Grave Encounters: Everyone Gets More Than They Bargained For, Including Me

If you’ve read past posts on found-footage films and other horror clichés, you’ll know that at least at first glance, a found-footage horror film set in an abandoned mental hospital is most likely not going to be my thing, and most of the time, you’d be right. The cynical among you might say “ah, but if A24 or SpectreVision puts it out…” and, well, you’d be right. I’ve got my biases, and arty horror is definitely one of them. But I’m also not totally resistant to films that I keep seeing recommended, over and over again, even if it’s not the sort of thing I usually go for. Just recently I took a chance on Hell House LLC after having it enthusiastically recommended, and though it did have its weaknesses, it was also actually really scary in spots without being cheap or obvious about it. Flaws don’t always overwhelm a film.

And that’s pretty much where I find myself with Grave Encounters. It definitely has its problems, but many of them are, I feel, mitigated by some really good, surprising choices in other areas.

The film opens with an introduction by a TV producer responsible for a number of the kind of reality shows you’d find today on pretty much any cable specialty channel, talking about a ghost-hunter show he picked up called Grave Encounters. It’s hosted by Lance Preston, who strikes just the right level of douchey self-importance that you’d expect from someone making a ghost-hunter show. He’s backed up by three crew members - T.C., Sasha, and Matt - who handle camera, sound, and paranormal detection (thermal imaging, microcassette recorders for spectral voices, the usual) and a psychic portentously named Houston Gray. We’re treated to some footage of an episode where they’re in an abandoned building, imploring spirits to speak to them, cast in the greenish glow of nightvision cameras. It really is the prototypical ghost-hunter show, and the TV producer says it was really successful for him.

Well, that is, until…Episode 6. That’s the one where they decided to lock themselves inside an abandoned mental hospital, notorious for its poor treatment of patients, barbaric treatment methods, and the notably bizarre interests of its head doctor.

Episode 6 is where it all went wrong, and the TV producer has assembled the raw footage to tell the story.

What I think makes this film good and helps set it apart isn’t so much in what it does - the baseline story isn’t surprising, crew locks themselves into a reportedly haunted hospital, crew gets more than they bargained for - as much as it is in how it goes about doing it. First, the crew all feel more or less like real, believable people, if not especially likable ones. Lance, Matt, and T.C. are various flavors of bro, nobody takes Houston seriously, and Sasha is probably the closest to having a conscience out of all of them, but they’re not obnoxious or overly caricatured either. You’re not especially invested in them as people, but you’re also not rooting for them to die, and that’s important for a horror film to be effective, I think. Having this be the raw footage of a ghost hunter show also gives it the same sort of critical remove present in Butterfly Kisses, but as unsubtle as it is in some ways, its critique of found-footage (and paranormal activity shows) ends up being subtler or more naturalistic than Butterfly Kisses. For example, a comment to get some B-roll of the camera sort of floating around corridors is followed by a shot of exactly that. It’s pretty clear from the raw footage that everyone involved knows this is a put-on - the crew set things up to look spookier than they are with practiced ease, and a solemn reading of a room by Houston, who goes on and on about the powerful energies in the place, ends as soon as they call cut, both Houston and Lance break out in laughter at the silliness of what they’ve just done. Much like the haunted-house entrepreneurs in Hell House, LLC, these folks are competent at their jobs, they want to put on a good show, and there’s just the slightest contempt for the supernatural that will of course get scared right out of them when shit gets real. What I like is how the artifice of their show isn’t all that different from the artifice of the film itself. Butterfly Kisses basically pointed neon signs at this idea, and though it was good fun, it did make that film less frightening as a result. Here, it doesn’t really get in the way of the scary stuff.

And the scary stuff here is definitely better than I expected. It’s an abandoned mental hospital, so of course it’s going to suffer from Abandoned Hospital Syndrome, but to its credit, it uses the setting in some interesting ways instead of just letting the creepy old abandoned building do all the heavy lifting by itself. It’s certainly nothing that I want to give away or spoil, but it solves the problem of why the team doesn’t just leave in novel fashion - one which raises the tension before we see a single ghost - by messing with time and space in interesting ways, which is more than a lot of films set in abandoned mental hospitals bother to do. You could probably make this a really scary film without actually having any ghosts in it. But there are also ghosts, and even when you’re pretty sure you know what’s coming, things are well-paced and well-staged enough that even the obvious stuff usually works. It throws a mix of bizarre things at you, and in some cases doesn’t really give you time to dwell on it, so you’re sort of in the shoes of the crew themselves, finding themselves in very much over their heads and ill-equipped to make sense of it all. Sometimes it makes unexpected choices, and sometimes it makes exactly the choice you think it’s going to make, and it’s just enough of a mix that you stay on your toes.

It does have some problems, though, many endemic to found-footage horror films. Some of the effects have not aged well and have since this film’s release become clichés in and of themselves (which isn’t this film’s fault, to be fair) and it could definitely err on the side of subtlety and more deliberate pacing in places. The crew sort of goes from zero to utterly panicked and turning on each other way too quickly, and the end of the film is robbed of some of its impact as it overreaches by introducing a lot of new information at the last minute, as if it doesn’t trust that what it’s shown us is frightening enough by itself. It also suffers some from “we have to film everything for reasons” syndrome in places, and some of the details (archival footage, graffiti on the walls) aren’t convincing enough to stick the landing, but it’s just self-aware enough and well-paced that it maintains a nice feeling of tension throughout. It also shares a major plot hole with Hell House, LLC in that, given the events at the end of the movie, it isn’t really clear how anyone actually recovered the footage we’re watching in the first place. I don’t think that film criticism that boils down to “look at all the plot holes I found” is very good criticism, but in both cases, it kind of took me out of the experience. Nevertheless, there are definitely moments in this film that have stuck with me - almost like I went into something I expected to be another rote exercise and ended up getting more than I bargained for. Imagine that.

IMDB entry
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