Intensity: 🩸 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Written and Directed by Dan Asma
Curiosity is a dangerous thing. In cosmic horror, the exploration of truths can lead to fates worse than death, and yet, people will still seek to know things they really should leave alone. In Tribe, a man lost in the remote badlands of the southern Sierras undergoes a horrific physical transformation. He hopes that some media drives he found in his Airstream trailer will tell him why he is in the predicament he is in. His salvation may come in the form of his own found footage material, but it also may foretell his own doom.
Dan Asma has taken a most curious route towards becoming a film director. He is the co-owner of Buddha Jones: A Theatrical Motion Picture Marketing Agency. Asma has produced many of the great trailers in recent memory, including Hereditary, Dunkirk, Wonder Woman, Annihilation, It, and The Conjuring. He has also produced a couple of interesting horror titles: the acrophobic Fall (one of my favorite films of 2023) and the quirky Mind Body Spirit, but this is his first narrative feature direction. He picked an excellent format for his debut.
Found footage features can live and die by their editing. When considering what a trailer director does, it is essentially an editing exercise, taking portions of another director’s work and making it into a compelling advertisement. Tribe is a story stitched together from found video elements. As is necessary for a film like this to succeed, the verisimilitude is essential, and he nails it. The production is honest. Key to the believability of the story is that he cast himself as a crypto-chasing web documentarian in pursuit of mysteries that should have been left alone.
The Cast of Tribe:
- Dan Asma (uncredited) plays Devon Adams, a retired professor of Visual Studies from the University of Southern California (Though he wears lots of University of Oregon gear). He is searching for answers to why one of his best friends mysteriously committed suicide.
- Keaton Asma plays Charlie Anchor, Devon’s best friend since the early ’90s. Charlie belonged to the Church of Heaven’s Light, potentially a cult. As a child, he was found wandering alone in the wilderness. We see Charlie in old media footage.
- Nicole Jones plays Kate, Devin’s ex-wife, who has recently uncovered new information that suggests ominous circumstances behind Charlie’s disappearance. Devon consults with Nicole on his findings since she knew Charlie too.
- Tyona Bowman plays Archer, one of Adam’s former students who assists him remotely with research in his explorations.
A Synopsis of Tribe
Professor Adams has been stricken with a disfiguring illness. Adams is lost in the boulder-strewn Cuyamaca Mountains near San Diego. In his delirium, he has forgotten how to perform simple tasks, such as driving his car. Fortunately, he still remembers how to access media from some hard drives that are in his airstream trailer.
The video files on the drives inform us that he is investigating why his estranged best friend, Charlie, went into the Cuyamacas and went insane. Charlie left some old videotapes with Kate, featuring interviews in which Charlie expounded theories of evolution tied to other intelligent species that had died out without a trace millions of years ago. The evidence is gone, but mysterious sites still hold the truth. Additional footage shows disfigured people and an amorphous monstrosity. Soon afterward, Charlie took his life, and Devon must know more.
Devon arrives in the Cuyamacas, one of the sites of power. There, Adams discovers a pristine Conex storage container in the middle of the wilderness, which is being used by some of the mutants in the video footage that Charlie left behind. Devon gets too curious, stakes out the Conex, and gets attacked by one of the mutants.
Adams escapes his attacker and manages to steal a musty codex from the storage container. In addition, Kate discovered a tome on the history of the Church of Heaven’s Light. This “church” and the mathematical codex reveal that Charlie’s alternate belief of an alternate evolution is true. These beings didn’t die out; they went underground, and they can travel between dimensions through the shadows. Charlie was not what he seemed, and now Devon has trespassed into a realm with powers that he cannot comprehend. Professor Adams has been chosen for something… greater.
Prepare for Heaven’s Light. You don’t need eyes to see your savior. Forget the mind to find your faith. The faithless will suffer forever.”
A translation from a text of mathematical formulas in Tribes
Evaluation of Tribe
Tribes deal with the heady stuff of the cosmos. And, as such, it can be a bit confusing. Asma handles the exposition through consultations with other professors and the translations of blasphemous tomes, as well as wild theories spoken by Charlie. It has a bit of a “blow your mind” material in it. So, connecting with the material can be a bit tricky. Fortunately, it has an effective narrator. Asma, curiously, did not credit himself in the leading role. Perhaps it is to immerse the audience in the found footage conceit that this is all “real”.
Asma is convincing. He has an odd charm and is fully at ease with the character. For someone getting their first call sheet acting role (even an uncredited one) in midlife, he is wonderful to watch. You don’t feel like he is rehearsing lines. This is a lived life cosmic experience. The rest of the cast, though, don’t seem as at ease with the material, although the professors he interviews do feel like experts in cryptic fields.
The Buddha Jones influence pays dividends in this film. For a micro-budget indie picture, the production values and visual effects are robust and vibrant. Again, the quick-cut editing of a trailer is evident in the snippets of fragmented information inherent to a found footage film like this, and the result is well-orchestrated. A logical flaw in the film’s design, though, is that as a mockumentary, the central figure of this movie, Devon, could not have finished it. Found Footage logic! A classic use of the trope would be to announce that “This material was found in a box…” but the work is so well crafted that it clearly had a skilled editor, even a fictional one.
Deep Background
The original format for Tribe can be found in the digital footprints of the story. Originally, this material wasn’t about Charlie; instead, the Church of Heaven’s Light was about a lost tribe of “Water Heads” or a cult of hydrocephalic cultists. Asma created an Instagram Page for “insearchoftribes” that utilizes a lot of the footage from Tribes, but presented it as a series of video blog posts, offering a more documentary-like presentation. There are about fifty video clips that tell a very similar story. Some of the actors have been cast in different roles, while others remain the same.
In a move reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, the marketing team prepared a website that references the work of Devon Adams. (Now a Wisconsin Professor of Anthropology). Although the script has changed, it is rare to see an outline format presented in this manner. I’m not sure how long these other sites were active prior to the film. It is certainly evidence of a marketer’s touch, though. It’s very inventive, and I really like seeing the transformation from one medium translated into another.
Concluding Thoughts:
I like found footage done this way, documentary style. The use of body cam, drone, trail cam, and historical VHS footage all blend into a convincing and appealing combination. There is some shaky footage, but for the most part, it maintains focus. The effects are punching far above their weight class, and I think Asma can be proud of achieving a cohesive and creepy story by stitching together a quilt of short video segments.
Tribe showed at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. If you are a fan of cosmic horror, this is an enjoyable watch. I appreciated the “Silurian Theory” proposed by the plot. Granted, the Silurian era didn’t even have many creatures with spines… or land dwellers… but still, it’s a fun twist. There is so much buried in the Earth that we have yet to discover. Who is to say that there isn’t a race of ancient beings that has eluded us… so far.
Tribes will be released on streaming on October 10, 2025, on Plex TV. The film is unrated. There is a bit of gore, a little violence, some grotesque mutants, and some foul language, but it is not a movie with a lot of objectionable material in it. It should be fine for mature teenagers.
Review by Eric Li
