A More "Moral" Fake-Found-Footage Horror?: EVIL THINGS

  

  

Evil Things (Click for Trailer), a 2009 reality horror film by Dominic Perez, features an interesting twist on the fake-found-footage conceit of apparently aleatory footage as a "raw" document of (usually) traumatic events. Found-footage horror films, such as Cloverfield and Home Movie (both 2008), attempt to mimic the sense of immediacy of accidental or incidental footage; these films must appear to be untampered-with records of events, "unedited" and unrehearsed. In keeping with this found-footage illusion, Evil Things, like Cloverfield, begins with a title card identifying the film as evidence collected by the U.S. Department of Justice, found with a handwritten label identifying the film's title. [I suppose I should warn you not to read on if you're interested in experiencing the film's twists first-hand.]  However, Perez's film deviates from its status as found footage when, at about midway, the perspective shifts from victim to victimizer, and what originally appeared to be unedited found footage is identified as a manipulation.

Like The Blair Witch Project, Evil Things crosses the kind of anxiety around the constant presence of (and need for) a camera apparent in most reality horror films, with horror's more traditional dread of isolated, open, unfamiliar rural spaces. Five friends head out on a road trip to sequester themselves in an isolated house in the snowy Maine woods, one of the friends incessantly documenting their journey to the initial amusement, and later frustration, of the others. As they navigate treacherous icy mountain roads, the group is menaced by a stalker in a black van with opaque windows who appears out of the night in a series of scenes that are unnerving and effective in creating the general sense of paranoia and inevitable doom common to rural horror. The group seems to have lost their pursuer once they have reached the house. When the inevitable home invasion occurs, it comes initially in the form of a videotape delivered to the front porch of the house, showing the group that their highway stalker has continued to pursue them, recording them from both outside and inside the house, creeping into their rooms as they sleep. At this point, control over the footage/narrative splits between the group and their stalker; later, after the requisite series of unfortunate events, their stalker acquires the group's camera and takes over all documenting duties from the group. 

It is not long after this point that the entire film is identified as a manipulation by the victimizer--even showing him at a console, laptop at the ready, reviewing multiple screens of footage we have already seen (which I suppose explains, however implicitly, why this "found footage" features artful dissolves into static, slow fades to black, and occasional non-diegetic music to underscore some of the film's more tense moments). Not only do we learn in the film's latter half that the stalker is the primary perspective structuring the film's footage into a coherent whole, the film fairly explicitly suggests, over an extended end-credit sequence, a moral motivation on the part of the stalker (and, I presume, killer). This information comes in the form of footage inserted into the film from other shoots showing the stalker in Central Park singling out a film crew and choosing to include them in his sadistic-voyeuristic pursuits. Camera-bearing in Evil Things thus seems to bring on a threat of in-kind punishment and a sort of video retribution, where the protagonists go missing and become consumed by the visual record that contains them: here, within the video footage presumably left (or delivered?) by the film's malevolent video-stalker to be found by the authorities.

As James Keller has argued of the monstrous editorial presence in The Blair Witch Project, Evil Things is, in its own way, about "the progressive loss of control of the cinema process" in that it, like Blair Witch, fails to divulge its monsters, preferring to suggest it/them at work behind the camera (Keller 60). While Blair Witch is perhaps more ambivalent about its filmmaker-protagonists' faith in the recorded image, Evil Things explicitly links its obsessive filmmakers to that of horror's usually malevolent, monstrous force by framing the final events of its narrative as a moral comeuppance somehow deserved by the camera-bearing protagonists (and their friends). In Evil Things this sort of moral imperative is made fairly explicit also in the scene in which the protagonists view the video-stalker's footage of them in horror, footage in which their own invasive camera is featured prominently.

Evil Things results as a bit disappointing in that it does not follow through on its conceit of victim and victimizer struggling for control over the producing and constructing of the footage we see. To this effect, there is one effectively disconcerting scene in the film in which the spectator is not exactly sure just who has control of the camera as it searches through the silent, pitch-black house in night-vision mode. As in the Gothic's proliferation of points of view and often conflicting, increasing layers of text, this battle of enunciating presences in Evil Things has the potential to subvert the comfortable notion of any visual perspective (or medium) offering unfettered access to the real.

Yours,
Oland

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies: Universal Horror, Class #1

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies held its first class of the 2011-12 academic year last night. Instructor Charlie EllBé led the class through a lecture on the origins of Universal Studios' first cycle of horror films (1931-1939), with screenings of clips from F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu and the Spanish version of Dracula, shot on the same sets (at night) as the more iconic film starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning. EllBé also elaborated on the inspiration and production practicalities for the set design of the Universal horror films, pointing out shared elements between Browning's Dracula and the sets of films such as The Man Who Laughs (1928, d. Paul Leni). A screening and discussion of Browning's beautiful, poetic and dreamily-paced film followed. Highlights of the lecture and discussion included insights into Bela Lugosi's star-making performance, as well as regarding the film's careful, impressionistic use of sound and silence, and its parallel visual play with fullness and lack, particularly in the film's framing of its iconic monster, Lugosi. I look forward to three more weeks of Universal Horror studies!

Creeping Camera: Introductory Sequence to DARKROOM (1981-2)

A classic (and horrifying) example of "creeping camera," Dennis Giles' term for unmotivated camera movement in horror films that creates a sense of monstrous presence without manifesting a monstrous object. The sense of absence or lack courts a scopophilic response in the spectator of horror, a simultaneous desire to see the monstrous and to be protected from full revelation of the monstrous. This series, hosted by actor James Coburn, aired from 1981 to 1982. I adored it as a kid. Sadly, it is not available on DVD in North America. 

Documentary Guide

Check out this new search resource for locating all sorts of documentary films, festivals and organizations.

http://www.documentaryguide.com/

Techno-Gothic Ghost Story: Lake Mungo (2008) d. Joel Anderson

Joel Anderson's 2008 reality horror film, Lake Mungo, is constructed as a conventional documentary focusing on the mysterious death and spectral reappearance of a young woman named Alice Palmer. The film bills itself as a "record of ... events" in a series of hauntings in which a ghostly Alice Palmer appears in a variety of media, including photographs, cell phone video footage, and amateur video recordings. Alice’s own narrative—her ability to speak for herself—is a deeply embedded text in this document of her disturbing visually mediated re-entries into the world of the living. In addition to Alice’s spectral presence in the film, images of the living Alice in photographs, home movie footage, video-recordings of her sessions with a medium, and even a sex tape, emerge as a further techno-Gothic embedding of Alice's story, overwhelming the person with visual evidence and talking-head conjecture. The film's various narrators—police, family members, neighbors—cannot hope to capture a sense of the young woman in life or death. (Nobody, it seems, really knew her.) And though the film’s numerous probing zooms into photographs promise visual evidence of Alice, they produce only abstractions: grainy, broken and blurred images. As with The Blair Witch Project (1999) and the more recent Paranormal Activity films, Lake Mungo encourages the viewer to scan, scrutinize and probe its varied video and photographic “evidence” in search of a ghostly, possibly monstrous, Alice—evidence that is, at worst, proven to be a hoax, and, at best, shown to be equivocal. Lake Mungo is thus about the near impossibility of representation of the subject at its center—like Blair Witch especially, it documents a subject who is not there.

Anderson’s film is self-consciously constructed around a number of concerns that the mock-documentary horror film (or “reality horror” film, as I term it) has at heart. Among these notions is a concern with contemporary subjectivity as media-obsessed, simultaneously valorizing new visual technologies and deeply distrustful of them. Something of an extended allusion to the popular turn-of-the-20^th century practice of spirit photography popularized by such influential figures as William H. Mumler, Lake Mungo explores conceptions of new visual technologies as having to do with attempts to capture time and conjure ghosts. In a key scene, as Alice Palmer races through the dark of the dried up bottoms of the film’s eponymous lake, the ill-fated girl’s cell phone mediates a premonition of her own death by drowning, suggesting the same connection between “magical” new technologies and the supernatural that can be found in a millennial dread of technology at the turn of both the 20^th and 21^st centuries. As its title hints, Lake Mungo continues a trend in the Australian Gothic cinema—found in such films as Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1974) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), and the first half of Greg Mclean's Wolf Creek (2005)—where nature and natural formations carry uncanny, possibly supernatural portents of future (or present, but insidious) disaster. In its combination of fake found-footage, hoax imagery, news footage, police video, talking-head interviews, and other visual media designed to evoke the reality effect of a documentary aesthetic, Lake Mungo proves to be not just a fascinating update on the conventional Gothic ghost story, but also a record of the deep anxieties of a culture confronted with new media hybridity as one of the ways we can construct postmodern subjectivity. A film largely concerned with the very personal trauma of loss and mourning, Lake Mungo can be seen in the context of an anxious millennial response to new technology somehow mediating spectrally between present and past, living and dead, especially as evidenced in late 19^th-century spirit photography and memorial photography, the latter practice even referenced in the film's disturbing title sequence. Lake Mungo is also a shrewd updating of traditional horror conventions, such as the genre’s traditionally circumscribed subjectivity, its deep distrust of the rational and scientific notions attendant with new technology, and Roger B. Salomon’s (2002) notion that the horror narrative relies heavily on its narrators as troubled witnesses, challenged with the task of chronicling an impossible reality.