[Film Review] Grave Encounters (2011): Ten Years Later

This piece contains mild spoilers.

Grave Encounters (2011), an independent Canadian film, celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. The film follows a team of ghost hunters spending a night locked in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, recording the sixth episode of their reality TV show  ‘Grave Encounters’.

It begins with an interview with the show’s producer, assuring us that what we are about to see is real footage, only edited for time, and the rest of the movie is shot found-footage style. We meet our main characters: Lance is the show’s host, and Sasha, T.C., and Matt are his crew. For this episode, they invite a psychic named Houston to join them, because Collingwood hospital contains so much psychic energy, they need the extra help. As their cameras roll, we are privy to speculation about whether they will finally experience a real haunting, and it’s clear that the crew involved do not necessarily believe in the paranormal. They certainly do experience something real, and encounter spirits trapped in the hospital. There is an unexpected twist revealed about halfway through the movie, and suddenly Grave Encounters becomes a surprisingly unique story. 

Grave Encounters does well as found footage, and uses grainy shots and night vision strategically to aid the look of the practical effects. There is the right amount of foreshadowing in the beginning, when the TV crew are interviewing locals about their experiences at Collingwood, and we later see similar events happen with the crew. Most of the scares rely on atmosphere, and dread compounds exponentially after the twist is revealed. There are a handful of jump scares purposefully placed throughout the movie. It’s easy to see the influence of The Blair Witch Project (1999) in Grave Encounters, and not just because it’s footage left behind by ambitious filmmakers who disappear. There are several scenes in which Lance is talking directly to the camera, much like Heather does in her famous confessional in The Blair Witch Project. There are also scenes in which characters are fighting over which direction to walk, or screaming each other's names, and the parallels between the two films are apparent.

It makes sense that Grave Encounters was released in 2011, when there was a cultural interest in paranormal TV, found footage movies, and ghost stories.  At the time, ghost hunting shows were notably popular, and Grave Encounters is clearly inspired by Ghost Adventures, a Travel Channel show that debuted in 2008. Found footage was likewise becoming trendy again. Also released in 2011 was Paranormal Activity 3, spurred by the success of the first two, which of course were found footage. There were several other found footage movies released a few years before Grave Encounters, including REC (2007), Lake Mungo (2008), and The Last Exorcism (2010), to name a few. Additionally, trends in horror were shifting to the paranormal around this time. The Haunting in Connecticut (2009) and Insidious (2010) had already been released, and this was only a couple years before The Conjuring (2013), which would become a huge franchise. Horror was trending away from the violence and gritty roughness of the aughts, and looking toward a period of spooky jump scares and unexplained phenomena. With those factors and trends converging, 2011 seems to have been the perfect year for Grave Encounters.

Ten years is not a long time, but it can sometimes feel that way revisiting horror movies. Something that dates this film is the treatment of Sasha, the only female main character, and T.C., the only non-white main character. Sasha is the first to suggest something might be going wrong, but she is frequently ignored or dismissed by her male colleagues. They never apologize for doubting her. At one point, Sasha has been wounded off-screen, the word “hello” carved into her back. Lance lifts her shirt to show the camera, though she is audibly protesting and saying “no.” Sasha’s character is not given much power or agency, and she often feels like an afterthought, only included to make sure they have a woman in the cast. Meanwhile, T.C. is assigned the most egregious dialogue. He uses homophobic and ableist slurs, seemingly just to convey emotion or emphasise his points. Plus, he makes a sexist joke when he finds a kitchen in the hospital, saying aloud, “cook my dinner bitch!” But he is alone in the kitchen, there is no one to share the joke with. The line feels noticeably out-of-place and only exists as a wisecrack for the audience, and it makes T.C. look shallow. We learn that T.C. has a daughter and partner, but it seems we only learn that so it’s sadder when he dies. Other characters' deaths are meant to be sad on their own, and the audience is trusted to care about them with no additional context. It feels like the filmmakers did not trust the audience to care about T.C. as his own person. Maybe it felt different in 2011, but today, it’s clear that T.C. and Sasha are owed more significance. 

While a similar story could be pitched in 2021, this exact same movie would not be made today. Hopefully there would be fewer (is it too hopeful to wish for zero?) jokes that rely on bigotry for the punchline, and T.C. and Sasha would get better treatment as characters. The setup of the story would likely be different in 2021. The footage could be live-streamed for internet fans, rather than taped for network television. Grave Encounters did get a sequel in 2012, Grave Encounters 2, but since then there have been no additional sequels, remakes, or reboots. And I don’t think we need them, because the original Grave Encounters does something special. It’s not perfect, but it is fun and scary, especially if you haven’t seen it before. Ten years later, it’s still worth a watch.

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