First person camera movies are generally not my cup of tea, but Grave Encounters holds a place in my black spooky heart with the likes of The Taking of Deborah Logan and As Above So Below. Grave Encounters is a satire on paranormal investigator shows, but what we actually want to see happen on those shows. Our “host” Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson) and his crew get tipped to check out a haunted asylum. Little do they know they are going to be getting more than they bargained for.
What this movie lacks in production value, it sure as hell makes up for in its scares. The Vicious Brothers use the camera quality and shaky movements to their advantage in the first half of this movie. It all starts off as simple, subtle scares. While you are fixated on the crew and the switching between cameras, your eye picks up on flashes of shadows and dark human like figures. Which creates an eerie mood and draws you in more.
This all escalates quite quickly when Lance and his crew realizes that the asylum itself has no intentions of letting them go. Some of the scares are quite intense, for example the distortions of the ghosts face (I got to say some of these ghosts had me chanting nope), and some look cheap and obviously edited in in post production. It becomes quite obvious what was practical effects versus what is cgi since some of the post edited effects do not blend well into the shot at times. Honestly, I think that is what gives this movie its charm.
The Vicious Brothers really hit it out of the park with their attention to detail throughout this movie. From the beginning everything is set up for a look inside a paranormal reality show. It shows that some stories and people involved are just there for added effect to build drama. It even goes as far to make the crew pretty skeptic when it comes to extreme paranormal encounters. Even the camera work is consistent for a first person camera horror movie. There is consistent motivation and reasoning for any of the crew to handle the cameras. A lot of movies in this sub-genre just loosely rely on the reasoning of having to document everything otherwise they have no movie. Only downside to this is the moments where the camera gets too shaky, while understandable and fitting to the situations, to focus on what is happening.
I mentioned before that this movie is a satire on paranormal shows. The writing and direction keeps the characters and plot real enough to be believable, but just on the side of over the top to not have the movie taken so seriously. If this was to be taken seriously, viewers would just write this off as another cheap, cheesy teen scream horror flick. Though I personally would have seen the character Dr. Friedkin utilized/mentioned more since he is the reason for the state of the asylum. To only have him appear in the end is a bit underwhelming given everything that happened in the asylum.
Overall Grave Encounters is a low-key smart, underrated film filled with subtle scares and creepy-as-all-get-out ghosts. If you loved the simplicity of The Blair Witch, this is right up your alley. It captures and draws you into what the characters are going through as you see what they see. This will always be a movie I go back to when I need a fun watch.
4 out of 5 spirit orbs
The Nerdee Foodee 