 can still squeeze substantial scares and dread out of footage shot by cameras that barely move, if they move at all.

That said, you don't go into a movie such as this one without expecting to have many things left to your imagination. There are many shots where characters see and react to things that are just outside of the camera's view. This is why I would strongly recommend that viewers see PA and PA2 before seeing this sequel, since PA3 cunningly plays off of what you already know--and don't know--about Katie and Kristi and their family history to build tension. For example, there's a scene where one of the sisters is innocently playing dress-up in adult clothes. This would come across as sweet and adorable in any other movie, but it's absolutely bone-chilling in PA3 because of what has come before (or what is yet to come, given that this is a prequel). Curiously, the film takes place in 1988, which puts it in the middle of the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" (SRA) panic during the 80s and 90s that began under the claim of "recovered memories". (For as crazy as SRA accusations sound, that didn't keep innocent people from being put on trail and serving jail time in the real world.) Hidden abuse and buried memories both play major roles in PA3.

I should also stress that like its two preceding movies, the setting and the characters themselves are very mundane (at least on the surface). There are no exchanges of complicated, layered dialogue between characters or dramatic complications that the characters experience that allow them to change and grow as characters. (Actually, for what revelations there are in the movie, they happen too late for the characters to do anything about them.) This not only complements PA3's simple story structure and modest visual style, but it makes the increasingly violent supernatural events so much more jarring and vivid. Perhaps this is why found footage films have found a home in horror and not in any other genre--such intense mixings of the plain and ordinary with the unthinkable and horrific wouldn't have nearly the same impact anywhere else.

The camera reveals all ... or does it?

While PA3 is a solid prequel that's better paced than PA2 (read my review of that film here), it does have a few nagging quirks. For movie that's made from footage recorded on a slow speed on VHS tapes from the late 80s, the overall quality of the video images is much better than it should be. Even the visual glitches that were common on VHS tapes from that time, such as brief screen discolorations and occasional lines of static, are nowhere to be found. Furthermore, this is the only film in its series so far that doesn't have some sort of message thanking a law enforcement agency or relatives for allowing the filmmakers to use the footage. To follow the narrative logic of most found footage films, the "real" footage was assembled by a "real" documentary crew who got the footage after a "real" investigation into the strange events depicted on the footage and the people involved. If we're lucky, maybe PA4--which is scheduled for release in October of this year--will show us who these fictitiously real/really fictitious documentarians are and why they have been so devoted to tracking the fateful lives of the sisters Katie and Kristi.

PA3 is great sequel, and I recommend it to anyone who's a fan of the series or scary found footage films in general. The details that are revealed during this movie leave this franchise open for many more stories outside of Katie and Kristi and their family, so I'm curious to see what new kinds of found footage frights PA4 will have to offer later this year.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes Review: Horrific Homicides Caught on Home Video

Being a horror movie fan requires a bit of effort to get the full benefits that this genre of cinema has to offer. There are the horror classics that everyone knows about (fan or not), classics that are usually easy to find for rental or purchase. Then there are the horror films that are heavily promoted by the big studios regardless of their actual quality; these too are easy to find and most people have heard of them. Yet there's another category of horror films, films that few people know about but are well worth seeking out because they provide shocks and shivers in ways that most mainstream and classic horror films don't. Such is the case of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, a found footage mockumentary film that was directed by John Erick Dowdle and written by Dowdle and his brother Drew Dowdle.

I heard about Poughkeepsie Tapes back in 2007 when it was playing the indie film festival circuit. I didn't do much to look for it because on the basis of the brief plot summary that I initially heard, it sounded like the found footage version of a Saw movie (much like how Cloverfield is a found footage version of a kaiju movie or how The Last Exorcism is a found footage version of a demonic possession movie). As I heard more about the film over the years, I found out that Poughkeepsie Tapes is far from being a "torture porn" movie, so I decided to seek it out--except that I couldn't find it. Even though this movie got the Dowdle brothers work in Hollywood, Poughkeepsie Tapes didn't find a national distributor. After finally tracking this title down, I think I found out why: Poughkeepsie Tapes is a very good movie, perhaps too good for its own good. Read on for my complete review.

The story of Poughkeepsie Tapes is simple on its surface. It begins with the FBI finding a discarded cache of video tapes--over 800 of them, each numbered in chronological sequence--that were shot by a serial killer known as "The Water Street Butcher" as he stalked, tortured, murdered, mutilated and disposed of his many victims. The entire movie is structured like a documentary around this found footage, with criminal experts and friends and relatives of the victims providing their thoughts about the killer and the legacy he left behind. Because its plot structure is circular in nature, the movie ends pretty much like how it begins--with a mysterious and insatiable serial killer still on the loose--but just because you know how this film ends doesn't prepare you for what you'll see along the way.

What’s remarkable about Poughkeepsie Tapes is how the Dowdles used the narrative structure and tropes of documentaries to tell a story about a fictitious serial killer. There are times in the movie when the killer seems too perfect to commit as many murders that he has without getting caught and there are some candid scenes that feel somewhat scripted, but the film's strict adherence to the documentary style keeps you engrossed enough that these shortcomings don't shatter the illusion that the documentary is somehow "real". The end result of this storytelling format is reminiscent of Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatization H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds--which I'm guessing is why you'll never see Poughkeepsie Tapes playing on any TV channel. Just like how some people tuned into Welles' dramatization and assumed that a real alien invasion was happening, it's not too far-fetched to think that someone could find Poughkeepsie Tapes during an afternoon of channel surfing and assume that he was watching a documentary about a real serial killer.

Having Poughkeepsie Tapes structured as a documentary also allowed the Dowdles to play with the audience's expectations of what will happen next. Since documentaries are very formal in how they organize and present information, the movie lulls you into passively accepting the information about the Water Street Butcher as it is given. Yet because this killer is fictitious and his story has never been told before by anyone else, it provides ample room for the Dowdles to throw in a few twists and turns that you'll never see coming. Some of these plot developments lead up to a discovery and an interview at the end that will make your skin crawl and stick with you long after the film is over.

Adding to the film's unnerving tone is the found footage itself. The footage in this movie differs from other found footage films in two significant ways: 1) the footage is only part of the movie, not all of it and 2) this is one of the few found footage horror movies that allows you to see through the eyes of the monster, not the victim(s). The footage itself is not very gory; like David Fincher's Seven, you'll hear more about the gore than see it, which leads your imagination to fill in the blanks provided in the distorted, grainy video footage. The killer's modus operandi is erratic enough that even though you see the footage through his eyes, you're never completely sure when, how and even who the killer will attack next--all you can do is sit back and watch. Furthermore, the poor quality of the video footage serves as an unmistakable suggestion that the killer watched these tapes repeatedly to relive his sadistic experiences.

Poughkeepsie Tapes could be regarded as a found footage slasher flick, but I don't think that categorization accurately captures what makes this film work. Pervious slasher flicks such as Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre have looked to real life examples of serial murder for inspiration, and Poughkeepsie Tapes takes that practice a few steps further by framing its story as a documentary. Yet because the movie expertly emulates what a documentary looks and feels like, you can't help but to be reminded of how the media covers real cases of serial murder, rape, abduction, and abuse. Sure, the Water Street Butcher invites comparisons to real serial killers such as the Zodiac Killer, killers who went on killing sprees but were never caught, but you'll be left thinking just as much (if not more so) about the sensationalized media coverage of such killers. This is why Poughkeepsie Tapes is such an effectively creepy chiller: Even as you're watching this movie for the first time, the real life examples it emulates and that you've seen many, many times before will haunt you, no matter what the film's flaws are. Few other movies, horror or otherwise, use such familiarity so effectively to convey a pervasive feeling of unease.

The Poughkeepsie Tapes is difficult to find, but well worth the effort to do so. Also, be sure to keep watching after the credits for a final frightening video clip.