Editorials
Monster Movie ‘Sweetheart’ and the Resurgence of Aquatic Horror
This summer brought Alexandre Aja’s nail-biting alligator thriller Crawl, and this coming January sees the release of deep-sea creature feature Underwater. Smack in between is J.D. Dillard’s Sweetheart, an aquatic horror movie that’s equal parts creature feature and survival horror. Despite positive buzz out of the Sundance Film Festival for its world premiere, including a rave from our own Meredith Borders, the island-set horror movie was quietly released on VOD a couple of days ahead of its October 22 street date. Like Crawl, Sweetheart offers up another solid entry in aquatic horror that makes this writer hopeful for a serious resurgence.
Sweetheart is minimalist horror at its best. It’s a simple story with very little dialogue, but it’s executed well. Think Castaway, for at least a large chunk of the runtime, but without any volleyballs or seagulls for its lead protagonist to befriend.
The opening frame shows Jenn (Kiersey Clemons) waking on the shore of some nondescript island. She finds another washed up person, someone she knows, but he’s got one gnarly chunk of coral lodged in his ribcage. He has about enough energy to mutter, “Did you see it?” before succumbing to his wound, leaving Jenn shipwrecked alone. While the adaptable Jenn quickly sets about trying to survive alone on a small island, she learns soon enough what her fallen comrade meant. She’s not so alone after all.
Every night something prowls the island for food. It’s big and it’s deadly.
For a brisk 82-minute runtime, the film is pretty much void of dialogue for roughly half of that. A lot of it is dedicated to Jenn formulating plans and simply trying to survive. Which isn’t to say that it’s without tension or that nothing interesting is going on- Dillard is adept at knowing when to layer in story clues- but that the minimalism likely won’t be for everyone.
Dillard is also the type of filmmaker that understands how frustrating it can be to show too little or too much of the creature in a creature feature. He also gets that too much ambiguity can be annoying. All of which to say that we get to glimpse the film’s monster in subtle teases, at first, resulting in one breathtaking creature shot for the ages. It gradually increases until we see a climactic showdown that shows artist Neville Page’s creature design in all its glory.
When asked about the film’s title at a recent screening, Dillard simply stated that he wanted to keep audiences in the dark as much as possible to preserve the surprises. The nonexistent marketing does effectively preserve mystery; the only stills available pre-release were of Clemons’ character in the ocean. Odds of unsuspecting viewers stumbling into this movie thinking they’re going to get anything but horror are probably pretty high. Sweetheart deserves a much better fate.
Crawl left viewers on the edge of their seats, using hurricane flooding to unleash a congregation of aggressive alligators upon a trapped father and daughter. The suspense was so taut and consistent that Aja didn’t seem to want viewers to catch their breath. Sweetheart is something wholly different. Dillard uses a pared back story to let his leading lady and the monster she’s forced to battle shine. It’s simple, yet extremely well-shot. It bides its time to pack a powerful punch where it counts in the third act.
While there are still a few months between us and the release of Underwater, all marketing seems to indicate that it’ll be a massive underwater creature feature, popcorn style. If that’s the case, that means a trio of diverse aquatic horror films, all tackling various corners of the subgenre. It’s the beginning of a beautiful new wave of aquatic horror, or at least the potential for one.
Here’s hoping the resurgence continues.
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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