27 years ago this past week, Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project introduced the world to a style of filmmaking largely unknown up to that point: found footage. Presented as literally the found footage of a group of film students who went missing in the Maryland woods while making a documentary on a local legend, The Blair Witch Project was a gamechanger for horror filmmaking. Suddenly, the market was flooded with filmmakers eager to make the next BWP, and predictably most of them were near unwatchable. That trend has waxed and waned over the years, but it’s never entirely gone away; it feels like every year there’s yet another crop of subpar horror movies using this technique. Raymond Wallace’s Paranormal Investigations is the newest in this long line of attempts to recreate lightning in a bottle and unfortunately it falls woefully short.
Two years ago, the crew of the hit paranormal reality TV show Paranormal Investigations traveled to the infamous Hennesy House in rural North Carolina to film the premiere episode of their upcoming season. The next morning, a caretaker arrived to find the entire team brutally and inexplicably murdered. Now, the footage from that horrific night is finally being shown to the public for the first time.
I’ve written about found footage before. I’ve got something of a love hate relationship with the technique because when it’s done well it’s genuinely terrifying; to this day I think Savageland might be one of the most effective horror films I’ve ever seen. Alas, Paranormal Investigations lacks everything that makes a FF film really pop. Every misstep that can be made in the process of making a believable FF film is made. Someone experiencing something unbelievably terrifying/threatening but making sure to film it the entire time? Check. A camera being put down in such a way that it captures some ghastly thing perfectly? Check. A camera glitching in such a way that it captures something really creepy in excellent detail. Check. A tearful confession to the camera in the final act by someone about to die? You better believe that’s a check. Every cliché of the technique makes an appearance in this film and it drags an already thin story down.
At no point does the film come off as footage that was actually found; the slick editing and the presence of what would be postproduction effects made me ask myself out loud why someone would put such effects in footage where people had been gruesomely murdered. There’s a sequence towards the end where we witness a time lapse of all the footage from around midnight when everyone is murdered up until the next day, and instead of just relying on time stamps in the actual footage, numbers in a spooky horror movie font are overlaid in the corner. You can say I’m nitpicking, and maybe I am, but the whole point of making a found footage movie is that it’s supposed to be taken as actual raw footage from some doomed party, and any sort of editing is going to kneecap the suspension of disbelief required to consume such a film.
If you enjoy found footage movies, you’ll probably enjoy this movie. I’ll give the filmmakers credit because they had an idea, and they did the work to get it made and there’s a virtue in that. Seriously. But in all honesty this movie didn’t actually feel inspired at all to tell a worthwhile story. It’s tragically by the book, wholly predictable, and sadly at no point does it become engaging. There’s a handful of spooky moments to be fair; one scene involving a microphone picking up audio below the range of human hearing was eerie, and there was potential for some creepy visual shots using the thermal camera. But overall, it was just…medium rare at best.
