Feminist Fear Freak: found footage

Friday, July 10, 2015

The Den

I was not expecting to be freaked out by this movie. I heard from a friend that they found it scary, but they thought it was mostly because they work on webcams. I do not work via webcam. But I found this pretty freaky anyway.

First off, this is a found-footage film (ish). But it's done in a surprisingly refreshing way. The entire film is viewed through webcams (primarily on computers & cell phones). This was a surprisingly refreshing twist on the found-footage genre. It follows a young graduate student who is doing her thesis on the way people interact with strangers on the internet. She does this primarily using the ominously named "The Den" (which is really just an amalgamation of Skype, Chatroulette & Omegle). This gives a lovely excuse for her to film herself 24/7, but also to film her interactions with random strangers. We also get to see her chat logs/emails/youtube videos, because it's primarily oriented as a "screen capture". We see what she sees.

At first it's mostly normal internet stuff. Some of it is even quite funny. She's trying to figure out why people do the things they do online, and keeps hilariously simple notes including "exposed penis for entire length of "conversation". But she also has a few good conversations with normal seeming, interesting people.

Then she starts to encounter things that are... darker in content. Some of them are obviously hoaxes, jump scares and the like. Some of them, however, might not be. But because of the high prevalence of trolling, police don't take her seriously when she thinks she sees a real threat.

What I found really drew me in was a really effective portrayal of gaslighting via a technologic medium. Stalkers do sometimes hack into people's computers and use that access to make the computer owner feel like they're going crazy. Files being deleted, webcams turned on and off, and secret recordings being made and downloaded are all totally possible. While I'm not convinced there's actually people out there killing strangers on camera for fun, there are real people who exhibit a lot of the early behaviors shown in this film. And that's what makes it downright terrifying.

There's really not much more I can say (or show) without giving something away. But I'd say if you want a good creep-out I can recommend this. And for being about webcams the nudity & sexual content was kept to what I found to be a very reasonable minimum. There's a lot of graphic violence (some meant to be fake, some meant to be real) but not any particularly sexual violence, which was refreshing.

If you would like further evidence that I found this film genuinely spooky, let me present some photographic evidence. (the photo below is from my life, not the movie)

This is a photograph of my computer 10 minutes after watching The Den

I watched the film on my TV, not my computer, or it probably would've been sooner. As you can see I have used a chip clip & a sock to cover my webcam (I made sure the clip's edges aren't touching the lens, so don't panic!). I'm not sure I can give a lot better review for a horror film than that.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

The Bay

The only real way to describe this film is as an Environmental Horror Mockumentary. That sounds like too many genres, too overwrought, but it really works.

I can honestly say I've never seen a film like this before. I wasn't particularly excited about watching it, because I'm getting tired of shaky cameras, but I decided to just sit down and watch it on Netflix. When the film started, I was playing some Candy Crush on my phone, only half paying attention. Five minutes in, I set my phone down, backed up to the beginning, and started over.

There's really no way to describe how real this movie feels. Our narrator describes the lives of these people as she understands them, bits and pieces with lots of missing information. She is obviously older, wiser, and broken-down by her experiences. It's interesting to hear the voice of the "final girl" years after the events have ended. Her acting is absolutely superb, as she plays both herself as an intern reporter during the course of the events and then years after, speaking into a webcam and brutally criticizing herself for the way she handled the situation. It's heartbreaking and mesmerizing.

While the "big bad" of the film is an unknown disease that is sweeping suddenly through a small-town 4th of July celebration, that never feels like the true evil in the film. The government, both before and after the incident, are proven to be the bigger terror, hiding water pollution with disastrous consequences.

The juxtapositions set up in the film are really stunning, idyllic scenes of young children splashing joyfully in the pool against images of hospitalized people covered in unknown boils. It has the slow effect of making even the most beautiful, most wholesome, most all-American of images feel sick and terrifying.

For being a film with such a liberal lean, more attention could have been paid to issues surrounding underrepresented minorities - mostly about the complete lack of them. I understand that they were trying to make a microcosm of "good old fashioned small town America" but there are people of color in Maine. And while the films narrator & another main character are both women, the film still doesn't pass the Bechtel Test. But the film also doesn't really sexualize them, which can be quite a rarity in the horror genre.

Overall, in spite of it's few shortcomings, I think it will become one of my new favorites. Because while the jumps were few and the tension built slowly, the next day I was still sitting feeling uneasy, thinking about children idyllically splashing around what they think is safe water. It's a very effective film.

Entertaining