Some horror movies emulate documentaries in a disturbingly faithful way, creating chilling experiences that feel all too real. For a long time, found-footage horror movies have been quite popular, from the Paranormal Activity Films to classics like Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project. But few of them go so far as to also function as a mockumentary, presenting their found footage in a fully-edited documentary that might really exist.
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Horror movies that act as fake documentaries can sometimes be so compelling that audiences might mistake them for being real, inciting panic with faithfully-depicted supernatural events. Others take place more in the real world, showcasing grisly crimes in a similar vein to an actual crime documentary. Whatever the case, emulating a proper documentary can be a strikingly effective trick for any horror story to lend some authenticity to itself.
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10
Horror In The High Desert
Eerily close to a real missing persons report
In real life, people do sometimes vanish without a trace, leaving behind maddeningly unsolvable pissing persons cases that seem to remain open forever. Horror in the High Desert presents itself as a search for Gary Hinge, an environmental activist and experienced wilderness expert who disappeared somewhere in the Mojave Desert in Nevada. Spliced into the search are interview vignettes, bits from Gary’s blog, and testimonials from people who knew him.
Horror in the High Desert makes for an interesting examination on the topic of obsessions, as the filmmaker behind the camera delves deeper and deeper into madness in an attempt to find his missing subject. The gradual, deliberate pacing and authentic performances lend themselves to an air of reality that makes the film easy to mistake as real. Of course, the show-stopping final shot leaves behind a stunning payoff to the slow build-up.
9
Lake Mungo
Gazes at death for uncomfortably long
One of the greatest Australian horror movies ever made, Lake Mungo is another horror mockumentary that strikes fear into the hearts of its viewers due to just how authentic it is. The film uses interviews, family footage, photographs, and B-roll to tell the story of Alice Palmer, a young teen girl who tragically dies in a mishap in the waters of the titular Lake Mungo. Before long, supernatural events begin befalling the Palmer family, implying that Alice may have come back to haunt them from beyond the grave.
Lake Palmer is one of those rare horror films whose ultimate antagonist isn’t a supernatural creature or a deranged murderous person, but the concept of death itself. The film supposes that Alice’s fate was sealed from the very beginning, calling upon one of the oldest and most ubiquitous fears of all time — The inevitability of death. The bleak, nihilistic promise of total oblivion is the true spectre haunting not only the Palmer family, but every living person in the real world.
8
The Bay
An ominous warning on the effects of pollution
Another horror mockumentary with a serious subject matter, The Bay looks to mother nature for its horror inspiration, spruced up with a dash of artifical meddling as a result of toxic waste and runoff pollution. The movie claims itself to be classified footage that was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, describing a tumultuous series of events taking place in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. After an intense level of pollution makes its way into the water, a population of parasitic isopods mutates enough to worm their way onto land and into supple human flesh.
Based off of a real organism that eats off the tongues of fish and replaces them by latching on to the insides of their mouths, the creatures of The Bay are positively horrific, made all the scarier by the realistic-looking way they’re depicted. Of course, as always, humans end up being the real monster, with a government cover-up hiding the fact that the waters were polluted in the first place. Almost more of an environmental documentary than a horror film, The Bay acts as a grave warning on the dangers of unchecked waste dumping.
7
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Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon
A love letter to the slasher subgenre
The iconography of the masked horror movie villain is a time-honored tradition at this point, a trope that many subversive films have used the perception of to their own unexpected advantage. Enter Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, which presents itself as a documentary about the devious serial killer Leslie Vernon for the morbidly curious. At the same time, the film seems to acknowledge its own tropes, practically breaking the fourth wall as it points out how tired the mockumentary horror format has become.
Ironically, despite openly mocking the concept of horror mockumentaries, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is one itself, and a great one at that. The film poses some interesting questions on the nature of human fascination with psychopathic murderers, begging the question as to why content featuring or even celebrating them is so popular. Though it shifts back into being a traditional horror movie halfway through, the documentary portions of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon warrant praise for their biting satire.
6
The Poughkeepsie Tapes
A disturbing account of a serial killer
A genuine human murderer, however mentally disturbed, is always a more realistic villain than a supernatural entity, especially if convincing an audience that what they’re seeing could be real is the goal. That wasn’t necessarily the ambition of The Poughkeepsie Tapes, but the film is so chilling that is has the effect anyway. Supposing itself to be a loose collection of snuff tapes found at a serial killer’s crime scene edited in with interviews with special experts, the movie tells the twisted tale of serial killer Edward Carver.
Carver’s horrific actions in the tapes are some of the most gut-wrenchingly terrifying scenes in any horror film to feature a human antagonist, eerily true to life in their graininess, unsettling performances of genuine terror, and amateurish look. One particular shot of Carver creeping up on a victim with a duct-taped mouth is especially infamous. Toing the line of horror mockumentary and snuff film, The Poughkeepsie Tapes isn’t an easy film to choke down for all the right reasons.
5
Ghostwatch
A broadcast that fooled an entire country
Few horror mockumentaries have been as deliberate or as successful in their attempts to genuinely pull one over on their viewing audiences as Ghostwatch. The feature film originally aired on Halloween night on the BBC, presenting itself earnestly as an honest documentary without acknowledging that it was, in fact, a work of fiction at all. The “news story” sees a group of reporters enter a haunted house for a segment, only to find genuine supernatural horrors awaiting them.
Upon its premiere, Ghostwatch managed to pull a hoax not seen since the level of Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds radio drama. The fact the broadcast was hosted by actual BBC veteran Michael Parkinson certainly helped, lending a true air of reality to the fictional story of ghostly apparitions, based off of the supposedly real Enfield Poltergeist case in England. Few horror films had such a powerful effect that they actually induced real-life trauma in viewers, as Ghostwatch did.
4
Digging Up The Marrow
A chilling case for the real-life existence of monsters
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Serial killers and ghosts are all good enough for making frighteningly realistic horror movies, but actual monsters are a whole new level of scary movie authenticity. Enter Digging Up the Marrow, which takes a realistic found-footage approach to encounters with twisted humanoid beasts thought to be the stuff of fiction. The film acts as a documentary created by a filmmaker researching art featuring monsters, only to find a man who claims he can lead him to a few of them in real life.
Digging Up the Marrow‘s creative creature design and claustrophobic atmosphere make for a great stage upon which to unleash some true supernatural terrors. The shadowy trail camera footage makes for some true-to-live cryptid sighting cinematography as the beasts get closer and closer, gradually unveiling themselves to the documentarians at the helm. A criminally underrated creature feature, Digging Up the Marrow deserves more dues for its stark sense of terror.
3
Noroi: The Curse
The scraps of a haunted life
Perhaps one of the greatest horror films to come out of Japan, Noroi: The Curse gets away with being both a horror mockumentary and a literal found-footage film all at once. The film explains how the footage within was actually recovered from the property of the late paranormal researcher Masafumi Kobayashi, who was investigating strange events leading up to his death. With his house burned down and his body missing, the film itself is the only clue as to what could have happened to Masafumi.
Noroi: The Curse certainly takes its time to gradually establish how things got to be so dire for its supposed documentarian, but the gradual buildup of terror is more than worth the wait. The low-budget format once again does a lot of heavy lifting, making every ritualistic sacrifice and demonic possession feel that much more realistic. The final stretch of the last act is an explosive series of scares to ominously end on, as well.
2
Antrum
A metacontextual meltdown of madness
Antrum, also known as Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, has the benefit of being a film-within-a-film. That is to say, the story presents itself as a documentary about the making of another film, the mysterious Antrium, a film from the 70s that was rejected from movie festivals all around the world before premiering at a single theater, ending in disaster when one of the attendees set the theater on fire. The rest of the film explains the creators’ quest to find a copy of the legendary cursed film and show it once again.
The film-within-a-film concept of Antrum is quite clever, pulling a similar trick to the haunted videotapes of Ring fame. The main difference is that Antrum gives its audience no chance to look away from its ominous footage, daring viewers to resist the temptation to give into their fear of the curse. More disturbing and metacontextually frightening for the viewer than a traditional horror movie, Antrum hits some unique beats few other movies do.
1
The Fourth Kind
A convincing case of alien attack
Not to be confused with Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fourth Kind isn’t the type of alien contact one comes away from with a good feeling. One of the rare horror movies that capitalizes on aliens to astounding effect, The Fourth Kind retells the experience of one Dr. Abigaill Tyler, whose child was supposedly abducted by aliens. Using a combination of testimonials and dramatic recreations, the film chronicles the harrowing events of the extraterrestrial kidnapping.
The Fourth Kind uses nauseating shaky-cam and fuzzy footage to conjure up a truly horrific image of alien kidnappers, contributing to a believable storyline. Though the film has backed off on its claims of authenticity in the years since its release, it’s easy to see how one might mistake The Fourth Kind for a genuine depiction of what a real alien abduction might really look like. Few horror movies are able to do the mockumentary premise better.
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Category: Entertainment