Milk & Serial: J/K Bro, It’s Just A Prank

I don’t think this is any kind of huge revelation or anything, but some of the best horror films being made right now are not coming out of the studio system. Which makes sense – studios are in the business of making profitable films, and when you’re in the business of making profitable films, you aren’t going to want to take chances. You want product that’s going to bring in an audience. Has this lead to a glut of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels and (ugh) franchises? Yes. A lot of slick, glossy exercises in jump scares. And there’s an audience for that, but I’m not it. So in an environment where there are actual alternatives to the studio system and consumer-grade cameras and editing software are getting better, you get people willing to take chances and pursue their vision and actually getting it out there in front of eyeballs like mine, and it’s refreshing.

Milk & Serial is a great example of this. It’s a sharp, nasty, unnerving bit of short horror that does a really good job of working within its limitations and making its apparent amateurishness an asset.. And it’s on YouTube, of all places!

The whole thing picks up in medias res, as a dude nicknamed Seven is setting up some kind of a prank as part of his buddy Milk’s birthday party. Milk and Seven have a YouTube channel called “Prank Bros,” where they are…well, two bros, pulling pranks. It’s a pretty involved stunt, using bullet squibs and an actual handgun firing blanks. Seven’s invited some rando to Milk’s birthday party, someone he knows from, well, somewhere else, and Milk isn’t happy about it. While they’re arguing about it, there’s commotion from the living room and they run in just in time to see this rando holding a gun on their friend Naomi. He fires and Naomi goes down. And then, once the initial shock has passed, she pops back up and they all start singing “Happy Birthday.” Those kinds of pranks.

The party is brought down a little when someone knocks on the door to complain about the noise. Nobody recognizes him, and after they placate him he goes away, only to be discovered hanging around outside.

The next day they find him sitting in their living room.

It’s a little more than an hour long, clearly shot on a shoestring budget, and it ends up being really impressive – it doesn’t have much to work with, but it tells a story that doesn’t need much to work well. It’s a story told through the cameras that Milk and Seven use to film their pranks, which are consumer-grade camcorders, there are phone cameras, there are even spy glasses at once point – it creates the feeling that everything these two guys do is recorded to be turned into content. At the same time, it’s pretty clear pretty quick that this isn’t strictly raw footage. So calling it a found-footage film (which is how it’s marketed) sort of does it a disservice. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem too bound to the conceit, and the ways it breaks plausibility are fairly easy to overlook in favor of what it does well. It looks like jittery cinema verite, shot by the kind of frat-bro assholes you’d expect to do a prank show on YouTube, giving it a nastiness and immediacy that fits the narrative perfectly. It really does feel like you’re watching something that’s going to end up being evidence in a manslaughter trial or something similar, and still manages to fit in some nice camerawork, using focus to dramatic effect in a couple of places and benefitting from an abrupt, clipped editing style that jumps between perspectives with a suddenness that communicates tension and unease even at relatively mundane moments.

On top of that, the type of story it is, told the way it is gives it some thematic heft. It is nominally a film about a prank that goes wrong, and it does a good job of keeping the audience on its toes. It’s almost a nesting doll of a story, and setting things up that way means that it’s very much a story about the line between truth and fiction. Where do the pranks stop and real events begin? What even is real in this context? It’s true for both the audience and for characters in the story as well – we’re watching a story that looks just like something you might find on some random YouTube channel, and we’re watching it on YouTube, so there’s a lot of reflexivity to it. Meanwhile, the longer the story goes on, the harder it is for the characters in the film to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a setup for yet another prank until it’s too late. It ends up going some very dark places, and it works in that regard because the performances are strong and naturalistic - which they really need to be for a found-footage movie -  and in at least one case, sincerely unnerving. So you get what looks at least initially like something you might actually find on YouTube (and you’re…watching it on YouTube), you get a sense of how it’s going to unwind…until it doesn’t unwind that way and you realize that something really, really bad is going on.

Some time back, I wrote about a film called I’m Just Fucking With You, which largely squandered the opportunity to be a horror film that digs into the inherent viciousness and cruelty of pranks. This film doesn’t squander it, instead it faces it head-on and then blows right past it in something that reminds me of nothing so much as Creep and the segment “Amateur Night” from V/H/S – it’s persistently uncomfortable in the best way and is a great example of how budget doesn’t dictate quality.

Between the Adams family, analog horror like Local 58, Kane Parsons’ work on The Backrooms, and people like Kyle Edward Ball and the Phillipou brothers getting feature-length films distributed off the back of their own work on YouTube, this is a really good moment for indie horror, and I’m excited to see what comes next.

IMDB entry
Available on YouTube