Grave Encounters

Grave Encounters (2011)

What It's About: Some years ago, the crew of the ghost-hunting reality series "Ghost Adventures" "Grave Encounters" vanished while investigating the supposedly haunted Waverly Hills Sanitorium Collingwood Psychiatric Institute. The show's producer eventually decides to make public the footage left behind by Zak Bagans Lance Preston and his group of technicians, cameramen and psychics. (Everybody got killed by ghosts in the asylum.)

"Prepare to have...some Grave Encounters!"

Why You Should Watch It: As a rule, I'm not too fond of found-footage horror movies. On one hand, they're cheap to make and provide an opportunity for skilled amateur filmmakers to break into the business. On the other, they're cheap to make and provide an opportunity for talentless amateur filmmakers to produce poorly-acted, badly-written Blair Witch Project ripoffs that would otherwise have gone unmade. Most found-footage horror defies all common sense. Sure, the characters all act like complete morons, but that's more or less to be expected, because most horror movies would be over in about five minutes if they didn't. What bothers me is that the subgenre is limited by its very format, and characters who should be dropping their cameras and running stubbornly hold onto them up until the very moment they're abducted by aliens or hacked up by a murderer.

So I was fairly surprised at how much I liked Grave Encounters. First of all, it has a pretext for its camera format. Sean Rogerson does a pretty much pitch-perfect Zak Bagans impression as the leader of the "Grave Encounters" crew. The ghosts are actually pretty scary, with their gaping, too-wide mouths and dead white eyes, and they're not so overused that they outstay their welcome. There's also an enjoyable Silent Hill-ness to the whole thing with the asylum shifting its layout into an endless labyrinth of decrepit corridors, random bathtubs of blood and a night that extends on well past the planned twelve-hour lock-in. It's a fun, well-made Halloween-season movie, if not much more.

(Don't bother with the second one, by the way. They do that stupid Blair Witch Project 2 thing, where the first movie was a movie and the sequel is about a film crew going to investigate the disappearance of the people who made the first movie. It's a dumb gimmick that's never worked and likely never will, and makes the original movie lesser in context as it's suddenly an in-universe fictional document.)

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.