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.

Three Excellent Examples of Horror Anime: Another, Moryo no Hako, and Shiki

The face of madness revealed in Moryo no Hako.

As someone who lives in a country where animation is overwhelmingly aimed at children and general audiences, I'm fascinated by the amount of freedom that animation has over in Japan. In particular, I'm still amazed at how anime is used as a means of telling serious horror stories, something that you'll never find here in the U.S. In this post, I will look at three horror anime series--each of which are based on a novel--that are great examples of how hand-drawn monsters, murders and mysteries can chill the soul of even the most jaded horror fan. Read on ...

Title: Another

Year of Release: 2012

Number of Episodes: 12

Plot Summary: In 1998, teenager Koichi Sakakibara moves into a new town while his father is away teaching a college in India. When his fellow students begin to die under unusual and shocking circumstances, Koichi learns that his class at Yomiyama Middle School has fallen under a bizarre curse that has haunted the school since 1972. With the help of his friend Mei Misaki, he sets out to uncover the secret behind the curse before his entire class dies.

Comments: Another is kind of like a slasher story in the sense that almost all of the potential victims are teenagers. However, unlike most American slasher stories that characterize teenagers as sex-crazed, booze-binging jerks, the teenagers in Another are likable, hard-working and normal (for the most part). Even in cases where the teenagers are abusive towards each other, they are often doing it out of fear of the curse; understanding that the kids are just trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying to survive a curse that's as inexplicable as it is deadly, makes it easier to sympathize with them and thus adds to the shock every time the body count goes up--and boy howdy, does it go way, way up.

Some horror fans might be frustrated with the amorphous, elusive nature of the curse. While there are some inconsistencies in the curse's mechanics (i.e., who dies and how, who goes insane and who doesn't, etc.), I thought that curse's unpredictability made it so much more intimidating and added to Another's vivid, Gothic atmosphere of dread and disorientation.

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Title: Moryo no Hako (a.k.a. Box of Goblins)

Year of Release: 2008

Number of Episodes: 13

Plot Summary: In post World War II Japan, a failed attack against teenage girl at a train station serves as a prelude to a series of grisly murders involving severed body parts placed around the countryside in boxes.

Comments: Moryo no Hako is a brilliant mashup of pulp mystery, sci-fi and occult horror. Both stylish and well-written, it travels through a wide variety of subjects--extortion, demonic possession, transhumanism, religion, ancient folklore and so on--as it tells a story about killer's obsession with perfection and immortality. Curiously, Moryo no Hako approaches the familiar plot device of "mad science" from a unique perspective. Usually, the term "mad science" is shorthand for destructive scientific research that has run amuck or has originated from a mind of questionable sanity; in Moryo no Hako, we see a science that is so ghastly and morally bankrupt that it has the capability of pushing people to madness--even people who appear outwardly rational.

Of the anime series listed in this post, Moryo no Hako is most demanding of its viewers. Some segments are shown out of sequential order, so you'll see many things in the early episodes that won't makes sense until you get closer to the end. Furthermore, for as grotesque and depraved as this series can get, many of the episodes are thick in dialog exchanges, something that may bore some horror fans. However, this is neither pointless discussion nor exposition-heavy posturing; the dialog is loaded with crucial detail and each segment contributes something interesting and essential to the mystery. Between the out-of-sequence snippets and well-scripted dialog, watching the numerous threads of Moryo no Hako coalescing into a final revelation is like watching a flower slowly unfolding, petal by petal, into a disturbed, perverse blossom.

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Title: Shiki

Year of Release: 2010

Number of Episodes: 24 (22 in the original broadcast, with an additional 2 as part of a subsequent video release)

Plot Summary: During a hot summer in the '90s, a small town in a remote part of Japan named Sotoba comes under attack by a family of vampires.

Comments: Based on the plot summary, Shiki sounds like anime's answer to Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. While that's not an entirely inaccurate assumption, there's more to Shiki than that--much, much more.

Between its large cast of distinct characters, a well-paced narrative, and soulful commentary on the nature life and death--as well as what it means to be forsaken and what it means to be free--Shiki is a top-notch terror yarn that most vampire fans will enjoy. Even though some of the story is told from the vampires' perspective, these vampires are monsters, both deliberate and unintentional, with no attempt to romanticize them (Twilight this isn’t). Furthermore, killing the Shiki vampires is not a quick, simple task where the undead suddenly turn to ash; no, the staking, beheading and sun exposure of these vamps involves plenty of effort and buckets upon buckets of blood.

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.

Want to Add a Slender Man Doll to Your Horror Collection? Nevermore Toys and Kickstarter Can Help!

Early this year, I published a post about toy designer Richard T. Broadwater’s Kickstarter campaign to launch Legendary Monsters, a series of highly-detailed action figures that are based on cryptozoological legends such as the Mothman and the Chupacabra. Since then, Broadwater and his company Nevermore Toys have expanded their selection of fantastical frights to include a legend from the modern digital age: the Slender Man.

While Nevermore Toys’ Slender Man doll is not officially part of the Legendary Monsters series, it makes for a great complementary piece to the Legendary Monsters figures. According to various online sources, the Slender Man is actually a creation of a “paranormal pictures” Photoshop contest back in 2009, but the Slender Man has gone on to have a life of his own. Like the creatures in the Legendary Monsters series, the Slender Man legend has yielded plenty of blurry pictures and bone-chilling tales since his first appearance four years ago--so much as that an entire Wikia site has been created to catalog his ever-expanding lore.

Nevermore’s Slender Man is a 32" plush doll that is being created with the finest fabrics and materials to provide a soft yet durable toy. Click here to go to the official Slender Man Kickstarter page for more information about the figure and what you can do to support its production and release. Nevermore is also distributing a limited number of Slender Man illustrations, which are being made available either with the doll or individually. Each print is limited to 30 and will be signed and numbered by the artist.

Nevermore’s previous experience with Kickstarter succeeded in launching the first series of Legendary Monsters figures. Since the initial campaign, Legendary Monsters has been slightly modified to include a role-playing game component. (After all, what’s the point of collecting so many horrific beasts if you can’t make them fight each other?) With any luck, the Slender Man doll campaign will be equally as successful.

Series one of Nevermore Toys' Legendary Monsters series.

Note the retro Aurora monster model kit packaging style.

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.

The Past Outruns the Present in The Abandoned (2006)

I first saw The Abandoned when it was making its rounds at movie theaters in 2006 during the annual, limited-run "8 Films to Die For" After Dark Horrorfest. I saw it after a showing of The Gravedancers, another film that was included during that year's selection of horror titles. Both films were good but while Gravedancers was fun to watch, The Abandoned left me speechless. Few films affect me like that, so I thought that I would return to this gem to review why it's one of the best overlooked horror films from the last decade. Read on ...

The Abandoned tells the story of Marie Jones (Anastasia Hille), a woman who was orphaned as an infant and is returning to her birth home of Russia on the eve of her 41st birthday. She's returning to claim--and quickly dispose of and forget about--a piece of property that she inherited from her birth parents, an abandoned farm that's located on a lake island deep inside the rural Russian landscape. Shortly after her arrival on the farm, ghostly visions appear that give her clues about her mysterious past ... and possibly her future.

I can see why The Abandoned is not a favorite of many horror fans: It is an extremely gloomy, mournful movie, even by horror movie standards. Co-scriptwriter and director Nacho Cerdà permeates his film with an overwhelming sense of dread, even during the opening credits; doing so makes The Abandoned less of a ghost story and more of a meditation of how the past shapes us as individuals throughout the course of lifetime--even events that we don't fully remember or don't remember at all--and that we can never escape the past in a genuine, decisive way. Such a depiction stands in sharp contrast against the prevailing American attitude of self-determination, so I can understand why many American horror fans would prefer to avoid something as unrelentingly bleak as Cerdà's film. Depending on how you look at it, The Abandoned is a more mature, fatalist version of Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on movies; it's also the thematic equal and polar opposite of Meet the Robinsons. (Yes, really. Go watch The Abandoned and Disney's 2007 CG animated family film back to back and you'll be surprised at how they are similar and yet are still so different, other than being in separate genres with separate target audiences.)

In terms of plot, the structure of The Abandoned puts it in the horror subgenre I have dubbed as the "Lost Souls" subgenre. As I first described it in my review of Wii's Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, "Lost Soul movies usually revolve around a protagonist who has experienced some kind of forgotten trauma. The trauma is forgotten either because it happened so long ago or that it was so intense and violent that it caused the protagonist to experience memory loss. The protagonist is also haunted as the result of the trauma. The hauntings may be the result of hallucinations induced by the trauma, or they may be caused by a supernatural presence; depending on the movie, the difference between the hallucinatory and the supernatural is never made clear and they remain indistinguishable. The hauntings prompt the protagonist to try to understand the trauma, which results in the revelation of an existential truth so shocking that the protagonist is never the same again. The Lost Soul narratives are apt metaphors for what trauma survivors experience in the real world, which is why they make for effectively chilling horror stories."

The Lost Soul subgenre consists of movies such as Carnival of Souls, Jacob's Ladder, Head Trauma, and The Broken. The Abandoned fits this subgenre as well, but what sets it apart is that the forgotten trauma in it is inseparable from the protagonist's identity. Thus, Marie's exploration into her infant past evokes moods of tragedy and inevitability. Throughout the movie, Marie is conflicted: She would prefer to forget her past but at the same time she also wants and needs to understand it because it is so much a part of her as a person, even if attaining such an understanding puts her in jeopardy when the past and present begin overlapping each other in delirious arrangements. As the narrative progresses, we learn more about Marie's adult life, as well as the life of someone she meets along the way, and realize that both characters are very broken people with very broken lives; thus, there's a painful symmetry between Marie's forgotten infancy and turbulent adult life that is both sorrowful and appropriate.

At its core, The Abandoned portrays an example of when a traumatic past is best left forgotten--especially a past that threatens to destroy the survivors of such a trauma, no matter how much the survivors feel the need to understand what they experienced and how it made them who they are as individuals. This is weighty subject matter for a horror movie, and The Abandoned handles it in a way that is creepy, thoughtful and anguished in equal measures.

Support Cryptozoology Action Figures through Kickstarter

You know who is represented frequently in the area of high-quality action figures? Superheroes and movie monsters. You know who isn't? The creatures of cryptozoology. Thankfully, toy and video game designer Richard T. Broadwater plans to do something about that.

Broadwater is using Kickstarter to fund a new line of action figures called "Legendary Monsters". According to the Kickstarter page, "Legendary Monsters is a line of action figures based on monsters of urban legend and folklore. ... Each of the four monsters comes with an eyewitness figure, a diorama base depicting the surroundings and a written account of the real life eyewitness account right on the package! ... Each victim has 5-6 points of articulation and stands 3 and 3/4-4" tall. Each monster features 10-12 points of articulation and contains hinged arms, legs and ball jointed shoulders. Our figures will be crafted from the best materials and feature solid engineering and are fully posable."

Series 1 of Legendary Monsters figures includes the Jersey Devil, Mothman, the Missouri monster and the Chupacabra. If Series 1 meets its goal, Series 2 will include the Dover Demon, the Flattwoods Monster, the Yeti and the Loveland Frogmen. Future plans also include two deluxe sets, one featuring Bigfoot and the other featuring the Loch Ness Monster.

Click here to learn more about the Legendary Monsters project and what you can do to help get this figures off the drawing boards and into the hands and shelves of action figure collectors.

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.

A Promising Ghost Story Gets Orphaned in The Orphanage (2007)

Did you ever watch a movie that you want to like but you simply can't because it doesn't adhere to its own internal logic? If you do, then you know how I feel about The Orphanage, a 2007 Spanish horror film directed by Juan Antonio Bayona.

The Orphanage is about Laura (Belen Rueda) and her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) who are renovating an orphanage into a home for special needs children. Laura herself was an orphan at the very same orphanage that she and her husband are restoring and they even have an adopted child of their own, Simon (Roger Princep). A series of mysterious incidents begin to occur as Laura and Carlos prepare the building for new occupants, incidents that culminate with the disappearance of Simon on the very day of the orphanage's reopening. Laura's subsequent search for Simon leads her into the building's forgotten past and the dark secrets that it hides.

As a gothic ghost story, The Orphanage drips with unrealized potential. The cinematography is gorgeous and creepy in equal measures, the underlying themes and symbolism adds emotional weight to story's proceedings, and performances given by the principle cast make you feel for the characters and their plight. The story builds to a crushing and bittersweet finale, but that feeling rapidly fades when you begin to think about the story and realize that much of its details don't make sense. Character motivations and actions don't add up, and curious details surface that go unresolved even though they should not. There's even a hidden door that plays a major part in the story, yet it doesn't take much to realize that the details behind the door--who finds it, how it is found, and why it was hidden in the first place--weren't very well thought out by the script writer.

Overall, the viewing experience that comes from seeing The Orphanage is akin to waking up from an intense, feverish dream and then realizing that what you just experienced--regardless of its emotional power--can't stand up to the scrutiny of conscious thought. In that regard, it felt like this movie was just a few script rewrites away from being a better movie. Perhaps if one or more of the secondary characters, subplots or themes had been removed, the total narrative would be greater than the sum of its many parts.

In his review, Roger Ebert wrote that The Orphanage "is deliberately aimed at viewers with developed attention spans". I think that the exact opposite is true: The viewers who pay close attention to the film's minutia will be the ones who find its biggest faults, regardless of how deftly the film appears to utilize the narrative conventions that are common in stories about ghosts and haunted houses. Without giving too much away, it would seem that the moral of The Orphanage is that if anyone ever goes missing in or around a recently renovated building, please be sure to check the building's blueprints before consulting with a psychic. Speaking as a horror fan, this is not the kind of concluding message that any decent fright flick should leave with its audience.

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.

Classic Italian Horror Cinema Lives on in Insidious (2011)

One of the great things about being a long-term horror fan who watches both American films and films from other countries is noticing how older horror films impact newer horror films in different cultures. No, I'm not talking about Hollywood's current infatuation with remaking horror movies, both domestic and foreign; I'm talking about how filmmakers from one country adopt the look and feel of horror that is often associated with filmmakers from another country--while at the same time remaining faithful to their own cultural roots. Such mixture of styles result in horror movies that are much more engaging than those that are content to merely imitate the cinematic approach used by the most well-known horror movies.

Take Insidious, for example. When it was released in 2011, the ad campaigns promoted the fact that it produced by people from the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises--namely James Wan, Leigh Whannell, Jason Blum, Jeanette Brill, Oren Peli and Steven Schneider. Wan directed Insidious, while Whannell wrote its screenplay and Blum, Brill, Peli and Schneider assumed producer duties. Such advertising was done to capitalize on popular American horror franchises, and the plot of Insidious does bear some plot similarities to Paranormal Activity (2007) and other popular American horror movies such as The Exorcist (1973) and Poltergeist (1982). Yet what I did not expect when watching Insidious was just how much it was influenced by classic Italian horror directors such as Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. In other words, as American horror movies go, Insidious is the most Italian movie I've seen that wasn't made by anyone from Italy.

Insidious tells the story of Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) who have just moved into a new home with their three children. After one of their children Dalton (Ty Simpkins) slips into an inexplicable coma, strange occurrences begin to plague the Lambert family. The Lamberts move to a new address to escape what they believe to be a haunted house, but the haunting continues in its frequency and intensity. Josh and Renai soon learn that the key to ending the haunting lies with saving their comatose son, a task that requires the Lamberts to look to the past for answers.

I don't want to say too much more about Insidious because it will give too much away. What I can say is that I think it is a movie that delivers an ample supply of scares, largely through Wan's careful attention to detail: the film features many visual and spoken clues that pay off greatly during the film's final act. I also encourage horror fans who love films by Italian directors such as Bava, Fulci and Argento to see Insidious because they will find much to appreciate in this movie. As the film progressed, it reminded me of classic Italian thrillers such as Shock (1977), Suspiria (1977) and The Beyond (1981).

I think that Wan's homage to Italian horror was intentional: If you look closely in Dalton's bedroom in the second house, you'll briefly see a page from a Diabolik comic book displayed in a picture frame. The character Diabolik made his first appearance on the big screen in 1968's Danger: Diabolik, a film that was directed by horror maestro Bava. That said, I'd also advise that fans who don't care for Italian horror, which is known for balancing surreal creepiness with low-budget camp, might want to avoid Insidious for the same reason why I appreciated it. If spaghetti horror isn't your thing, Insidious probably won't be either.

Insidious is a welcome addition to the haunted house subgenre of horror, but fans who know their foreign films will also be thrilled by the movie's frequent nods to the classic Italian approach to fright flicks.