Random Movie #4: Grave Encounters

Our fourth random movie was one of Becky's additions to our Netflix Bucket: the 2011 horror film Grave Encounters.  Becky had seen this months ago and had been trying to get me to see it ever since.  For some reason I was never really interested in it, despite being the kind of movie that I usually like.  It turns out that it takes blind luck of the draw, rather than reasoned discussion, for her to get her way.

Like Ghost Hunters, Grave Encounters is a paranormal investigation show.  The show's cast consists of host Lance Preston (Sean Rogerson), occult specialist Sasha Parker (Ashleigh Gryzko), psychic medium Houston Grey (Mackenzie Gray), cameraman T.C. Gibson (Merwin Mondesir) and technician Matt White (Juan Riedinger).  For the latest episode of their show, they visit a haunted psychiatric hospital in Canada, where they lock themselves in overnight while they conduct a paranormal investigation.  After a seemingly uneventful night, they become trapped in the hospital, terrorized by the very ghosts that they came looking for.

Grave Encounters, like the more famous Quarantine and Cloverfield, is a found footage horror film.  In an attempt to create verisimilitude, the film has been shot in such a way as to appear authentic footage from a paranormal investigation.  The only things that we see or hear as audience members are what the numerous cameras placed throughout the hospital (or carried by the protagonists) have shot.  We are forced to literally adopt the perspective of the protagonists that, experience tells us, are all doomed.  Their fear is made all the more palpable since the audience is fully immersed into the protagonists experiences.

The film is essentially a superior version of The Blair Witch Project.  The updated premise ( a ghost hunting show) comes off as far less forced than its predecessor's (a group of students filming a documentary in the woods).  The rotting fixtures, nonsensical graffiti, immersive shadows and labyrinthian hallways of the derelict psychiatric hospital were the best possible combinations of the impossible layout of The Shining's Overlook Hotel and Silent Hill's corrosive infrastructure.

While a large number of scenes in The Blair Witch Project unrealistically stretched the assumption that the characters themselves shot the footage (scenes where they bickered and argued with one another over where to hike or who was to blame for getting them lost).  Realistically, the characters would either have been too absorbed in finding a solution to their problem or too angry with one another to record the increasingly bitter arguments for posterity.  In Grave Encounters, however, the found footage premise never forces itself upon the action of the film.  Since a number of cameras had been set up prior to the start of the investigation, it makes sense that there would be footage of events that the protagonists were otherwise too preoccupied to shoot themselves.  Additionally, the basic premise of the film necessitated that they wanted to record proof of the paranormal, so it would only stand to reason that they would continue filming beyond the point that a group of college students working on an unrelated project would.

Grave Encounters also features a far more experienced and far more capable cast.  The Blair Witch Project starred three purely amature actors.  The film was the debut of actors  Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard and it was actress Heather Donahue's first non bit-part.  Their  inexperience showed throughout the film, where they merely shifted from calm to angry to unconvincing bouts of crying.  They succeeded in reading their lines and marching through the woods, but that was all.  Grave Encounters' cast is vastly more experience, each credited with non-recurring tv and film roles.  While the cast of The Blair Witch Project had difficulty conveying even simple emotions convincingly, this film's cast plays off one another with the ease of experience.  Mackenzie Gray easily shifts between his duel roles of irreverent actor and dramatic spiritualist Houston Grey while Sean Rogerson embodies the charismatic, self absorbed Lance Preston with practiced deftness.

Grave Encounter's The Vicious Brothers show a greater and subtler ease helming their film than Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick did with theirs (despite both pairs having no previous directing experience).  The frequent and seemingly random switches between color and black and white in The Blair Witch Project were needlessly jarring, preventing the fully immersive experience that the found footage genre seeks to create.  The more-occasional (though still frequent) shifts between color and night-vision maintained Grave Encounter's verisimilitudinous qualities while eliciting the same unease and sense of "wrongness" that the green-tinted lights are commonly used for in horror films; it succeeds in creating tension without succumbing with unthinking ease into convention.  Likewise, the use of fixed-position cameras at present locations offered a third-person perspective to the events of the film that The Blair Witch Project lacked.

Grave Encounters' one great fault is that the exact "whys" of the plot are not immediately evident after the first viewing.  While they are there, they are threaded through heavy exposition in the form of interviews before the protagonists' overnight lock-in at the hospital.  It is exceedingly easy to miss this information and even easier to forget it when the action of the film gets underway.

Overall, the film is an effective and entertaining addition to the found footage horror genre.  It features far superior acting, directing and writing than The Blair Witch Project and far steadier camerawork than Cloverfield.  Becky and I both give it a rating of 7, putting it on par with the aforementioned Cloverfield, Cabin Fever and both Fright Nights.