Halloween may be one day, but I celebrate the entire month of October by watching as many horror movies as possible. Forsaking other genres for spooky, scary thrills. Filling the month with films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. So, let’s grab some popcorn, turn off the lights, and get our fright on with some found footage horror films!
Films discussed: The Blair Witch Project (1999), [REC] (2007), The Last Exorcism (2010), and Apollo 18 (2011).
I saw The Blair Witch Project in the theater, and I remember the stir it caused by utilizing a recent technological development: the internet. The website had many thinking Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Mike Williams actually went on a hike in the woods just outside of Burkittsville, Maryland. The film set the foundation for found footage horror films: introduce the characters, show their routine, discuss the subject of the project, have a steady sprinkling of odd occurrences, shaky footage, and a slow build to the inevitable end of some or all of the characters. Does The Blair Witch Project hold up? I say yes. The trauma of being lost in the woods combined with the sounds of twigs cracking and the crying and laughing children, the mysterious appearance of piles of rocks and twig figures, and the disappearance of Josh all hint at the evil in the woods. The lack of an explanation is one reason the film is scary. The image of Mike standing in the corner makes me shiver. Is he dead? Was he forced to stand in the corner? And who attacked Heather? The Blair Witch? Another entity? A crazed Josh? The fact I cannot answer these questions shows how good the film still is.
[REC] starts with TV reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) taping the latest installment of her series, “While You’re Asleep,” featuring the activities of firemen on the night shift. After meeting the two firemen she will follow, Manu (Ferran Terraza) and Alex (David Vert), she gets antsy. Hanging out at a quiet fire station isn’t her idea of an exciting show. Things rev up after a call comes in about a woman trapped inside her apartment. Instead of finding a kindly old woman who has fallen but can’t get up, they find an old woman covered in blood. She doesn’t speak. She rushes them, biting a cop. The tension mounts as the apartment building is placed under quarantine—no one gets in and no one gets out. Confined, the number of infected grows as people underestimate the strength of the infected and what it takes to kill one. One by one they succumb until Angela and her cameraman Pablo (Pablo Rosso) rush up the stairs. The shot looking down and the infected in the stairwell chasing them is horrifying. What they encounter in the penthouse is one of the most disgusting creatures I’ve ever seen in a horror movie.
The Last Exorcism centers on Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a disillusioned pastor determined to prove that demon possession is just a state of mind. Those who claim to be possessed just need the exorcism to feel better. The person will be “cured” because it’s all in the person’s mind. Cotton has hired a documentary crew to film his last exorcism and show the world how easily poor, uneducated people can be fooled to believe they have witnessed an exorcism. He pulls a letter at random and the letter is from Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum), the father of Nell (Ashley Bell), who thinks his daughter is possessed. Cotton demonstrates how to fake a bed shaking and how to rig a cross to blow steam. Smug, Cotton leaves the Sweetzers thinking Nell is better and with a wad of cash in his pocket. However, things aren’t right. Nell suddenly appears at the motel Cotton is staying at, a motel five miles away from the farm. Since the focus is on Cotton, we see the developments through his eyes, and as he questions whether or not Nell is possessed, so do we. The film is as much about possession as it is about a minister rediscovering his faith. The last twenty minutes of this film punches you with revelation after revelation, climaxing to a reveal I did not see coming. The Last Exorcism takes your expectations and skewers them just enough to make the film feel smart and fresh.
Apollo 18 claims to be edited from over 80 hours of footage uploaded to a website devoted to exposing the truth about missions to the moon. This unknown mission to the moon was classified by the Department of Defense because the astronauts involved, Lunar Module Pilot Captain Ben Anderson (Warren Christie), Commander Nate Walker (Lloyd Owen), and Command Module Pilot Lieutenant Colonel John Grey (Ryan Robbins), are told they are there to set up equipment to help the USA protect itself from Soviet missiles. As the mission progresses, they find an abandoned USSR lunar module, there is interference in the communication links, and other odd things start to happen. Out of all of the films I watched during my found footage mini-marathon, Apollo 18 has the slowest burn. Because most of the film is in black and white, your imagination takes over in figuring out what the creatures look like, but the threat the creatures pose isn’t felt until the last twenty minutes. The film lacks moments of intense horror, but it has the look of a 1970s NASA documentary, making it feel like actual found footage. A lot of the tension comes from living in tight spaces and the thought they could be stranded on the moon with no hope of rescue.
While the format of found footage horror hasn’t strayed much from the mold The Blair Witch Project created back in 1999, it is interesting to see that the form is still around and that some filmmakers have been successful playing with the formula and delivering some really good scares.
