Editorials
One Year Later: Remembering Wes Craven
Several years ago, I had the amazing opportunity to participate in a round table interview of sorts where Wes Craven came to a horror class I was taking at the University of Michigan and allowed us students to grill him for about an hour. His knowledge was exceeded only by his kindness and patience, enthusiastically answering every question we threw his way while holding back nothing. It’s an experience that I will never forget.
One year ago today, the esteemed horror writer/producter/director passed away after a battle with brain cancer that next to no one knew of. I remember that night vividly. I tried to go to bed early but my body thought I wanted to take a nap, so it woke me up around 10pm. Frustrated, I grabbed my laptop and began catching up on my socials.
“Anyone say anything of interest on Facebook? Pfft, yeah right. How about Twitter? Let’s scroll through and, wait…what? Wait, fucking what?! No! No no no!!!”
In a year when we’d already lost Leonard Nimoy, Christopher Lee, Geoffrey Lewis, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Daniel von Bargen, and Betsy Palmer, and many more, it felt like that year couldn’t hurt us any more. The damage was already too great. However, the news hit like a flood and suddenly everyone everywhere was reporting that Wes Craven was dead. Just like that, he was gone. And with his passing, a part of the horror community died along with him. I posted about his death with tears in my eyes and then watched as the disbelief and pain spread like ripples on a pond.
Craven’s legacy cannot be denied. He created two major franchises with Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street. He pushed horror to extremes with Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes. He went off the beaten path with films like The People Under the Stairs and The Serpent and the Rainbow. His impact on the horror genre is undeniable and it’s a sad world that we live in where he’s not a part of what’s coming next.
Earlier this month, Trace wrote on Craven’s birthday about the director’s career and last year I wrote to express my mourning and how Craven shaped my horror path. Now here we are a year later. The grief is muted but the memories are still crystal clear and our appreciation for him and his work hasn’t wavered at all. If anything, many of us find ourselves wishing that he was still around to bring his signature flavor to the horror world.
But I think to truly honor Craven, we need to not only remember the past and his works but we also need to recognize and appreciate what we have been given since his passing. Just look at Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe, which creates a tension that is so thick, I doubt even Freddy’s razor fingers could cut through it. Or how about James Wan’s The Conjuring 2, which paid homage to Freddy, and spent as much time making us care about the characters as it did creating highly effective scares. There was also Robert Eggers The Witch which was a brilliant exercise in familial horror and establishing a brooding atmosphere. Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, which came out of nowhere, and stunned critics and audiences with its paranoia-fueled story.
Wes Craven’s death may have felt like the end of an era but every end ushers in a new beginning. The filmmakers working in the genre now are undeniably influenced by Craven and his spirit lives on far beyond his own works. Horror is in good hands and I know that he’d be smiling and confident about what the future holds for all of us. There are plenty more nightmares to be had.
Hollywood tends to learn all of the wrong lessons when confronted with an indie success story that doesn’t follow the established rules of the industry. For instance, instead of accepting that the massive success of Backrooms has more to do with Kane Parsons’ individual talent as an established artist who has been producing high-quality videos since the pandemic (combined with the popularity of liminal horror among younger audiences), producers are now trudging through old Reddit posts looking for the next viral meme that studios think might have the potential to be turned into a cash cow.
This is by no means a new phenomenon, and I think one of the most pertinent examples of Hollywood misunderstanding what makes a movie work has to be the aftermath of The Blair Witch Project. While Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s genre-defining movie proved that POV camerawork and lo-fi aesthetics can captivate mainstream audiences when backed by a genuinely compelling story, there was a sudden trend of filmmakers attempting to appear hip by incorporating found footage into their films as if the occasional presence of diegetic recordings was enough to make a movie seem “hip”.
That’s why the 2000s were such a frustrating period for found footage fans, as the genre was still mostly relegated to obscure indie productions while studios only teased us with the format’s narrative potential. And yet, talented filmmakers can tell compelling stories under any circumstances, and this is how we get to the weird world of found footage bonus features produced alongside traditional movies.
Diegetic filmmaking may not necessarily be easier than conventional camerawork (it’s a lot harder to simulate reality without the added toolbox of cinematic editing), but it’s certainly a hell of a lot cheaper. That’s why it makes sense that plenty of high profile projects invested in found footage bonus content in order to add value to their home video releases – a once profitable industry that is sorely missed in the current media landscape.
The irony here is that many of these found footage extras were a little too good when compared to their promotional origins. With that in mind, I’d like to take a closer look at three examples of found footage bonus features that were better than the movie they were meant to enhance!
3. Halloween: Resurrection (2002): WebCam Special
I might lose some of my horror cred for admitting this, but Halloween: Resurrection was actually the first Halloween film I ever saw. Thankfully, this misguided entry didn’t scare me off from watching the other movies in the series, but even as a teenager I recognized that the flick’s premise of an online streaming show gone wrong had some merit to it – it’s just too bad that these ideas were never fully realized in the feature itself.
It was only years later that I discovered the fabled WebCam Special on Resurrection’s physical media release and got the film I had always wanted. This 41-minute cut of the film is by no means a masterpiece, but excluding everything except for the found footage elements of the production somehow transforms this ill-advised sequel into a deeply unsettling exercise in voyeuristic cinema.
In fact, I’d argue that the long takes of Michael simply moving through the house without calling attention to himself are much closer to John Carpenter’s original vision of the bogeyman than any of the exaggerated sequels that depict The Shape as something more akin to a superpowered Jason Voorhees. It’s just a shame that the franchise would never explore this format again.
2. Believers (2007): The Quanta Group Videos
Daniel Myrick’s Believers is by no means a bad movie, with this direct-to-video thriller following a duo of paramedics who find themselves captured by a deranged death cult inspired by all the worst aspects of Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. Unfortunately, the Blair Witch alumni’s low-budget exploration of religious madness was quickly forgotten simply because most people didn’t bother to engage with the other half of the experience by exploring the DVD menu.
Within the disc’s extras, Myrick actually included in-universe interviews and orientation videos meant to expand the Quanta Group’s backstory and beliefs. These found footage recordings greatly enhance The Believers by providing much-needed context for some of the film’s scariest moments. There’s even a wonderfully creepy epilogue sequence here as another group explores the cult’s dilapidated compound after the events of the film.
While it’s baffling that this material didn’t make it into the movie itself through in-universe cutaways (especially IO’s darkly humorous interview), watching it alongside Myrick’s film turns the whole thing into a highly compelling multi-media experience.
1. Dawn of the Dead (2004): The Lost Tape & Special Report: Zombie Invasion
I’ve always considered 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake to be Zack Snyder’s best film (though most of the flick’s qualities are the result of James Gunn’s excellent script) even if it fails to capture the social anxieties of Romero’s 1978 original. However, this apocalyptic production is also the perfect example of an expensive project being overshadowed by the low-budget bonus features on its own home video release.
You see, the Dawn of the Dead DVD actually boasts two separate found footage short films that I find much scarier than the movie they’re marketing. The Lost Tape: Andy’s Terrifying Last Days Revealed is a somber video diary written by Gunn and starring Bruce Bohne as the ill-fated Andy – a minor character in the main film who becomes trapped in his own gun store when the zombies attack. Then there’s my personal favorite, Special Report: Zombie Invasion, a fully simulated news program starring Babylon 5’s Richard Biggs (as well as Bruce Boxleitner) that chronicles the spread of the undead virus.
Not only do these bonus features add context to Snyder’s film, but I’d argue that they make for a better standalone viewing experience than the so-called “main attraction”. Special Report honestly feels like a charming low-budget adaptation of Max Brooks’ World War Z novel (despite coming out a couple of years before that book was published), and I adore how The Lost Tapes turns Andy into a genuinely tragic figure.
These obviously aren’t the only found footage extras worth revisiting (for instance, I adore that Skull Island mockumentary that accompanied the special edition of Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake), but I figured that the three aforementioned projects could provide us with a snapshot of a curious moment in popular culture where found footage could still impress viewers despite not being quite as respected by the studio system.
That being said, don’t forget to sound off in the comments below if you can think of any other found footage bonus features that deserve a shout-out! After all, I’d love to see this trend of diegetic extras make a comeback in modern times – especially where found footage-heavy movies like Backrooms are concerned.
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