Movies
Pink Eye
“An imperfect, offensive, low budget horror nightmare. Pink Eye may at times seem like it was rush produced, but the low budget atmosphere quickly absorbs the minor bumps and blemishes and allows a strong ensemble to shine through like the sheen of a bloody pool seeping through the ceiling from an upstairs murder scene.”
What would it take for you to pull your own eyes out? Not just pop out your own eyeballs… peel your eyelids off, too. Pop out those slimy orbs and pull those optics nerves until they snap. Force your fingers into the holes left in the front of your face. Reach in, and pick at the flesh until you can pull out chunks of brain meat like ground, bloody sausage. For one patient in this asylum for the insane – it’s a combo of drugs mixed with PCP causing her and scores of other patients to become homicidal maniacs. In Pink Eye, the mad have been medicated with uberviolent experimental pharmaceutical cocktails, and those who don’t tear out their own eyes are killing the staff and about to break out of the facility onto the streets. For one family living in a town nearby, life is about to become a living hell.
Savage Roses Productions (Addiction, Aunt Rose, Eat Your Heart Out) returns with director James Tucker at the helm once again, guiding another sick ship written by Joshua Nelson. Pink Eye centers around a prison-like hospital for the severe mentally ill, where two doctors are conducting chemical tests, injecting phencyclidine into the rabidly mad. Phencyclidine, known on the streets as PCP, is a psychotropic anesthetic that was infamous for disconnecting its user from their environment or body, allowing them to become capable of extreme actions because of their high threshold for pain – such as breaking bones to pull ones own hands through handcuff rings, or yanking on the steel so inhumanly hard that the links actually break.
Deemed illegal and banned from use, two doctors (under the guidance of a greedy, heartless pharmaceutical company) are leading tests nonetheless, injecting PCP cocktails into the mad. The result is an extreme outbreak of homicidal mania and self abuse, as patients tear themselves and others to shreds, about to break out upon the streets of an innocent town at any moment. One particular patient has taken to the drugs in a most unique way – his body deformed and covered in open sores, his mind twisted into a knot that wants to kill every last living creature in the world with his bare hands, blistering with poetry – Edgar breaks out and the body count soon begins to rise.
Edgar (played commandingly by newcomer Joshua James) is not normal. He wears the creepy mask of a swollen, pink eye victim, and about every word he speaks are quotations from Edgar Allen Poe. He poetically maneuvers his way through the hospital dispatching lives with scalpels and a pairs of human hands driven by the maddest of minds. When he gets out, crosses the woods and meets the little girl of a nearby family within, his focus soon turns to Delilah, an exceptionally beautiful victim. Delilah (played by the alluring Melissa Bacelar) is quickly captured, and soon its up to Brandon (Joshua Nelson) and an investigating officer to enter the asylum, survive the bloody carnival of evil within, and save her from the grips of a hell bent maniac.
The gore, when it struck, was supreme. Broken heads, knuckle deep eye wounds – the makeup and effects are vicious and convincing (save the bad angle on the crowbar/skull piercing at the end). The acting was especially far and beyond. Melissa Bacelar has a great screen presence. She dominates with ultra feminine charisma and is addicting to watch, and can even steal a scene from a cute little girl. Nelson is a little masculine monotone in his role, but its like an artistic grey that allows the other colors to seem more vibrant. From Raine Brown’s freak out sessions to the excessively cute Emma Hinz – Pink Eye is an example of how good low budget horror can be when you have a mega-talented cast and crew behind it. Joshua Nelson’s screenplay is lively and oddly artistic – the actors are as sharp as scalpels – Marc Fratto (director of Last Rites of the Dead) inputs on an excellent atmospheric soundtrack – and James Tucker brings out the most it has to offer with another directorial slam dunk that lingers like a lingering, vivid nightmare.
Final analysis: An imperfect, offensive, low budget horror nightmare. Pink Eye may at times seem like it was rush produced, but the low budget atmosphere quickly absorbs the minor bumps and blemishes and allows a strong ensemble to shine through like the sheen of a bloody pool seeping through the ceiling from an upstairs murder scene. Once again, Savage Roses puts together a ton of underrated talent and delivers a uniquely raw horror experience – its shortcomings being the budget only. The directing, bloody effects, and acting take this film far beyond the mass of low budget efforts. It has that gritty 70’s feel of an early Tom Savini/Wes Craven cross. Id even go so far to say that if Tucker’s films had been introduced to wide audiences in theaters in the late 70’s, I think he could have made as strong an impact as the like of an early Carpenter or Craven. What comes across in the end isn’t the same style (to each their own) – but it manages to tattoo your imagination with a likewise unique strength. In the past five years, when it comes to low budget films, Id be pressed to name a better horror filmmaking team than Joshua Nelson and James Tucker. If you don’t manage to catch Pink Eye at a conspicuous late night theater on the coast, watch for it through pus-crusted eyes to hit DVD shelves in 2008.
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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