Effective found footage storytelling requires a delicate balance of narrative structure and chaotic realism. After all, if you make your movie too realistic, it’ll likely be about as entertaining as keeping up with a nanny cam. On the other hand, if you try to inject the story with too many of the usual tropes and contrivances that make traditional movies exciting, you’ll end up defeating the purpose of trying to emulate amateur footage in the first place. This tension lies at the heart of every single film featuring an in-world camera, and while there’s no definitive right way of doing it, we’ve seen several good films on both ends of the spectrum.

That’s why I was curious about Sam Freeman’s experimental debut feature Don’t Look in the Dark, as the marketing behind this micro-budget horror picture promised to deliver a new kind of genre experience even more understated than the original Blair Witch Project. You see, unlike most found footage movies where the recordings are intentional, Don’t Look in the Dark presents us with footage from ordinary cellphones that began recording on their own during a camping trip in New Jersey – complete with black screens and extended moments of eerie ambient sound.

In the finished film, which was envisioned as a scare-driven Rorschach test where no two viewings are the same, we accompany a loving couple on an ill-fated trek through New Jersey’s Pinelands National Reserve (also known as the infamous Pine Barrens). When Maya (Rebi Paganini) sees a mysterious child in the woods, she and Golan (Dennis Puglisi) end up caught in a possibly supernatural web of terror orchestrated by an entity that wants to be seen.

Of course, the story here is little more than an excuse to conduct Freeman’s aesthetic experiment. If you think about it, real found footage tends to be full of holes and unintelligible images/sounds. Most people don’t really focus on filming things as cinematically as possible while under duress, so it makes sense that recordings of a real horrific event would be messy and incomplete.

Unfortunately, while other found footage films have found ways to incorporate different sources of scattered evidence into a larger narrative whole (such as Savageland or even Lake Mungo), Don’t Look in the Dark ultimately falls victim to its own minimalist gimmick.

Credit: Courtesy of Don’t Look In The Dark / Sam Freeman

Despite being marketed as a novel experience, the film doesn’t actually invent anything new. What Freeman is really doing is recontextualizing the existing format of an audio drama as something that can be experienced in theaters, accompanied by the occasional snippets of freaky imagery containing exposition and subliminal scares. While this works to an extent, as we’re immersed in an event that feels like it really happened (at least during the first half of the film), the gimmick simply can’t sustain itself throughout a feature-length story that you’ve seen before in countless other found footage movies. The presentation here may be unusual, but the core of the movie is no different from your garden-variety retread of The Blair Witch Project, to the point where you start to wonder why the filmmakers didn’t also resort to borrowing the mockumentary format in order to further flesh out the story and characters.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some legitimately thrilling moments scattered throughout the film (with many of them owing to the location’s naturally eerie vibes), but it’s hard to justify paying for a ticket to see something with so little effort behind it. That’s why I keep thinking about how much better this footage would have been as part of a larger mockumentary, as this format would have allowed us to really get to know Maya and Golan as people while also skipping the unbearably repetitive segments where the couple despairs about being lost in the woods. Hell, you could even expand on the existing recordings with instant replays and zoom-ins as experts dissect specific frames, Noroi-style.

Alas, the film we ultimately got is much less interested in telling a scary story than setting up a spooky atmosphere. I’m not totally against this style of filmmaking, but it’s hard to endure a feature-length presentation when there’s barely anything onscreen and most of the dialogue can be summed up as our main characters screaming each other’s names.

Ultimately, Don’t Look in the Dark didn’t really work for me, but I’ll concede that I watched the movie at home by myself rather than inside a packed theater filled with horror fans willing to engage with its minimalist gimmick. While I still doubt that the theatrical experience would have added more narrative value to the flick, which was ultimately my biggest gripe, it could be that this is one of those movies that needs to be seen (and heard) on the big screen in order to be properly understood.

So if you happen to be a fan of cinematic Rorschach tests fueled by moments of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it terror, you might enjoy Freeman’s daring debut. However, fans of story-focused found footage productions should probably take the film’s advice and steer clear of the dark while they still can.

Don’t Look in the Dark screened at the New Jersey Film Fest. Release info TBA.