Grave Encounters (2011)
Dir. and written by "The Vicious Brothers"
Starring Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Juan Riedinger, Mackenzie Gray
The evidence is encouraging that the high-water mark of the
found-footage wave is now safely behind us, or has at least receded enough to
allow us to take stock of the damage it did when it was fully upon us. Though
it never entirely went away after the huge success of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT
(not the first found footage film,* but unambiguously the genesis of the modern
movement, even if it took a few years after its release to really catch fire),
my sense is that the conceit make the leap from "gimmick" to
"subgenre" somewhere around 2007/2008, which together logged 20
entries I can easily identify, including the first films of the PARANORMAL
ACTIVITY, REC, and CLOVERFIELD series (by contrast, wikipedia lists only 26
prior found-footage film total, many of them vanishingly
obscure). And it wasn't done growing; I count 19 films in 2013 and a peak 22 in
2014, after which things gradually slowed down without ever completely stopping
(wikipedia lists 6 found footage films from 2021, and five so far this year).
GRAVE ENCOUNTERS, our subject today, hails from the thick
of it, a time when there was still some excitement about the idea that the
format might be used to do new things, although I personally was already a
little sick of the whole thing. I never bothered with it at the time, but even
though the conceit has lost a little of its vigor in the last few years, it's
been a part of every Chainsawnukah since I watched the original V/H/S in theaters during the first one, and one tinkers with tradition at a high
spiritual cost. So what the hell, once more into the breach, dear friends.
GRAVE ENCOUNTERS is a very stupid name that does not
inspire much confidence, but I'm pleased to say it doesn't quite live up to the
worthlessness the name implies. The premise is a simple one: a team of TV
hucksters making one of those insipid "Ghost Hunters" type shows
locks themselves in for a night in a supposedly haunted ex-asylum, only to find
that getting out is not as simple as they might have assumed. Oh, and it's
haunted.
The haunting part is the movie's weakest trait; while it's
certainly more eventful than the ridiculously whammy-free PARANORMAL ACTIVITY
(four years old by this point!) the events themselves are pretty basic
haunted house hokum, occasionally good for a jump scare but mostly a bit
threadbare (there's a person standing in the corner! Oh no, they turned around
and have a scary face!) or just outright silly (there are... uh, a bunch of
arms awkwardly reaching out of the ceiling? A lady disappears in a puff of
smoke?). Can’t argue with the sturdy efficacy of a black-eyed, bloody-mouthed
goon appearing suddenly on the ceiling and chasing you, but it’s not nearly
enough return-on-investment to be worth sitting though eons of agonizing improvised circular arguments between the film’s green-faced non-characters. It’s also not
something that takes any real advantage of the found-footage format, though by
the year 2022 I’ve more or less given up any reasonable expectation that a
found-footage film will use the format in any innovative ways.
Fortunately, it turns out the “getting out is not as simple”
part is rather more interesting than the hauntings. See, when you’re in a
haunted asylum, the obvious thing to do is just to… leave. And in fact, that’s
exactly what our gang tries to do. Only they find that they can’t. Every
hallway just leads to more hallways. Every stairwell leads to more stairs. When
they finally get to the atrium where they’re sure they entered, the door just
leads to more hallways. At one point, we’re told they spent an entire day
walking in one direction without getting anywhere. Or at least, one day
according to their watches; somehow, the sun never comes up. Days pass. They
sleep, they wake, they wander. They’re supposed to be let out the following
morning, but morning never comes, and no one ever comes for them. That is
kind of scary; the deep wrongness of the never-ending night, of the
never-ending hallways, the feeling of being utterly trapped in a cage that has
no exit, where basic rules of reality have dissolved until you lack any tools
at all to fight back against your captors… that is horror on a very different
level. Hell, since I already used the words No Exit, I might as well
just say it: it’s existential horror. You can run from a scary ghost. You can’t
run from reality itself. If true horror is, to a degree, about making you feel
powerless, this is one of the most oppressive scenarios I can imagine, one
wherein the rules have been rigged so that no amount of strength or speed or
cleverness can save you.
It's a dark vibe, so it’s both a shame and maybe just as
well the movie mostly tilts towards headier scares after a while; there’s only
so much oppression you can take before things get more depressing than a movie
this silly can handle. Still, there’s something here, and it gives the
standard-issue BOO! moments a little more punch than they’d otherwise have, at
least for a while. Still not enough to really make it worth enduring 95 minutes
of annoying people shouting the same thing at each other endlessly in
night-vision green (which does add to the oppressiveness of it all, but also to
the monotony), and especially not to get to such a silly nothing of an ending.
But I’ve seen worse, and was expecting less. When you’re expecting nothing and
get a little, one tends to be grateful. Still, a film that’s making fun
of Ghost Hunter type shows, even one which is at least moderately more eventful,
would do well to remember that at least those shows are only, like, an hour
long, and that includes commercials.
* That honor appears to go to Shirley Clarke's THE
CONNECTION way back in 1961, with the first found footage horror film apparently CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST in 1980.
