Movies
Knife Edge (UK)
“The audience is left with a brilliantly directed haunted house movie that’s crippled by a messy, convoluted mystery-movie narrative.”
With most haunted house movies, only the first half is scary. Why? Because all of the ghostly activity is completely unexplained in the first half. There are banging noises and creepy whispers and flickering lights and bass-voiced toddlers, and nobody knows what the hell is going on. But then the second half rolls around, and of course the ghost needs a back story, and the ghost’s death needs to be avenged, and before you know it the ghost is reduced to a nagging spiritual presence, needing all this random shit done like your wife on Saturday morning, and the whole movie just stops being frightening. With few exceptions, the modern haunted house movie serves the ghost rather than the audience.
Knife Edge, a recent DVD release from the U.K., pours a little too neatly into that oh-so-common haunted house movie mold. With his business flourishing, Frenchman Henri spontaneously moves his new wife and young stepson from New York out to a bulging mansion just outside of London. He secretly purchased the mansion several years before, after the previous tenants suddenly abandoned it. While Henri occupied with his flourishing business, his wife Emma is frequently left at home alone with her young son. It doesn’t take long for her to begin to suspect that the spacious mansion might be haunted.
At first the paranormal signs are relatively benign. Some quiet whispers in the hallways. The faraway sound of a child crying out for its mother. Images of bloody violence flashing behind Emma in the bathroom mirror. She might be going crazy. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all real. It’s certainly hard to tell when you’re watching a movie that’s this downright manipulative.
Like most successful haunted house movies, Knife Edge is unabashedly frightening during its first half. The early scares are genuine, with eerie sounds and bloody images that really work their way under your skin. Staged with an impressive finesse by veteran horror director Anthony Hickox (Hellraiser II: Hell on Earth), these inspired first-reel scenes are convincing enough to compel you to watch the film all the way to the end. Too bad the movie as a whole is so overloaded with perfunctory haunted house subplots—Emma has a miscarriage, a mysterious nanny (Joan Plowright) appears on the scene to dispatch dubious advice, the young son forges an imaginary friendship with an ugly doll—that the later plot twists bear little impact. The audience is left with a brilliantly directed haunted house movie that’s crippled by a messy, convoluted mystery-movie narrative.
Found footage movies rely on immersion and a particular kind of suspension of disbelief in order to scare viewers, so it stands to reason that playing along with the “kayfabe” of it all is necessary for these movies to be effective. However, despite being something of a purist when it comes to in-universe recordings, I’ve come to accept that traditional productions can benefit from the occasional injection of found footage thrills.
For instance, Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation makes genius use of the analog gimmick in order to trap us in the titular rooms alongside our main characters before effortlessly switching back to a more cinematic language. In honor of these dynamic films that manage to combine the best of both worlds, today I’d like to share six other hybrid horror movies that successfully incorporate found footage into their scares!
For the purposes of this list, “hybrid” horror movies are defined as any flick that shifts between diegetic recordings and traditional filming techniques for a significant amount of time (or at least for pivotal scenes).
As usual, don’t forget to comment below with your own hybrid favorites if you think a particularly freaky one was missed.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. The Last Broadcast (1998)
Internet critics may have overstated the influence that Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler’s The Last Broadcast had on The Blair Witch Project, but the found footage subgenre still owes a huge debt to this underrated piece of avant-garde filmmaking. However, while the movie sets itself up as a documentary about the disappearance of a group of cryptid-hunters attempting to track down the Jersey Devil, things take a darker and much more grounded turn towards the final act.
I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say that the jarring shift in perspective actually helps to sell the idea that everything we’ve seen before the finale was an attempt at using filmmaking to manipulate the public perception of a “real” incident.
Not bad for a movie with a $900 budget!
4. Cam (2018)
When you consider just how much the internet affects our daily lives, it’s strange that we don’t see Screenlife elements pop up in more movies these days. For instance, Isa Mazzei & Daniel Goldhaber’s highly underrated Cam only works as a freaky parable about online sex-work because it masterfully balances Madeline Brewer’s intimate moments with highly immersive segments within cyberspace.
While one might argue that the entire film could have been produced as a Screenlife experience, the hybrid approach allows the filmmakers to explore our main character’s life beyond the screens – with the duality of modern human existence actually becoming a recurring theme in the story.
3. Banshee Chapter (2013)
Most of H.P. Lovecraft’s popular stories were told in the epistolary format (where the text is presented as an in-universe compilation of letters or personal notes), so it makes sense that a spiritually faithful adaptation of his work would incorporate elements from the modern-day equivalent to epistolary fiction – found footage!
That’s why Blair Erickson’s Banshee Chapter is such an effective scare-fest, as this hybrid adaptation of From Beyond -retold through a conspiratorial lens as it references MK-Ultra and even secretive numbers stations- immerses viewers in a mind-bending tapestry of Cosmic Horror that blurs the line between fiction and reality.
2. The Deep House (2019)
The underwater setting does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Deep House, with the film being especially uncomfortable if you’re already scared of tight spaces and being deprived of oxygen. However, even the universally unsettling elements of the flick only work because the POV often shifts into claustrophobic footage courtesy of our main characters’ GoPro cameras.
Telling the story of a couple of YouTubers who encounter a haunted house at the bottom of an artificial lake while vacationing in France, The Deep House’s first-person exploration sequences contain some of the film’s scariest moments. In fact, I’d argue that the movie didn’t even need ghosts, as becoming trapped in the titular House already sounds like a fate worse than death.
1. Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
My personal favorite instance of filmmakers successfully managing to combine traditional cinematography with POV filmmaking, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, is proof that the two formats can co-exist if the right story comes along.
After all, what better way to conclude a mockumentary all about reality getting increasingly more cinematic than by ditching the found footage gimmick altogether during the finale? Not only does this shift in presentation work on a conceptual level, but it also elevates Behind The Mask into a proper Slasher, which is probably why we’re so excited for that long-overdue sequel!
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