Found Footage Horror - Dying alone in the dark or living anew?
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” - H.P Lovecraft
Disclaimer: this review contains minor spoilers
Lovecraft’s stories are well known for placing normal people in highly volatile, fantastic situations. Fear is evoked through the knowledge that things exist in this universe that are so beyond mortal comprehension, so beyond the realm of human experience that even slight exposure can cause total sanity loss.
While Lovecraft is able to deliver this through his writing, delivery through film is a different story. But here we are in 2023 and we’ve got another found footage horror film. We’re still doing this? I thought this sub-genre would have died alone in the dark (boing) at this point given the multitude of flops generated in Hollywood, but there are still some indie directors brave enough to tackle yet another shaky cam extravaganza. Enter The Outwaters, a 2022 found footage horror film directed by Robbie Banfitch.
Found footage horror occupies a bit of a derisive place as a sub-genre. Ever since the arrival of The Blair Witch Project back in 1999, fans have either fallen in love with this type of delivery or run screaming in the opposite direction (no pun intended). In its best moments, found footage works by placing the viewer in the shoes of the persons experiencing the phenomena, listening and watching to the same sights and sounds, and experiencing some of the same horror.
On a bad day, found footage horror is shaky camera work, bad acting, and borderline unwatchable. Go visit any film from the Paranormal Activity series (there’s only 4 of them) or The Amityville Haunting, a 2011 found footage garbage reboot of the classic Amityville Horror. Eventually, watching people run around screaming just loses its luster and boredom quickly sets in. What was at first innovative and interesting has become commonplace and cliché with few exceptions.
The problem is that generally found footage has been used as an excuse not to include the normal elements of a good story - a.k.a - fully developed characters and a plotline. Directors for some reason think that bad camera work and screaming somehow replaces character development, plot and pacing. Yet there are good examples of when it works. Back in 2008, a film called Lake Mungo got everything right. It didn’t sacrifice any of the cornerstones a “normal” movie simply because it leveraged a found footage delivery. It's possible then that these films can be amazingly good.
So where does The Outwaters fall in the spectrum of found footage disasters? The answer is somewhere in the middle. The Outwaters does a few things very well, and indeed pushes the boundaries of the genre. There are a few moments of intense, mind-blasting gore that perform as designed, shocking the viewer and bringing them into a world where an unfortunate group of desert hikers are assailed by forces beyond their comprehension. Banfitch demands that the audience participate in dissecting the specific plot elements and meaning, forcing you to figure out just WTF is going on here. There’s a monster out there and he’s not going to tell you what or who he is.
What’s more surprising is that Banfitch himself admits he’s not at all familiar with cosmic horror or Lovecraft, but he wanted to do something within it. Even without expert literary knowledge, The Outwaters indeed captures the two main tenets of Lovecraftian horror: the fear is unknowable and it’s brutally cruel. The immense, monolithic terrors that lurk in the universe do not care if or how you die. In the areas where innovation occurs, The Outwaters deserves praise, but is it enough to sustain a feature-length film?
The problem begins with the pacing. After an initial intriguing sequence featuring a distressing 911 call featuring strange, distorted voices yelling in panic, we’re brought into the world of four people preparing to embark on a hiking trip. Some information about the characters is gleaned from these sequences, but unfortunately it’s incredibly boring. By the time I was ready to see something happening, I was already checked out. This part of the film could use some serious editing. By painting a clearer image of these characters in the beginning, I would have cared more about them when they ultimately met their grisly demise later on.
Banfitch is trying to draw us in with small vignettes about these people, but despite his effort they appear to be four strangers running through the dark, screaming and then being brutally ripped apart. I was concerned, and dismayed at various times throughout the film, but I never approached the point where I actually cared about any of them. While The Outwaters I think is still mostly reserved for indie horror aficionados, I’m very much looking forward to future output from Banfitch as he gets more mature as a filmmaker (and more budget) to truly bring us into the cosmic horror story we’ve all been hoping for.
Rating: 2.5 Stars (out of 4) - Worth watching and appreciating once.
Stinky Cheese Man Says:
