Grave Encounters is a found footage horror movie from 2011, presented as the last recordings of a reality TV crew filming a night of ghost-hunting inside a legendarily haunted asylum. It’s been at or near the top of Shudder’s recommendations for movies this month, making me think it was much more recent.1There’s even a Grave Encounters 2, which I will not be watching. But in reality, it’s just the perfect movie to watch during spooky season when you just want to see some good, old-fashioned trash.
I have to be clear up front that I’m very much the target audience for a movie like this. I still think that The Blair Witch Project was extremely effective, and I’m 100% into anything that takes the piss out of the Ghost Adventures format and especially its crew. The team behind the in-movie Grave Encounters series2Which only recorded six episodes and never aired, unfortunately is absolutely in that mold, led by handsome, leather jacket-wearing host Lance; gothy occult expert Sasha, always ready to make a sinister duckface pose for the camera; tech bro Michael managing the static cams; belligerent cameraman TC; and special guest psychic Houston Gray.
It’s the beginning of the movie, where we meet the team and watch them setting up for the shoot, interviewing various people for a tour of the asylum and its backstory, and establishing their characters and what they expect from the night, that makes the whole experience. It’s not quite a comedy, and it’s a little too broad to be called satire, but it does a good job of setting the tone. These people are all full of shit, and they’re expecting the night to be completely routine. Just like every other place they’ve visited, and just like every other reality TV ghost-hunting series that’s ever existed.
Over the years, it’s become clearer that what gave The Blair Witch Project its over-sized reputation was its restraint. It was very sparing in what it showed, so by the end of the increasingly-annoying runtime, even the most mundane image from its final scene could have a huge impact. It was probably a budget limitation more than anything else — at least, that’s my assumption based on the filmmakers’ later stuff — but it retained just enough ambiguity to feel artistic. Grave Encounters doesn’t have patience for any of that sort of nonsense.
The scares in this movie are almost entirely of the Knott’s Scary Farm variety: go for broke and throw it all at the audience, no matter how well you can execute on it. As you’d expect, the scares progress from weird sounds, to glimpses of things moving, to doors and windows opening and closing on their own, to full-on sightings. Many of those have some of the dodgiest CGI you’ll ever see, like seeing a jump-scare Snapchat filter in night vision.
But I did appreciate how effective the movie is at establishing how these characters are so thoroughly and definitively screwed. There’s a development at the midpoint that I thought worked really well, was cleverly paced with various displays showing the viewer the current time, and was more disorienting and chilling than I’d expected from a movie that was almost entirely made up of scenes from a haunted house attraction separated by people wandering around and yelling at each other.
The downside of that go-for-broke mentality is that it actually backfired for me. Once it became clear what the movie was doing, there wasn’t much sense of its building towards anything new. The movie is only an hour and a half, but I found myself checking the progress bar a lot, and being surprised that there was still so much time left.
It was also structured so that I kept predicting more clever developments than it ever had any intention of delivering. The whole premise of the second half of the movie would’ve allowed for all of the things set up in the asylum’s backstory to have an interesting, horror-story-twist payoff later on.3Mildly spoiler-ish example: we hear about the ghost of a man with a shaved head who keeps being spotted at the end of a hallway, and our cameraman TC happens to have a shaved head…. It didn’t take long to become clear that Grave Encounters simply isn’t that kind of movie.
But its sense of humor and self-awareness, plus the balls-out go-for-broke attitude overall, mean that I’ve got to appreciate it as a movie that knows exactly what it is. It does occasionally cross the line into tastelessness — as any horror story set in a mental institution is bound to — and it does start to drag when it’s just an annoying bunch of people yelling at each other and being miserable. But as cheesy as it often is, it’s light years beyond cheap and astonishingly low-effort movies like Hell House, LLC. And its refusal to take itself too seriously is something that’s sorely lacking in found footage horror.
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