Horror on a small budget can be tough. It’s not impossible by any means - see, for example, Creep, or The Blair Witch Project - but if you’re making the kind of film that’s going to need effects work, it’s really easy for that kind of thing to look as cheap as it actually is and be really unconvincing as a result. And when it’s unconvincing, it takes you out of the film. For my money, some of the best horror films - like any other film - are ones that suck you in so much that you sort of forget you’re watching a movie, and being reminded breaks that spell. And small-budget horror usually runs afoul of this to the extent that the filmmakers’ ambitions outstrip their budget. Monster movies are tough sells in general, but monster movies on a small budget are nigh-impossible to pull off. The limitations of budget translate into limitations around the kind of stories you can tell.
And so Horror In The High Desert - an uneven, but pleasantly surprising mockumentary - largely works to the extent it does because it not only works within its limitations, but actually uses its imitations to its advantage.
The film’s presented as a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a young man named Gary Hinge. Gary lived in small-town Nevada, loved trains, hiking, and outdoor survival. And it was these last two that routinely took him way out into the middle of nowhere as part of his job, which is to map and survey remote areas for hikers to use as reference. To chart the uncharted so less-prepared others wouldn’t get lost. And it was on one of these hikes, that he just…vanished. He wasn’t a novice outdoorsman, he knew what he was doing.
After three years of Gary being gone, his remaining friends and family have finally gotten some idea of what might have happened to him, and as the disclaimer that opens the film suggests, it’s not going to be pretty.
And that “warning, what you’re about to see is disturbing” is one of a few missteps here, but it’s not a fatal one. One of the things that betrays a lot of found-footage or mockumentary films is a tendency toward slickness - they’re supposed to be stories of real people, but all too often it’s clearly performance and scripted dialogue. They’re supposed to be capturing (at least in part) amateur footage of events, but all too often that gets cheated with cameras put in convenient places to capture shots a single consumer-grade camera couldn’t, or the point of view just gets forgotten entirely. Making films that are supposed to be something other than traditional films can be a safe bet from a budget standpoint, because you can cheat a lot with low-grade footage and you don’t have to worry about lighting setups or expensive camera equipment. But narratively, that kind of film is a lot harder than it looks, because we forgive all kinds of contrivances in regular films, but as soon as something is supposed to be “real,” those contrivances stick out like a sore thumb. Whether it’s a mockumentary or a more purely found-footage premise, you need to figure out the appropriate point of view and commit solidly to it, because otherwise believability goes right out the window.
And the first thing this film gets right is commitment to the point of view. Much like films like Howard’s Mill or Savageland, it looks like a true-crime documentary made by a small crew, aimed at the direct-to-streaming market. And it feels pretty damn convincing on that front. It’s clearly working from a modest budget but it rarely looks egregiously cheap, with production values consummate with a mid-level documentary. The music ranges from tastefully sentimental and forgettable to foreboding, with music stings to highlight the scary stuff. It’s a little on-the-nose in that regard, but that’s true to the form - the kinds of documentaries it’s aping aren’t subtle in the least. And the performances largely don’t feel like acting - they err on the side of understated, everyone seems like everyday folks, and they’re not always especially polished or articulate, but again, since the premise is that this is a documentary about something strange that happened in (very) small-town Nevada, it makes sense that even the professional journalist isn’t the most well-spoken person you’ve ever met. The dialogue reflects these characterizations, never really feeling glib or overly clever. The majority of the movie is a mix of talking-head interviews, archival video, and voiceover laid on top of footage of the Nevada desert, the rural blink-and-you-miss-it town where it takes place, and close-up footage of model trains, an attempt to capture the essence of who Gary was. So in that sense, the pretext is very believable and it’s easy to forget that it’s a work of fiction for most of its run time.
The characters are largely believable as people - you’ve got Gary’s sister Beverly, racked with guilt over her brother’s disappearance, and Gary’s bewildered roommate Simon, who had no idea what sort of things Gary was up to, and who Beverly suspects had something to do with the disappearance. Peripheral to them are Gal, a local journalist who sees an opportunity for an exclusive not being covered by the big-city outlets, and Bill, a private investigator hired and extremely frustrated by Beverly, who keeps unwittingly interfering with the investigation. And at the center of it, Gary - a somewhat shy, awkward young man seen in archival footage, someone whose biggest passions are outdoor survival, exploration, and railroads. Someone who has a YouTube channel about outdoor survival and exploration, even though he’s not the most charismatic or natural performer ever. They’re all human beings, explored to varying degrees of depth, but none of them feel especially two-dimensional. It’s easy to buy into them as characters, as the kind of people whose lives get turned upside down by exactly this sort of situation.
So it looks right, and the people feel right, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, because these are the kind of details that other films of this type routinely fuck up. But there are problems with how the story plays out. Probably the biggest problems here are pacing and some of the choices made around advancing the narrative. Any crime documentary worth its salt knows how to tell a story. Usually you present the basic facts of the case, and then spend the length of the film drip-feeding hints at greater revelations, eventually dropping bombshells of one sort or another - someone’s hidden past or things they’ve been keeping secret, twists, facts that exclude the obvious culprit but make someone else look suspicious, things like that. And some of that happens here, but it happens fitfully - Gary was keeping secrets (as most people do), but they aren’t really explored - one is sort of brought up but then dropped almost immediately (it almost feels like they couldn’t afford another actor to flesh it out), another isn’t especially earth-shattering (though it is important for moving the story forward) and the way it’s presented it makes Beverly and Simon - the two people closest to Gary - look either like they didn’t actually know him that well at best, or kind of stupid and unobservant at worst. Tension between Gary and his sister over something that happened as children comes up, but doesn’t really go anywhere. Tension between Simon and Beverly gets brought up, but doesn’t really go anywhere. Bill says that Beverly “screwed everything up” (and indeed she did, to the point of evidence tampering) but it too is sort of glossed over, with little sense of how her mistake sets back the investigation. All of the pieces are there, but they’re sort of discarded as quickly as they’re introduced, as if the filmmakers knew they needed to be there, but not really why.
The pacing has problems on a broader structural level as well. A little more than two-thirds of the movie consists of interview footage and voiceovers, and though this is the stock in trade of this kind of documentary, it starts to feel a little inert by about the halfway point. The table-setting phase of the documentary, where we learn what happened and who all the players are, feels like it stretches out a little too long, the surprise revelations don’t mean much in the overall scheme of things, and each of the characters sort of exists in a vacuum relative to the others. Moreover, this film has a tendency to tell us how disturbing or unsettling or shocking something is without actually showing it to us for most of its running time. There’s a lot of variations on people telling us how bad something is instead of showing us the bad thing. It’s like we’re getting a lot of the important information second-hand, as if maybe the filmmakers didn’t have the budget to show something, so instead they had the characters describe it. And this, combined with two initial acts that have very little movement or action to them, starts to feel frustrating, as if we’re just going to get tease after tease with no payoff.
But there is a payoff, and it does make good well enough on the first two acts. Gary’s last-known footage is recovered (and there’s even an explanation for how it was discovered, someplace where even some otherwise really good found-footage films drop the ball), and the majority of the third act is a tense sequence shot in infrared in the middle of the Nevada desert chronicling his last moments alive. It goes on maybe a touch too long, but it’s another place where the film’s limitations work for it. The footage is very much the footage of a single hand-held consumer-grade video camera, it’s not always pointed in exactly the right place, it spends a chunk of time pointed at the ground, and the stop-start nature of the filming heightens the tension nicely - every time the camera looks away, you dread what’s going to be there when it comes back, and infrared covers up any limitations to the practical effects for the most part. It lingers maybe a little too long toward the end, but I’m pretty sure it’s to a degree that only bothers me and won’t bother anyone else. So it does come good in the end, and that buys it a fair amount of goodwill.
On the other other hand, though, there’s an epilogue that undercuts some of the tension with an attempt to explain what we saw and a cautionary note about content creators not leaving well enough alone (though that’s certainly true to life too), and what seems like a hook for a sequel. It would have worked better with a much sparer ending and it would have worked better if the story didn’t spin its wheels for so long, but it plays like a documentary about actual people and an actual tragedy, and that’s not always the easiest thing to pull off. A quick look at the director’s entry on IMDB suggests his usual fare is the kind of low-budget horror films that miss the mark (at least according to people who post user reviews on IMDB, and we’re not exactly talking Cahiers du Cinema here), and apparently this film is the result of having to work around social distancing in the middle of the COVID pandemic, which is another set of limitations on top of budget. But if you’re trying to make a movie that isn’t in the traditional third-person mold, limitations aren’t just acceptable, they’re downright essential. Trying to cheat your way around those limitations really misses the point, and to the extent this film embraces them, it works a lot better than I expected it would.
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