Want to know what it’s like filming getting buried alive? How do you capture the quintessential ’90s look for a found footage horror film? V/H/S/99 cinematographer Alexander Chinnici tells the Scariest Things his experiences working on this famed anthology franchise.
★★★.5 out of ★★★★★
There’s a very real chance that this film may be the first of its kind. True story. One of one. The first ever. Well, that might be a little bit of a stretch, but it’s unlikely that there are any other found footage horror films made by Syrian teens who happen to be refugees living Lebanese settlement camps. If there are others out there we’d sure love to know about them.
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
If we’ve learned anything it’s that horror movies are one big bag of smoke and mirrors. It’s a ruse, a put on, a sham. So much disbelief needs to be suspended to make the entire haunted house of cards structurally sound. If there’s any loose horror screws the entire effort collapses in a pile of unscary dust.
But when it works? Oh boy, does it work!
★★★ out of ★★★★★ Found footage films can be a tricky business. You really have to sell the conceit that someone, or in this case multiple people, are going to be carrying around camera and recording every single move they make — and they might even inadvertently catch a freaky apparition in the background. A tall task made even more grand by the sheer number of found footage films that have made their way to the bottom of the bargin bin at Best Buy.
You love ’em. You hate ’em. You don’t know where to start. You worship at their altar. All these things are true. One of the most polemic (and satisfying) devices in the horror genre — shaky cam/found footage flics.
Things just can’t possibly get weird enough. Hollyweird may have run out of ideas and the public is going to […]
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
A found footage style film that for years was found footage itself. Dip your toe into the water under a bridge too far and watch The Poughkeepsie Tapes.
★★ of ★★★★★
A found footage anthology, complete with a hand-written note of spookiness!
