I haven’t delved into a bunch of found footage flicks in a while, so I figured it was time to throw in a marathon of them. Let’s find out if that was a good decision.
CHATEAU (2024)
If you love found footage films, this is a pretty fun one to check out. It’s filled with cheap scares, ghouls, and horror hottie Colton Tran as the gay best friend of the main girl, landing this one on the does the gay guy die? page.
Our main girl is trying to make it as an influencer, so Colton suggests she go ghost hunting in a haunted chateau in France. She poses as a cleaning lady, and once the woman who owns the house leaves to let her do her work alone, she whips out her camera and starts her supernatural search, and eventually welcomes Colton in to help her out.
It’s everything you’d want from a found footage flick. The chateau setting is amazingly creepy. She roams dark halls, she catches glimpses of something in the shadows, she falls victim to bogus scares, she falls victim to real scares.
Complicating matters, she gets calls from what sounds like her dead mother, and her mother even joins the corpse-like ghosts that seem to multiply as the film progresses. Yes, her grief over the loss of her mother is a driving factor in her life in case you’re looking for something a little deeper in your found footage flicks. Personally, I was not.
She even decides to do what she says they do in horror movies…she hides under a sheet. Considering this foolish knows hiding under a sheet is what they do in horror movies, she should have expected it to go exactly as it does.
There are definitely some great suspense and scare sequences, but I was underwhelmed by the turn the plot takes in the final act.
THE HAUNTING OF THE MURDER HOUSE (2022)
This is another one that sticks to the found footage template and should satisfy fans of the subgenre. The opener draws us in as a cop slips into a dark house and encounters a killer clown.
Next, we meet a group of ghost hunters doing a live stream in the house, where a serial killer tortured and murdered numerous people.
The group explores the house and sets up some fake scares to entertain the masses. However, one team member thinks they should actually try to conjure something supernatural.
They use a Ouija board, they do a ritual in a pentagram, they find a mannequin in a clown mask that offers up a very Hellhouse Llc scene, and one guy has a Lights Out moment.
Finally, in the last 20 minutes, the action picks up, and this briefly turns into a killer clown found footage slasher, complete with a cheesy, old school final frame scare.
OBAYIFO PROJECT (2024)
This Spanish film is one sloppy found footage flick. Good news is it’s only like 72 minutes long.
A group of friends wants to make a Blair Witch movie about an African vampire spirit. They travel in an RV. They visit a shaman. There’s a ritual. Someone dies. That someone is buried. That someone apparently had a camera strapped to their chest.
The rest of the movie consists of snarling sounds as the camera shakes wildly and gets splattered with the blood while the vampire spirit attacks lots of random people that seem to be out in the middle of nowhere.
There’s a lot of running through ruins, screaming, and flesh-gobbling that’s too blurry to see. It was all just too chaotic, dark, and unfocused for me to find any of it scary. And yet…still scarier than anything we ever see in The Blair Witch Project.
