The latest edition of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival has drawn to a close, wrapping up retro screenings and world premieres with an all-night A Nightmare on Elm Street marathon.
Our first roundup of Popcorn Frights 2024 capsule reviews included found footage fright Chateau, along with fest darlings and new discoveries. The found footage didn’t stop there, though, with the fest’s back half unleashing even more found footage world premieres.
Here’s a round-up of some of Popcorn Frights 2024’s found footage feature offerings…
The Ceremony Is About to Begin
Writer/Director Sean Nichols Lynch employs a well-trodden found footage setup in The Ceremony Is About to Begin. A documentary filmmaker, Keith (John Laird), makes an ancient Egypt-obsessed cult his subject, exploring their inner workings. Of course, there’s an ulterior motive at play for Keith beyond simple documentary aspirations. It yields an unnerving push and pull between Keith and the cult’s youthful, irreverent current leader, Anubis (Chad Westbrook Hinds).
Nichols spends the bulk of his zippy short runtime digging into the discomfort of Anubis’ behavior, drawing clear inspiration from Mark Duplass’s Creep. It’s also where the film becomes more visually interesting, with Lynch breaking free from the early talking heads documentary format that delivers the bulk of the exposition.
The Ceremony Is About to Begin wears its influences on its sleeves while leaning into the gnarlier aspects of Egyptian rituals and mythology. It presents a fresh angle for the cult itself, though the found footage rules constrain it. Instead of running wild, the film faithfully follows Creep to a fault, falling into the predictable path that culminates in the expected outcome.
Livescreamers
Writer/Director Michelle Iannantuono’s Livescreamers gets inventive with screenlife horror, delivering a unique Twitch-style horror entry that calls video game horror movies like Stay Alive to mind. The setup assembles a group of games from popular video creators Janus Gaming, along with a dedicated fan tagging along as a guest, to record their playthrough of the elusive horror game “House of Souls.” It doesn’t take long for the game’s quirks to reveal itself, growing more lethal the further into the game they get. As it bleeds over into the real world, picking the players off one by one, they’ll have to work together to survive. If only the game would stop exposing their darkest secrets to the group.
Iannantuono impresses with visual worldbuilding, using the video game realm to deliver sprawling medieval mansions with uncanny contemporary flourishes and puzzle games to offset the minimal backdrop of the tiny Janus studio. It’s a great contrast and an innovative means of stretching production value on a minimal budget. Livescreamers struggles to blend the real world with in-game happenings, though; what’s happening in the studio is always less engaging than the avatars evading death in-game.
Even still, Iannantuono effectively captures the pitfalls of the online gaming world and the overwhelming pressures of being a public figure. Pointed GamerGate commentary aside, the filmmaker brings a satisfying level of bloodshed and fun game lore. For all its commentary on content creation, Livescreamers has fun foremost on its mind. It’s a scrappy new twist to screenlife horror that keeps you guessing on its kill order, each bloodier than the last. The precise type of effort that makes you wonder why we don’t get more original video game horror movies.
Old Wounds
Frogman actor Chelsey Grant co-writes and stars alongside director Steven Hugh Nelson and Brian Villalobos in this deceptive found footage feature, produced by Frogman helmed Anthony Cousins. Like Frogman, Old Wounds centers around a trio of unlikely friends embarking on a final hoorah together before life pulls them into a new chapter. In this case, Ashley (Grant) and Steve (Nelson) road trip out to the country for an important step in their relationship: meeting the family. The lovebirds decide to document their trip, and they eventually notice they’re not the only ones recording their journey. Things get even weirder when Steve’s quirky pal Graham (Villalobos) shows up.
Olds Wounds plays like a mumblecore riff on The Blair Witch Project, with the central trio getting lost in their own personal drama and hang-ups that they can miss things lurking behind them in the distance. That means that the horror elements fall into the background as character relationships take center stage. That’s by design here, with this team taking an audacious approach to the found footage finale that’s guaranteed to be divisive. It’s a commendable experiment, but there’s no denying it’s the type of bold ending guaranteed to ruffle a few feathers.
Old Wounds won’t induce much in the way of fright; approach this one like a hangout movie that tests the found footage format’s boundaries.
The post Popcorn Frights 2024 Found Footage Capsule Reviews: ‘Livescreamers’, ‘Old Wounds’ and More appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.