“This place is about as haunted as a sock drawer.”
It feels like a lot of modern found-footage horror movies follow the same playbook: a group of skeptics goes into a place they believe isn’t haunted, only to find that it is in fact extremely haunted. It’s a solid formula, which is why there are three films in the Hell House LLC franchise and an equal amount in the Grave Encounters franchise. The films are cheap and make for quick shoots (this movie was filmed in ten days), and if you get the right people behind the camera, they can make for some pretty nasty scares. Grave Encounters, directed by the, sigh, Vicious Brothers, is one of the subgenre’s bright spots. It’s not perfect, and it drags in the beginning, but here’s a white-knuckler if you’re in search of one.
The setup is pretty straightforward. We get an intro by a TV producer, extolling the virtues of the titular ghost-hunting program. He ominously informs us that what we’re about to see has not been doctored, only edited for time. The host of Ghost Adventures is Lance Preston, played by a man I refuse to believe is not some Frankenstein combination of Jim Carrey and Dane Cook. We see them setting up the show, making it clear to the audience that they are firm skeptics. They’re set to stay the night at an abandoned mental hospital (the film does itself a service by making the building’s edifice totally normal). This makes for some fun scenes, such as Lance bribing a new gardener to say that he’s worked at the hospital for ten years and is no stranger to ghostly apparitions.
Lance’s crew is comprised of tech guy Matt, cameraman TC, occult expert Sasha, and clairvoyant guest star Houston. Here it’s hard to tell how seriously we should be taking the show-within-the-film, because the credits for it are incredibly cheesy, and Houston’s appearance is genuinely funny. There’s a somewhat anachronistic quality to Grave Encounters that can be distracting. It was released in 2011, takes place in 2010, but all the tech is laughably out of date. I can promise you that no one was using brick cell phones or mini DV cameras during the Obama administration. Also distracting are the actors themselves. One gets the feeling that a lot of the dialogue was improvised, which explains all the bad jokes and mountains of curse words.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Grave Encounters is light on scares in its first third. It’s a slow burn, perhaps too slow for most viewers, but effective nonetheless. Some are better than others: it’s not that scary to see a wheelchair move behind TC’s back, but when an unseen entity plays with Sasha’s hair, the moment lands because Sasha absolutely loses it. The thing that scary movies can do well is show people actually scared, and here is where Grave Encounters nails it. It’s easy to see the inspiration taken from The Blair Witch Project, which had such emotionally vulnerable characters. There’s even a fun little nod to that movie, during a scene in which some people briefly argue about a map.
This is where Grave Encounters really shines. There are ghosts, sure, and most of them look pretty good, but none of them are as scary as the hospital itself. It’s a hellmouth. In a move taken from The Shining‘s playbook, the hospital adheres to no rules of typical geography; stairwells are blocked by concrete and all hallways lead back to where the group began. It’s here that the movie moves with the implacable logic and pacing of a nightmare. It really does seem, at times, that these people are in hell.
Of course the characters get picked off one by one. Some are more effective than others. Matt disappears early on, only to be found later, clad in a hospital gown and speaking nonsense. He throws himself down an elevator shaft. Other deaths are less shocking; Houston gets thrown down a hallway and Sasha basically just disappears. What works best is seeing how nasty the film can be at times – after a night sleeping in a closet, Lance, Sasha, and TC wake up wearing patient ID bracelets. The little scares here work better than the jump scares.
The performances in Grave Encounters are largely hit and miss, but the Vicious Brothers (Jesus Christ, c’mon) handle the directing nicely. They were their influences on their sleeve: there’s some of The Shining here, some Blair Witch Project, a not-insignificant amount of House on Haunted Hill, and more than a little of The Ruins. Honestly, at the film’s best it feels like an adaptation of the terrifying game Outlast. That’s not a bad thing; the horror genre is so prevalent at this point that a lot of great entries in it are basically mixtapes. Where this film sets itself apart is in its relentless nature. Scenes go on longer than they would in a more mainstream horror film, especially in the extended climax, which shows Lance and Sasha trying to escape the hospital through the service tunnels. Sasha disappears and where most films would end with a jump scare, Grave Encounters shows us the devolution of Lance’s sanity, in all its rambling, rat-eating ignominy.
Grave Encounters is certainly a product of films that came before it. It’s nothing new, but it’s very well done. The amateur performances and lack of a musical score help sell the experiential nature of the film, and the atmosphere is just as dreadful as the monsters. This movie is about 95 minutes long, but feels longer. For once, I mean that as a compliment. For the length of a typical romantic comedy, you instead find yourself wondering if you can escape from hell.
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