Not many horror films truly scare me these days. But alien horror? Even the ones subpar to most send me into a fear frenzy. That’s why I’m taking a deep dive into the sub-genre.
Welcome to “Aliens Scare Me”. A look into alien horror films on a case by case basis. This month for the first time we have an actual alien documentary: On The Trail of UFOs: Night Visitors, which just released earlier this month.
What it’s about: Director Seth Breedlove and his indie crew ‘Small Town Monsters’ make short documentaries (usually around an hour or so long) about the occult. They’ve covered The Mothman (another freaky ass idea that scares the chap stick out of my shoes but that’s for another day), The Bell Witch and even Bigfoot in a chapter of their “On the Trail of” series, which Night Visitors is the latest part of.
In this newest entry they include Paranormal Investigator Shannon Legro as they head to South Colorado to investigate a rich history of cattle mutilation (very possibly from scary ass aliens).
Why it’s scary: Like with much of the UFO coverage in the world, Night Visitors is a documentary made for believers. You’re either going to scoff at what you see, start a whole new life investigating aliens or do what I do and say “I’m so scared of even the possibility of it being true, I wouldn’t dare say out loud that I don’t believe it because they might hear me, fly to my house and do some weird shit to me.” Choose your fighter.
Throughout the documentary there are interviews with both the scholarly type and the random person who looks like they’d be fun to smoke a bowl and play Nintendo with — but they aren’t going to turn any skeptics. Which is no insult in my opinion. It takes a certain type of person comfortable enough in their own skin to admit to a camera they saw a UFO or made contact with an alien. This is the scariest thing about alien sighting reports. For every person willing to go on record as having experienced this phenomena…there’s probably a person who will never share that experience with anyone, ever.
While I’ve seen alien documentaries that freaked me out far more, the geographical area of Night Visitors is where it shines. The beautiful landscape of rural Colorado mixed with the stories from townspeople and the horrifying states in which they would find their cattle is pretty convincing. Not merely drained of blood but some wild shit that Michael Myers wouldn’t even to do with his victims post slaughter. These cows and horses are found with specific organs missing, broken ribs that insinuate they were dropped from a long distance (like a goddamn UFO beam), crop circles nearby, holding Will Smith’s Oscar, you name it. The true horror is thinking about why aliens would want to steal a cow’s reproductive organs.
Where it lands: In the same way Night Visitors won’t convince skeptics, it will likely not be very entertaining to your friend who came out of the womb knowing Santa Clause wasn’t real. It’s definitely for those of us entranced with the occult.
What is entertaining is Breedlove and his crew’s ability to create haunting and artful imagery while you’re receiving the information. If you‘re a fan of Rodney Ascher’s work (The Nightmare, Room 237) as I am, you will be reminded of it and likely appreciate it. They don’t go as deep or as frightening with their re-enactments as an Ascher film (and I wish they would have!) but the imagery is still impressive and a pleasure to watch. The footage here is more akin to one of those badass television show intros like Daredevil or True Blood.
I do feel like there were deeper places to take Night Visitors that would have left more of a mark. Such as, waiting for one of these cows to turn up during filming and hiring an official Veterinary autopsy person to walk us through the anomalies. That being said, I don’t know the difficulty of any of that. There’s a lot of taking people’s words for it here.
Still yet, there are some interesting ideas and theories happening here. Many involving both the paranormal and the military which, as the documentary points out, is mysteriously abundant in the area of these findings. Small Town Monsters have once again found an interesting and underexamined topic to delve into in a unique way and I look forward to their next installment.
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