Apollo 18: Moon’s Haunted

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear by now, I’m really picky when it comes to found-footage films. I cut them a lot less slack than I do some other types of films, but I promise you, this comes from a place of love. I am an absolute sucker for any kind of story told via recovered documents or ephemera. Epistolary novels, oral histories both real and fictional, documentaries, mockumentaries - this kind of story is completely and absolutely my shit. I like stories told this way so much because when done well, it helps me forget that I’m reading a story. I dunno, I’m pretty sure in another life I could have been a historian, because the idea of teasing out a narrative from a bunch of archival documents sounds like something I’d enjoy tremendously.

(cue a legion of historians shaking their heads sadly because I’ve completely misunderstood what they do)

Anyway, I think it goes back to that feeling of secret discovery, of being presented with some kind of record for posterity, never intended for a wider audience. I love that feeling. But goddamn, do a lot of found-footage films fuck it up. It’s not an excuse to cheap out on the production or the acting or the writing. If anything, they’re harder to make because you have to make everything look naturalistic and still tell a good story. The instant something feels contrived or artificial , it yanks you right out of the story. You can’t fall back on the usual bag of cinematic tricks to evoke horror, because those are things than happen in movies, and you aren’t supposed to be watching a movie, you’re supposed to be watching raw, unmediated footage.

Apollo 18 does some things very right, other things less so, and the result is sort of a mixed bag.

We open with a title card that says, in essence, that what we are about to see is classified footage from the Apollo 18 moon mission. What makes this noteworthy is that officially, Apollo 17 was the last manned mission to the moon that NASA ever launched.

This footage shouldn’t exist.

We’re introduced to astronauts Nate, Ben, and John in short interviews as they prepare for the mission. This is what they’ve been training for, and though they express concern over the mission’s secrecy - their families are told they’ll be doing a training exercise overseas, and they have a liaison from the Department of Defense - they’re excited to actually be going to the moon. The footage is intercut with some home movies of the three of them at a barbecue, wives and kids in tow. And this really highlights one of the film’s strengths - the attention to detail here is impressive. It really does look like footage from the early 1970s (apparently accomplished in part by the use of lenses from the period), the actors are dressed and groomed appropriately for the time, and speak with the plain competence of men who work in high-risk aeronautics. Most found-footage films go for the camcorder look (which almost always looks like pro-grade camera footage with a cheesy camera overlay on it), but here, we have film stock, maybe some very early video - it’s made clear that the DOD think it’s important to record every facet of the mission, using what was at the time state-of-the-art technology. It’s plausible, it makes sense for the type of story it is, not a case of “oh, we’re going to rig our entire RV with video cameras for reasons.”

Likewise, the launch of the mission looks and sounds like actual spaceflight. I’m not an expert, they may very well have screwed some things up, but the way people talk, the sound of the communications equipment, it all more or less jibes with footage I have seen of space missions from the time. So a lot of work goes into making all of this feel plausible, like we are actually watching classified footage of a mission to the moon that did not officially happen. It’s not just impressive, it’s necessary to create a believable story.

This attention to detail, however, tends to be in service of a film that never really coheres. It looks and sounds fantastic for the most part, but it never really establishes a mood or tension as well as it could. Of course something bad is going to happen (it is a horror movie, after all), but how you get to that point matters. This isn’t an over-the-top assault on the senses, this is supposed to be something that really happened, and stories like that, in my opinion, tend to benefit from being developed gradually, in small, subtle ways, so that when the big surprises hit, there’s real impact, real shock there. The film starts with the idea that there’s something wrong a little too early and depicts it a little too bluntly, and the dialogue is a little too on-the-nose at points (John, who is piloting the orbiter, states early on that “it’s my job to bring you home safely,” and at another point Ben says “it feels like something’s watching us.” Like, we know). From a pacing standpoint, it would have benefited from a slower build-up, from everything being fine until the moment it wasn’t. Instead, almost as soon as they’ve touched down on the moon we know things are amiss and it sucks a lot of the tension out of the film. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

That doesn’t mean it’s entirely tension-free - Nate, Ben, and John discover that the official version of events in the U.S. space program doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality. and it starts to become clear that the mission has been kept top secret for a very good reason. When things start to escalate, it does start to pick up a head of steam, albeit late in the game, and to its detriment, it largely does so when it starts to abandon period authenticity for something closer stock horror-film cliches (even given the omnipresence of cameras, the indication that someone’s losing it by showing us high-speed footage of his head whipping back and forth doesn’t read like actual footage, it reads like a horror movie), and so we go from a believable film that isn’t setting mood to one that sets a mood at the cost of believability. Luckily, it’s not too egregious and it’s mostly late in the film, but it rankled. There’s also the matter of how the footage was recovered - I’m not someone who thinks film criticism is about finding all the plot holes, but it’s a big thing to go unexplained and soured me a little on the experience.

Don’t get me wrong, though, this film definitely has its moments. There’s a great setpiece search through a dark crater, lit only sporadically by a flash, that ends with a shocking discovery, a sudden reveal of something that shouldn’t be on the moon, alongside the claustrophobia and isolation of their environments and the sterility and barrenness of the moonscape. In that sort of environment, the discovery of anything out of the ordinary is that much more startling. If the filmmakers had leaned into that a little more, unwound things a little more gradually, and let small revelations do most of the work, it could have been really good.

There’s a way to tell a story within the narrow constraints of found-footage and make it effective. Setting it in space makes survival itself a tougher prospect (see also Europa Report), and makes anything unusual potentially scary. Unfortunately, this film tips its hand a little too early, goes a little too obvious in places and stretches plausibility toward the end (including a mild case of “we have to keep filming” syndrome), which makes all of the obvious care and preparation that went into making it look like it was actually recovered footage stand out in stark contrast. It did a lot right up front, which ends up throwing all of the stuff it does wrong into sharp relief.

IMDB entry
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