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Have worked through a few more movies this week. i didn't find Grave Encounters or The Hollow as satisfying as the movies I mentioned last week, although I wouldn't call either of them bad. They are pretty predictable, though.
Grave Encounters: A paranormal investigation TV show films an episode in a *gasp* abandoned mental hospital!!! will the they survive??? of course not.
The director deliberately eschewed some conventions of found footage--there's not a lot of ambiguous shots or slow-building horror in this movie--when frightening stuff goes down it's direct, fast and violent. Even the build-up scares--a moving wheelchair, doors slamming shut, someone's hair getting pulled--occur loudly. It's not exactly bad; the jumpscares with the ghost patients and the tub room are particularly nerve-wracking, but others, like hands reaching out of the wall, feel so OTT they lose their impact.
The movie also veers pretty hard into the supernatural, in a way that bleeds a lot of tension out of the second half of the movie. It becomes very clear that the hospital is a space that the characters can't escape and there is no hope of rescue from the outside, and once that's established you kinda just watch these doomed people run around dark hallways screaming until they die. "Wait for all the characters to die" is kind of a found-footage weakness, but Grave Encounters goes out of its way to establish the hopelessness of the situation early into the investigation, and then spends an awful lot of time having the characters run around the shifting hallways and screaming about how fucked they are.
The film ends with the reveal that the doctors were performing Satanic rituals on patients because why not i guess, which strikes me as a terrible misuse of a great setting. Mental asylums are horrifying because they were well-intentioned projects that became hellish as both workers and residents were warped by the stress of living in these huge, isolated buildings...to replace that intrinsic corruption with "oh the doctors cut open patients to call Satan" is far less frightening.
Ultimately, I think this is a found footage film for people who don't like found footage, which is a bit of a weird niche but also one that definitely exists if user reviews are anything to go by.
The Hallow: An Irish couple with a newborn baby move to a house in the country to conduct surveys for a national park or something. surprise surprise, something ~scary~ lives(?) in the woods nearby and the surveying plus NEW BABBY prove to be an irresistable combination to the spooky creatures and they eventually attack the couple over the course of a horrifying night.
this is a pretty straightforward survive-the-night story that involves an obvious gag baby and a cute doggo in peril, which was not exactly my cup of tea (the dog...does not fare well). it's implied that the monsters in the woods are possibly banshees or some other Irish folk creature, but in practice they are just screamy monsters with tree root hands. there's some unsettling eye-related gore but otherwise it's a kind of tame movie. It's beautifully shot and the acting is fine, but overall pretty forgettable once it's done.
I also watched V/H/S/94, which I have a lot of thoughts about, but given it's an anthology series I'll leave it for another day.
current to watch list:
V/H/S
Noroi
Medium
Werewolf Within
Poughkeepsie Tapes
youtube found footage thing
The Houses October Built
[REC]
Grave Encounters: A paranormal investigation TV show films an episode in a *gasp* abandoned mental hospital!!! will the they survive??? of course not.
The director deliberately eschewed some conventions of found footage--there's not a lot of ambiguous shots or slow-building horror in this movie--when frightening stuff goes down it's direct, fast and violent. Even the build-up scares--a moving wheelchair, doors slamming shut, someone's hair getting pulled--occur loudly. It's not exactly bad; the jumpscares with the ghost patients and the tub room are particularly nerve-wracking, but others, like hands reaching out of the wall, feel so OTT they lose their impact.
The movie also veers pretty hard into the supernatural, in a way that bleeds a lot of tension out of the second half of the movie. It becomes very clear that the hospital is a space that the characters can't escape and there is no hope of rescue from the outside, and once that's established you kinda just watch these doomed people run around dark hallways screaming until they die. "Wait for all the characters to die" is kind of a found-footage weakness, but Grave Encounters goes out of its way to establish the hopelessness of the situation early into the investigation, and then spends an awful lot of time having the characters run around the shifting hallways and screaming about how fucked they are.
The film ends with the reveal that the doctors were performing Satanic rituals on patients because why not i guess, which strikes me as a terrible misuse of a great setting. Mental asylums are horrifying because they were well-intentioned projects that became hellish as both workers and residents were warped by the stress of living in these huge, isolated buildings...to replace that intrinsic corruption with "oh the doctors cut open patients to call Satan" is far less frightening.
Ultimately, I think this is a found footage film for people who don't like found footage, which is a bit of a weird niche but also one that definitely exists if user reviews are anything to go by.
The Hallow: An Irish couple with a newborn baby move to a house in the country to conduct surveys for a national park or something. surprise surprise, something ~scary~ lives(?) in the woods nearby and the surveying plus NEW BABBY prove to be an irresistable combination to the spooky creatures and they eventually attack the couple over the course of a horrifying night.
this is a pretty straightforward survive-the-night story that involves an obvious gag baby and a cute doggo in peril, which was not exactly my cup of tea (the dog...does not fare well). it's implied that the monsters in the woods are possibly banshees or some other Irish folk creature, but in practice they are just screamy monsters with tree root hands. there's some unsettling eye-related gore but otherwise it's a kind of tame movie. It's beautifully shot and the acting is fine, but overall pretty forgettable once it's done.
I also watched V/H/S/94, which I have a lot of thoughts about, but given it's an anthology series I'll leave it for another day.
current to watch list:
V/H/S
Noroi
Medium
Werewolf Within
Poughkeepsie Tapes
youtube found footage thing
The Houses October Built
[REC]
