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
Yours,
Oland
