3 out of 5

Directed by: The Vicious Brothers

Serving as something of a Best Of of found footage horror tropes, Grave Encounters’ creators, The Vicious Brothers (aka Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz) are able to apply that history to provide their genre entry with some good foundations: solid, fitting acting; justifiable why-are-we-still-shooting reasons; and a solid tweak on the haunted house concept. While this does make the 95-minute film pretty watchable and generally entertaining, the movie is also quite tired in reaching for its actual scares, the writer/director duo not really able to put their foundation to its intended use of creepiness. Still, I’ll take a structurally effective failure over some more wholly inept found footage entries, and I think the idea of Grave Encounters kind of outlasts its actual execution.

The movie commits to its shtick well: Grave Encounters is the name of a short-lived ghost hunting reality TV series that, in a “real” interview that precedes the footage, we’re told pre-dated the actually real ghost hunting shows that popped up in the wake of Blair Witch and so on. Title cards tell us we’re watching the edited for time recordings of GE’s would-be sixth episode, which never aired due to reasons we’ll witness.

Hosted by business-minded cynic Lance (Sean Rogerson), the GE crew of two camera people, a ghost specialist, and their tech person – manning the camera rig, setting up EVPs and the like – agree to be locked in to the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, a reportedly very haunted locale. BTS footage shows Lance paying caretakers for scary stories, but I appreciate that The Vicious Brothers (and Rogerson) don’t sketch the crew as slimeball horror fodder: yes, Lance plays things up for the camera, but he also has a desire to actually, hopefully, find something to counter his cynicism, and he gets a buzz out of crafting good entertainment. There’s some bossiness towards the crew, but on the whole, they seem like good people with actual personalities, kind of eager to maybe one day capture some ghost footage, and meanwhile having a good time working an otherwise fun job.

Lance encourages the caretaker to actually lock them in for the night to add some stakes; the crew sets up cameras from around the building and finds some scary set pieces, but otherwise agrees that the night is mostly a bust. As they’re packing up, one crew member is sent to fetch the aforementioned cameras… and doesn’t return.

Thereafter, it’s a bit of a slow crawl between jump scares, but, from a technical perspective, the build up is well done – bumps in the night; things shifting around. The paranoia is ramped up slowly, giving the actors room to breathe reality into it. What’s less well done is actually capturing those scares: the low budget is masked with digital clipping when things get wild, and often the cuts of things people are reacting to are just too quick to really land. When things finally do show on screen, the slow crawl works against them – we’ve been conditioned to not expect much, making the eventual visuals less impactful (as opposed to tension ramped up, it’s kind of tamped down).

Still, I appreciated a bit of deviousness to how the set is used, and some more obvious tropes are avoided in favor of consistency. Yeah, again, that doesn’t equal the best scares – which admittedly is the point – but I think it made for a better “film,” making it kind of comfort food horror.