November 2024 Reviews

3 12月 2024

As people may know, I've been pretty busy in real life and on the internet. But fortunately I've been watching a lot of movies, especially found footage horror movies, in the first half of October.

In fact, I was watching about two to three movies a day, which was fun and all, until I realized that I had a lot of writing to do...

I'm not sure how people see me as a person, but I'm first and foremost a film bro (nonbinary/trans-adjacent). I may have made my name(?) writing about games and visual novels, but my real passion comes from discussing cinema. Many of my ideas about what makes for interesting viewing and criticism come from my deep interest in movies.

In that spirit, I've also created a Letterboxd account, but I'm not interested in reviewing movies. Instead, I'll be curating lists that might interest people in getting more involved with movies. The first one is Anti-Cathartic Stillness, so check that out.

Without further ado, here's a lot of horror movies.

Fulci, Lucio (1981). ...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà.

Localized for English audiences as The Beyond, the film follows a New Yorker who moves to New Orleans after learning that she has inherited a hotel. She has been down on her luck professionally and is looking forward to running it. Unfortunately for her, this hotel has been associated with one of the seven gates of hell when an artist and practitioner of black magic who guarded the gates was lynched by a mob in 1927.

The plot doesn't get any more elaborate. Characters who work for her get their eyeballs gorged out and their faces torn apart. The setting and scenario are there to connect the dots and elidely explain why these surreal horror scenes are happening. In one scene, spiders crawl up to an unconscious man and bite the shit out of his face like it's dough being stretched; he just happens to be an architect researching the layout of the house. Character motivations don't get any more complex than that, except to provide a reason for these characters to go to the places where they will be attacked.

The movie is thus centered around various death scenes. It is invested in showing eyeballs popping out in different ways, and they are rather creative and gross. On the other hand, symbols and motifs do not cohere into a larger picture. Scenes don't even follow the bare minimum of dream logic, with characters and events just contradicting the foreshadowing at times.

I feel that how much you like this movie depends on whether you prefer consistency or strong individual scenes. The rushed production and writing definitely make it harder for me to watch; the pacing seems all over the place, and the plot makes little sense. But there is beauty in the movie: the special effects are impressive, the shots of New Orleans give a Southern Gothic flavor to the horror, and the ending visuals are poetic and bleak.

For me, I admire this movie for its gory scenes, but I feel it's too much of a montage of cool horror deaths, and there's not much theming to sell the one cool idea in it. I like the idea of hell opening up and people reacting poorly to it, but it doesn't get capitalized on until the last twenty minutes or so. The movie is too distracted to focus on throughlines. I would have liked to see the ending payoff come from proper setup and characterization.

But I also recognize that this hodgepodge of ideas may be the main appeal of the movie. There's something fascinating about watching the filmmakers work with what they have. It is an inspiring film production that shows the ingenuity of the director and crew who clearly have a passion for the craft of horror filmmaking. Watch it for its love of horror, you won't regret it.

Hancock, John D. (1971). Let's Scare Jessica to Death.

Despite the eccentric title, this film explores gaslighting and mental health in the context of a haunted house setting. Jessica has been released from the psych ward and lives with her husband and boyfriend away from New York, in an old house where they're planning to make an orchard. She often questions herself and wonders if she's allowed to be happy. After meeting another woman who squatted in the house, her paranoia begins to confuse her as she discovers bodies and suspects her husband may be in love with the other woman. But no matter how much she rings the alarm bell, none of the men will listen.

This movie is therefore quite sensitive to misogyny and gaslighting. Although the male characters should know better from their hippie backgrounds and liberal attitudes, they often denigrate Jessica's voice as a disabled woman. They do attempt to take her claims seriously, but they also give up very quickly when they try to investigate the issue. Her husband, in particular, has the hots for another woman and doesn't distinguish between his concern for her mental health and his desire to commit adultery when he wants to send Jessica back to the psychiatric ward.

But while the audience may sympathize with Jessica, her subjectivity always seems compromised. It is difficult to figure out whether we are hearing her inner monologue or a supernatural force that are subliminally sending her instructions. Her paranoia, justified and unjustified, challenges the viewing experience. Even mundane scenes, of which there are many, don't seem believable at first glance. It puts the audience in the same position as the men who are clearly fed up with her. Are we to believe everything she sees or...?

This paranoid viewing experience is balanced by the slow, atmospheric pacing. There's some great folk music, with one scene performed diegetically. Much of the film is about the interactions between the characters and their struggle to hold their farm and relationships together. Until the very end, I sometimes forgot that I was watching a horror movie.

But when the horror happens, it's quite shocking. The acoustic music seems to have magically regressed to synthesizer distortions, apparently an innovation since this was one of the first movies to use synthesizers. There are few bloody scenes, but the costumes and scars are quite decent. The ending has one particular scene that surprised my partner and me: just people flooding the camera like there's no tomorrow.

It's a decent folk horror movie that plays with gender and mental health issues, but it feels like it could have been something more. The big reveal doesn't feel exciting enough to me, knowing the possible literary sources of inspiration. Despite the ingenious angle on the horror protagonist and the brilliant cinematography, the plot -- especially its second half -- is surprisingly standard. It makes me wish for more, and I agree with my partner that the ending should just be darker. As it is, it's okay.

Alioto, Dean (1989). UFO Abduction.

Even though it predates Blair Witch Project by ten years, this is an impressive zero budget movie that showcases all the techniques now common in the found footage horror genre.

The film purports to be footage shot for a young girl's birthday party. But when the men of the family investigate some strange lights in the distance, they discover a spaceship and, more distressingly, aliens. They flee into the house, telling the women in the household to close the windows and lock the doors while they grab their guns. Everyone is frightened, especially the women, as the men wave their guns and yell at everyone to calm down.

This movie achieves verisimilitude by using shaky cameras, focusing on objects that aren't important to the actual plot, allowing the actors to improvise and dictate the scene, and so on. It's indeed impressive to see the building blocks of the found footage genre in action, and the movie feels like a real meandering home video compared to the more polished offerings in the genre. Not surprisingly, ufologists and believers still claim this movie is authentic because the performances and camera techniques don't feel scripted at all.

But while its historical significance, craftsmanship, and influence are undeniable, watching it felt like doing homework. The actors, especially the mother and the patriarch, play very believable characters, but they're not interesting because they're just any white American family: boring with a dash of anger management issues. The movie starts too slowly, with the guys joking too much like they belong on a podcast before their encounter with the alien. The aliens are also not threatening enough for my taste, and the plot in general feels too rudimentary for 2024.

I appreciate the movie for very much starting one of my favorite horror subgenres. And it's worth a watch if you're interested in the history of horror. I found this movie because a writer had recommended it as one of the ten found footage films on their BFI list and the alien costume looked too silly to ignore. What I got was a deep historical lesson about horror movies, and it allowed me to have a critical reflection on the kind of found footage horror that excites me. For watching a movie that looked so ridiculous, this is a better reward than I could have ever hoped for.

Manning, Leslie (director) and Volk, Stephen (writer) (1992). Ghostwatch.

It's hard to write about this BBC One TV movie without repeating the wonderful documentation of the controversies and interviews that people have done over the years. Like Orson Welles's infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, the show was so believable that it upset many people who feared for the lives of the newscasters. While the crew had to publicly apologize and the film was banned for a decade, it is now considered a pioneer of found footage: it predated Blair Witch by seven years, and its mockumentary style is unsurpassed.

The film featured popular BBC news anchors playing themselves in a typical BBC special format. At one end of the studio was a presenter, an expert on parapsychology and several staff members handling calls from the audience. At the other end, the journalists and the TV crew are on location investigating what is considered "the most haunted house in Britain". A single mother and her two children are being haunted by a poltergeist and have agreed to appear on the BBC because they are tired of people not believing their stories.

Like any other live TV special, the presenter interviews different experts and switches between the studio and the house to create the illusion that this is an actual show produced by the BBC. The pauses from journalists, the serious yet inquisitive tone in the questions, the dial-a-number box, the need to sensationalize in order to fill in the dead air, the plain yet awkward responses from interviewees, and the empathetic yet distanced way the journalists interact with the family all feel like the real thing. Frankly, I sympathize with the people who are distressed by the show; the realism is too close to home.

Along with the appropriate ghost-hunting technology (including a camera with infrared night vision, which didn't exist at the time), this special felt like a high-quality ghost-hunting TV show. But there were two things that made it feel more than that:

1. The studio segments are sometimes interrupted by fake phone calls. These callers are either true believers or prank calls, and they mimic the chaotic vibrancy of a special like this when it is filmed live.
2. In the second half of the TV special, the host and other staff members have lost their enthusiasm for the subject. The host is particularly antagonistic toward the expert and begins to demand explicit answers, even when obvious supernatural phenomena are occurring. Watching them express disbelief and then fear after their interest in the paranormal is quite unnerving because they feel like real people.

It's incredible how much this early movie got everything right in terms of verisimilitude. I couldn't believe my eyes that this was even broadcast. It didn't matter if the story was unoriginal by today's standards: nothing felt off, and that's what makes this TV special so eerie.

The only reason I can't recommend this movie is the characterization of the poltergeist. It's a cliched apparition that cross-dresses and engages in pedophilia, classic transphobic tropes when taken together. These references are simply unnecessary and only serve to worsen the perception of trans people.

It frustrates me that I can't tell people to go see this movie because for the most part I love what it does. The techniques it uses are revolutionary, the performances are fun to watch, and the ending is awesome. However, the transphobic identity of the poltergeist revealed at the very end makes it difficult to recommend the movie today.

Balagueró, Jaume and Plaza, Paco (2007). REC.

This Spanish-language horror film is a found footage classic for a reason. It opens with a local journalist bored out of her mind covering firefighters for a puff piece before she and her cameraman answer a 911 call to rescue an elderly woman in an apartment building. Little do they know that everyone -- the firemen, the police, the residents and the news crew -- will be quarantined by the state.

Found footage movies live and die by how authentic they feel to the audience. The transition from professional TV journalism at the firehouse to the chaotic camerawork and running up and down the stairs of the apartment makes me feel like I'm watching real raw footage. The transitions also make sense: the camera is turned off when nothing is happening, the policeman gets violent with the cameraman, and I like the scene where a young girl is playing with the camera and accidentally turns it on. With one glaring exception (the movie showing footage being rewinded), the camera feels like a real prop in the movie, and our only line of sight into this mayhem is always in jeopardy.

There is also a sense that these shots and sequences are unedited, even though they are fully scripted and planned. It doesn't take long for the plot to introduce the stakes, but it feels like the characters have stumbled upon what's going on. And because the state suppresses vital information even from the policeman in the building, each new nugget of information feels earned. The illusion of organic momentum in this movie makes me very interested in what's going to happen next.

That said, I find it a pity that the most accessible English subtitles are poor, because I really like the performances in the movie. Prominent characters get into screaming matches because of their different connection to the state: the fireman and the policeman disagree even though they try their best to maintain the status quo; the journalist we follow wants to get everything on tape so she and the cameraman are happy to break the rules; and the neighbors' racism towards the Japanese immigrants living in the apartment is just enough to make it clear that some of the people living there are kind of shit. Unfortunately, their performances are muddied by poor translation practices: unclear pronoun references, awkward writing, and just a lot of typos.

And while I enjoyed most of the movie, I can't say I was as thrilled with the finale. For a fairly minimalist premise, the big reveal felt like it was trying to make some deeper commentary or reach for a more concrete explanation, but it ended up being superficial and lost a lot of the mystery for me. It certainly didn't help that I didn't like the way the movie tried to rush the surviving characters to this point. Everything about it feels like a contrived wrap-up compared to the dynamism in the earlier parts of the movie. I suppose I'll give it credit for pioneering the infamous "camera watching a person being dragged into the darkness" shot, but that's about all I'm willing to praise.

I suspect that my apathy towards the finale is due to my aversion to endings that provide too many answers to interesting questions and speculations. The movie does a very good job of masking the gore and allowing the audience's imagination to run wild, so it's irritating that the movie doesn't allow that freedom to continue after the credits roll (which, by the way, has one of the most inappropriate songs I've ever had the pleasure of watching).

I certainly agree with the consensus that the movie is a masterpiece, but it also brings up my usual qualms about horror writing. I want horror to be speculative between the audience and the work, and this movie comes pretty close. If only the ending had been a little more restrained, I could see this movie being a lot better than what it is right now.

Țofei, Adrian (2015). Be My Cat: A Film for Anne. (recommended?)

When I learned that the premise of this found footage horror movie was to get Anne Hathaway to star in the protagonist's movie, I knew I had to see it.

Set in Romania, the protagonist (played by the director) was enamored by Hathaway's performance as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises and wants her to come to his attic to film his childhood dream movie. But he knows that's a tall order, so he's hired three actors to play the role she'll be playing. He assures Hathaway on camera that his heart is with her; they're just there for a test run.

The movie quickly descends into chaos. He yells at his actors to do unreasonable things, one of them too fat for his taste, and keeps asking them to find a solution. When the terrible violence happens, it seems to come out of nowhere, but still follows the logic of the protagonist.

The film is extremely uncomfortable to watch because it seems too uncanny and real (thankfully, the actual production makes sure the actors are safe). In fact, the film deliberately blurs reality and performance. The director is a method actor, so it's interesting that the film can be read as a statement about how harmful and delusional method acting can be. The protagonist sees Hathaway as a method actor, someone who understands that committing to extreme methods can produce the best performances. He pushes his actors to do the same, sometimes even deceiving them so that they can be "sacrificed" to increase the quality of the film.

His confessions to the camera/Anne Hathaway suggest that, for better or worse, he is an honest director. While viewers may see him as a "psychopath," as one character puts it, I think he expresses the darker side of aspiring directors. Abuse and cruelty are useful in making great commodified art. It doesn't take much to extrapolate this tendency to some of the more unethical Hollywood movies of the past and the way the culture industry churns out actors, especially women. Not surprisingly, people outside of Hollywood can pick up on this and play out this dehumanizing misogyny in their home videos. The movie is always destabilizing what it means to see a great performance, to see an artist suffer for his art, and so on, to the point where I began to understand the terrible mentality of the protagonist.

This is an unpredictable, unsettling film with some great improvisation and editing. I cringed as I watched it because it felt too visceral at times, even though there wasn't that much gore. The energy emanating from the beginning just gets louder and louder to the point that I feel overwhelmed by his gestures and words. In a way, this movie did the near impossible: it scared me. I was relieved when the credits rolled. It's such an intense movie that I don't think I can recommend it to most people, but it's definitely one of the most uniquely terrifying works out there.

Levinson, Barry (2012) The Bay.

The premise of this horror mockumentary is quite riveting: there was a cover-up that decimated the town of Chesapeake Bay during a Fourth of July parade, and the local journalist who was there is ready to make a documentary that will reveal the whole truth.

Combining fact and fiction, the film speculates on the real issues surrounding the bay and how they could manifest into an ecological disaster of unprecedented proportions. Most of the science, according to one reviewer who has a master's degree in marine environmental science, is accurate. The beginning of the movie features actual news footage, and there are so many extras that it felt like I was watching a small town fall into chaos.

At times, the movie feels like a panoramic view of the town. We are treated to a barrage of different video sources with different aspect ratios, video quality, and audio volume to get a better picture of what happened. Scenes are sometimes filmed from different angles and cameras, allowing the audience to triangulate and imagine the spatial relationships of the people suffering from whatever is in the water.

They're also edited in the way that a shlocky documentary would be edited: there's text that pops up in that CSI digital way, over-the-top music, sentimental portraits of families and children who have no idea they're about to lose their lives, and a somewhat "unedited" voiceover that complements the footage. These techniques make it feel like I am watching a real conspiracy theory documentary.

Some of the best found footage comes from the CDC. While the doctors are frustrated that they can't do anything, the CDC is treated with sympathy throughout the film: they are confused by what's happening in the city, they realize that vital reports aren't coming their way, and they seem self-aware that they're solving something that was solved hours ago by other state and federal bureaucracies. Toward the end of the movie, one of the employee lashes out at Homeland Security who tells them that it's just a small town and it's not worth shutting down the entire bay for. These scenes show how cold bureaucracies can be when they try to deflect responsibility and say that any action can only be taken by the higher-ups.

So it's pretty obvious that this movie is about the environment and how corporations and politicians don't care about how pollution can affect public health and aquatic ecosystems. The antagonist of the film is the mayor, who the narrator of the documentary points out as one of the main culprits for allowing this to happen. Before the mayhem unfolded, he and other politicians told their constituents that they could fix the bay later; it was more important to promote businesses like poultry farming. Such rhetoric is clearly taken from actual politicians, so I find it refreshing that the film has a progressive social message that also makes the conspiracy theory cover-up more believable.

I don't really have anything critical to say about this movie. If anything, it's a highly produced movie that I somehow don't feel strongly about. The movie is very intriguing from start to finish: it was great to see the real culprit being as exciting as the movie hyped it up to be. But I still feel like the movie didn't do much for me: it's just entertaining, and that's all there is to it.

Maybe the mockumentary approach of this movie is too elaborate for me. It just feels like a real documentary, with the dead air removed and edited for manipulative effect; in fact, the director originally wanted to make a documentary about the Bay's pollution, but when he learned that PBS Frontline had already made one, he used the research for the basis of an eco-horror film. What I like about found-footage films is the amateur aesthetic of people filming something they can't possibly show because it's just too big for their handycam or smartphone. The abundance of video sources, while impressive, gave me too clear a view of what was happening on the ground. I know how big the disaster really was. There was no room for imagination watching the film because we just get everything we need to know.

I think the movie is a good watch, even if it doesn't appeal to my horror sensibilities. It has a timely subject and the performances are memorable. But since I already agree with its message, it would have been more powerful for me if the movie gave me more ambiguity to reflect and interpret its ideas. I just felt like I was in the choir that the movie was preaching to.

Brice, Patrick (2014). Creep.

The premise sounded good at first: a videographer films a cancer survivor who is in remission and wants to record footage for his unborn child. And there are some great shots, including the scene that becomes the poster for the movie, and some cleverly awkward performances. But oh my god, I can't believe how ridiculous the writing of this movie is.

Abandoning the supernatural as a source of scares, the horror plays on the homoerotic tension between the videographer and the survivor. Lines like "This is great, huh. Two guys having some whiskeys" and shots like the one where the survivor draws their initials circled around a heart shape on a rock are too much for my fujoshi spirit.

The big reveal behind the survivor's fetish is also prepostorous, especially if you know anything about that subculture. All of this culminated in an extremely campy experience, and I couldn't appreciate the attention to craftsmanship and atmosphere at all. The survivor thus doesn't come off as creepy. He's just a guy who needs to check out better porn. It's way too absurd a movie to be anything close to horror.

While I find the movie entertaining, I got tired of the overuse of queerphobia, jump scares, and ableism in the improvisation to characterize the survivor. It's just a poorly conceived movie with no sense of suspense because the horror and comedy rely so much on bad faith readings of the subcultures they're riffing off of. Despite the obvious effort to make this a naturalistic movie about the awkward relationship of two guys, it just comes across as insensitive and sensationalistic.

All in all, this is unfortunately a disappointing movie for me. I expected more considering the acclaim it has received from the found footage horror community. I won't deny its technical competence and excellent performances from both actors, but it didn't really rock my world. At best, I hope the queer film reclaims this movie as a camp movie because I do think it's quite hilarious with queer friends who share a similar sense of humor.

Le, Antoine (2018). Followed.

For a horror movie that should have pissed me off, I actually thought it was actually kind of fun. The movie follows a Logan Paul-like vlogger and his crew as they stay in a hotel clearly inspired by the infamous Cecil Hotel in New York City. While I wasn't a fan of the movie using everything from its history to bolster its premise, the movie is more focused on the content creator grind and how toxic it actually is.

The found footage aspect is pretty fun. It's framed around someone accessing a video site and watching these edited vlogs. If you don't blink, you can even read some poorly written comments. The desktop screen and browsers aren't convincing to me, but they work well enough to show that you're watching a bunch of YouTube videos made by some jerk. The vlog aspect also allows things commonly disavowed by found footage affocianados like diegetic music, edited montages, and stock sound effects. It really does feel like you're watching a horrible vlogger abuse the trust of hotel staff and exploit traumatic cases for the sake of clicks.

I appreciate that the movie focused on a deeply unlikable character who exploits his workers and the horrific scenarios for subscribers and views. The main reason they're staying in this haunted hotel, despite his staff's deteriorating mental health, is that he needs a few thousand subscribers to get some sponsorship money. His style of vlogging demands that every second be filmed: it doesn't matter if the staff is feeling vulnerable or he's just found out he's having a kid -- everything is content. The movie touching on his anxiety on how little money video content makes is quite nice to see. It was pleasing to see him suffer the most while everyone else is more or less a nice person dragged into his nonsense.

And there are parts in the movie where one gets a sense why his crew always stuck with him in the end. They joke around each other, play pranks, and their chemistry is just kinda believable. The workers are just working for an asshole who can be funny sometimes. Leaving these snippets of them goofing off in the vlogs makes me think about how it humanizes the protagonist and why viewers might become parasocial to controversial vloggers like him.

But it suffers from trends I dislike in modern horror. While I understand that there is a thematic reason to include real-life cases and traumas, I still find it cringe. One could reasonably argue that the movie tries to have its cake and eat it too since it criticizes the sensationalism of horror web content but is based on popular real-life creepypastas. The digital glitches aren't too annoying, but it gets unbelievable when the videos aren't edited anymore; they just look fake. I also find most of the jumpscares in the second half unnecessary and cheap. The poster is also misleading: I have no idea where the woman is from.

I still think it's not a bad popcorn movie, despite my distaste for using real world elements in horror flicks like this. Its focus on how shitty the protagonist is makes this movie more palatable than it should be. Not my first choice for a Halloween movie, but it's just a good time.

Gabriadze, Levan (2014). Unfriended. (recommended)

You know, this horror movie ain't bad despite its notoriety. Actually, it's quite good at what it's trying to do: a horror movie based on the social media and cyberbullying of that era.

For people who aren't familiar with this movie, it's about a bunch of teenagers trapped in a Skype chat with a mysterious stranger who turns out to be the ghost of someone who was cyberbullied and died by suicide. The victim seeks revenge by making people reveal their dirty secrets and how complicit they were in the cyberbullying.

The entire movie takes place on one character's laptop screen. Skype is prominently featured in this movie, but there's also Google Chrome, Facebook, iMessages, iTunes, BitTorrent, and even Chatroulette. The authenticity is impressive, and it makes me smile to hear the Skype beep and see all these software and websites once more.

Crucially, there's never a moment where I felt like the screen was being used as a gimmick. There are some great shots using the Skype webcam format: Screens freeze and distort; and in one case, we can see a character from another webcam, and seeing them wave their hands in both cameras makes for quite the uncanny experience. The protagonist also sends covert messages to her boyfriend on iMessage to calm him down during tense moments, which feels true to life. But most importantly, we also see and hear her typing and see her mouse movement. You get a sense of how she uses the laptop and her familiarity with technology just from the way she surfs the web and her constant need to use menus instead of shortcuts.

As for the cyberbullying, I was quite surprised that the movie used it to explore how people perceive themselves as good people who wouldn't betray others when they're just repressing those bad memories. It's very interested in exploring degrees of complicity: some of the characters are more visibly vile than others, but others are more successful at hiding their responsibility and appearing good to the public. It's a surprisingly nuanced view that feels refreshing in today's social media landscape.

I also have to commend the actors for doing all this in one long take. They met the filmmaker's demands head-on, and it takes an impressive amount of effort to get everything in place.

There are some corny details in the movie (the jumpscare at the end stands out), and the movie isn't that frightening by today's standards. But honestly, the execution of this movie is nothing less than spectacular. I'm sure that if I watched it when it came out, I may have cringed at the movie (especially when the protagonist asks "What is a troll?"). But today I find the desktop, the sounds, and the horror in the movie quite amusing and nostalgic. If anything, the way this movie has aged may have made it better to watch. It dates itself and its concerns about the internet in some fun ways. Technology moves on, but I have to admit: high school has never left my mind. It's always fun to reflect on what has changed and what hasn't.

Hughes, Graham (2019). Death of a Vlogger.

This is an alright, if somewhat shallow, mockumentary about content media creators who are addicted to social media. It follows a sketch comedy YouTuber who discovers his apartment is haunted and how he turns to horror vlogging.

The documentary interviews several key figures connected to the vlogger: a best friend who helped with some of his videos, another best friend who remains sceptical about the whole ordeal, an opportunistic ghost hunter and an investigative journalist who believes these hauntings are fake. There are also animated segments with a social psychologist lecturing the audience on how social media addiction works.

I found the satire too thickly layered to be entertaining. The film makes it clear from the start that it is going to be quite manipulative: it tries to make the audience question their trust in the vlogger, but I find the constant use of red herrings and plot twists quite annoying; the characters, especially the ghost hunter and the investigative journalist, are caricatures that obviously will build up to the audience in the end saying "aren't they right all along"; and the documentary deliberately obscures real key details to make the mystery more intriguing and the social commentary deeper than they actually are. The film felt like a drag.

Unfortunately, the great cinematography and editing can't save this film from having very little to say other than the obvious: the hunt for social media dopamine is kind of bad. It doesn't question the material or ideological conditions of the influencers. Despite its critique of public shaming, its emphasis on individuals trying to game the algorithm out of context feels like they're participating in the same dogpile. Its attempt to recognise that everyone, even the investigative journalist debunking the myths, is in it for the clicks feels unfinished. In the end, the film wants you to doubt whether the haunting really happened or not. It's not interested in asking the bigger questions about the internet, why people watch these videos and why people make them.

All I can say is that I felt like I was watching an anti-social media film that, despite its clever premise, somehow avoided putting the blame on social media and how it enabled influencers to thrive. And even with these educational segments, it still relied on the audience's justifiable distrust of social media and influencers to fill in the blanks. Its satire doesn't really work for me at all.

Clement, Jemaine and Waititi, Taika (2014). What We Do in the Shadows. (recommended)

This mockumentary made me laugh so hard. Using similar reality TV techniques found in other mockumentaries like The Office, the film follows a found family of vampires as they try to adjust to modern times in a mansion in New Zealand.

Much of the humor comes from adapting classic monster tropes to modern life. Vampires need to find prey, so they have to go to discos. They learn to surf the web thanks to my favorite character, Stu the IT Guy. And there's faction fighting between the vampires and the werewolves. It doesn't defang the violent mytholos of these fantastical creatures, but rather allows them to kill and let the uncanny horror of it all seep in.

It's a charming flick that plays on the absurdity of its premise and somehow manages to create genuinely tender moments through its comedy. There's not much more to say about it than that it's a lot of fun, and it makes sense why it got a popular Netflix TV spin-off. The comedy is just that good.

Savage, Rob (2020). Host.

As a horror film made during the early days of the COVID-19 quarantine, it is very well produced. Out of context, I don't think it holds up very well.

The movie follows a group of friends who have hired a spiritualist to perform a seance on Zoom. Not everyone takes it seriously, which may have upset some of the spirits. Their home becomes a death trap as the ghosts begin to harass them before finding ways to kill them. It's clearly a literalization of the fears people have during a lockdown, and it's interesting to think about what made the pandemic so threatening back then: its invisibility, people trying to rationalize its "wrath," and the fact that we can only communicate via a pretty shitty video service. It's novel that our homes have become haunted houses thanks to the pandemic.

While the movie plays this very well, I find the way it is edited too distracting. Just like in Unfriended, we see a screen share from one of the protagonists' laptops, and for the most part we see everyone's webcams in the client. But every once in a while, the Zoom client will switch the screen to gallery view without any input. While I recognize that this is done to focus the tension and make the audience anticipate the scary moments, it weakens what I think is a core component of found footage/screenlife horror: the illusion of no artifice. I think Unfriended works for me because a good portion of the movie involves the protagonist using other browsers to surf the web and check out more details. Her awkward mouse movements, while exaggerated, at least suggest that someone is using the computer. Host sticks very much to Zoom, and the mouse movement is quite smooth. I can't help but notice details that don't match how I've used Zoom and computers in general.

And I think the writing is too straightforward. The movie is ostensibly about the people who disturb the spirits, so the COVID-19 allegory is obviously about people who break the rules of lockdown and masking. This is a clever idea, but if adapted straight, it also reduces the character interactions to simply watching the events unfold in horror and blaming the survivors for their actions. The dynamic doesn't really shift in any interesting way, and I found the later sequences predictable because of this.

I don't want to be too negative about this movie, because I think it's pretty decent, especially as a reminder that we haven't taken the pandemic seriously in recent times. It's just that I find the movie to be underbaked; for example, I would have liked to see more Zoom-specific features like the face filters and common problems found in the client. There's so much the movie can do with its premise and characters. Hopefully the success of this movie will inspire more fully realized quarantine horror movies in the near future.

Winter, Vanessa and Winter, Joseph (2022). Deadstream.

The quick and dirty way to describe this movie is Evil Dead 2 meets screenlife horror. A Paul Logan-like character decides to livestream his experiences in a haunted house, and he introduces these rules that force him to actually engage with the setting.

This makes for a very engaging watch as the rules of the movie are clearly laid out. The way the streamer interacts with the chat and the HUD is also quite fun since the guy is a scaredy-cat, but his peanut gallery refuses to let him off the hook.

The movie later descends into cartoonish fun. It's an enjoyable romp that I can have with pals, but it's not something I'll remember for years to come.

Øvredal, André (2010). Troll Hunter.

This is a rather unique found footage horror movie as it is not scary at all. Instead, it is more interested in evoking a Finnish mythology in a down-to-earth setting.

The movie follows a team of college students who track down a real troll hunter. At first, they don't believe the creatures are real. But after their encounters, they decide to document the hunter's life and the things he does.

The squabbles with the bureaucracy are the most exciting part of the movie as Finland is trying to hide the existence of trolls from the public. The hunter is fed up with this conspiracy, which is why he agrees to people documenting his film. This interesting between the typical uncovering of government conspiracies and the documentation of someone's life makes the film quite watchable in my opinion.

There's some neat techniques the film uses to spice things up. In the second half, there is a change in the cinematographer, and this is immediately noticeable in the framing of the shots. It gives the changing cast members some personality.

Although the film is rather slow, mimicking the ennui of the hunter as he tries to find these creatures, the film seems reluctant to exploit its rich tedium. Parts of the film feel like an action movie, others are clearly trying to scare people. However, it is this odd mix of genres and the love for all things Finnish that makes this film a very interesting watch. I wouldn't recommend it to the general public, but if you're interested in this kind of thing, give it a look.

Goldner, Elliot (2013). The Borderlands. (recommended)

This movie feels like it's redefining what a sleepy hit should be: it's not only fairly unknown, but it has a rather sleepy atmosphere and is quite good.

The English countryside is as much a character as the three protagonists: a Catholic priest who doesn't act like one, a carefree videographer who got the job by pretending to be a Christian, and a rational priest who believes in science over the supernatural. Together, they act like the Vatican's own myth-busters, making sure that what they're witnessing on camera are real miracles and not just a scam to steal money from pilgrims.

How much you like this movie seems to depend on how much you find these character dynamics interesting, the folk horror setting gripping, and the ending surprising. I liked all those aspects, and it felt like a more modern Wicker Man. But I can also see how people might feel kind of bored by the end.

Still, the way the movie ends is undeniably fascinating to me. I'm still shocked by how abrupt it is and how I didn't pick up on the really obvious foreshadowing. It's great because the movie doesn't really go for any deep literary or religious themes: it's just about the fear of the unknown, no matter what you believe in. In a way, I find that more satisfying than, say, Heretic.

I'm not sure if I would consider it a favorite of mine, but I respect the way the movie created this intoxicating atmosphere that plays with Catholic motifs, technology, and Lovecraftian horror. It's definitely one of the few movies that actually scared me, and I think that's quite an accomplishment.

Lee, Derek and Prowse, Clif (2013). Afflicted.

Although this movie is not to my taste, I found this take on vampires fresh. The movie pretends to be a travelogue: one of them is dying of a brain tumor and this is their only time to travel around the world. Unfortunately, their attempt to travel the world turns into chaos when he gets infected with vampirism.

There are some incredible one-take sequences and the writing is top-notch. I just found it a little too action-heavy for my taste.

But movies like this show that there's more to be explored in the found footage genre. I also really like how the movie is set in different countries, with language barriers being a big part of the story. I wanted a movie that would explore what it means to travel around the world with this fictional disability, but I thought this was fine for what it is.

I'm not sure what kind of media I want to focus on this month. Maybe I'll read more trans fiction (especially online/self-published stuff) and yuri visual novels. I know people will ask about the former, so I'll just say that I am interested in reading A Little Vice by Shadell. I like to see a thorough take on magical girl stories. No promises, but it does sound very interesting.

Other things to keep in mind: Elin, which I'm sure I'll write about, has been keeping me company in these troubling times, and there's also Aural to Hikari no Ryuu to finish.

But knowing me, I am also extremely unpredictable and might move on to something else. Backlogs, what's that?