[Film Review] Grave Encounters (2011)

“This place is about as haunted as a sock drawer.”

In one of the few clever post-Blair Witch Project found-footage entries, the film crew of the titular paranormal reality TV show finds themselves trapped inside a legitimately haunted former asylum.

Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), a dead ringer for Zak Bagan’s particular brand of showmanship, and his crew (Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray, and Fred Keating) travel to the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital as part of their paranormal investigation TV series Grave Encounters. After a few light scares and a series of embellished bumps in the night, things begin to get a little too real for the crew. 

But, despite it being well past 8am, the sun never rises and the front door they entered through suddenly opens to reveal yet more of the hospital. Alongside this, windows don’t open, exits have been replaced with walls, and the malicious spirits that still reside in the halls of the hospital begin to pick the crew off one by one.

Grave Encounters has a cult following. That doesn’t necessarily make it a great film, but it’s not for no reason. Written and directed by The Vicious Brothers (Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz) and released in 2011, this film entered right in the fervor of Paranormal Activity’s revelatory expansion of the found-footage genre as well as in the peak of successful paranormal investigation shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures (the show this film most obviously spoofs). Like the greats of postmodern meta-horror such as Scream and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, this film was acutely speaking to its audience. 

The first half is a greatest hits of all the ghost hunting jargon and beats viewers of such shows have become accustomed to: EVP sessions, electromagnetic fields, static cams, paranormal hot spots, lockdowns, and so on. It winks at the audience while Lance pays off guests to embellish scary stories, the hired actor playing their psychic medium dramatizes making contact with restless spirits, and the camera crew discusses ways to ensure cuts and shots make for a good show.

And then the movie really nails the pivot. A slammed door leads to a strange voice recording which leads to some pulled hair and we watch the organic shift from a group of skeptics orchestrating a haunted house to a group of people fearfully locked inside a sinister and sprawling ruin. The reveal that the front door they’d walked through in daylight only hours before has somehow transformed into another hallway is devastating and creepy, especially when paired with the threatening endless night outside the windows that we become more and more sure probably goes nowhere. The way in which reality morphs around the characters--they wake up at one point to find hospital tags complete with their names on their wrists, one character falls into a full tub and is vanished when they dump the tub out, doors appear and disappear--is perhaps the most successful unnerving of the film. 

Less than successful is the use of CGI and other special effects, as well as the bold scene of a floating gurney that is too clunky to be truly frightening. This film, like many other found-footage films, fails to convince with its conceit for the camera and relies more on overacting than the improvisation that made Blair Witch Project such a success. Still, it’s an incredibly fun ride and an easy watch, even if it’s intentionally derivative and peppered with less than impressive scares. 

For anyone looking for something different to throw on for a Friday night horror film showing, you could do much worse than this low-budget but inventive spooky romp through a paranormal TV show gone wrong.

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