Movies
The Amityville Haunting (V)
“Asylum has been churning out found footage and mockumentary-style horror flicks, and with ‘The Amityville Haunting’, they have finally reached their apex of terribleness.”
There’s a certain level of expectation required of an Asylum film. When that film is done in the style of “found footage” – arguably the easiest method of making a horror film to get right –your expectations are very slightly raised, if only because it’s the only way the studio can utilize their incredibly low budget in a way that isn’t utterly laughable. Their first foray into the style came with Paranormal Entity, an attempt to cash in on the enormous popularity of Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity. And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t great by any stretch of the imagination, but it was sufficiently creepy enough to provide a modicum of entertainment. Since then, Asylum has been churning out found footage and mockumentary-style horror flicks, and with The Amityville Haunting, they have finally reached their apex of terribleness.
The film opens with a group of kids breaking into a house, having sex, then presumably being murdered. We’re then taken to June of 2008 and the arrival of the Benson family in their new home, 112 Ocean Avenue – the same home where Ronald DeFeo, Jr. shot and killed six family members in the seventies and subsequently providing the inspiration for The Amityville Horror. Aware of the house’s past but unable to keep jumping from house to house, the family moves in and begins to experience strange occurrences, all captured on camera.
One of the great things about found footage horror is its ability to hide bad acting. It’s not always successful, but more often than not you’re too distracted by what’s going on – or what might be going on – the footage as it slowly unfolds. While our three female characters fit firmly into these two categories, the two male leads inThe Amityville Haunting manage to turn what is essentially an easy pass in some downright laughable performances. The son, Tyler Benson, is filming a documentary, turning the camera on himself at the end of each day to explain what he has seen. The father, Douglas Benson, is a tough-as-nails, I-don’t-take-shit-from-anyone type of father who rules the family with an authoritarian fist. While at first it’s forgivable, the presence of the ghost, given some sort of physical manifestation through the mildly frightening yet severely played out discussions between it and Douglas’s young daughter, manages to devolve the character from an unbelieving father to one who shadow boxes an unseen specter and drops to the ground in an apparent Vietnam flashback. It’s hilarious, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be.
As the film progresses, the decision is made to switch from a first person point of view to a mix of first person and CCTV footage, installed by Douglas. This is precipitated by a series of bizarre events – doors opening, noises, and the aforementioned ghostly discussions – and while it adds a new dimension to the level of fear the film is trying to convey, it does so in a sporadic and uninspired way. Numerous shots of the CCTV footage where nothing happens appear more often than anything of substance, with one creepy scene featuring a ghostly apparition doing the bare minimum to keep you from turning off the movie. Eventually we’re given an ending that somehow manages to be more interesting and well executed than the rest of the film while at the same time being infused with the sort of unintentional hilarity we’ve come to expect out of Asylum productions.
The Asylum is brilliant. Deliberately marketing their productions in a way to fool unsuspecting fans of horror films unaware with their devious practices ensures a return on almost all productions. Since the found footage boom that was more or less kicked off in 2009 with Paranormal Activity, they’ve been churning them out at an astounding rate. And you’ll keep watching them, and they’ll keep making them, and we’ll be caught in this endless cycle of laughable mediocrity until The Asylum is the only production company left on Earth.
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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